Entry Questions:
Migrants use music in various ways in their new environments: to stay connected to their home culture, resist cultural assimilation, navigate their evolving identities, and strengthen bonds within their ethnic, racial, or class communities.
Is there a musical genre you personally identified with a particular Latinx group in the US?
Metaphorically speaking, how does this music illustrate aspects of the (im)migrant experience?
Can you identify these aspects highlighted in I’m No Longer Here?
Origins
Cumbia started as a folk music style in coastal Colombia, blending influences from the region’s diverse population, especially Afro-indigenous groups. It became popular across Colombia in the 1940s and 1950s and then spread to other Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, notably Mexico. It’s deeply connected to working-class communities, but newer versions are more global yet with outstanding local variants, as in the case of Monterey. By the turn of the millennium, Mexicans had reconfigured cumbia to such an extent that many Mexicans believe cumbia is of Mexican origin.
How are the Mexican characters in I’m No Longer Here “reconfigured” cumbia?
Presentation(s)
Discussion:
Pick one of these quotes by musicologist Cathy Ragland to expand on the cultural movements portrayed in the film.
.In these weekend dances, the deejay, or sonidero as he is known, together with those in attendance, creates a powerful transnational musical and social experience. By manipulating music and simultaneously reconfiguring time and place, they turn feelings of displacement and marginalization into a collective sense of identity and connectedness. (339) (See 7:50)
.In the process, they dramatize and mediate their own experiences of a modem life that oscillates between and encompasses both Mexico and the US. They effectively portray and create a modernity animated by both real and imagined interpretations of history and culture and by their shared experiences of travel, dislocation, and a reinvention of their lives as both Mexicans and Americans. (339) (See 18:00)