Class, Gender and Ethnicity in Popular Music, or how did Colombian Cumbia become the Center of Argentine Popular Culture?

ALABARCES, PABLO; SILBA, MALVINA

London

Simposio; Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change: A Cross-Disciplinary Symposium; 2011

Metropolitan University

From its origin as ethnic music in Colombia in the late Nineteenth Century –showing a combination of indigenous and Afro-American features, like other genres known as "tropical"– cumbia spread to most of Latin America countries through the mediation of cultural industries, marked in each case by local particularities and meanings. In each and every case, there’s one meaning that prevails: it is consistently the music of the poor, the popular classes. In Argentina, since its arrival in the mid-sixties, its popularization meant its connection to other local products –folk music, as in the case of chamamé, or modern, as in the quartet–; but fundamentally, the popularization of cumbia led to its consecration as the most popular genre, in the double sense of its consumption –its sales figures place it as the best selling genre– and its meaning of class. Cumbia is in Argentina, without question, the music of the popular classes –but the ways in which the middle classes also consume it allows us simultaneously to understand the phenomena of cultural plebeianization that have happened in the last two decades. This paper aims to discuss these roads, while pointing out how the study of the cumbia –both its musical and lyrical texts, and their practices (from musical production to the dance)– brings issues of class, gender and ethnicity into play, possibly as no other cultural product in contemporary Argentina.