Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Latinos, Too, Sing America:los latinos, también, cantan américa …byJuan FloresLatinos, too, sing America! The “other” America, América in Spanish,English, and broken tongues; songs of hope, struggle, and broken dreams.America sung in boleros, in décimas, merengues and corridos, mariachi y mambo,plena y guaguancó Nuestra América.Latino songs resonate with ancestral chords and chants: drums,guitars, flutes from Indoamerica, Africa, Andalusia. Nuestra música takesroot in the coastlands and cattle ranges of Mexico, the canefields and coffeehills of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic. Its history is the storyof homelands and uprooting, migrant freight cars and steamships, barbedwireborderlands and Ellis Island holding pens, the America of beet fieldsand canneries, garment sweatshops and janitor pails, boxcar barrios andtenement stairways. La migra and Texas Rangers, United Farmworkers andRaza Unida, Brown Berets and Young Lords. Poverty and pride, racism andstruggle, suffering and joy. Nuestra historia.The musical life of this country is unthinkable without its glorious“Spanish tinge,” the irresistible infusion of ranchera and tango, cumbia and soninto the heartbeat of jazz, blues, country, big band, and rock. New Orleansjazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton was the first to acknowledge it, but America’s“first composer,” Louis Moreau Gottschalk, before him, and Dizzy Gillespieand Bo Diddley and scores of others since, have all paid their musical homageto the rich current of rhythms and voices, dance moves and song formsforever emanating anew from the cultural wellspring of Latino culture.Rafael Hernández and Lydia Mendoza, Flaco Jiménez and Celia Cruz, Nar-262