Making Music in Latino Charlotte: Politics and Community Formation in a Globalizing City
Item
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Title
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Making Music in Latino Charlotte: Politics and Community Formation in a Globalizing City
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:5d8893ae5458:11287
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identifier
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11745
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Creator
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Byrd, Samuel Kyle,
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Contributor
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Ida Susser
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Cultural anthropology | Music | Hispanic American studies | Cities | Community | Immigration | Latinos | Politics
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Abstract
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"Making Music in Latino Charlotte: Politics and Community Formation in a Globalizing City" examines how Latina/o immigrant musicians and their audiences form local communities centered around music-making that link to hemispheric social networks and operate within the context of global flows of capital, labor, and cultural practices. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from 2008-2011, I place musical communities in the context of Charlotte's political economy and document how musicians and audiences create musical community. Residential segregation, class divisions, and tensions around race and ethnicity divide Charlotte's Latin music scene into three districts that loosely correspond to genre categories of regional mexicano, musica tropical, and Latin rock. Musical genre distinguishes between different social groups within the Latino population, marking class, ethnic, linguistic, and status difference, but also facilitating collaboration between groups with common experiences. Working musicians labor in the vulnerable context of immigration crackdowns, low-paying, contingent jobs, and varied class-based views on training and professionalism. The study analyzes how musicians engage with politics in their music and personal lives, revealing a relative lack of overt political activism among working musicians, because of their multiple vulnerabilities. Yet, musicians carefully consider political questions through storytelling and meta-discourse about music, and, through the everyday act of making music, recognize themselves as a group having agency. Latino cultural festivals reveal how community organizations market latinidad, drawing musicians and their labor practices into debates about cultural production and consumption. Local musicians draw on the agency they form through making music in Charlotte to engage with the uneven terrain of the global Latin music industry. I analyze what Charlotte`s Latin music scene means for a conceptualization of the city as a center of music-making, for Southern literature, and for the future of Latino music in the US South.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Anthropology
