softcommunication asked: You've probably answered this already (if so direct me to it) but why Latin music?
That’s a great question! I think it’s an attempt to correct two imbalances, one personal and one systemic.
When I was twelve my family — white (Anglo-German, mostly), estadounidense — moved to Guatemala to work as missionaries. I spent my six years there vacuuming up all the US and UK culture I could get my hands on — I learned Spanish, but that was the extent of my interest and participation in Latin culture, whether local or international. Twenty years later, I’m deeply ashamed of this, and having found my way into certain elements of Latin culture (thanks largely to a girl I haven’t spoken to in ten years), I find myself broadly curious about nearly all of it; music is in some ways just the most convenient prism, and one that’s easiest to research from the comfort of my home.
But the other thing is that when I started paying serious attention to the Internet’s music-chatter ecosystem about five years ago, I saw almost no discussion of or appreciation for Latin music, either historical or modern. I think the thing that crystallized it for me was Pitchfork’s 60s list, which paid tribute to yé-yé, Afropop, rocksteady, krautrock, Italian soundtracks, Brazilian pop, and even (elliptically) chanson, but completely ignored the great Hispanophone music of the decade, whether populist movements like bugalú and salsa, counterculture figures like Victor Jara and Paco de Lucía, or establishment figures like Piazzolla. I didn’t know any of these names in 2006, but I knew there was part of the story I wasn’t being told. So I decided to learn.
