Tamara Elena Livingston-Isenhour and Thomas George Caracas Garcia Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005, xviii + 254 pp. + CD
Sergio Navarrete Pellicer Maya AcM Marimba Music in Guatemala Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005, vii + 276 pp. + CD
Katherine Borland Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006, xii + 223 pp.
Michael E. Veal Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007, ? + 338 pp.
With these four books comes reaffirmation of the continued vitality behind the scholarly project dedicated to understanding socio-sonic relationships in Latin America and the Caribbean. As all of the authors involved here make evident, the idea that music and music-making are of tremendous social and political significance for the region's numerous and diverse population groups is one that still fosters deep intellectual curiosity and commitment. In all four works, engagement with and through music is represented as a fundamental expressive as well as effectively strategic means by which populations in particular Latin American and Caribbean locations have attempted to make sense of and withstand the changing, often precarious, and not infrequently violent conditions around them.
What is important in this collection of publications, though, is that they have emerged from the perspective of scholars who want us not only to read about these conditions but also to hear them. Collectively, Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia, Navarrete Pellicer, Borland, and Veal call on us to be aware of the myriad ways that the region's many conflicts and injustices have been musically incorporated and enacted. From such a sonic orientation, it is tacitly but emphatically implied, we might become more sensitized to the many pressures and complexities confronting the region's inhabitants. Moreover, we might grasp that the quest for agency in these struggles is never a simple black-and-white matter of one unified, monolithic side challenging another. Rather, we are urged to comprehend that agency derives from a capacity to both navigate and articulate ambiguity. Challenges to and responses from authorities and oppressors are inevitably mixed, varied, and heterogeneous. In pluricultural, multilingual Latin America, they are often transcultural or transethnic as well. In the musical traditions and practices that are investigated in these works, we thus find an array of contentious manoeuvrings displayed, including the rejection and destruction of music, certainly, but also creative appropriation, integration, resignification, and transformation of elements of the very sources that are perceived as oppressive-all gestures, perhaps, of a hopeful agonism between conflict and resolution, difference and identification, human connection and disconnection. Katherine Borland's words seem applicable across the board here when she observes that "the oppositional power of popular culture resides in the process of cultural negotiation itself (4).
Each of the volumes uses a different focal point (e.g., a musical genre, instrument, performance context, production site) from which to elaborate this broadly shared framework of understanding. In each, the presence of ethnographic data based on the authors' own fieldwork and interviews injects a sense of real live flesh and breath into the pages at hand, thus conveying with immediacy and embodiment the social and musical struggles of the different population groups represented. In addition, each book is the first full-length, comprehensive study to have appeared on its particular subject.
In their social history, co-authors Tamara Livingston-Isenhour and Thomas Garcia concentrate on choro, a popular, highly participatory, and, some say, "quintessentially Brazilian" (1) instrumental genre that is today based typically on an ensemble of flute, cavaquinho (a small, four-stringed guitar), guitar, and pandeiro (Brazilian tambourine). The authors explain that the word choro-which has several possible etymological roots, including chorar (Port, "to cry or weep")-may also be used to refer to a style of playing, to a social occasion in which choro music is performed, and/or to the ensemble itself (3). Combining backgrounds in historical musicology and ethnomusicology, as well as shared expertise in classical guitar playing, LivingstonIsenhour and Garcia deftly layer musical and social analysis into their text to "demonstrate how social and political contexts are embedded in [choro] style and genre to produce a sonic experience at once entertaining yet profoundly meaningful" (1).
The historical starting point for the social and political contexts traversed in this nine-chapter work is 19th-century Brazil (Chapter 2). The authors show how from that time forward, emphasis on the nation's basis in racial mixture became a predominant trope in competing discourses of national identity. Most important for the emergence of the choro in cosmopolitan-minded Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 19th century was the encounter between European and African cultural strands, witnessed especially in the musical interactions of three popular forms: the modinha (originally a European salon-style song form); the lundu (an African-derived song-and-dance genre); and the maxixe (an African-derived dance). The cross-fertilization of these expressions through musical "circles" or gatherings called rodas and their eventual consolidation into a newly recognized genre was such that "[b]y the 1930s, choro was upheld by intellectuals as Has perfect example of musical miscegenation" (17; my emphasis).
But "perfect," as we learn, was a relative term, often dependent, at least for many of the Brazilian elite, upon the "whitening" and thus the perceived improvement of the African elements. Indeed, the concept of miscegenation was itself a paradox with elites often claiming to approve enthusiastically of the Euro-African cultural mix "even as they practiced racism" (21). Nevertheless, although Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia are careful to point out that forms of racial and class-based denigration existed-thus adding their voices to the important contemporary debunking of the Brazilian racial democracy myth-they also do not want to lose sight of the knowledge that "the lines between popular culture and high culture were often ambiguous and fluid, allowing for a high degree of exchange" (38).
In Chapters 3 through 5, the theme of exchange is explored in detail. We are taken into the depths of cariocan society as the authors survey a number of shaping forces from the late 1880s into the 20th century's middle decades: the immigration and subsequent urbanization of rural peasants, freed slaves, and their descendants; the rise of middle-class sectors; new forms of technology and communication (radio, the recording industry, television); various outside musical and cultural influences (military bands, jazz, American popular music, Carmen Miranda); and critical moments in national politics (the Vargas dictatorship). All of these developments are seen to have produced tensions around but also to have generated productivity within choro performance practice. Contestations but also fusions across race and class were always part of the creative musical exchanges that occurred. These alignments and displacements are made especially clear in the biographical profiles of various professional choro musicians, including the virtuoso black flutist and composer Pixinguinha (1897-1973).
The remaining chapters (6 through 9) look at patterns of decline and revival in choro as the authors work with a theorization of musical revivals (in Chapter 7 especially) that is one of the book's strongest contributions. Spanning a time frame from the 1950s through the period of military rule (1964-85) to the subsequent return to democracy at the end of the 1 980s and into the present, the authors continue their nuanced approach, carefully exposing the musical dimensions of the nation's politico-cultural entanglements. Noteworthy among the observations they present is the way that choro was variously perceived depending on the national mood at any give time. For example, during the early 1960s when optimism about modernization reigned, choro fell into disrespect, denigrated as a music associated with an "undeveloped" Brazilian past. It remained virtually out of the picture for the better part of two decades, superseded by, for example, bossa nova, rock and roll, protest music, and MPB. However, at the end of the 1970s, with significant support from the state and in an appeal to "historical authenticity and continuity" (150), a major choro revival occurred. Then with neoliberal government cutbacks and a deteriorating economy in the 1980s, choro once again experienced a downturn. But with signs of economic stabilization toward the turn of the millennium, choro began to make a comeback, with a new and younger generation of musicians promoting its recovery. As of the time of their writing, Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia conclude that today, choro seems to "know no limits" (176). Its attachment to other global musical forms, the fluidity and dynamism with which it crosses boundaries and incorporates new influences (176), and its linkages with classical musical forms, including compositions by globally revered Brazilian guitarist Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) (Chapter 9), helps sustain the revival impulse and ensure the genre's continued survival and development. As the authors conclude in their final sentence, choro at the present time is "a spirited conversation that is taking place between the heart of Brazil and the world" (201).
In the second title under review here, Sergio Navarrete Pellicer places a traditional musical instrument, the marimba, at the centre of his study. A keyboard percussion instrument similar to a xylophone, the marimba is (in one of its typical incarnations) constructed of an adjacent series of gourd-resonated wooden bars or keys. Although of African origin, the instrument has, as a result of various though not completely understood diffusions during the colonial slavery era and after, a long association with several indigenous populations in Central America. Navarrete Pellicer investigates specifically the marimba's connection with the Maya Achi people of Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, victims of some of the worst political violence in Guatemala during the long decades of the country's brutal civil war.
The book consists of an introduction and ten subsequent chapters in which we are acquainted with Maya Achi history; worldview; musical history; ideologies about music, alcohol, and women; musical occasions; musical values and aesthetics; musical economy; and sociomusical interaction. We learn that, as a result of various European religious and political impositions during the contact and colonial periods, the Achi developed a special form of local Catholicism organized around cofrad�as (sodalities responsible for the care of the saints), centred on belief in the dead, and expressed in a hybrid mix of European, indigenous, and sometimes African musics and cultural ritual forms such as dance-dramas. We are also told that Achi music generally is conceptualized as a function of Achi cognitive structure. Important here is a duality principle concentrated around such binary classifications as: su' (wind instrument) and q'ojom (percussion instrument), and son (ritual music inherited from the ancestors) and pieza (foreign or Ladino music). There are also other cognitive pairings that are said to operate in complementary fashion in nature, in social roles, and in music, for example: female and male (the marimba and music, generally, is understood as female); and first and second (referring to a hierarchy in both social and musical leadership roles).
The duality principle is seen as having derived from the ancient Maya ancestors' "dual power of giving and taking life" (35). The ancient Maya are believed to have created both musical instruments and alcohol, which, depending on one's fate, "can cause illness and death or effect cures and give life" (35). According to Navarrete Pellicer, the contemporary Achi, committed to promoting the view that they have always done things as their ancestors have done, profess that the marimba has always been an Achi tradition. From this perspective, the marimba dates back to the beginning of time, corresponding with the creation of the World of Light (the coming of Christianity). However, the author states that the son marimba tradition in Rabinal actually began in the 20th century. Navarrete Pellicer elucidates the inner workings and ritual manifestations of the Achi cosmovision and its accompanying musical components largely with an aim to underlining "the ways that musicians and audiences appropriate cultural changes and construct a view about their cultural practices that corresponds with previous worldviews" (212). In order to do so, he draws our attention to some of the broader Guatemalan social and political unfoldings that have, since colonial times, severely impacted Achi life and the marimba tradition.
The consequences have indeed been complex. One instance that Navarrete Pellicer points to is the controversy around the marimba as a Guatemalan national instrument (a designation that, according to official government decree, it now has). Heated debates have erupted over time as certain ladino elites and intellectuals have insisted, in spite of evidence to the contrary, on attributing a pre-Hispanic indidenous rather than African origin to the marimba. Part of the motive (not entirely without elements of indigenous consent) has been to press for the incorporation of the marimba as a national symbol and thus support the proposition that indigenous roots are what forms the authentic foundation of the Guatemalan national identity
But as critical sectors have recognized and as Navarrete Pellicer makes clear, there are problems with these constructions of nationalism. For one thing, designating the marimba as a national symbol of Guatemala "veiled the country's multiethnic nature" (70) and, additionally, "erroneously promoted the idea among the wider public that it is an ancient Maya instrument" (70). For another, and this recalls a point made above in the story of choro in Brazil, there emerged an unhealthy paradox in which Guatemalan elites glorified the nation's indigenous past while at the same time foisting racism and other atrocities upon the currently living indigenous population. Navarrete Pellicer mentions, for example, labour exploitation and "ambiguous policies" (208) around the sale of alcohol which for the Achi, along with music and food, is considered a "precious gift" and extremely important in facilitating communication between the living and the dead (123).
One of the most disturbing consequences presented in this account is that which occurred following the coup that brought General Efrain Rios Montt to power as Guatemalan president in 1982. Riding a wave of religious influence imported originally via visiting Protestant sects who had come to help after the 1976 earthquake, Rios Montt became a convert to evangelical Protestantism which, the author observes, "gave a messianic character to military repression" (21). The Protestant fervour that followed combined with the military's "scorched earth" policies was horrific for the mainly Catholic population of Rabinal. The brutality unleashed during this period, known as "/� violencia," brought repression and also death to great numbers of Rabinalenses, especially to Maya Achi marimbistas (marimba musicians) who were "the most visible symbol of Catholic custom" (24). Navarrete Pellicer reports that the massacres of the period, combined with some voluntary Protestant conversions, "wiped out almost an entire generation of marimbistas in Rabinal" (210).
The tragedy deeply changed Maya Achi life in Rabinal. The population was traumatized and had few resources left, economic or otherwise, to put toward their cycle of religious fiestas. As a result, the cofrad�as organizations, which had already shown signs of weakening prior to the atrocities, declined even further. However, the marimba tradition did not cease. As assassinated and "disappeared" members of the community were mourned, Acni belief in the dead took on politically subversive and activist overtones. In these circumstances, surviving marimba players had a heightened role to play, keeping the memory of the atrocities alive and playing at anniversaries for the dead.
Navarrete Pellicer notes that at the time of his field research some years later marimba music had received renewed emphasis among the Achi, having become "the music of choice for zarabandas [social gatherings], weddings, modern dance-dramas, and, most important, celebrations in the cemetery on the Day of the Dead" (209). Moreover, he found that Achi musicians were also playing more of the "foreign" pieza marimba repertoire associated with Ladinos, and they were doing so for both Achi and Ladino audiences. Although economic necessity was a good part of the reason behind this musical change, Navarrete Pellicer suggests that in some respects Achi-Ladino relations were being improved as a result.
Yet, while finding these positive observations on which to conclude, Navarrete Pellicer does not want us to close his book thinking that Achi marimba musicians now have things easy. He reminds us that in the course of negotiating relationships with Ladinos and their modern, urban music, they must also continue to negotiate what are often demanding relationships inside their own community. This is especially so given the reluctance of some community members to reconcile Ladino music with Achi tradition. Thus, as is true for musicians in many societies, the work of communication that Achi musicians do in performance must also have its parallel in the balancing of day-to-day social interactions. As Navarrete Pellicer cautions, "Friendship (and/or patronage) is essential to maintaining a good image and gaining contracts: it is also vital in order to avoid gossip, envy, and witchcraft. Musicians' views about their own music [must] take into account the views of the community" (210).
Indigenous-mestizo relationships are also at the core of Katherine Borland's eight-chapter, four-part study. In this case, however, the setting is the city of Masaya, Nicaragua, a population centre with a history of strong indigenous associations that in the year 2000 was declared by the country's National Assembly as the Capital of Nicaraguan Folklore (18). Like the authors discussed above, Borland is interested in unraveling-or "unmasking" as her book's title indicates-various ethnoracial and national issues as they intertwine the musical with the social. But whereas the earlier authors cited concentrate their analysis primarily on musical sounds, instruments, and musicians, Borland's concern-located in the context of a selection of Masaya's festival celebrations-is with actors and agents who respond to and make use of the music that is made, for example, listeners, dancers, masqueraders, ritual performers, festival participants, outside visitors, and institutions. As with the Guatemala study, marimba music-also considered a national music in Nicaragua-is the featured music here, but philharmonic brass bands (chicheros) are also "heard" as part of the festival soundscape.
Situating her work historically in a time frame that spans the Somoza, Sandinista, and neoliberal periods, Borland examines the cultural politics around several Masayan festival expressions, or "enactments" as she calls them. Most of these enactments-the torovenados, the ahuizotes, and the Negras and Inditas dances-are associated with the annual St. Jerome Festival, held during October and November to honour the Catholic saint who is the preferred, although not the patron, saint of Masaya (20).
The torovenados and ahuizotes are the subject of Chapters 3 and 4, respectively. The torovenados, with antecedents likely dating back to the 1800s if not before, are processions and popular street theatre presentations. Participants (indigenous and mestizo) don masquerade costumes and, to the cacophonous accompaniment of sones de toro (bull songs) played by brass bands, dance, cavort, and act out scenes meant to portray Nicaraguan cultural traditions as well as contemporary social issues and political affairs. Torovenado costumes, which today can be upscale and elegant, are traditionally fashioned from old clothes, symbols of decay, but also "creative decay" (70). Their wearers caricaturize, satirize, and/or critique certain personalities or types of people (e.g., campesinos, poor people, bandits, politicians, priests, virgins) or animals (often bulls and jaguars, although the term "torovenado" literally means bull-deer, a reference to what may have been two stock characters in the original manifestations of the event). The ahuizotes (strange sounds, things, or spirits) are also street masquerades but the characters that are mimicked are frightening supernatural creatures or "spooks." The Ahuizotes Procession, a festival activity emerging in the last decades of the 20th century that is also accompanied by sones de toro, is associated specifically with Monimbo, a barrio of Masaya recognized as a solidly indigenous neighbourhood and famous for a spontaneous and powerful antiSomoza insurrection staged in 1978, the year prior to the Sandinista revolutionary triumph.
The Negras and Inditas dances (Chapters 5 and 6) that are also performed during the Festival of St. Jerome are accompanied by marimba trios (marimba, guitar, and guitarilla). In contrast to the raucous torovenados and ahuizotes, the marimba dances emphasize an aesthetic of elegance, refinement, and grace. The Baile de Negras is an all-male marimba dance in which half of the dancers impersonate women. Elegant costumes and white, wire-mesh masks are used to disguise the dancers. These days, with sexual orientation more of a public issue, there is also an element of debate about homosexuality connected to this dance. As for the Dance of the Inditas, Borland says that it was regarded from the 1930s as "an enactment of the national myth of mesticization [that] told the story of the birth of the Nicaraguan people through the harmonious union of inferior Indian women with arrogant but gallant Spanish men" (14). This narrative, too, is fodder for contemporary argument.
Besides being rich in ethnographic description, a major strength of this work is the way that it nuances, through a performance studies lens, theories of culture and the dynamics of hegemonic versus popular identity. Using quasi-poetic images and language at times (e.g., "To be Indian, then, was to remain an undigested, socially subordinate part of the mestizo nation" [30]), Borland finesses her argument in such a way that it becomes almost a meditation on the nature of indigenous-mestizo struggle in Nicaragua. As she contemplates this struggle in relation to a wide array of topics and themes (ethnicity, class, gender, homosexuality, transvestism, religion, state, market, tradition, modernization, revolution, mestizaje, folklorization, cultural revival, the local, the global, gang violence, tourism, music), her guiding research touchstones are, unfailingly, tension, contradiction, ambiguity, double-sidedness, paradox, the mask. Borland makes it her intellectual business to break through stereotypes, question categories, resist homogenizing or essentializing tendencies, and peel back the layers of difference and disguise that complicate and destabilize but also challenge and drive cultural negotiation.
For example, noting the major key tonality that is characteristic of marimba playing, she disputes the common Nicaraguan stereotype that marimba tunes "evoke Indians' melancholy and sadness, whereas the brass band sones de toro of the torovenados are happy and boisterous" (109). She also exposes tense grassroots versus professionalizing/elitist divisions among the architects of Sandinista cultural policy, thus dispelling any simplistic notions that it emerged from a unified and coherent radical position (7). Moreover, she is discerning in her construction of festival celebrations as resistance, observing that: "Far from providing a unitary statement about the people, these enactments . . . demonstrate how complex and multifaceted popular identities are" (17).
Constantly supporting her aforementioned claim at the beginning of this essay that "the oppositional power of popular culture resides in the process of cultural negotiation itself (4), Borland impresses upon us that regardless of attempts by authorities or dominant groups to limit, control, shape, and exploit festival expression according to their own vested and "masked" interests, Masaya's indigenous residents have refused to submit to dominant desires for "nostalgic evocations of an indigenous past" (49). Following the legacy of insurrection passed down to them in 1978 in Monimb�, Masaya's indigenous residents continue to exercise their own cultural authority, display their dynamic capacity to assert difference, and revel in their ability to continually reinterpret, play with, and perform new and alternative meanings. It is this embrace of change in festival that explains why their city enjoys its status as Nicaragua's folklore capital. As Borland concludes, "Masayans are not the guardians of national culture because they faithfully maintain a set of cultural forms, but because they continually generate new forms" (184).
The fourth and final book under consideration here, by Michael Veal, treats a music that of all those discussed so far will undoubtedly be the most familiar to North American ears and, indeed, to ears worldwide. Emerging in Jamaica in the 1970s, dub music-a subgenre of reggae characterized by the versioning or remixing of already existing music-has enjoyed wide circulation in the contemporary global music market and has been influential upon a number of contemporary popular musical forms. Veal points out that while there are various interpretations of the term dub, its basic definition is "either to record on top of or to make a copy of" (62; emphasis in original). But he extends this definition by synthesizing the views of a number of his sources, explaining that for many of the musicians, DJs, selectors, engineers, and producers responsible for its creation, dub style revolves around "the elements of rhythm (that is, drum & bass patterns), sound processing, and song remixing" (62).
Many readers who come to this book-reggae scholars, rap enthusiasts, and hip-hop aficionados, for example, but also more general readers-will already be well-acquainted with or at least have heard of a number of the legendary personalities whose names and photographs grace its pages: Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock, Errol Thompson, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and Clement "Coxsone" Dodd. Many will also know about the famous Kingston studios-e.g., Black Ark, Studio One-where these recording producers and engineers honed their sonic craft. Some will be aware of the musical lineage-mento, rhythm and blues, ska, rock steady, reggae-from which dub emerged.
But while Veal reprises some of this knowledge, he also adds new layers and details, producing an outstanding piece of scholarship that expands significantly our capacity for close musical listening and understanding, thus helping us to penetrate the inner depths of a challenging musical expression often represented as "mysterious," "mystical," and "psychedelic." In eight chapters plus introduction and coda, Veal aims, as he expresses it, "to show the extent to which this music (despite its creation in the hermetic setting of the recording studio) is in fact a potent metaphor for the society and times within which it emerged, and for global culture at the new millennium" (2). The author is eclectic in the way he approaches this task, but the work shines in four areas in particular: ethnography of the recording studio; interviews with dub's innovators and critics; musical description and analysis; and cultural interpretation.
In Chapter 2 ("Every Spoil is a Style": The Evolution of Dub Music in the 1970s), Veal takes us inside the Jamaican dub recording studio. Here we learn about the main sound processing technologies and compositional strategies at the heart of this experimental and reconfigurative musical art form. Studio engineers who, much more than singers or instrumentalists, are the protagonists in the dub story, took already recorded musical materials (mainly popular songs) and broke them to pieces or, to take a word from the title, "shattered" them. Songs were stripped of their vocals and instrumental tracks and pared down to a drum and bass format. They were then rebuilt, resculpted, or, again referring to the title, "soundscaped" in different ways to produce multiple and-it was hoped by the usually enterprising producers involved-money-making versions. Engineers erased, fragmented, collaged, and multilayered song lyrics; they applied spatial and echo effects, used reverb, delay, equalization, and filtering devices; and they spliced and manipulated tape as well as creatively "abused" equipment in order to arrive at their desired product. They also incorporated "found" or "ambient" sounds from the wider sound environment. Interestingly, Veal draws some parallels between these techniques and those found among electronic and new music composers (e.g., Cage, Stockhausen, Reich) in the industrialized world. One of the driving motivations shared in both cases seems to have been the desire to contest and deconstruct if not destroy the conventional Western popular and art music aesthetic with its entrenched and predictable insistence on tonal harmony and resolution. Questioning the category "music" itself was also an impetus.
What dub's sound engineers were trying to do is also made known to us in their own words as well as the words of others who worked alongside them or who commented on their undertakings and related musical developments. Veal includes numerous interview excerpts quoting from these sources. Admirably, when applicable, he allows these voices to speak in their original Jamaican vernacular. Complementing what these speakers communicate is Veal's own description and analysis of the dub sound. His language is compelling and evocative as he works through several recorded tracks and their versions, at once lifting the sound off the recordings, onto the printed page, and into our auditory consciousness.
It is especially in Chapter 8 (Starship Africa: The Acoustics of Diaspora and of the Postcolony) that Veal brings us to a consideration of the broader social significance and meaning of dub. Here he undertakes what he describes as "an interpretive attempt to ground dub music in the particular cultural and historical experience of postcolonial Jamaica, and within certain dominant tropes of African diasporic history" (20). Revisiting some of the material set out previously in Chapter 2, this chapter explores the possibility that particular sound processes, strategies, and effects employed in dub composition may stand "as sonic markers of certain processes of black culture" (20). Always graciously speculative rather than dogmatically insistent, Veal suggests that dub creative procedures and qualities such as erasure, fragmentation, collage, rupture, collapse, incompletion, and so on (which he also finds operating in other African-derived literary and visual arts) may be musical codes for the often traumatic social experiences of Africans and their descendants scattered in diaspora. In other words, "shattered songs" may be interpreted effectively as aurally resonant expressions giving voice and testimony to "shattered lives." (Although Veal does not mention this point, it is interesting to note here that "shatter" and "scatter" are etymologically related.) But while musical shatterings and scatterings may translate as social trauma and destruction, Veal also asks that we acknowledge the potential such breakage carries for rehabilitation and reconstruction.
In sum, Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia 's Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music, Navarrete Pellicer's Maya Achi Marimba Music in Guatemala, Borland's Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival, and Veal's Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae do a solid and often inspiring job of bringing us closer to understanding not only what music does in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also how and why it does what it does. These works also equip us with a strong sense of how music in the region sounds. In the dynamic, contestatory worlds that these books' pages portray, the conflict never stops. But neither does the music. That is the hope.
Acknowledgement
I dedicate this essay to the memory of Andy Palacio (1960-2008), world-renowned Garifuna musician from Belize and never-to-beforgotten personal acquaintance.
[Author Affiliation]
ANNEMARIE GALLAUGHER
York University
