Consider Selena Quintanilla. The Corpus Christi native has become seen as an emblem of Latin music but there is nothing Latin-American about her or her music, which was distinctly American — more specifically Texan and even more specifically Tejano — a melding of Spanish folk music, waltz, and polka, an organic fusion created by the meeting of Czech immigrants, German immigrants, and Texas Mexicans (Tejanos) in Central and South Texas nearly 200 years ago. This history didn’t matter to her fans, Hispanic or otherwise, and nobody seemed to care that she didn’t speak Spanish fluently and learned her lyrics phonetically. Decades after her tragic murder, another monolingual-English-speaking Tejana named Selena — Selena Gomez — faced backlash for releasing music in Spanish.
What changed?
To keep it short, ideas about “cultural appropriation” were created decades ago in the “ethnic” studies departments — themselves a byproduct of new-left campus activism in the 1970s — but, for the most part, mercifully remained in the academic ghetto until the mass adoption of social media in the 2010s. Though significantly less common than they are now, conversations around appropriation popped up in mass media before the 2010s. For example, in 1994, Ray Charles took umbrage with people referring to Elvis Presley as “the king,” telling NBC’s Bob Costa that “he was doing our type of music,” and noted that while whites celebrated Elvis’s hip-swaying act, Nat King Cole had been run out of town in Alabama for doing a similar one. Ray Charles’ assertion that Elvis “did” black music is closer to the truth than the popular perception today, which is that Elvis “stole” black music. Elvis Presley was not a suburban Jew from New Jersey or a Norwegian farm boy from South Dakota. He was a poor white from Tupelo, Mississippi, who lived in a largely black neighborhood and found his musical inspiration in an Assemblies of God church — a church which, like all Pentecostal churches, traces its lineage to the Azusa Street Revival, a movement which came out of the black church but quickly attracted and accepted disadvantaged people from all walks of life, including the white underclass. United by hard lives and possessed by the holy ghost, poor blacks, Hispanics, whites, and Indians prayed, sang, testified, and spoke in tongues together. Given the segregated history of Protestant Christianity in the United States, this was a radical movement of cross-racial Christian brotherhood and, at least in Jim Crow Mississippi, must have seemed like an act of outright social rebellion. Of course, Elvis sang like a black gospel singer, he grew up in the same religious tradition! He was alleged to have literally stolen a song from a lesser-known black artist — but only decades after the appropriation accusations started. In any case, Ray Charles and black artists of his generation had reason to feel bitterness toward Elvis. White artists did have advantages in the Jim Crow era that black artists didn’t, and it's hard to imagine that Elvis could have replicated his mainstream success if he had been black. (...)
Appropriation and cultural synthesis happen on a global scale now, thanks to the internet, and now foreigners mock Americans for their tsk-tsk-ing about the practice. Earlier this year, Spanish singer Rosalía was criticized (by Americans) for “appropriating” Latin American culture leading to the “widespread misconception that she is Latina,” so says an NPR writer in an article that uses the term “Latinx.” (They talk like that in el barrio Ms. Restrepo?) These “gringo latinos” were later mocked by actual Latin Americans, who didn’t seem to care that Rosalía was a “colonizer.”
by River Page, Pirate Wires | Read more:
Image: Heinz
