“Nostalgia and Deracination in the Latin-American Immigrants Music”

This presentation was prepared in the context of a three years research funded by National Commission of Science and Technology of Chile(CONICYT) which aim to understand the relations between the topics of music and immigration taking into consideration the increased arrival of Latin American immigrants to our country(Chile) whose comes mostly from Perú, Colombia and Equator.

We are interested more specifically in develop an approach to the  artistic and migratory trajectories of the immigrant musicians and also their repertoires. We think that music can be itself a mediator(Antoine Hennion) between two worlds, the country of origin and the one of arrival, between two temporalities, the past and the present, in the consideration of the immigrant subject as an inhabitant of two realities (Marta Torres). In order to conduct this research we’ll use the contributions from Sociology of emotions, Sociology of art and Musicology.

Several studies shows that music might be a privileged field to explore the interfaces of the intimate and the social (Hesmondhalgh) as also the individual identities and the collective ones, so It's perceived as a dispositive that is easily connected to the emotions.  We’ll seek for the way in which the repertoires chosen by these musicians would be closely related to the feelings of nostalgia and deracination, and how is that the repertoires exacerbates or conjure them, what would allow to create new social bonds through the emergence of musical communities(Becker).

The analytical corpus considers 42 interviews to musicians (already made), field notes and audiovisual materials of ethnographic observation.

We look forward to contribute to create knowledge about the migration experience beyond the usual sociodemographic approach to see in-depth the sociocultural dimensions and its sensible and existencial elements.