Race & Music in America

Transcript for Student Voices

Ivan Ramos and Benjamin Salinas

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You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.

Benjamin Salinas: Hello everybody, everyone that’s listening, my name is Ben Salinas, I’m a third year PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Brown University. Today I’m talking with Assistant Professor of Theater Arts and Performance Studies, Ivan Ramos, about his recent participation in the panel discussion on Race & Music in America. Ivan, gracias, thank you for being here!

Ivan Ramos: And I’m really excited, thank you for taking the time!

BS: Now I just want to start this conversation with kind of the framing of “Latinx” in this event. I thought it was interesting that Latinx was included within a “race in America” discussion series. Just in my view, I haven’t seen Latinx as a race necessarily but kind of…has a complicated relationship with race. So I wonder if you might just, like, begin with some thoughts about, you know, that relationship between Latinx and race, the concept of race, and maybe how that plays out in music and in your work.

IR: Yeah, that’s a great question, because I think it’s one that we find ourselves constantly returning to in the last few years in a way that, you know, both complicates, at a really particular political moment, what Latinx will do, right? And we can think about, of course, how these conversations have come out of, one, you know, a need to reckon with histories of anti-Blackness, right, and with Indigenous dispossession in the Americas. And of course, I think the US context, with the anxiety around whether particular ethnic groups within that the Latinx diaspora want to call it that, you know, are tending toward a conservativeness, right, and I think a lot of it comes around in a particular anxiety that eventually, Latinx will go by way of Irish, Italian, etc.—other immigrant groups, right, that it will eventually get the designation of whiteness, and precisely thinking of how—why is it, or how is it, or why is it so easy for that designation to travel. But at the same time, I think that the designation still works within a conversation to raise, because we do still see particular social, economic, and other kind of historical relations that have functioned within a race model, right? I think especially the way that we are able to grasp what “Latinx” has meant in the US in its longer history, it’s still within this very particular racialized mode, right?

So one of the people that I mentioned, you know, and one of the people that I kind of think about and I always return to, is somebody like, you know, Desi Arnaz, and Desi Arnaz, of course, you know, we can think about how, on the one hand, it is a particular proximity to whiteness that allows Desi Arnaz to even play the role of Ricky Ricardo and be married to a white woman on national television in the ‘50s; on the other hand, of course, the comedy comes not from just a sense of, like, just ethnic difference, but actually a very racial break that happens in the way that they communicate, in the way that Ricky appears darker, right, like the way that these models still function in it, and we can think of course, to the ‘60s and ‘70s, right, where the brown liberation movement both around Puerto Rican and Chicano, Chicanx liberation does bear a particular language of racial liberation that I think is necessary to give the categories some consistency, right? Because once you remove that, then you’d be stuck with a little bit of a problem that is a product of the designation of Latinx, right, like “Latino” or “Hispanic” originally is a category that doesn’t begin to congeal until the 1970s, right, so perhaps, I think that there’s a moment of interrogation, of being like, well, did the label not work, right, what do we actually need a more specific label to designate each of those differences or, if we take that away, the potential political coalition, which doesn’t necessarily use a particular racial language, like, would it fall apart, right?

And I think that, you know, I know some, like, veteranos of the 1960s and 70s who absolutely hate “Latinx” or “Latina” because they’re saying, no, we’re actually losing our really specific struggles which are, or which do carry particular racial elements, right? Like for regions in New York, like, you know, Chicanos in Los Angeles or across California, where they’re saying no, like, it is, it is a particularly brown racial struggle. But then what happens when we lose that coalition, even if that coalition is itself, you know, to kind of, like, reference Lauren Berlant a little bit, like the cruel optimism of the fact that one day we’ll be able to see each other and understand what our solidarities are instead of constantly running into the limits and the silences that it necessitates for the category to remain legible.

BS: Yeah, that’s super interesting. I’m really interested in, always, these, like, identity labels that at once congeal a whole bunch of people for a purpose but, in doing so, you lose a lot. So I wonder if you might talk about, like, you know, in the comments section or the question/answer section of the talk, there was this kind of framing of a failure to overcome difference, which I thought was very interesting framing. It may be, maybe I would frame it as a negotiation—like music is a space of negotiation for these kinds of differences. So I wonder if you might talk about, like, kind of the benefits of music for that kind of negotiating all these different complexities of Latinidad, or maybe even some limits of our modern music market and how that plays into this negotiation, or perhaps failure, to overcome difference.

IR: Well, so, you know, one of the questions that I kind of try to tackle, or I think through, is the fact that this category of Latinx music, right, or the Hispanic music market does require that sense of difference to be maintained, because it is tied to authenticity, right? Like you listen to artists who have some sort of distance from a US model, right, or from a US relationship to sound and music, because that’s when you know that you’re listening to the authentic sound, right, so you want Shakira and Ricky Martin and even Bad Bunny or whoever, right? You want them to have a little bit of an accent, because that means that they were raised in the context of the music that they’re trying to give you, right? And so, in some ways, you know, I think historically, music has been one of the ways in which Latinx people have become legible, but as long as we maintain that sense of difference, right, like you still are hoping, just like with Mexican food and there’s fights over, like, making sure that you’re tasting the most authentic thing possible, even if no such thing exists: it’s the same thing when it comes to those labels that, you know, and I also think that that’s precisely where those questions of racial difference are. Even if Shakira goes blonde and she looks white by any, you know, use of the term within a contemporary vocabulary, you still want that extra assurance, right, that is both given through the sound, but also through her persona, right—with the dance moves, you know, and kind of the flutes in the background—that she still bears a mark of essential racial difference in order for that music to circulate, and even if she sings it in English, or perhaps especially when she sings in English, you want that layer that assures you that you’re not just listening to, like, a gringa who’s singing with these sounds.

But, of course, you know what ends up happening—which is, again, it’s always at the center of these questions around Latinx and race—is that the category ends up getting expanded a little bit, to the point that it loses some intelligibility, and in the case of Latinx music, the test case for that in the last few years has been an artist like Rosalía, right, who is Spanish, who, you know, whenever I teach, she’s the example that always comes up with my students: they’re always like “Rosalía! Why is she winning Latinx music awards when she’s clearly from Spain?” And so, that shows one how slippery and how difficult the category is, but, too, the investment that record companies, for example, have in keeping the category, right? Like the fact that Rosalía might be from Spain, but the fact that she has made the duet with Bad Bunny because she is seen as, like, a legitimate, you know, transmitter of these sounds, is because, ultimately, record companies understand that audiences are not going to be asking those questions because, you know, for them that is authentic: she has the accent, she has a vaguely Mediterranean look, and thus, she will be able to participate within that economy because, one, the mainstream world that you want to buy these records is not going to recognize the difference, right, that they don’t—the Grammys don’t know, and what ends up happening, right, it does come down to the level of the fans who understand, you know, hey, wait a minute, do I need to be Spanish basically passing basically as a white woman to make it in the Latinx music industry? And so I think that’s the tension that’s going to remain there until, you know, we take away these conversations, away from the major artists, right? Like, that’s why it’s important always to look at the ways in which things are happening at the regional level, because record companies, you know, know where the bottom line is, and that bottom line is always going to be one that doesn’t demographically represent the majority of the hemisphere.

BS: Thank you. I like that you mentioned, kind of—as a linguistic anthropologist-in-training, I’m interested in, kind of, that language designation you were just talking about, like, Shakira kind of having, like, having a bit of an accent; Ricky Martin having a bit of an accent; like, sounding—to quote, you know, Jonathan Rosa’s book—“sounding like a race.” And I was thinking about this in your talk, in your panel presentation, when you were kind of talking about these different ways of, like, every decade there’s some kind of, like, ah, yes, Latinos, we’re here, Latinx, we’re finally here, and I wonder if you saw any kind of relationship between, like, people’s ability to code switch in Spanish and English and use kind of both languages, and their, like, success in the marketplace, or maybe even just general trends of acceptance of Spanish within the United States and how that might have played into these kinds of waves of acceptance of Latinx people?

IR: Yes, I mean that what ends up happening, and so this is where part of the argument of my book rests, or this is an important moment, is precisely when capital can recognize a Hispanic, Latinx, you know, what have you, market that actually does know it code switches a little bit. So, you know, after the murder of Selena we have, you know, the best selling People, you know, issue of People, which is the one that has Selena on the cover, which is sold around the southwest and it tells out immediately, which then, I think, maybe less than a year later, People does People en Español, right, and Univision, Telemundo, I can’t remember which one NBC Universal owns, I think it’s Telemundo, right? It gets bought out by these conglomerates, and if you see…there’s at least a bit of an acceptance of the capacity to, you know, or like at least an understanding that the population that will be consuming these products are able to code switch, right? And so as much as they may want to keep a proximity to Spanish by having all of these things suddenly in Español, that actually, they code switch and the way that they code switch is precisely through the advertising, right, and through the kind of ways in which capital is able to be tolerant of it.

Of course, we know the limits of it, the fact that this booming decade of post-Clinton, you know, even George W. Bush being a friendlier President to Latinos, even if he’s bombing the Middle East, you know, and Obama as whatever kind of projected image that he had as the ultimate multicultural representative of racial integration in the US, is the fact that all of these gains that are given by capital of course disappear when somebody like Donald Trump comes in, right? And the fact is that the market wants that accent, does want that Spanish, does want that hint of being able to be recognized as Latinx for consumption, right, or for authenticity, or for authentic consumption, but there’s always that thing that looms in the background which says “no, this is still outside of the purview of what America will be.” And we see this, for example, you know, in the fact that between probably the mid-90s to the late 2000s, there’s a huge amount of bilingual and Spanish-language media, and there’s more of an acceptance of what Spanish can do, and then, in the last few years, I’m really interested in cases where people who are speaking Spanish, regardless of their status, have the cops called on them by, you know, Trumpists, to put it in a particular, you know, slightly reductive way—to find out that, of course, the gains of capital can always be taken away when somebody can harness the populist, you know, racist discourse, right?

And that’s where, again, right, we see the category reified itself, right, and like you mentioned, you know, Jonathan Rosa’s work, the idea of, like, “sounding like one of the many flavors of America,” as this music promises every few, you know, every few years, can then almost immediately be turned into “sounding like a race” at a moment’s notice, and that’s what we’ve seen. And right now we’re still in the moment, I think, of a particular market of, you know, post-Reggaeton, like, you know, post-Trap, and especially, again, like J Balvin, you know, Bad Bunny—I’ll even say Rosalía’s name for the sake of the argument—years, but that, you know, eventually, that well will run dry and I don’t know what that next wave will look like.

BS: Right, well thank you, I think that’s all the time we have for the interview. Muchas gracias por la plática, I’m super interested to hear all your ideas and I hope we can get to talk a bit more.

IR: Yeah, muchas gracias, and yeah, thank you everybody for listening!

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Student Voices is a feature of the Race & in America digital publication series developed by the Brown University Library. Our theme music is “see the unseen” by Butter. Explore the series at digitalpublications.brown.edu.