The coronavirus moment is a global crisis experienced, interpreted and confronted in locally- contingent, idiosyncratic, and often virtual ways. The covid pandemic necessitated a mass reduction in human movement and direct interaction, but a diverse cultural life nevertheless has flourished in new ways, many of them presented and experienced online. The inspired, tremendous outpouring of musical responses to the Coronavirus pandemic from Latin American artists addresses similar themes through distinct cultural lenses informed by local histories, affects, and artistic conventions. This introduction considers the challenges and opportunities of the singular covid music moment for Latin American musicians in different regional contexts. It connects the book’s overall study of the region’s musical response with other new research into covid-era individual and community music making, social media technologies, and an array of other new scholarship on the impact of the coronavirus on music, musicians, listeners, and the soundscape. The introduction spatially and culturally maps over 1,600 musical responses to coronavirus from across Latin America collected by the authors, noting points of similarity as well as divergence among the examples and building a conceptual framework for their analysis built around theories of music and wellbeing, diasporic music, Do-it-Yourself (DIY) archiving, ethnopoetics, locality and musical mobility, and sustainable regional music cultures. The introduction presents and contextualizes stylistic, lyrical, and productional diversity of these responses. It explains the thematic connections and interdisciplinary framing of each of book’s chapters, each of which is oriented around a specific theme built on regional music case studies. The introduction concludes with a description of fieldwork and digital ethnography in the time of social distancing and considers ethics, privacy, and ownership in contemporary digital research. Building on the raft of studies of virtual and hybrid ethnography over the past two decades, this book argues that the unprecedented ubiquity and penetration of social media in daily life during the pandemic necessitates a renewed understanding of what it means to make and listen to music as an inescapable aspect of digitally-mediated life. The chapter concludes with a discussion of YouTube, the primary site of the initial research in this project, as a platform that is designed to be simultaneously participatory and stratified and which has emerged as a critical, participatory, DIY archive of regional musical life across Latin America during the pandemic.

This chapter is a concise global history of community music experiences in times of pandemic and other widespread health catastrophes, with an emphasis on responses to the modern era of newly emergent viruses. This chapter provides a history of community and artistic responses to crises of health and wellbeing as well as to the challenges of isolation and quarantine when faced with dangerous communicable diseases such as avian and swine influenza, malaria, HIV/AIDS, ebola, zika, dengue, chikungunya, and coronavirus. This chapter engages the historical scholarship on cultural and musical responses to disease and other traumatic experiences particularly in Latin America to contextualize the lineages of the musical responses to coronavirus as well as to highlight the novelty of the moment. It considers the development and applicability of conceptual frameworks from medical ethnomusicology and music therapy about the ways music and music-making can mitigate health impacts on individual and community scales. It considers the history of cultural production during global pandemics of the historical and recent pasts, emphasizing the rise of popular and vernacular musics as the main expressive route for artistic response to disaster and disease. Finally, this chapter provides a brief history of the rise and transformation of social technologies such as music and video streaming services like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and YouTube, social media like Facebook and Instagram, live internet chatrooms, and livestreams and their relevance to the musical cultures of the covid pandemic and to music-making during the period of mass-isolation.

A Mexican quick hit writer named Mister Cumbia understood the commercial potential of a song about the coronavirus very early, and released his catchy and ubiquitous “La Cumbia del Coronavirus” on YouTube on January 22, 2020, a week before the World Health Organization even declared a public health emergency. Soon, countless songs about coronavirus were being released throughout Latin America, many of which were built around catchy samples, pre-made beats, and other hallmarks of viral content creation. This chapter begins by asking why the earliest manifestations of coronavirus music from Latin America most frequently took the form of a cumbia, a rhythm and style with roots in coastal Colombia that has since been regionalized across Latin America. The transnational cumbia sound serves as a “blank slate” a danceable, instantly recognizable, and easily remixed format that, like a global, airborne virus, is privileged by its adaptability and infectiousnesss. This chapter charts the history of popular topical cumbias about tropical diseases (ebola, zika, chikungunya, dengue) while framing the spread of the transnational cumbia in epidemiological terms. It also examines the ways in which two non-musical recordings of the human voice uploaded to personal social media accounts by recording artists Cardi B and Anuel AA took on lives of their own as they were remixed, sampled, and circulated around the world in new musical contexts. By interrogating and unpacking the increasingly-significant metaphor of “viral media” in the context of cumbias about disease and the schizophonic memesis of the human voice via social media, this chapter demonstrates how the interconnected world-system that facilitated the global coronavirus outbreak simultaneously facilitates the unpredictable spread of hybridized cultural products.

This chapter looks at questions of digital intimacy and well-being in the context of pandemic-time video streams and the communities that have arisen around them. In particular, it examines the social dynamics of regularized video-queue streams on three YouTube channels that specialize in música huasteca, a music-and-dance tradition from a geo-cultural region in central Mexico with a significant diaspora in the southern United States. The chapter describes how a digitally-mediated social infrastructure initially developed to serve a community in diaspora readily scaled to address the need for connection during the early stages of the pandemic. It examines a new genre of livestreams by huasteco trios, huapango dance contests, and how the practice of improvisation in son huasteco generated a voluminous repertory of new verses that speak to the coronavirus moment and contributed to setting norms for sanitary behavior by framing hygienic precautions as a form of collective care. It features interviews with content creators, artists, and active participants in the virtual huapango communities the authors term the cyber-Huasteca that has manifested around the YouTube channels GaVBroadcast, QuerrequeFilms, and Cotorro Huasteco.

This chapter poses questions about topophilia, xenophobia, plague, and the fraught history of cultural encounter and interchange in the Americas as expressed in música del coronavirus. This chapter looks at how lyrics in coronavirus-themed Colombian vallenato, Mexican corrido, Cuban timba and Peruvian huaynos reflect a dualism that links regional pride to anxiety about a foreign Other. This tendency is historically contextualized by considering the experience and cultural resonance of readings of encounter since the Spanish conquista, the region’s long history as a nexus of extractive commerce, and manifestations of political paranoia during Latin America’s bloody twentieth century. This chapter discusses how symbols of cultural patrimony are posited in the music as potential bulwarks against the coronavirus and how lyrical musings on cuisine and lifestyle bespeak a worldview that categorizes the pandemic as invasive and uncanny. It also acknowledges the common presence of racist and derogatory language in música del coronavirus, and contextualizes these sentiments within the cultural history of xenophobic Anti-Asian feeling in the region.

This chapter addresses the centrality of rhythmic hooks, dance crazes, and repetition in many examples of música del coronavirus. Popular Caribbean music genres such as reggaeton, hip-hop, and dembow are often characterized by shouted hooks that employ repetition and take advantage of the pre-existing cadence of spoken language to build rhythmically-memorable motifs and achieve commercial success. This chapter examines how words and phrases such as “coronavirus,” “virus,” “pandemia,” “covid diecinueve,” and “cuarentena,” among others, have been adeptly used in the manner described above to create earworms that reproduce the recursive inner voice of an individual living through an all-consuming crisis. The chapter also considers sampled spoken or shouted vocal clips from Caribbean coronavirus songs have been integrated into transnational remix culture, and the ways choreographed dances have contributed to the proliferation of these songs via video sharing social platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. The chapter considers the cultural implications of the commercial success for these varieties of coronavirus music receiving millions of views and listens, and discusses them within the continuum in vernacular music responses among tiny regional audiences confronted with the same set of pandemic challenges.

This chapter surveys the wide array of affective responses to the pandemic found throughout música del coronavirus. It begins by considering the specific material impacts of COVID-19 on professional musicians in the region, with an exploration of venue closures, performance cancellations, and the hospitalizations and virus-related deaths of notable Latin American musicians. It goes on to examine the ways in which lyrics, performance styles, and approaches to content distribution articulated different attitudes about the pandemic situation. This chapter explores how expressions of pandemic era fear, anxiety, and frustration became linked to broader cultural attitudes toward death, fate, and individual agency. It also looks at some of the more unusual affective treatments of the pandemic in the form of coronavirus drinking songs, hyper-sexualized quarantine dance videos, and songs that express doubt about the severity of the pandemic and the veracity of public health reporting in covid and in the vaccine movement. Finally, it considers examples of Christian messaging in música del coronavirus, and how this genre recapitulated many aspects of other musical examples alongside spiritual reinterpretation of themes of sin, judgment, and life after death in a time of pandemic.