INTRODUCTION
Throughout most of the twentieth century, Spain was a country of emigrants rather than immigrants. Economic stagnation and political tension, both exacerbated under Franco's long dictatorship (1939–1975), kept opportunity seekers away, and it did not experience the postwar boom in diversity that occurred in nearby France, Germany, or the United Kingdom. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, EU accession, demographic change, and a surging economy interacted to make Spain newly attractive.Footnote 1 Foreign workers came in increasingly impressive numbers, which fell off only after the global economic crisis of 2008 ruined the peninsular economy, with effects that linger today. Spain has become a country of emigrants once more, but two decades of prosperity bequeathed large, settled, and now mutigenerational communities hailing from Eastern Europe, North Africa, Latin America, China, and the Indian Subcontinent.Footnote 2 Despite the importance of antiracist politics for Spain's self-image as a belatedly modern, but finally European state (Rogozen-Soltar Reference Rogozen-Soltar2012), many native Spaniards remain uneasy with this kind of diversity, wary of non-European residents whose attitudes and habits might trouble Spanish policies that grant limited recognitions for cultural difference.Footnote 3 Meanwhile, immigrant actors are using old and new ethnic imageries to shape counter-narratives about the marginalizing aspects of life in Spain, seeking “the right to be different … without compromising one's right to belong” (Rosaldo Reference Rosaldo1994: 57).
In this context, the polysemic trope of “integration” that guides discussions about and among people from outside Western Europe indicates both a commitment to the ethical treatment of minorities and ambivalence about their potentially destabilizing role in Spanish society (Calavita Reference Calavita2005). Like its rhetorical counterpart, the menacing immigrant “ghetto” (gueto), new and native Spaniards alike use “integration” to support discrepant visions of proper ethnic relations. And since their purpose is to parse the “chaos of identity” generated by shifting demographics and citizenship regimes (ibid.: 162), such rhetorical terms are keys to understanding the ongoing production of new ethnicities and forms of belonging at the intersection of late capitalist demands for flexible labor and older norms of national community.
This article approaches these issues via the competing notions of self and other that structure the experience of Latin Americans in Spain. Focusing mainly on Peruvians in Madrid and their patronage of the city's popular music offerings, I ask how performance, consumption, and conversations about music allow people to rehearse their relations to old and new ethnic identities, and to define their place in a changing multicultural order. I am particularly interested in their relation to emergent discourses of “Latino” ethnicity that flourish in the marketplace, a forum that is central to Spain's ethnic imaginary in the absence of state-sanctioned spaces for ratifying immigrant identities. Some acts of consumption are pitched as ways to stay true to national origins, which supports a type of distinctiveness that disturbs Spain's commitment to the primacy of civic identity. Other musical choices are aimed at cultivating a distinctively “Latino” sonorous sensibility, suggesting a transatlantic parallel to the process of pan-Latino ethnogenesis within the United States (Escrivá Reference Escrivá, Berg and Paerregaard2005). Elsewhere, listeners seek instead to establish lines of distinction between different Latin American nationalities, thereby refusing what they feel is an essentializing Latino sameness.
The aspect of the global traffic in identity that my account reveals is how mass culture can take a partial but determinative role in ethnogenesis and “additive” nationality (Coutin Reference Coutin2003). For Peruvians in Madrid find themselves tacking between a sense of Peruvian nationality acquired over a lifetime, their new self-awareness as members of an emerging, marginalized “Latino” community within Spain, and state-driven pressures to minimize disruptive signs of alterity despite its persistent influence in their lives. These competing projects flow through different channels, including political action, marketing, and everyday conversation, reflecting the “disjunct” relation between movements of people and their ethnic categories under globalization (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996), and the weakening of a Westphalian system where political and legal subjectivities were bound tightly to national territory. However, older notions of identity persist in kaleidoscopic dialogue with the new forms of long-distance belonging, deterritorialized citizenship, and transit migration particular to late capitalism (Coutin Reference Coutin2003). People move among these modes of identification, which are no longer experienced as exclusive, especially when such movement helps to alleviate contradictions produced by the system itself. In the case at hand, the Spanish state's expectation that immigrants seek to become unmarked, “generic” citizens speaks to the continuing influence of a civic nationalist model with deep roots in European human rights discourse (Selby Reference Selby2011; Terrio Reference Terrio2003). At the same time, “the immigrant marginality that is so beneficial to the economy creates a class of outcasts that is unacceptable to liberal democracies heralding inclusiveness” (Calavita Reference Calavita2005: 75). Rather than promoting dialogue about racialization and the potential value of difference, integration discourse remains grounded in the state's preferred frame of reference, seeking to alleviate marginality by demanding that natives and immigrants work harder to banish alterity from the public sphere.
Thus do Spanish convictions about the perniciousness of “ethnonationalism” regulate immigration so as to produce indignities like those documented elsewhere in neoliberal Europe (Ticktin Reference Ticktin2006; Partridge Reference Partridge2008). And thus does incorporation “entail its own exclusionary dimensions … when immigrants and refugees are included at a cost—that is, on the condition of leaving certain practices or identifications behind” (Rogozen-Soltar Reference Rogozen-Soltar2012: 634). It is the “exclusionary dimensions” of this situation that lead many Latin American immigrants to favor complementary modes of identification, such as the defense of national particularity, or the creation of a subalternized “Latino” subject position, each of which presents rich possibilities for developing counter-narratives to Spanish state discourse. However, these ethnic frames, too, may have exclusionary dimensions, and by setting Peruvian efforts to navigate ethnic discourse in dialogue with those of other Latin American and Spanish agents, I mean to show how the market-driven consolidation of Latino identity draws upon unwelcome stereotypes of Latino essence, and drives Peruvians to seek alternatives for exercising their sense of selfhood.
Since these thoughts were inspired by my own observations as a scholar of Andean music who resides occasionally in Madrid, I begin with two experiences that motivated my initial inquiries, and which point to the ideological terrain on which these issues move. On 19 June 2010, I visited a Peruvian club in Villaverde, a working-class district south of downtown Madrid that had filled with foreign-born residents. The performance I saw there was unexceptional in real terms, but personally memorable due to the circumstances. After years of residence in Peru, I had been away for some time. In the Spanish capital my wife and I had reconnected with Peruvian friends who had immigrated several years before, and together we waxed nostalgic about the things we missed: the food, the music, and the altogether less-abrupt manner of interpersonal interaction. Madrid was already filled with Peruvian restaurants and there were a handful of Peruvian peñas (live music venues), most of them in peripheral neighborhoods, but our friends' lives as domestic workers, shop clerks, and food service employees left them little time to explore this scene. Carmen, the youngest of the group and the most avid music fan, complained that when her Spanish friends took her out in search of a good time they ended up at clubs dominated by salsa music, a genre that is thinly consumed in her home city and for which, against her companions' assumptions, she felt no special affinity.Footnote 4
One day, while perusing the advertisements in Ocio Latino (Latino leisure), an entertainment guide aimed at Madrid's Latin American community, I discovered a peña called the Rincón del folklor (roughly, “The folk nook”) that promised live Peruvian music, dancing, and traditional food on Sunday afternoons. This is a time when Peruvians typically socialize with family and friends around a large meal, and our friends leapt at the chance to experience a semblance of life back home on their one day off from work.
Though the venue was oddly situated inside a walled complex of soccer fields, itself set amidst industrial buildings and charmless apartment blocks, its atmosphere hewed close to the particulars of a Peruvian Sunday peña. The large, open room featured a bar at one end and at the other a stage, backed by an inevitable photo of Machu Picchu. Before a cleared space for dancing sat dozens of large tables covered in checked cloths, around which hundreds of families dined on traditional dishes like ceviche (fish marinated in lime juice), papa a la huancaína (Huancayo-style potatoes in sauce) or chicharrón (fried pork), washing them down with bottles of beer and chicha morada (a purple corn beverage). Despite a smattering of interlopers from Ecuador, Colombia, and Spain, attendees were overwhelmingly Peruvian, judging by audience response to regional shout-outs from the stage (a common practice within and outside of Peru at concerts with a regionally diverse audience). Prices were moderate, calculated for a working-class customer base, and the venue's ambience was spartan, dominated by painted cement walls and industrial tile rather than the handicrafts and wooden accents that furnish Peruvian establishments aimed at tourists and gourmands. Even so, the atmosphere was loud and convivial, especially after the house bands began to play at mid-afternoon. Singers accompanied by karaoke-style backup tracks alternated with a live trio of two guitars and a keyboard, a flexible combo that has become a standard ensemble for workaday musical performers in Peru. They were played by middle-aged men in the matching, brightly colored shirts that mark professionalism among the country's musicians for hire, and people of all ages made periodic trips to the dance floor, eagerly moving their bodies to hits drawn from Peru's coastal, Andean highland, and “tropical” repertoires.
In this way, the scene at the Rincón del folklor departed from what might be expected in Peru. Each of these repertoires is considered distinct, and many of the songs the band played are so closely associated with particular social groups that they would not normally be performed in any club aimed at a general public in Peru. This is especially true of Andean music, tied to the mestizo (“mixed”: typically, of blended European and indigenous origin) population of Peru's highlands. People from the country's coastal and jungle regions tend to view highland songs as morose, due to their focus on love gone wrong and their minor-key melodies (and despite their energetic rhythms). Nevertheless, dance floor activity did not diminish noticeably during highland mestizo songs like “Vaso de cristal” (“Crystal glass”) or “Tú me dices que te olvide” (“You say to forget you”) when compared with “tropical” cumbia numbers like “Ya se ha muerto mi abuelo” (“My granddad's dead”) or “Mujer hilandera” (“Spinster woman”).
Later, a performer at a different peña explained that Spain's Peruvian community was not large enough to maintain the distinctions between coastal, Andean, and jungle repertoires, or between criollo (Euro-descendent), mestizo, and indigenous listeners that obtained back home: making a profit meant catering to everyone, and homesick immigrants were content to indulge the curious tastes of compatriots from other regions.Footnote 5 On this occasion, our Andean friends left energized, filled with the effervescence that comes from unanticipated reengagement with an experience long denied, and I could empathize since I had essayed the two-step huayno dance of the Andes alongside them. Reentering a sound world and acting out a set of interpersonal kinetic norms that had not been available to me for years, I achieved the visceral sense of satisfaction and identification with others that theorists of embodiment, motor memory, and musical activity have theorized under such rubrics as “habitus” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977), “groove” (Feld Reference Feld, Keil and Feld1994), or “participation” (Turino Reference Turino2008), and which only suggests the power of the experience for Peruvians native to that context. This may all seem rather prosaic; immigrants often seek to recreate their native cultural milieus, and the thrill of mitigated nostalgia is surely familiar to those who have found a way to return home after a long absence. Nevertheless, my working-class friends routinely sought further opportunities for this kind of musical consumption, which they described as a respite from the daily indignities they suffered as Peruvians and their disempowering relationship to Spanish society generally.
Another way to illustrate the sort of dislocation they had in mind is to contextualize the frustration of a middle-aged Peruvian man hollering at a DJ on 28 July 2010. The date is Peru's independence holiday, and each year associations based in Madrid organize festivities to commemorate the occasion. This edition was held at the amusement park in the Casa de Campo, an enormous green space west of downtown that often hosts Latin American community events. Inside a pavilion, booth attendants offered information about sponsoring organizations as well as choclo con queso (corn with cheese), while folkloric performers interpreted national dances for a small standing audience. Outside, a much larger crowd stood and sat within an open space, drinking beer and carousing before a stage on which a DJ spun energetic dance music. His selections were not like those I heard at the Rincón del folklor. They consisted only of the Caribbean dance genres that are glossed in Peru and elsewhere with the term música tropical: pan-Latin salsa, Colombian vallenato, and Dominican merengue and bachata, leavened here and there by a cumbia—which also originates in the Caribbean region but was long ago adopted by Peruvian performers. Some young people moved to these rhythms on the dance floor but it was never full, and beyond this group enthusiasm was muted. When, after a brief silence, the tinkling guitar of yet another Dominican bachata emerged from the speakers, a man behind me threw aside restraint and, standing on a case of beer to yell over the heads of the crowd, cried, “Play some Peruvian music! Bachata is Dominican music!” He generated some appreciative laughter, but not a change in the tenor of the musical selections.
His outburst is emblematic of a broader concern about the emergence in Spain of a Latino subject position, the agents that help to consolidate it by tailoring products and services to it, and the opportunities for self-definition that are being lost in the course of its naturalization. Stereotyped notions of Latino essence can help to flatten the diversity of the Latin American immigrant community when they are put into practice, in this case, when a DJ replaces Peruvian music with sounds that are more obviously “Latin,” at an event meant to celebrate Peru's unique identity. Elsewhere in Spain, the people called “Latinos” get subalternized due to their non-European backgrounds and their often-precarious position in the labor market. In combination, these factors work to replace the specificities of different communities with cultural and class markers mediated largely by outside agencies. Here, otherwise innocuous musical acts can become spaces in which to enact resistance to and force reflection upon the creeping hegemony of an unwelcome ethnogenetic process.
The first of the episodes just narrated united Peruvians seeking to recreate the earmarks of their native context, while in the second the importance of that context as a frame of self-reference was directly dismissed. Together, they suggest a point of entry into an informal practice of counter-narrative, wherein Peruvians reject both the façade of generic citizenship and market-driven notions of Latino unity, and thereby seek to control the dislocations of identity that are wrought in processes of immigration and ethnic re-composition.Footnote 6 In the rest of this article I develop this idea by drawing out qualities of Peruvian migrant experience that intersect with the activities outlined in this opening section. First, I review the American and Spanish histories against which their identity positions are becoming defined. I then outline the parameters of an emergent Latino subject position in Spain, constructed largely in the realm of consumption and viewed with ambivalence by some of those who are expected to inhabit it. I also describe how that consumer identity is transected by class and race, such that different individuals are differentially interpellated by it. Finally, I show how musical mediators excise Peruvian artists of indigenous descent from the Latino “mainstream” on the assumption that their neo-folkloric genre is a sort of sonic ghetto, situated outside a commons construed in terms of Euro-American pop esthetics. Such actions legitimate latinidad (Latin-ness) by weaving it into a Eurocentric teleology of development, but they also dismiss the historical specificity of Peruvian culture and its possible connection to a more expansive version of the concept.
Based on a handful of interviews and more extensive observation of everyday life in Madrid, this account is necessarily a particular one. It is rooted in the experience of Peruvians and in Spain's Castilian capital, where events may be informed by hostility to Spain's native Catalan, Basque, and Galician “nationalities” (as these non-Castilian minorities are dubbed). After hard-fought negotiations, their cultural, linguistic, and political autonomy were enshrined in the post-Franco constitution of 1978, but ongoing efforts to secure further autonomy have generated resentment and charges of treason. It is possible that ambivalence about immigrants' ethnonational distinctiveness in the Castilian heartland derives partly from anxiety about these projects, and studies of other immigrant groups in places like Catalonia and País Vasco might reveal greater sympathy for the plights of new Spaniards. Note, though, that other immigrant communities describe similar experiences with Spanish integration discourse and racialization (Berg Reference Berg2011). And given that Catalan, Basque, and Galician political movements harbor xenophobic tendencies of their own, it is not clear that greater receptiveness would characterize the autonomous communities where they operate.
Finally, there may be some tension between my portrait of Spanish “exclusionary inclusion” (Rogozen-Soltar Reference Rogozen-Soltar2012) and the tolerance shown to the nationalities, but this contradiction is something of a red herring in evaluating the regulated integration of foreign-born immigrants, because European origin plays a heavy role in Spanish evaluations of alterity. Calavita's finding, “The appellation of Otherness is reserved for foreign residents from the third world” (2005: 154), echoes widespread accounts of European neo-racism (Balibar Reference Balibar, Balibar and Wallerstein1988), wherein older somatic and cultural prejudices are simply transferred to geographic origin. Here, “European civilization the universal and legal, the ordered, the dynamic, and progressive [are] set against … the particular and lawless, the chaotic, static and backward” (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick and Fitzpatrick1995: 18), and in this sense my account clarifies the particular difficulties faced by foreign-born nationals who assume their identities as such. For them, Spanish tolerance makes little difference so long as it remains premised on the European origin of those who are tolerated, or upon their own assimilation.
LATINO IDENTITIES AND SPANISH REALITIES
The factors that are shaping a Latino subject position in contemporary Spain both parallel and differ from those that have attended the creation of the American version. The literature on this topic itself diverges on many points, beginning with the relative importance granted to the processes that shape a sense of unity among Spanish-speaking peoples in the Western Hemisphere. Beyond a host of lesser factors, scholars point to conversations among colonial and postcolonial writers discussing their feelings of difference from European colonialists (Fernández Retamar Reference Fernández Retamar, del Sarto, Ríos and Trigo2004; Rama Reference Rama2006; Rodó Reference Rodó2000 [1900]); opposition to U.S. imperialism and Anglophone pretensions to cultural supremacy (Oboler Reference Oboler1995); the politics of the civil rights era within the United States, which fostered the realization that Hispanophone people were racialized in ways similar to African-Americans and led to calls for redress (Oboler Reference Oboler1992); and the adoption of “Hispanic” and “Latino” labels by a Census Bureau eager to manage ethnic identities and distribute resources among U.S. residents (in 1977 and 2000, respectively; see Marrow Reference Marrow, Falconi and Antonio2007).
A second debate arises from the fact that the term “Latino” glosses an understanding of Latin American societies as fundamentally mestizo (mixed), molded from Iberian, African, and/or Amerindian elements. Partisans have usefully wielded this vision of positive mixture against the Eurocentric assumptions of older labels like “Hispanic,” but critics also decry the way that dominant notions of Latino mixture tend to mute the specifically Afro-descendent, indigenous, and indeed Asian or Euro-descendent identities that many Latin Americans claim (Suárez-Orozco and Páez Reference Suárez-Orozco, Páez, Suárez-Orozco and Páez2002). Still another debate explores a tension between the Latino category and the national identity discourses borne by incoming migrants from places like Central and South America, where racial formations and cultural repertoires differ from those in the United States (Mendoza Reference Mendoza2000; Zevallos-Aguilar Reference Zevallos-Aguilar, Falconi and Antonio2007). Since the dominant Latino imaginary arose in connection with the Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican people who have loomed large in the political history and popular culture of the United States, scholars increasingly ask if it is capacious enough to incorporate the interests of other Spanish speakers, and whether it might not marginalize these “Other Latinos” (Falconí and Mazzotti Reference Falconí, Mazzotti, Falconi and Mazzotti2007).
Though unsettled, the discourse of latinidad demands attention because it is increasingly globalized, subsuming prior notions about peoples of Ibero-American descent as it travels. And in practice there is wide agreement about its central aspects, making a provisional sketch possible. The label is of recent vintage, having passed into common parlance only in the last two decades of the twentieth century. It is “made in the USA” (Suárez-Orozco and Páez Reference Suárez-Orozco, Páez, Suárez-Orozco and Páez2002: 5), but even there it is viewed with skepticism, and, “There is no guarantee that all the different communities of people of Spanish and Latin American descent that live in [the United States] will some day share a new singular, hybrid Latino identity nor that many would desire such an outcome” (Falconí and Mazzotti Reference Falconí, Mazzotti, Falconi and Mazzotti2007: 6).
Finally, the label's uptake as a self-identifier is facilitated by businesses seeking to create and then manage a growing “Latino market,” a stable consuming body with a set of presumptively uniform and identifiable habits (Dávila Reference Dávila2001; Reference Dávila2008). Given the geographic dispersal, ghettoization, and intercommunity rivalries that separate Spanish speakers and their descendants from one another, media organs have been central in alerting citizens to the very existence of a putative “Latino community,” and in disseminating the imageries that make up its content. Against this background, the urgent tasks for Americanist scholars of latinidad have been to describe both the “power that both official U.S. definitions and U.S. natives' current ideas of Hispanics/Latinos wield over incoming immigrant populations from Latin America,” and the way that individuals “employ their own self-identifications and incoming conceptions of race and ethnicity to determine different paths of incorporation against the backdrop of homogenizing … ethno-racial categories” (Marrow Reference Marrow, Falconi and Antonio2007: 41).
All of these issues also apply to the situation of Latin American immigrants in Spain. That said, American notions of Latino difference and unity have often encountered resistance in Spain, where they directly challenge local beliefs about identity, citizenship, self, and other. One staunch pillar of opposition is the legacy of Hispanism, an ideology that posits an essence uniting all current and former Spanish subjects via the Castilian language, the Catholic religion, and above all a talent for the sublation of difference. Feros (Reference Feros, Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips2005) dates this ideology to the Spanish Restoration of the 1870s, when nation-building government ideologues sought to stabilize a shaky multilingual state. A raft of general histories were published at that time to praise past deeds that had united Castilians, Catalans, Galicians, Basques, and others residing within Spain's borders. One prominent example was the events that Gener euphemistically dubbed “wars sustained to colonize the New World” (in ibid.: 112), which had attracted Spaniards of all linguistic and cultural groups. Thus historians and ideologues made Spanish colonialism into something other than a violent means to secure dominion over new lands and resources. Instead, it was an extension of a benevolent Hispanic disposition developed in the peninsula, whereby Spaniards incorporated other peoples through peaceful governance and the gift of Western Christian culture. Hispanizing agents of civilization helped ensure that epiphenomenal and maladapted forms of difference like linguistic diversity and non-European culture would vanish unlamented, leaving behind gratefully Westernized indigenes who were not colonized subjects, but rather fellow citizens residing in Spain's “overseas kingdoms.” This vision required thinkers to disavow “a racialist concept of Spanishness,” and argued instead for “the idea of ‘mestizaje,’ both ‘cultural’ and ‘biological,’ between all ethnic groups involved, voluntarily or forced, in the colonization of America,” thus furnishing “one of the most persistent myths or legends in the Spanish colonization of the Americas: that all Hispanic societies are in essence racial democracies” (ibid.: 113).
Hispanist ideology entailed an understanding of Spanish essence that was inimical to the recognition of differences among Spanish Catholics everywhere in the world. A historical and sociological tradition founded upon this principle has persisted ever since, despite the dislocations of Spain's late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and the challenges posed by Catalan and Basque nationalism. It gained another valence after the bitter loss of Spain's last overseas territories in 1898, because scholars juxtaposed the benevolent unity of Hispanic peoples to the rapacious anti-humanism of Anglophone and French colonies, “where a clearly European conquering and governing class ruled over unassimilated, subjugated, and racially distinct indigenous masses” (Schmidt-Nowarra Reference Schmidt-Nowara, Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips2005: 5). Hispanism was officially codified in Bécker's tome La política española en las Indias (rectifcaciones históricas), commissioned in Reference Bécker1920 by Spain's Royal Academy of History, and found still wider purchase during the dictatorship of Franco, who eagerly adopted its tenets while positioning himself as the immanent savior of Catholic, Castilian Spain and its virtues. In Francoist rhetoric, Hispanism dovetailed with the imagery of the Reconquista (the medieval “re-conquest” of the Iberian peninsula from Muslim rulers), and together they buttressed “intolerance towards nonconformity and outsiders. Under Franco, the ‘other’ was not just limited to the regime's opponents, but embraced any manifestation of cultural pluralism and difference” (Graham and Labanyi Reference Graham, Labanyi, Graham and Labanyi1995: 16).
Though Franco is long dead and his memory reviled, aspects of Hispanist ideology remain vigorous in Spain today. Scholars such as Kamen (Reference Kamen2007: 329) and Santaolalla (Reference Santaolalla and Labanyi2002) are correct that Spaniards rarely mourn their lost empire, but portraits of colonial benevolence, notions of pan-Hispanic oneness, and hostility to cultural difference are all easy to find in Madrid. They animate events at the Casa de América, a cultural center founded in 1990 by the Ministry of Foreign Relations in consortium with the state and municipal governments of Madrid, designed to sustain cultural links between the Americas and the madre patria (mother country), and housed at the opulent Linares Palace near the city center. They also guide programming at the institutions known as CEPIs (Centros de Participación e Integración), which are meant to facilitate immigrant integration through classes and legal advice, and are run by private foundations with support from Madrid's state government. All of these agencies eschew the celebrations of otherness familiar from multiculturalist institutions in the Anglophone world, and instead feature the contributions of Spanish speakers to cultura universal (European arts and letters).
Vestiges of Hispanism are especially visible at the Museo de América, a decrepit institution that languishes near the Ciudad Universitaria neighborhood north of downtown, but is also Madrid's only major museum that treats the topic. Here Spain's New World history is told as a wondrous tale of culture contact, and as of 2012 visitors searching for references to the extirpation of indigenous religion, or to wars of extermination, would find only a lone placard avowing that the “dislocations” occasioned by Spain's invasions were comparable to the ongoing wars between the continent's original inhabitants.Footnote 7
These and other sites for the contemporary dissemination of Hispanist ideology are both uneven in their impact and particular to the Castilian capital, so it may be overreaching to describe “the history of Spanish colonialism … as an essential element of the ‘Spanish national character’” (Feros Reference Feros, Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips2005: 127). Nevertheless, they do show that Hispanism perseveres in attenuated form, and in fact its recent intersection with “Europeanism” has allowed its universalizing elements to be reworked for a new age. There was widespread disdain for Franco's chauvinist patriotism even before the dictator's death, so it is hardly surprising that “Spain's enthusiasm to incorporate a European identity … has been a notable feature of the post-Franco era” (Graham and Labanyi Reference Graham, Labanyi, Graham and Labanyi1995: 18). More startling, though, is the way that “in some spheres, it has engendered Eurocentrist attitudes and a hostility to marginal groups” (ibid.).
An exploration of this contradiction might begin with the country's 1978 constitution, which found wide favor because it addressed the historic rights of Catalan and Basque people without unduly empowering separatist movements, and thereby solved the “problem” of the nationalities. By positioning them as autonomous “nationalities” within a “nation of nationalities” that also contained non-ethnic autonomous regions, and describing the overarching “nation” as a civic entity upon which ethnic claims could not be made, as such, the constitution successfully implemented a liberal-universalist and anti-culturalist ideology.Footnote 8 In years since, this nascent, Europeanist anti-ethnonationalism has been refined via Habermas' notion of “constitutional patriotism” as the most thoroughly moral substitute for old ethnic nationalisms. This trend is perhaps most pithily expressed in a conservative politician's 2002 declaration, “Constitutional patriotism transforms nations drunk on identity into patrias ennobled by civic sense, helping us to travel along the hygienic path that leads from tribe to polis” (Vidal Quadras, quoted in Balfour and Quiroga Reference Balfour and Quiroga2007: 115).
In contemporary political discourse, the vague notion of Europeanism meets Habermasian constitutional patriotism and the tattered legacy of Hispanism to normalize an unmarked, universalizing civic identity and discourage ethnic politics tout court, scorning both Franco's Castilian ethnocentrism and the Anglophone model of multiculturalism. The most memorable expression of this disposition is doubtless the 2002 declaration by Mikel Azurmendi, then director of the Forum for the Social Integration of Immigrants, that multiculturalism was “gangrene.” This was then supported by Spain's Minister of Immigration, who declared, “At most, Spain might be a ‘multi-ethnic’ society—presumably comprised of those who have shed their foreign ‘cultures’” (Calavita Reference Calavita2005: 95). Here Spanish policies track French precedents, taking all “ethnonational” identities as inimical to an enlightened civil society based on laws and rights, and treating support for expressions of ethnic and racial distinctiveness as a form of “affirmative exclusion” (Amselle Reference Amselle2003). In fact Spanish discourse, in its constant evocation of migrant “ghettos” and “unintegrated” foreigners, echoes French concerns about urban banlieus filled with restive, unassimilated Africans clinging to atavistic, anti-Enlightenment identities (Durand Reference Durand2005; Selby Reference Selby2011; Terrio Reference Terrio2003), and also the broader shift from rhetorics of “multiculturalism” to those of “integration” and “assimilation” that Vertovec and Wessendorf have traced across Europe more generally (Reference Vertovec and Wessendorf2010).
From this perspective, the shift from an incorporative Hispanism to an assimilationist Europeanism is a small one, but it would be a mistake to equate them, since their contemporary moral valences are quite distinct. Like French citizens, who “have much invested in their [historic] identity as global moral leaders” (Ticktin Reference Ticktin2006: 35), the self-image of Spanish citizens as newly empowered actors on the world stage is often bound up with their support for European human rights discourse. More particularly, it is grounded in their commitment to policies that decry racism and demand proper care for immigrants, an omnibus ideology of integration that constitutes “a hallmark of modernity and a disavowal of the ‘closed,’ Franco-era intolerance that they felt had isolated Spain from Europe” (Rogozen-Soltar Reference Rogozen-Soltar2012: 640). The sincerity of such sentiments makes it difficult to look past them to their contradictions, but it is necessary to do so, because integration activities often reinforce the very inequalities they seek to mitigate. Designed to “offset resistance to an indispensable ‘alien’ population that is further ‘alienated’ by its marginal legal status and economic function” (Calavita Reference Calavita2005: 100), they rarely address the structured precariousness that supports the Spanish economy by keeping immigrants tied to temporary work permits and inhibiting paths to citizenship. Instead, they promote notoriously nonspecific notions of tolerance and inclusion via measures aimed at minimizing the effects of difference, which may entail assimilation as easily as respect for cultural origins. In filling “the semantic space between the politically incorrect ‘assimilation’ and the politically unpalatable ‘multiculturalism’” (ibid.: 97), integration discourse tends to place the burden of integration on immigrants who are assumed by virtue of their difference to lack the modern democratic values required to succeed. Only occasionally does it locate the source of their racialized marginality in the legal and economic regime of immigration itself.
The language of integration and the pathologization of persistent difference each saturate the popular press and everyday conversation, but a single, focused example will indicate the general tenor of such conversations. A 13 May 2012 report in Madrid's leading newspaper, El País, entitled “Es tarde en Vallecas” (“Too late in Vallecas”), explored the back story to a highly publicized crime in the district of that name, a former working-class barrio that has become home to many immigrants, and which the report described as a “meeting point for Latino gangs, unemployment, drugs, and alienation” (de Cózar Reference de Cózar2012). The article follows up on the murder of a second-generation Dominican youth by members of a gang called Dominican Don't Play (in English). The narrator, hanging out on the district boulevard with Dominicans and Peruvians, observing the heavy police presence and cars that pass “with the volume all the way up,” speaks with a young man who tells him, “Yeah, I like Spain, and of course I feel integrated. But things are bad and they're getting worse.” The author concludes that unemployment is exacerbating migrants' propensity to resist integration, and implies that further crimes can be expected from idle, alienated immigrants seeking solace in gang activity. This finding is buttressed by remarks from scholar Matilde Fernández Montes, who confirms, “A lot of the time they [join gangs] after failing in the attempt to integrate.” Unnamed sources said to include “police, social educators, and associations that work with minors” confirm that gangs act as “families that protect kids who feel un-integrated or different.”
Such media narratives linking violence and difference echo, if imperfectly, Nieto-Phillips' observations about the U.S. media's dissemination of “two seemingly contradictory stereotypes: the wholesome, light-skinned Hispanic who believes in tradition, family, and the American Dream; and the lawbreaking, desperate, dark-skinned day laborer” (Reference Nieto-Philips, Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips2005: 253). In comparable fashion, Latin Americans in Spain are rhetorically divided between wholesome Hispanics eager to lose their ethnicity and fade into a culturally indistinct Spanish mainstream, and restive Latinos whose vestigial cultural differences can only undermine the hard-won Europeanist bases of Spanish society from within. The authors of “Too late in Vallecas” do imply the responsibility of native Spaniards to aid in the integration of such subjects, but more often the failure is placed upon immigrants who wear too heavily their unreasonable attachments to the false ideology of cultural difference.
A final element that distinguishes Spain from the United States in this matter is the intermittent and negligible role of the state. Despite continuous tinkering since the late 1980s with legal mechanisms regulating residency and citizenship, Spanish governing officials have rarely addressed the place of new Spaniards in sociocultural terms (see Cornelius Reference Cornelius and Cornelius2004; Zapata-Barrero Reference Zapata-Barrero, Vertovec and Wessendorf2010).Footnote 9 The combination of government silence and popular distaste for expressions of difference means that identity formations alternative to that of European Spain move via channels peripheral to the national mainstream, in places that are often invisible to Spaniards, but not to immigrants searching for cues as to their place in a new society. In the case of Latinos, the content that finds them there typically mines American sources, bearing imageries of Latino selfhood from the United States unheralded into the lives of Spain's new immigrants.
This begins to suggest the subjective dilemma that many Peruvians have encountered upon arrival in Madrid. Faced with a national society disdainful of the performative folkloric frames that Peruvians in the United States “use to proclaim their ‘pride’ and cultural citizenship” (Berg Reference Berg, Berg and Paerregaard2005: 38), and with media channels that target Latin Americans via an unfamiliar Latino discourse, they are pressured to choose between assimilation and a weakly institutionalized Latino subject position that they feel is not theirs. This is not to say that Peruvians in Spain have failed to organize cultural events and institutions like those that Peruvians organize elsewhere: dance troupes rehearse every Sunday at the Casa de Vacas in Madrid's central El Retiro park; local organizations stage annual versions of the Inti Raymi, a fantastical recreation of the Inca solstice festival that is popular throughout the Peruvian diaspora; and clubs like the Rincón del folklor offer validation of Peruvian distinctiveness alongside food and music from home. But such efforts are decidedly peripheral, leaving the everyday spaces of Latin Americans and the figurative space of Latin American-ness to be filled with sounds and imageries that rarely respond to Peruvian interests. It is these circumstances that lead Peruvians to narrate certain experiences as methods for recovering a sense of difference denied them elsewhere.
This brings me, finally, back to popular music, which has long been regarded as a central tool in forging and contesting the canon of Latino essence. This is the case not least because it is easily linked, via dance, to notions of embodied sensuality that animate outsider and insider stereotypes of latinidad. Treatments of music in U.S.-based Latin American communities often reaffirm the founding insight of the voluminous literature on music and identity more generally: that sounds and associated ideologies allow performers to express who they think they are, and consumers to connect to that image and to one another. However, they also support the more complex insight that the senses of historicity and shared substance used in musical marketing tend to rework past facts and old traditions in light of present socioeconomic interests, possibilities, and pressures.
Music scholars have tacked back and forth between music's role as a tool for fostering intersubjectivity and its capacity to interpellate consumers. They do so whether they are describing the longstanding but largely unacknowledged ways that Latin American sounds have influenced Anglophone musicians, ranging from ragtime pianists to hip hoppers (Roberts Reference Roberts1972; Rivera Reference Rivera2003), or are showing how immigrants in mid-century New York, drawn together by virtue of their Spanish monolingualism, developed shared musical languages by blending their diverse repertoires (Glasser Reference Glasser1995); or analyzing the evolving, geographically dispersed circuits of production that weave Hispanophone spaces together and disseminate metropolitan versions of the Latino imaginary (Waxer Reference Waxer2002a, Reference Waxer2002b; Rivera, Marshall, and Pacini Hernández Reference Rivera, Marshall and Pacini Hernández2009; Pacini Hernández Reference Pacini Hernandez2010). More rarely, scholars in the United States have explored the ways in which individuals from Spanish-speaking countries seek to disaffiliate from the Latino musical and cultural formation. This returns me to the situation of Peruvians in Spain.
PUBLIC SIGNS OF LATINO LIFE
Public signs of the discursive uptake of the “Latino” category abound in Madrid. They link a series of business concerns with one another and with consumers in a way that echoes Dávila's accounts of market-driven Latino ethnogenesis in the United States, although the agencies involved in Madrid are more artisanal than those treated in her studies. Businesses targeting immigrants from across Latin America use the term to attract their clientele, as do (mostly free) media organs that report on matters of interest to the community. Alongside the weekly Ocio Latino, which features stories on celebrities and everyday citizens from the Americas as well as information about local Latin American clubs and restaurants, the magazine Imagen Latino offers a glossier take on matters of fashion and lifestyle. The newspaper Latino reports on serious matters like presidential politics in Latin America, and the police redadas (dragnets) that target sin papeles (undocumented immigrants) for detention and deportation.Footnote 10 All three publications are distributed at Metro stops in immigrant neighborhoods, and at immigrant-run businesses throughout the city, many of which advertise in them. These include restaurants, travel agencies, Internet cafes and locutorios (centers providing long-distance telephone service), money transfer services, and small groceries advertising “productos Latinos” that range from Peruvian ají chili to Paraguayan mate gourds to Argentinean chimichurri sauce (see figures 1 and 2).
Sign for The Little Terrace of the Latino Chef, a Peruvian restaurant in Vallecas. Note the flags of Spain, Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru at lower left. Author's photo.
“Latino Locutorio: national and international calls, Internet, photocopies, money transfer, and fax.” Author's photo.
Despite such widespread uses of the term “Latino,” its meaning is far from settled, and varies widely according to the speaker's national origin, generational position, and class status. An ethnic label of recent vintage, the term is tied to identity politics in the Western Hemisphere and was formerly seldom used in Europe. Still today, commentators and everyday citizens in Spain typically gloss notions of shared substance in the Spanish-speaking world via terms like “Hispanoamerica” or “Iberoamerica,” which imply the continuing authority of the old colonial powers. This language of Latino identification is new to most Spaniards, and when speaking with natives or longtime residents outside the working-class migrant milieu I found no consensus about the term. One Spanish man, an architect and an aficionado of nueva canción (South American leftist folkloric music of the 1960s and 1970s), told me emphatically that nobody in Madrid used it, even though his business sat around the corner from an Argentinean restaurant billed as a Latino establishment. By contrast, a Colombian professional told me that it had always been used informally, and that it held absolutely no significance. A Spanish professor at a Madrid university simply expressed bafflement at a label derived from a long-dead people and an archaic language, and especially at its application to himself upon an earlier visit to the United States.
Sometimes the term seemed opaque even to those whose businesses relied upon it. In June of 2011, I sought to speak with Ismael García, the director of Radio Corazón Tropical (“Tropical heart”), one of Madrid's several Latin American music stations. He was busy running for office in his native Dominican Republic and so directed me instead to his son Roger DJ, a longtime station employee with a degree in communications from a Spanish university.Footnote 11 Roger told me that the station had been founded to build bridges between Latin American communities and that it was succeeding in fostering common cause, as different groups abandoned their native “ghettoes” to gather around similar habits of musical consumption. After he used the term “Latino” to characterize his audience, I asked him what people meant by it, and the question caught him by surprise. After a pause, he said that it was a good question and then struggled to articulate its referent or associate properties with it. He admitted that his sense of the term was vague and that he had never thought of it as anything but simply a label for Latin Americans in Spain. He was sure that the label had circulated as such for as long as he could remember, and certainly since the early 1990s. He then stated that despite a historical dearth of anti-Latino sentiment in Spain, immigrants were beginning to receive shoddy treatment as they moved from jobs that native Spaniards disdained to compete in more exclusive labor markets.
This casual segue from the meaning of the Latino label to a discussion of growing if mild prejudice was telling for me because it echoed the experiences of my working-class Peruvian acquaintances in Madrid. In contrast to the vague or dismissive accounts given by middle-class citizens, they regularly spoke of the othering gestures that they faced in the Spanish capital, which often lumped them together with other Latin Americans in a way that made them uncomfortable. The notion of a shared “Latino” identity is often as new to immigrants from countries like Peru, where the discourse of Latino essence and unity has little purchase, as it is to native Spaniards, and their placement in the category drew them to reflect thoughtfully upon it.
My Peruvian friend Nancy, a citizen of Spain with eight years of residence, read the newspaper Latino because it was distributed at the Metro station near her house in the barrio of Usera. She was acutely aware of the stigmas and stereotypes associated with the term, and not only because she read a periodical that covered the concerns of its ostensible bearers. When I asked her about it, she began by relating a set of assumptions that she thought Spaniards made about Latin American immigrants, which revolved around loudness, casual attitudes toward work and punctuality, low levels of education, and improper public deportment. She was more specific on the last point, due to a recent encounter in a neighborhood park where she ran in the mornings and people drank at night. She told of meeting an outraged Spanish couple as they surveyed the strewn litter and empty bottles of the night before, and of the way that they accosted her, demanding to know why “you people” could not clean up after themselves like decent citizens. According to Nancy, she delivered a stern lecture in return, noting that she was not responsible for the litter nor did she engage in such questionable behaviors as public nocturnal drunkenness (a behavior that, in any case, is treated with benevolent indulgence when native Spanish youths drink in downtown Madrid's streets and plazas, in which case it becomes a sociable custom called el botellón).
The organizing conceit of Nancy's story is the sense that her national origin had led strangers to figure her as representative of an antisocial community. As a narrative of social encounter, it echoes what Coutin, writing specifically about the notion of migrant “illegality,” has called “alienation,” a process through which the bearer of a subaltern identity comes to occupy that role after being classified as such by a member of the dominant community, and internalizing the hegemonic perspective (Reference Coutin1993; see also De Genova Reference De Genova2002). Such acts of alienation are not, of course, limited to “illegal” aliens. The subalternization of “legal” immigrants is also structured partly by the suspicion that they are involved in extralegal behaviors (Coutin Reference Coutin2010), and similar tales often surfaced in conversations with Nancy and her roommates. They told of landlords reluctant to let them apartments, and who dropped by unannounced, certain that they would find unauthorized numbers of renters living in their properties. They recalled receiving special instruction in using appliances, on the assumption that their lives in Peru had ill prepared them to deal with European modernity. And they recounted the ridicule they faced due to lexical differences between peninsular Spanish and their American version. This last, seemingly innocuous example took on added resonance the day that I passed a Madrid employment agency offering Spanish classes for (perfectly intelligible) Latin American immigrants. Stories from other Peruvians echoed these and, as happens often among groups that seek to overcome a minoritized status by adopting majoritarian attitudes, I sometimes heard long-time residents bemoan the bad behaviors of compatriots who enacted stereotypes, exposing the community as a whole to ridicule. Thus one Peruvian artist, in discussing anti-Latino prejudice, ruefully told me of walking home from a gig one night and passing two drunken Ecuadorian women passed out in a median, and of having to teach a neighboring Dominican family to keep their stereo turned down.
The latter example is perhaps a manifestation of situations where immigrants compete for resources, attention, or respect. Especially telling, though, is the way that the narrator conflated Peruvian, Ecuadorian, and Dominican people as members of a “community” to which she felt responsible and by which she felt represented. Taken together, such stories suggest a widely shared vision of Latino distinctiveness that is tied to a coherent skein of associations for native and new Spaniards alike. Moreover, when we set aside more privileged interlocutors' vague or dismissive attitudes toward the “Latino” label, the precision with which these Peruvian proletarians articulate its parameters implies that it gets read more insistently onto working-class residents, who suffer its discriminatory effects more often and have fewer resources to resist.
The class inflection of this category emerges with special force when it becomes tied to acts more menacing than those mentioned thus far. Events like the police redadas aimed at seizing undocumented people remind working-class immigrants that notions of deep difference persist alongside official disavowals of racism, and that their community is disproportionately affected by such unspoken essentialisms. A redada is an action where police officers station themselves within subway stations, usually in working-class neighborhoods, and ask passers by for their papers. Even a casual observer can quickly discern the logic of the process, for in drearily predictable fashion their choices appear to be based upon skin color, facial features, or comportment, attributes that underline the somatic differences between immigrants and native Spaniards. These actions, as evidence that indigenous or Afro-descendent bodies impose an additional burden of proof on individuals seeking legitimacy in Spanish society, ensure that those Latin Americans likely to face redadas are permanently aware of subaltern difference. Nancy and her roommates, though they are Spanish citizens, often remind one another to take their documents along when leaving the house, documents that thereby prove both their legal citizenship and social alterity.
SOUNDING LATINIDAD AND PERUVIAN-NESS IN MADRID
Of course the Latino label does not depend only on its opposition to a “mainstream” Spanish identity; it is also filled with positive content, a set of expectations about cultural habits that are assumed to typify Latinos as a group. It might be expected that popular music, a powerful tool for shaping a Latino consciousness in the United States and an outstanding continental export, would play a role in this image. And so it does, though typically by working through registers of practice less strident than those beloved to academic and popular commentators. For instance, while Madrid's press writes about “underground” artists like Pachamama Crew, a Latin American hip hop collective whose lyrics decry racism and speak of marginality in the Spanish capital, only a minority listens to music that is so explicitly political. A larger cross-section of the Latin American immigrant “community” becomes aware of itself as a community by being addressed as a market with transparent, common interests.
Take Roger DJ and the content broadcast by Radio Corazón Tropical. When I asked Roger about the music that the station programmed in its efforts to “build bridges” between Latin American communities, he spoke largely in terms of audience share, as measured by marketing studies hosted on the station's website, and informal feedback, as measured by phone requests and the very active chat line kept open on an in-house computer during broadcasts. In other words, they simply played material that appealed to the largest possible swath of Madrid's Latinos. It was therefore dominated by the same Caribbean musical genres that I heard at the 2010 Peruvian independence celebration: salsa, vallenato, bachata, merengue, and, once again, the occasional cumbia. These genres also predominate in other locations that bill themselves as channels for Latino musical dissemination, such as rival radio stations and nightclubs (see figure 3). Much of Madrid's Latin American population does in fact listen to this music, because that is what is available in the forums that target them as a group. But the choices these forums make are driven by a totalizing logic of market share, according to which they broadcast music that will reach the largest cross-section of the Latin American population, rather than by any commitment to representing all of the constituencies within it. This repertoire hardly reflects listening patterns across the region from which that population hails, nor does it exhaust the varieties of music that Latin American immigrants want to listen to in Spain.
Bar El Meneo in Vallecas, which advertises música Latina: “Salsa, Merengue, Bachata, Vallenato, Cumbia, Etc.” Author's photo.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Peru, where Andean singers of marked indigenous ancestry, like Dina Paucar and Anita Santiváñez, have for decades handily outdrawn performers of Caribbean music, not to mention rock musicians, ballad singers, and other interpreters of self-consciously cosmopolitan musical fare. The fan base for these artists is centered in the country's indigenous and mestizo working-class majority, who find in their songs of failed love and social anomie, backed by a “modernized” highland ensemble of electric harp, bass, and percussion, recognition of their shared background and proletarian experiences in a rapidly developing economy (see Tucker Reference Tucker2013). Such music is almost completely unknown outside Peru, and even within the country its tinny timbres, abject themes, indifferent vocal delivery, and campy visual aesthetics have combined to render it anathema to most members of the upper classes. It is the urban-popular music of Peru's racialized lower classes. However, increasing class diversity within Madrid's Peruvian community clearly drove demand for such sounds, and local businesses sometimes combined forces to bring a standout performer to the city. Such performances usually took place at an outlying venue in a working-class neighborhood, but organizers demonstrated their expectation that they would draw Peruvians from across Madrid by advertising all over the city, even in such seemingly unlikely areas as the central Gran Vía and the bourgeois, gay-friendly Chueca neighborhood (see figure 4).
Photo of author with downtown poster advertising a show by Anita Santiváñez (covered over by later advertisements for a Chueca bathhouse). Photo courtesy of Jessaca Leinaweaver.
At Radio Corazón Tropical, I pointed out to Roger DJ that his DJ booth was covered with posters advertising Caribbean artists to the exclusion of such Andean artists. I also noted that the station played next to no Peruvian music, and he responded, “No, lo justo” (“That's right, just what is needed/appropriate”). He meant that the station played some Peruvian cumbia, but not so much as to alienate people seeking music from Colombia, Puerto Rico, or the Dominican Republic. They played tropical dance artists whose music drew a Latino listenership sizable enough to attract advertisers. And under no circumstances would the station broadcast music that was “folkloric,” a category that encompassed music of presumptively indigenous provenance, no matter how popular and “modernized” it might be. Even the concession regarding cumbia brought Peruvian music into dialogue with other Latino sounds via the country's lone tropical style, rather than through a distinctively indigenous or mestizo music. And it was confined to a half-hour show entitled Rutas del Perú, which aired at an off-peak hour and was soon dropped from the schedule. It is obvious enough to someone familiar with musical habits in countries outside the core market for tropical music that this station's programming cannot be seen as representative of Madrid's Latin American community. Granted, the station did not put itself forward as representative in that way, but it did bear an explicit mandate to “build bridges” between Latin American communities and end their isolation from one another, and that might imply educating second-generation immigrants and even native Spaniards about those around them, rather than silencing unfamiliar experiences.
Such sociocultural specificities seemed to be silenced even where agendas were not so thoroughly profit-driven, and according to a distinct logic of exclusion. On a different occasion I visited Radio Tentación, another station advertised in the weekly Ocio Latino, which was run by progressive Spanish mediators rather than Latin American immigrants. I spoke with the Spanish program manager, who I will call Rivera, about the station's mission and programming philosophy, and she explained that their bewilderingly diverse content was, like that of Roger DJ's Radio Corazón Tropical, designed to end “ghettoes” and foster “integration” among Madrid's populace. Thus shows in Chinese and Romanian aired alongside public service infomercials exploring basic reproductive health, a program by and for Madrid's taxi drivers concerning issues facing their union, and a variety of others. Rivera offered to introduce me to the Ecuadorian DJs who hosted the shows aimed at Madrid's Latino community, one of whom had been picked up in a redada despite his Spanish citizenship. I had heard the station's Latin American shows and knew them to be full of the same “tropical” content that filled Radio Corazón Tropical, so I took the opportunity to ask Rivera about what appeared to me to be a kind of Latino commercialism that contradicted the station's mission, and to query why nobody broadcast the indigenous and mestizo musicians so popular along Peruvian, Ecuadorian, and Bolivian audiences. Rivera explained both her own musical inclinations and the process through which she had learned to cast off her assumptions about Latino musical values. She said that her own tastes leaned, like (she presumed incorrectly) mine, toward the classic cantautores of Latin America—Mercedes Sosa, Víctor Jara, and Daniel Viglietti—artists whose leftist folk anthems had found much favor among politicized, anti-fascist Spaniards from the 1960s into the 1980s. However, she explained, conversations with Latino DJs had led her to see broadcasting such content as rank essentialism: after all, were immigrant listeners not as fully modern as she herself? Would this not be much like the expectation that she, as a native madrileña, spent her time listening to the corny, contrived schottisches that folkloric performers broke out once a year to celebrate San Isidro, the city's patron saint day?
It is hard to impeach Rivera's instincts to recognize Latin American communities as contemporary, cosmopolitan cultural formations rather than promoting the essentialized visions of “authentic culture” that too often lurk beneath contemporary celebrations of ethnic diversity. And yet, the assumptions that indigenous and mestizo musics are artifacts of the past, rather than dynamic sounds engaged with the modern musical world, and that all Latin American immigrants hear them that way, misconstrues the nature of popular cultural development in a country like Peru, where contemporary popular culture is often grounded in elements from that very same “past.” Her view also stands uncomfortably close to both Hispanic and Europeanist discourses in Spain according to which effective integration means abandoning cultural specificities that might evince non-Hispanic, non-European difference.
As working-class Peruvians learn their place in Spain, two converging pressures condition their growing sense of a distinct, migrant self, each promoted from both within and outside the local Latin American community. One is their assignment to an essentialized community of “Latino” peers with whom they are assumed to share lamentable social habits. The other fills the container of Latino alterity with cultural content that, despite claims that it is representative, consists mostly of tropical cultural forms that are already emblems of latinidad elsewhere, and which are seen as cosmopolitan and therefore “suitably modern” (per Liechty Reference Liechty2003). It is certainly true that most Latin American listeners, including Peruvians, listen to and like tropical music, and it is unreasonable to expect that listeners from outside Peru, who are the majority of the market, will be drawn to the music of an artist like Dina Paucar, based as it is in aesthetics unique to the country's Andean heritage. However, the unspoken expectation that a musical habitus organized around the appreciation of tropical music represents a consensus position for Spain's Latinos effectively marginalizes those from places dominated by other popular cultural formations, especially, in this case, Peruvians of indigenous and mestizo heritage. In this sense, the “bridges” built by new consumption patterns among Spanish Latinos are clearly one-way channels of communication.Footnote 12 They encourage a vision of Latino identity that is produced through market share, and Peruvians worry about the assimilative power of this “Latino” taste formation. This can lead them to withdraw from engagement with other Latinos, who they feel do not recognize them in all their specificity.
CONCLUSION
Several years ago, Escrivá observed that Peruvian migrants tended to regard debates about pan-Latin Americanism “with a certain disdain, focusing their attention on daily survival, and on bettering their present and future quality of life” (2005: 165), and she predicted that they would favor progress to full Spanish citizenship. But most of the people Escrivá interacted with arrived with the first wave of Peruvian migrants, who were mainly middle-class criollo citizens. This was before the immigration boom of the late 1990s and 2000s, and more recent migrants have been more diverse in terms of race and class. This is so even as the marketplace targeting Latin Americans has grown and ethnic discourses are exerting greater pressure on them. Since “human capital, class, and phenotypic characteristics of new immigrants bear heavily on the way in which they are able to command external ratification of their self-identifications” (Marrow Reference Marrow, Falconi and Antonio2007: 66), for how long will working-class Peruvians refuse to debate their place within the emergent Spanish Latino community? And given that native Spanish ideologies of Hispanism and Europeanism leave little room for a public right to difference, will Peruvians seek such ratification, and if so, where and how?
More broadly, the situation I have described raises the question of whether Spanish latinidad represents the persistence of a strongly ethnicized model of incorporation like those familiar from accounts of twentieth-century European and America, or instead the development of models particular to late capitalism. Or is it both at once? It has been widely observed that immigration regimes in the age of neoliberal globalization, with its demand for flexible and service-oriented labor, differ from earlier ones organized around Fordist capitalism, with its need for a fixed industrial and agricultural workforce (Sassen Reference Sassen2011 [1994]). Rather than the “hyphenated” identities familiar from the period of American modernity, neoliberal globalization tends to generate deterritorialized nationalism. Now we find “additive” nationalisms that bind people to multiple countries, and situations, as in transit migration, where immigrants may not even seek incorporation. The latter fits the many Latin Americans in Spain who see the country as but one temporary stop in a circular or extended migration (McIlwaine Reference McIlwaine and McIlwaine2011). It is difficult to predict what they will do, or their descendants, or their fellow immigrants who plan to stay for good.
Even so, a comparison with other situations brings out some aspects of their experience that may weigh in future events. First, unlike the United States, where immigration remains tied to a nation-building vision that promotes foreigners' incorporation into the “American Dream” (Coutin Reference Coutin2003), in Spain the very idea of a normative nationality is viewed with ambivalence, and immigration is more explicitly tied to the need for temporary labor. This transactional situation does not require immigrants to disavow their primary attachment to their home countries in return for full citizenship, as in the idealized American scenario. However, with Spain's cherished self-image as a modern European state remaining partly rooted in the mitigation of the threat posed by fractious national minorities in the post-Franco era, Spanish immigration discourse still asks incoming foreigners to exchange “ethnonational” claims for a better way of life. Even residents whose status is temporary must reconcile the state's promise of “generic” membership with their continuing treatment as different, and this will continue to foster discourses about alterity and marginalization.
Furthermore, there is ample evidence that these questions of belonging and ethnicity are playing out with special force among second- and even third-generation Latin American migrants, whose experiences were key determinants in shaping the ethnic identifications of the twentieth century (Rumbaut Reference Rumbaut2004). For instance, despite the variations in experience that discourage consolidation of a distinctive “Cuban-Spanish community” uniting the three generations of Cuban migrants present in Spain, Mette Berg has found that their sense of difference from other Latin American nationalities stands “alongside another discourse which invokes similarities with other new migrant groups, especially other Latin Americans” (2011: 135). This forces them to reflect anew upon the notion of Latino identity, and Leinaweaver has shown that immigrant children and transnational adoptees of Latin American origin, as well as their parents, all think deeply about whether or not they are “really Spanish,” and about the social consequences of being placed in a marginal Latino category by Spanish society at large (Reference Leinaweaver2013).
In this situation, it seems likely that some Peruvian immigrants will conceive of themselves simply as “Peruvians abroad,” while others, especially in the second and later generations, will become attracted to Latino identities. In watching this situation develop, we should bear in mind Berg's admonition: “Race and class are important for understanding these differences, as are changes in public understanding and attitudes vis-à-vis multiculturalism and immigrants” (2011: 173–74). For so long as race and class continue to shape individuals' imputed identities as alien “Latinos,” or as immigrants rather than new Spanish citizens, and so long as Spain's right to direct the “proper” management of alterity remains central to its self-definition, the effects will be felt differently across the country's Peruvian population. Regarding the Peruvian case, it is also important to keep national origins in view, since diasporic Peruvians tend to replicate divisions from home while living abroad, and to integrate differentially depending on their backgrounds. Thus poorer, more indigenous Peruvians tend to organize into regional associations designed to maintain close ties with Peru, while wealthier Peruvians connect instead with peers in host communities, other landed migrant groups, and fellow elites across the diaspora (see Paerregaard Reference Paerregaard2008: 129). It is therefore unlikely that Peruvians in Spain will construct a “hyphenated” subject position that would provide strong alternatives to either the Latino cultural formation or Spanish discourses of integration. Doubly marginalized as immigrants and as people whose national distinctiveness fits badly with dominant local categories, they will probably continue to find it hard to ratify their particular modes of difference.
Overall, the situation that I have outlined shows how Spain's management of intercultural discourse remains rooted in a model of “exclusionary inclusion” (Rogozen-Soltar Reference Rogozen-Soltar2010), which has been glossed, in a very different context, as “the cunning of recognition” (Povinelli Reference Povinelli2002). Spain's rhetorics of incorporation discourage kinds of difference that are determined, a priori, to be problematic, and although its operations are pitched as politically progressive, they encourage new citizens to abandon identities that they deem essential, on the premise that they can only be essentializing (per Turino Reference Turino1992). Scholars would be well advised to continue interrogating modes of not only exclusion, but also multicultural inclusion, to understand their ethnic disciplinarity (Williams Reference Williams1989). However, any analysis of legal and political regimes must also account for the small spaces where their human consequences occur, and this is why activities like musical consumption and “ethnonational” celebration remain important. For people who daily face stereotypes and expectations that often bewilder them, encounters with the familiar need not be attempts to disaffiliate with the host society, or evidence of atavistic chauvinism, nor are they mere acts of culturalist escapism unworthy of scholarly attention. Instead, they are occasions for parsing the exclusionary effects of social discourse, and seizing control over one's sense of self.
This is the thought that came to my mind on one of my last nights in Spain, when I invited Nancy and her roommates to a Peruvian club in Madrid's central Malasaña district for a Friday evening Andean song competition running up to the 28 July national holiday. These women rarely go out on Friday evenings because they work Saturdays and they can ill afford to arrive there exhausted from an evening on the town. However, as before, they jumped at the chance to hear music from home, and though they arrived worn out from their day jobs, they became more animated with each passing moment. When the unmistakable sound of Andean guitars finally came floating through the din of filler music with which a DJ had been testing the sound system, Nancy paused mid-sentence and cocked her head. Tension ran visibly out of her shoulders as her body settled lower into her chair, and she turned back, saying in a voice that combined equal measures of excitement and plaintiveness, “You just feel Peruvian again when you're here, you know?” Those who conflate distinctive migrant spaces with pathological “ghettoes,” those who assume that performance idioms from outside a putative international mainstream represent only an unreasonable connection to archaism, and those who prefer to focus on more “concrete” realms such as political organization and street protest, would all do well to attend to such small-scale expressions of identification, for they enact the kinds of claims that are absent from official multicultural discourse.
