Crossroads - Bolivian Urban Folk Music and Andean Diaspora Communities on the Internet "CANCELLED"

This proposed paper focuses on the relationship between representations of Bolivian urban folk music and Andean diaspora communities on the Internet. What transnational experiences may signify for a music culture, which travels between places and spaces, are discussed through case studies. Bolivian/ Andean urban folk music culture, which contributes to the construction of a relationship between folk, popular, rural and urban music and a relationship between a local and a global scene is studied.

 I study virtual rooms as leisure spaces where old and new meanings of identity and social relationships based on a sense of community can be observed. Processes of staging social and cultural identities in cyberspace will be described. Aspects about relationships between Andean popular music, Latin American music and Bolivian music, stardom and audiences are addressed.

Questions about defining identities and mixing influences are considered. I also try to show how contemporary social issues and changing identities are juxtaposed in complex collages in the virtual rooms, by musicians and their audiences, through affective links in processes of social production of music. Issues such as how relationships between the local and global music culture and new as well as old identities, articulated on the Internet, are examined. I attempt to understand processes of cultural production as ways of creating new meanings, spaces and a sense of belongingness in cultural activities of diaspora.