Rockin' Las Americas - (Illuminations) by Deborah Pacini Hernandez & Eric Zolov & Héctor D Fernández l'Hoeste (Paperback)

About the Book

Rockin' Las Americas is the first book to explore the production, dissemination, and consumption of rock music throughout Latin America. Contributors include experts in music, history, literature, sociology, and anthropology, as well as practicing rockeros.

Book Synopsis

Every nation in the Americas--from indigenous Peru to revolutionary Cuba--has been touched by the cultural and musical impact of rock. Rockinu2019 Las Amu00e9ricas is the first book to explore the production, dissemination, and consumption of rock music throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, Brazil, the Andes, and the Southern Cone as well as among Latinos in the United States.

The contributors include experts in music, history, literature, culture, sociology, and anthropology, as well as practicing rockeros and rockeras. The multidisciplinary, transnational, and comparative perspectives they bring to the topic serve to address a broad range of fundamental questions about rock in Latin and Latino America, including: Why did rock become such a controversial cultural force in the region? In what ways has rock served as a medium for expressing national identities? How are unique questions of race, class, and gender inscribed in Latin American rock? What makes Latin American rock Latin American? Rockinu2019 Las Amu00e9ricas is an essential book for anyone who hopes to understand the complexities of Latin American culture today.

Review Quotes

A fascinating and inspiring collection of essays on rock music's fifty-year journey through the Americas. Read it to understand that Anglo-Saxon rock is neither the only rock story nor even the most interesting (but be warned that it left me with a list of records that I'll have to spend the rest of my lifetime tracking down).-- "Simon Frith, author of Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music"

Every essay in this book is worth reading, because each offers a complex reading of thriving and engaging cultural phenomena.-- "College Literature"

From La Onda Chicana in Mexico to doo-wop in revolutionary Cuba, from Brazilian soul to punk rockeras in East Los Angeles, . . . [Rockin' Las Americas] offers the most comprehensive and multidisciplinary analysis of the ways in which rock musics have embodied the conflicts of the times in Latin America and in Latino U.S.A.-- "Frances R. Aparicio, author of Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures"

Reflects the individual expertise of the contributors as well as their broad familiarity with international cultural theory. . . .One of the main strengths [is] the way in which nearly all of the contributors locate national and local rock artists in larger transnational flows. . . Chock-full of subtle insights.-- "The Americas"

The importance of this book resides not only in its revealing documentation and analysis of rock en espanol, but in its implicit call for a rewriting of rock history as a global phenomenon from the outset.-- "Popular Music"

About the Author

Deborah Pacini Hernandez, associate professor of anthropology at Tufts University, is the author of Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music.