Latinos and Their Music in a Nation of Immigrants: The Social Imaginary in the U.S.

This paper focuses on how trans-national migration and immigration generates new forms of popular culture. The focus is on the migration of individuals from Mexico and the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean to the mainland United States and their creation and consumption of music. It looks at the borderlands of the Latino experience in the United States and how Latinos in this country must navigate a variety of borders – geographic, cultural, artistic, market, and psychic – in their music-making and music-consumption. It emphasizes how the dominant racial imagination in the United States effects this navigation as Latinos confront a state of being a “perpetual immigrant” or what Thomas (2010) calls a “citizen-immigrant.” I use Flores (2000) concept of the Latino imaginary to conceptualize the process of navigating the various borders of the Latino experience using a number of case studies of Latino music and Latino artists. I end with Macía’s (2019) argument that a new cultura panamericana or hemispheric imaginary – a transnational imaginary – is emerging not only in the U.S. but across the America’s that works against the older borders of national identity and the racial imaginary.