Bridging South America and the United States in black music research.

Just as the idea of a "Latin America" as a symbolic construction of general identity is politically problematic, the concept of musical boundaries and borders within it is equally perplexing. Latin-American scholars have insisted on setting boundaries of musical traditions according to the existing social stratification at a given time and space. Most have perceived those traditions in a four-part model of stratification: "primitive" traditional indigenous communities, folk-rural-peasant groups, urban popular mestizo groups, and dominating elite urban groups. The basic difficulties with such a criterion of classification are that stratification is not fixed and stable and that sociocultural or ethnic identity can vary considerably in time and space, according to the various contexts in which it is negotiated and for what specific purposes. Boundaries and borders are clearly related to the question of identity and must be rethought with special attention to the various factors that contributed to forge an old or contemporary identity (Behague 2000). Actually, we must recognize as did Richard Morse, that the word "identity" keeps losing its edge and thus needs to be resharpened periodically. He writes, "identity is not 'national character' as diagnosed by detached socio-psychiatry but collective awareness of historic vocation." Identity "starts with tacit self-recognition" (Morse 1995, 1). What seems particularly relevant, therefore, is the articulation of the relationship between music and the various contexts of identity (self-recognition) construction.

In an earlier essay (Behague 1982), I called attention to the dubious benefit of previous searches for origins in Latin-American and Caribbean musical expressions in relation to the configuration of contemporary societies. I warned then that the general tendency in Europe and North America of viewing Latin America as a monolithic cultural area has often resulted in naive, simplistic, and reductionist generalizations about the traditional musics of Latin America, particularly in the writings of non-Latin-Americans. The actual diversity of the musics of the Latin-American continent has become clearer since the 1960s as a result of more field research being carried out by more scholars from Latin America, Europe, and North America. To this day we have not, however, accumulated enough empiric knowledge of the vast music corpora of the continent to allow meaningful and comprehensive cross-cultural comparisons among music cultures that share a common ethnohistory but have developed different cultural expressions, as, for example, in the case of Afro-Caribbean communities of Cuba and Haiti and those of western Colombia and northeastern Brazil. I also argued at that time that the significance of the prominent social stratification that typifies Latin America's social organization elucidates to a large extent the musical expressions that function as class identity symbols. I asserted that this stratification provides the keystone for accounting for the various musical and performative practices to be found in both rural and urban areas of the continent, assuming that the stratification is contextualized in very specific terms (time and space). Hence, the ways in which we have classified the musical traditions of the area need further reflection.

The question becomes exponentially more intricate in attempting to bridge Latin American and U.S. black musical boundaries and traditions. In 1998, when Samuel Floyd approached me with this very topic, my immediate response was that such a topic had never been dealt with before, to which he responded: "this is the reason, of course, that we want to address it." And furthermore, the idea of a session on "Traversing Musical Boundaries in Research and Writing" was precisely to encourage a bridging of the Latin-American-Caribbean-U.S. connections, as well as a bridging of the geographical boundaries that plague black music scholarship and inhibit our knowledge of those connections. Floyd wrote (1998): "Specialists are well aware of them, but others are not and tend to still view black music outside the Americas as exotic and unconnected to the field at large. We want ardently to play a significant role in correcting this state of affairs. Thus, our topic." Convinced and intense supporter that I am of the longstanding research philosophy of Samuel Floyd and the Center for Black Music Research, this was a welcome opportunity to reflect on this theme. However, my contribution here is limited to a few ideas resulting from many years of research experience in ...