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There are two souls that exist in the contemporary world, those of revolution and decadence. . . . [T]he consciousness of the artist is the agonizing circus of struggle between the two spirits. An understanding of this struggle sometimes, most of the time, escapes the very artist. But ultimately one of the two spirits prevails. The other ends strangled in the sand.
-José Carlos Mariátegui (1981)
There is a familiar pattern characteristic of some discussions about popular music in Latin America. Initially, musical practices associated with one particular group or local community undergo a process of "discovery" and subsequent canonization as part of the symbolic imagery of one or more emerging group identity projects. The relative success of this endeavor is often predicated on the ability to promote this music among wider audiences, thus leading to its entanglement with the mass media and mass-market interests, as well as with institutions or groups of individuals who seek to impose particular stylistic, aesthetic, and performative standards in order to maintain a monopoly over its means of production. Such a process has led to two contrasting yet consistently iterated assessments. More often than not, practitioners, audiences, critics, and musicologists conclude that such commodification and institutionalization leads to creative stagnation and that, as social, political, and economic circumstances change, this genre loses its ability to engage with audiences in meaningful ways, thus bringing about its untimely demise or a nostalgic longing for a former golden age. See, for example, discussions regarding the commodification of salsa (Katz 2005), the nationalization of local musical genres such as the merengue (Austerlitz 1997) Afro-Cuban traditions (Moore 1997), and Colombian música tropical (Wade 2000) or the mainstreaming of popular genres such as bachata (Pacini Hernández 1995) or the Brazilian choro (Livingston-Isenhour and Caracas García 2005), among many others. Other scholars, practitioners, and listeners suggest that mass distribution is not necessarily bad. Some even suggest that an embrace of consumer culture, particularly of the transnational kind, can provide individuals with new sources for identity formation that resist the local dominant hegemony. Such is the case with discussions concerning salsa as a source of pan-Latino or transnational identity (Aparicio 1995; Arias Satizábal 2002; Berríos-Miranda 2003; Hosokawa 2002), or the resistive and transgressive power of rock...