Música, raza y nación: música tropical en Colombia

Throughout the pages of Music, Race and Nation Peter Wade explores the history of Colombian tropical music, analyzing its rise in the context of the development of electronic media, rapid urbanization, and regional power struggles. How did tropical music (porro, cumbia and vallenato) — which has its roots in the black, marginalized areas of the country — manage, starting in the 1940s, to become so popular in a country that prided itself on its white heritage? Through numerous interviews and archival research, Wade tries to answer this question and shows how big band performance of cumbias and porros in the 1940s and 1950s suggested both old traditions and new freedoms, especially for women. In the last decades,

Originally published in English in the year 2000, Música raza y nación has become a fundamental book not only for being the first extensive study of Colombian popular music, but also for its novel approach to the way in which music transforms and is transformed by ideas of race, nation, sexuality, tradition, and modernity.