U.S.-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom

In her new book, "Musical ImagiNation" (New York University Press, 2010), Williams assistant professor Maria Elena Cepeda shows how popular music has become an alternative, dynamic space for conceptualizing transnational Colombian identity.

Subtitled "U.S.-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom," the book engages in an interdisciplinary analysis of music, music videos, and other popular culture texts linked with the Colombian population of Miami to discuss previously overlooked facets of the Latina/o music industry.

"A primary goal of this book," Cepeda writes in the introduction, "is to move beyond the existing, highly descriptive Spanish-language studies that promote neat chronologies of a given genre and instead strive to achieve a representation of the contemporary 'rock en espanol' and 'vallenato' genres and marketing formats that more accurately reflect their transcultural, transnational nature."

Cepeda examines contemporary shifts not only within the music industry, but also in the demographics of metropolitan Miami-Dade and the paradigm of Latin American Studies. Driven in part by ongoing immigration from Colombia to South Florida, these developments include the emergence of Miami as the "Latin Hollywood" for both North and South America, and a growing scholarly engagement with the transnational aspects of U.S. Latina/o identity.

Cepeda asserts that the identity of the Colombian transnational community hinges on territorial as well as imagined communal spaces, chief among them popular music.

Cepeda is assistant professor of Latina/o Studies at Williams College. Her research focuses on U.S. Latina/o and Latin American popular culture, contemporary media, transnationalism, language politics, community-based pedagogical approaches, and gender and sexuality. She received her B.A. from Kenyon College and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan.