How “Latin Music” Erases The Black Origins of Many Genres

“If you’re advertising something I create with a name [I didn’t choose], nobody should have the right to come and change the name.” For the late Mario Bauzá, one of the founders of Black Cuban jazz, the term “Latin jazz” erased a key aspect of his music. 

“What is Latin?” he continued, during a CACE International TV interview. “We are not Latin to begin with. So then, I don’t see why they do that. They did it with salsa. They won’t do it to my music. My music is Afro Cuban. And that’s what it is.” 

When it comes to music defined as "Latin," the contributions of Black artists often go overlooked in favor of a more marketable pan-ethnic identity that flattens Latines and Latin Americans into one people. However, as Bauzá seems to suggest, why is the need to create a Latin identity in the national and economic marketplace often considered more important than the need to assert a Black one in the naming of truth, the integrity of origins, and the preservation of people? 

It is a matter beyond mere representation. Here, Bauzá creates a firm delineation and boundary, in which he explicitly states that his music is Black and Cuban. In doing so, we can find a framework to locate and assert Black art in the Americas beyond what erases Black identity for profit and nationalism. What does this mean?

Like the United States, Latin America uses Black imagery and culture as a marker of marketable street culture or “cool,” all while diminishing the originators and often shutting them out of the movements they create. It is then used to create a “unifying” concept of national culture exported globally. On the surface, Latinidad offers shared national cultures of harmonious blending, where there is an equal exchange of food, clothes, music, identity, and ultimately the unifying promises of belonging to “nations.” However, when Black Latines and Latin Americans are not the faces of the genres they created — and therefore, not financial beneficiaries or models of authenticity when these styles of music take off — we begin to unravel who actually has access to industry, economy, livelihood, and presentation of the self. 

This isn’t exclusive to Black Cuban Jazz or salsa. In recent years, reggaeton’s astronomical growth has not focused enough on the people who laid the groundwork for the genre’s success. The media and music industry often overlook how Jamaican dancehall, Panamanian reggae en español, Black American and Caribbean American hip-hop, as well as Black Caribbean salsa and Black Puerto Rican bomba coalesced into one of the biggest genres in the world. The conversation on origins and ownership is the subject of much controversy, which has even made its way to the courts with U.S. artists like Missy Elliot.

The erasure of Blackness was not a new phenomenon when Bauzá made his comments. Decades before, there was Desi Arnaz, who played bandleader Ricky Ricardo in I Love Lucy. In real life, Arnaz’s father — a mayor of Santiago, Cuba — banned the drums of Carnival in the Cuban city along with other elites of the ruling class. The elites considered the sights, sounds, and dances of Carnaval obscene and lewd in their association with Blackness. 

“Every year during Carnaval, we witness scenes that disgrace our culture and that make one suppose that part of our population is still influenced by atavisms that conflict with civilization,” the white Cuban leaders said at the time, according to the book Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000. “The spectacle is … repugnant: men and women, all sense of shame is lost, parading tumultuously through the streets to the sound of African music, singing monotonous choruses and reproducing in their movements gestures that may be appropriate in savage Africa but make no sense in civilized Cuba.” 

Still, these traditions persisted. Yet, instead of artists of the time representing the genre from long musical lineages, Arnaz became the face of the bembe rhythms he snuck out to experience as a child. After his father suppressed the local Black culture, he trained in their legacy and rose to fame in the United States, even going as far as performing blackface in his imitations. If we have any doubts about its origins, the dances of the conga included many variations and moves such as "kick," "cutting sugar cane," and "shining shoes," performances with roots among formerly enslaved Africans in the region.

In Arnaz, we find a figure similar to Elvis in his ability to become the more palatable face of Black Cuban music. Arnaz was a white man who descended from Cuba’s ruling class, the son of Santiago’s youngest mayor and grandson to an executive at Bacardi & Co. In the United States, he embraced Black Cuban culture as his own, taking advantage of the U.S.’s lack of knowledge and leaning into what they deemed as exotic. Like Elvis, Arnaz saw the rise of the white man who played up his sex appeal by shaking his hips like the Black performers who inspired him. It’s from this emulation of Blackness where the idea of the hypersexual non-Black Latine musician emerges. 

As we continue to see Arnaz-like figures in Latin music, we need to not only question appropriation but also how modern-day blanqueamiento expunges Blackness. This, I would argue, is the cultural legacy of the Americas. In an effort to whiten their nations and improve their standing internationally, Latin American countries offered incentives and citizenship to Europeans.

Historically, Latin America (like the United States) has distanced itself from Blackness and Indigeneity, while enjoying the fruits of our labor and subsequent disappearance. According to historian, documentarian, and co-founder of AfroLatinx Travel Dash Harris Machado, “These policies ranged from the dissolution of racial organizations and social clubs, officially banning music, targeted economic attacks, and even state-sanctioned violence.” Our modern music industry is the echo of this practice.

Dances that white populations once considered vulgar because they were unrepentantly Black and, therefore, against "good morals," later became a symbol of national cultural identity. This process of culture laundering removes any associations with Black people and “cleanses” the art form entirely for wider audiences. Such is the case with the tango in Argentina, with Black Argentines absent from the presented history of the dance and the country itself. “When asked of Black Argentines, former President Carlos Menem famously responded, ‘In Argentina, [Black people] do not exist. That is a Brazilian problem,’ Harris Machado quotes. 

It would take a complete overhaul of the Latin music industry to give Black Latine and Latin American artists the credit and payment they deserve, and we can play our part to help push it in that direction. We can actively seek to support Black musicians as a start. Artist and socio-critic Zahira Cabrera-Kelly suggests artists La Chocolatosa and the famous Yailin la Mas Viral. Of the latter, Cabrera-Kelly says, “she offers outsiders a look into her culture with cutting-edge imagery and artistry, only to be accused of copying the bigger artists that lift from her. Her Instagram is filled with racist comments and throwing up emojis.” 

But these artists offer an intimate scene of humanity and Blackness in the Dominican Republic that is devoid of gimmicks. It is their own traditions and neighborhood scenes that inform the cultural backdrop of their art; they are not merely appropriated props.

Then there’s Los Sufridos. “They show barrio life in a very cinematic way,” Cabrera-Kelly adds. “There are backdrops of sex work, drug deals, robbery, and describing the people who navigate their dangers for survival as valuable members of the community. It’s transgressive in its view of the value of all life. Instead of just costuming these things for performance, it’s unveiling the humanity that lies in places we usually discard.” 

Many of Los Sufridos’ videos place viewers in a position of spirit, where they follow the group through the raw fabric of life in the Dominican Republic, without judgment. They are one of many who reflect the “Harlem Renaissance” currently unfolding in the Dominican Republic.

When the approach to what we define as Latin music is more like a Sufridos video — without judgment of the fabric of life that is beyond the lens of whiteness — we begin to unravel deeper truths about Blackness in the Americas. Here, we begin to unveil concepts of authenticity and ownership of voice in the genres we create. It is a necessary conversation when it comes to the arts and, more broadly, how they shape the creation of our shared communities. Even if we don’t agree with Bauzá, the conversation is a vital one and invites us deeper into an understanding of identity, economy, and statehood. It gives us the opportunity to create blended cultures that are not only harmonious in name and sound but also in economic, artistic, and political practice.