Philip Kasinitz and Marco Martiniello, eds. “Music, Migration and the City.” Special issue, Ethnic and Racial Studies 42(6), 2019.

Review

---

Ethnic and Racial Studies produces four to six special or themed issues per year. The earlier special issues in this volume explored the topics of “The Mechanisms of Racialization beyond the Black-White Binary” and “Super-Diversity in Everyday Life.” This issue on “Music, Migration and the City” had its roots in an interdisciplinary conference held by the Advanced Research Collaborative of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2016.

Guest editors Philip Kasinitz and Marco Martiniello, both sociologists, frame this project with respect to a “crisis of immigrant incorporation” (857) throughout Europe and in North America. While the details may differ, immigrant-receiving countries have seen a rise in nativist¹ sentiment in recent years. The cities which these articles discuss are considered cosmopolitan and “superdiverse,”² with multicultural influences on many facets of daily life. People may enjoy the benefits of immigrant contributions to their sports teams, food, music, and other popular culture, while still actively excluding the “outsiders” from political participation and other aspects of involvement in their communities. It should be noted that non-migrants who are ethno-racial minorities (that is, non-white) are frequently targets of the same sorts of discrimination and exclusion. For thematic coherence, I would ask how each of the writers addresses this, where the challenges arise, and whether they give examples of these “culturally based forms of exclusion” (857) in their article.

The editors spend a good bit of time in this introductory essay seeming to have a need to justify why they are focusing on music, an everyday cultural activity, as though defending this choice against a panel of skeptical critics. Mainly addressing sociologists, they reiterate arguments which Martiniello has made in two previous articles (Martiniello 2015; Martiniello and LaFleur 2008), and which he also does in his contribution to this special issue, on what the sociology of music has to offer. While they criticize social scientists in general for neglecting the arts and thereby ignoring potential areas of research, they also somewhat critique musicologists for being too focused on musical details. They anticipate that their primary audience is other scholars of ethnic and migration studies, whose disciplinary homes are most likely sociology, political science, and cultural studies. Musicologists and musicians are the secondary imagined audience. The editors establish that, as music sociologists, they are focusing on sociocultural context, and that meaning in music is created by its production and its reception by audiences. A quote from William Roy and Timothy Dowd’s 2010 essay on the sociology of music encapsulates the argument: “Music is a mode of interaction that expresses and constitutes social relations (whether they are subcultures, organizations, classes, or nations) and that embodies cultural assumptions regarding these relations . . .. What is sociological, then, is less the sonic qualities than the social relations that music is both a part of and shaping” (184). (This is, of course, no surprise to ethnomusicologists.) The overall goal of the special issue is to demonstrate that popular music plays social and political roles and can contribute to our understanding of race and ethnicity as lived experiences.

The special issue brings together several disciplinary perspectives. The contributors come from the fields of political science, anthropology, musicology, and ethnomusicology, as well as sociology. These authors are located in Belgium, the United States, and Canada. Within the thematic focus, the eight articles represent research in three general categories, which the editors term domains. The first, local arts and culture, explores ways in which the musical expressions of migrants and ethno-racial minorities influence the mainstream cultural scenes. The second, social relations, shows music being used to bridge communities and as the site of meaningful interchanges between different groups. The third is local politics, in which music is used as a means of political expression, a basis for collective identification, and for social and political mobilization.

Most of the articles fit into more than one domain, such as the work of Alessandro Mazzola, which explores both a local artistic scene and political mobilization in Naples, a city with a large migrant population from neighboring Mediterranean regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The far-right political party the Lega Nord has capitalized on a historical north/south divide in Italy, building a platform of overt racism and Islamophobia on top of stereotypes of the south as “backward” and criminal. Mazzola’s case studies present musicians who combine regional folk music styles with contemporary production techniques. In their songs, videos, and performances, they employ different strategies to establish the presence and meaning of a local Mediterranean identity as a sociocultural setting, and to mobilize in protest against the Lega Nord.

Martiniello’s own essay also belongs to both the first and third domains. His community of study consists of second- and third-generation immigrants living in and around Liège, Belgium, representing a multi-ethnic working class. Through a shared interest in hip-hop culture, they have established a local identity that is more meaningful than that of their parents’ or grandparents’ countries of origin. Martiniello stresses the importance of viewing popular arts as a way for minority groups to express social and political views, providing clear examples of music as protest, as a call for change, and to mobilize youth into voting in local elections.

Three of the articles center around the city of New York. Musicologist Ray Allen examines the history of Caribbean Carnival music and its transnational flow. He demonstrates how migration was a catalyst in the development and circulation of two genres of music originating in Trinidad: calypso in the 1920s/1930s and soca in the 1980s. Musicians from Trinidad traveled to New York to record and to perform for the Caribbean diaspora. Music producers took influences from other black genres, changing the production and reception of these musics not only abroad, but also in the homeland. Rather than a one-way globalization route, or a center-periphery model of cultural capital, the process was more dynamic and circular. Allen proposes a theory of “diasporic transnationalism” as a more suitable model.

Anahí Viladrich’s project has some surface similarities with Allen’s, focusing on the mobility of artists seeking careers outside their home country. Capitalizing on the renewed popularity of tango, Argentine musicians, dancers, and instructors aim to establish themselves as its most authentic interpreters. Claiming symbolic ownership of their national cultural product is an ongoing process, as they must accumulate what Viladrich calls “tango capital.” This is the prestige and public validation that comes from both demonstrating innovation and by maintaining strong ties to Buenos Aires and proving their mastery of the traditional. This article is a bit different from the others in the domain of local arts and culture for a few reasons, primarily that Argentines are not visible minorities and view themselves as white, so it doesn’t quite fit with a crisis of immigrant incorporation. It is in fact quite revealing that Viladrich refers to the migratory artists as émigrés and not immigrants. The argument for changing the local artistic scene is that making New York a global tango hub enlarges the musical landscape of the city; however, tango is a very niche market without much impact on mainstream popular culture.

Broadway musical theater, on the other hand, is among those genres that strongly symbolize New York City and “American” music. Kasinitz turns a historiographic lens onto this genre. In its formative period of the 1920s to 1950s, the composers, directors, and producers were largely children of European Jewish immigrants, who were not visible minorities but were marginalized within whiteness. Their innovation was a blend of popular forms with older musical traditions, and became mainstream. “This audience, children of immigrants in a city in which the children of immigrants were demographically and culturally dominant, saw in these musicals an optimistic vision of an America with room for them” (884–885). The same is true today, with children of immigrants and other “ethnic outsiders” remaking mainstream Broadway. This is the argument Kasinitz makes, but Lin-Manuel Miranda, child of Puerto Rican migrants, is his only contemporary example—though a highly influential one, to be sure, with his musicals In the Heights and Hamilton. The latter is both “a tribute to immigrant reinvention” (896) and “a new take on a traditional American story, one which reflects the diversity of the time and place in which it was created” (897).

In the domain of social relations, anthropologist Bob White draws on critical sociolinguistics in his analysis. The French-speaking majority in Québec is a linguistic minority in Canada as a whole, and they are very protective over the use of their language. When a Montreal-based hip-hop group released an album using franglais (français/anglais), they were met with a lot of backlash for mixing the two languages. The group refuted the criticisms and stated that the intentional mixing and code-switching indexes their identity as young people who have grown up multiculturally. White conducted a textual analysis of one entire album, and found that the structure and syntax were fundamentally French, with some borrowed English words. In conjunction with an examination of race relations, he concluded that fears of language “corruption” were unfounded and masked actual anxieties about difference, specifically fears about non-white immigrants as a social threat.

Ozan Aksoy’s ethnographic research among Alevi immigrants and refugees in Germany highlights the role of music in the negotiation and transformation of identities in this community, a religious minority within a religious minority. A cultural insider as a Kurdish Alevi and a musician, Aksoy explains that “the intersectionality and the interdependence of political, religious, and cultural identities are vitally important” (920) within Alevi communities. Despite differences in language use, belief systems, occupations, and lifestyles, music is a shared practice that brings Alevis together. Over time, hymns and other religious music became incorporated into folk repertoire, and acquired new meanings in the diaspora, such as belonging, migration, exile, and other themes relevant to the immigrant experience. The musical venues known as türkü bars function as “virtual laboratories of longing and nostalgia where attendees exchange and negotiate political, religious, and social attitudes and stances through their requests and acts” (935), all to define their collective belonging to the community.

Local politics is the primary focus of Rubén Hernández-León’s investigation of son jarocho, a regional Mexican song and dance form that has become the soundtrack to the immigrant civil rights movement in southern California.³ Son jarocho is a participatory music-making tradition which takes place in communal gatherings. The community-building and collaborative learning aspects were appealing to Chicana/o⁴ activists (often children of immigrants themselves), for their potential to organize and mobilize people into action. Hernández-León discusses the history of the genre and its use post-revolution in Mexico; this history of reinterpretation and repurposing is key to the explanation.

The “Music, Migration and the City” special issue has presented examples of the expression and re-fashioning of group identification through music, music as a site of encounter, and its impact on social and political issues. Some have had clearer ties to the theme than others, and there are some perspectives which are obviously missing. One might wonder, for example, where the women are in most of these scenes? With the exception of tango artists, a calypso singer, and some Chicana activists, the participation or even presence of women is barely acknowledged in the majority of the articles. My main critique of the issue itself, though, is insufficient editing. There are considerable problems with both the primary editing and copy editing, evidenced by misplaced commas and numerous typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors, affecting the readability of several articles. As the Indonesian saying goes, “there is no ivory without a crack.”⁵ On the whole, the content of the issue is superb and makes a valuable contribution to the study of music and migration.

---

1. Nativism, not to be confused with indigenism or with indigenous rights movements, is used here in the sense of being anti-immigrant or more generally xenophobic. In the United States and Canada, it is better described as “settler-colonial nativism.”↩︎

2. This term originated with anthropologist Steven Vertovec (2007) to describe multi-dimensional shifts in patterns of British migration data. It has come to signify extreme heterogeneity both between and within immigrant and ethnic minority groups, such that ethnicity and countries of origin must be considered in interaction with other variables such as gender, age, religion, income, occupational types, and legal status. The concept has found greater resonance in Western Europe than in North America.↩︎

3. It is worth noting that although the article focuses on scenes in California, son jarocho is part of the immigrant rights movement throughout the U.S.↩︎

4. Chicana (f.) and Chicano (m.) are terms for an ethno-political identity among Mexican Americans.↩︎

5. I thank Sean Williams for bringing this expression to my attention.↩︎

Author Biography

Adrienne C. Alton-Gust is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, where she has also obtained a Graduate Certificate in Gender & Sexuality Studies. She is completing a dissertation exploring music, identity, and empowerment in drag performance. In her recent fieldwork, she has engaged in artivism (art activism) together with a community of undocumented LGBTQ+ migrants in the southwestern United States.