Popular music

In Latino/a cultural politics, to write a literary text is to give voice to the disenfranchised and to express in a public format the experiences, values, and ideologies of a local community, a gesture of resistance that becomes most salient in times of globalization. In addition to writing stories that function as alternative, counternarratives to their invisibility in US official historiography, Latino/a authors also deploy musical intertexts and references to examine differentials of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In this chapter, I will trace some of the most salient examples of the influence and intertextual presence of popular music in US Latino/a literature, focusing on the significant critical scholarship that has examined these interartistic texts in which words and sounds transform each other. Through a literature of resistance, US Latino/a writers have reclaimed their past oral traditions, folklore, and popular musical repertoires that reaffirm their differential identity within the US as well as the epistemologies of their cultural traditions. Thus, readers will find diverse inscriptions of the Mexican corrido in Chicano/a poetry and prose and of Afro-Caribbean sounds and salsa rhythms in Nuyorican, US Puerto Rican, and Latino Caribbean literature. These exemplify popular music as a discourse that privileges the authorship and creativity of the communal and the popular over elite and romantic notions of the writer as an individual genius. The presence of popular music in written literary texts also challenges traditional binary notions that privilege written literacy over orality. By fusing orality into written literature, US Latino/a writers highlight the primacy of voice and of sounds in the production of cultural identity.