MEDIA AND THE MUSICAL IMAGINATION: COMPARATIVE DISCOURSES OF BELONGING IN “NUESTRO HIMNO” AND “REGGAETóN LATINO”

Abstract

In May 2006, United States residents were witness to the largest pro-immigrant cross-country protests in the nation's history. During the apex of the pro-immigrant demonstrations, the single “Nuestro Himno,” a Spanish-language paraphrasing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was released. Both the “Nuestro Himno” recording and the demonstrations constituted important symbolic gestures toward the (re)claiming of U.S. public space and the contested meanings of citizenship, nation, and belonging. This essay commences with an overview of recent debates on cultural citizenship, followed by a discussion of the “musical imagiNation” as it pertains to Latino popular music in general. I juxtapose this commentary against a critical discourse analysis of mainstream (English-language) Internet and print media discourse regarding the “Nuestro Himno” recording and an audiovisual analysis of the hit video “Reggaetón Latino (Chosen Few Remix)” (2005). Employing “Nuestro Himno” as a analytical lens, I propose a (re)evaluation of the differential notions of (cultural) citizenship and family foregrounded in official and popular discourses: How does the discourse of family and nation that emerges from the media coverage of “Nuestro Himno” reflect prevailing beliefs about citizenship, belonging, and language? And if the marches of the spring of 2006 embody the political and social possibilities of cultural citizenship, then how are we to understand the contradictory underlying discourse of one of reggaetón's most popular music videos, despite its seemingly inclusive promotion of the pan-Latino familia?

Key Words:

• Cultural citizenship
• discourse
• immigration
• media
• music video
• popular music

I thank Mari Castañeda and the Communications faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for the opportunity to present an early draft of this piece. Muchísimas gracias to Carlos Alamo Pastrana, Rogelio Miñana, my anonymous reviewers, and editors Jonathan Hill and Thomas Wilson of Identities for their insightful suggestions as well. Finally, I especially thank Dolores Inés Casillas for her invaluable commentary. This essay would certainly not be the same were it not for her immensely critical, yet always cariñoso, eye.

Notes

1. The protests of the spring of 2006 were largely in response to two specific pieces of legislation passed in December 2005 by the House of Representatives and in May 2006 by the Senate. The House legislation (HR4437, otherwise known as “The Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Information Control Act”) requested the following: the construction of a 700-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border; the right for state and local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws; legal changes that would allow individuals, organizations, and religious factions to be criminally penalized for assisting undocumented immigrants; that those undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S be penalized as felons. The Senate version of this legislation, S2611, was nearly identical in content (GovTrack.us 2007).

2. As one Lancaster, Pennsylvania, newspaper editorial argued with regard to the performance of the “Star-Spangled Banner” in any language other than English, “It sounds the best—and it means the most—when sung in English” (Editorial May 2 “It means the most” 2006; emphasis mine).

3. The tendency to frame the everyday linguistic practices and cultural production of U.S. Latinos almost exclusively as mechanisms of resistance predominates in Cultural Studies literature. However, I advocate a more measured approach to the everyday politics of language and cultural production that recognizes the possibility that not all minoritarian expressive practices are necessarily purposefully resistant, just as all dominant practices are not conscientiously manipulative.

4. See Richard Rodríguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam, 1982) for further discussion of English as a public language and its relationship to the expression of U.S. identity in the public arena.

5. In comparison, Blanca Silvestrini foregrounds the potentially resistant character of Latino cultural citizenship in more explicit terms, labeling it “usually oppositional … because it describes the claims of social, human, and cultural rights made by communities that do not hold state power and that are denied basic rights by those who do” (1997: 44). Silvestrini's interpretation thus begs the questions: if by default “usually oppositional,” what does Latino cultural citizenship “look like” in nonoppositional form? Alternatively, under what parameters might Latino cultural citizenship not signify empowerment?

6. Recognizing the dual “routes/roots” nature of Latino identity entails a broader historical reading of the Latino presence in the present-day United States that includes those more recent immigrants and their offspring (those who have followed transnational “routes”) as well as those who trace their descendents back to land previously owned by Mexico (those who possess long-standing “roots” in this country). I thank the anonymous reviewer who brought the need to clarify this point to my attention.

7. This is not to suggest, as I demonstrate, that strict hierarchies of gender, race, culture, and class are not present in Latinos' own self-renderings of the (trans)national Latino familia, or that the concept of the musical imagiNation is employed in an exclusively symbolic and/or counter-hegemonic vein.

8. As Peggy Levitt (2001: 14) argues, transnationalism and globalization are mutually constitutive, if distinct, phenomena. Levitt locates this difference primarily in the fact that globalization is generally not tied to any one particular nation-state, while transnational activities are linked to or transcend one if not several nation-states.

9. In defense of his record label's release of “Nuestro Himno,” Adam Kidron, a British-born, U.S. resident of 16 years, stated, “There's no attempt to usurp anything. The intent is to communicate. I wanted to show my thanks to these people who buy my records and listen to the music we release and do the jobs I don't want to do.” While his remarks might initially be superficially read as a benign gesture of cross-cultural solidarity, on second glance Kidron's statement is nonetheless problematic, due to the way in which Kidron chooses not to emphasize the immigrant status that he shares with so many of reggaetón's consumers. Instead, he distances himself from the racialized, working-class individuals that he assumes comprise his company's primary target audience. As such, Kidron's previous utterance (“I wanted to show my thanks to these people who buy my records …”) may be interpreted as disingenuous at best. Conversely, Kidron's connections lead one to wonder if at least some of resentment toward “Nuestro Himno” might be attributed to the fact that many of its performers and its producer are connected to the reggaetón music scene, itself a target of race and class prejudice both within the music industry as well as among Latinos and non-Latinos alike.

10. Bush was not the only Washington, D.C., politician to express his unequivocal disagreement with “Nuestro Himno.” Shortly following the song's release, both the House and the Senate introduced resolutions “[a]ffirming that statements of national unity, including the National Anthem, should be recited or sung in English” (H.RES.458; S.RES.458) (Pandering with the anthem 2006). Several state legislatures, including those of Oklahoma and Minnesota, considered similar measures (Talley 2006; Sweeney 2006).

11. This narrative was posted in response to a National Public radio story by Mara Liasson (2006).

12. In several print media outlets, among them the aforementioned Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Georgia, 2006) and the Herald News (Passaic County, New Jersey, 2006), “Nuestro Himno” was characterized as a “bastardization” of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The lexical choice in these cases proves significant, particularly given the historic anxieties regarding cultural and racial miscegenation in the United States.

13. Indeed, the current struggles over citizenship are not unique to the present case in point, as evidenced by the Americanization programs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aimed at Native Americans and Chicanos, as well as the imposition of English within the Puerto Rican educational system in the post-1898 period.

14. For more on this debate, see María Elena Cepeda (2001).

15. For a comprehensive discussion of the reasons underlying the Afro-centric shift in hip-hop, see Raquel Rivera (2003). Because a discussion of reggaetón's origins are beyond the parameters of this essay, consult Ejima Baker (2005) and Jillian Báez (2006) for further information regarding the history and dynamics of the genre.

16. See Báez (2006) for an effective discussion of what she terms the “competing tensions” within reggaetón's gendered framework.

17. The archetype of the “successful” U.S. immigrant (i.e., one who does not accept government aid) has historically been used as a disciplinary mechanism aimed at internal minorities like Latinos, Native Americans, and Africans Americans. Behdad argues that this strategy ultimately displaces culpability for the failings of the U.S.'s supposed meritocracy from the dominant classes onto marginalized communities (2005: 13–14). I would also add that the very label “Latino” (a grassroots term linked to struggles for social justice), while politically efficacious, has also drawn critiques for its ability to gloss over the myriad differences within and across the numerousU.S. communities of Latin American origin. For more on this particular debate, see Felix Padilla (1985) and Suzanne Oboler (1995).

18. Most media outlets cite 1919 as the year of “La Bandera”'s publication, with the exception of Newsflash (2006), which lists 1912 as the year of publication. Notably, the commissioning of this translation occurred during the same period as the infamous Americanization programs and forced English instruction on the U.S. mainland and in Puerto Rico, respectively.

Various 2006. Nuestro Himno. Somos Americanos/We Are Americans. Urban Box Office.