Jasen Emmons, Marisol Berrios-Miranda, Shannon Dudley, Michelle Habell-Pallán, and Dwandolyn R. Reese
Moderator: Larin McLaughlin
Making American Sabor: Latinos and Latinas in US Popular Music / Latinos y latinas en la musica popular estadounidense
The American Sabor exhibit is the result of a long-term partnership between MoPOP, the University of Washington, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Service. The three worked together to create an exhibit greater than sum of its parts. As it communicated scholarly research in a popular voice, the exhibit experimented with multiple media and multiple platforms to allow the dynamics of sound to drive its audio, visual and print storytelling, and to infuse a feminista perspective on music as a process where gender norms are reproduced, challenged, and transformed. Over a period of eight years, 1,000,000 people viewed and listened to the exhibit. For many, it was the first opportunity to learn about the history of the subject.
This roundtable launches the newly published bilingual print book version of American Sabor (University of Washington Press). Featuring a dialogue with those directly involved with the making of the exhibit and book including MoPop’s Director of Curatorial Affairs Jasen Emmons, UW faculty Marisol Berrios-Miranda, Shannon Dudley, Michelle Habell-Pallán, and former senior Project Director at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service Evelyn Figueroa, our conversation will share best practices regarding the challenges and opportunities of collaborating on a project of this scope. Dwandolyn R. Reese, Curator of Music and Performing Arts at Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, will reflect on the exhibit’s impact. Together we explore the collective motivations and methodologies used to decide on American Sabor’s voice and perspective, the selection of stories and objects, and the media forms delivering its stories.
Like the exhibit, the book version of American Sabor evokes the pleasures of music as well as food, the word sabor signifies a rich essence that makes our mouths water or makes our bodies want to move. American Sabor traces the substantial musical contributions of Latinas and Latinos in American popular music between World War II and the present in five vibrant centers of Latin@ musical production: New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Miami. From Tito Puente's mambo dance rhythms to the Spanglish rap of Mellow Man Ace, American Sabor focuses on musical styles that have developed largely in the United States-including jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, punk, hip hop, country, Tejano, and salsa-but also shows the many ways in which Latin@ musicians and styles connect US culture to the culture of the broader Americas.
The scope of American Sabor required all involved in its making to learn through dialogue, both oral and written, between people from diverse backgrounds and experiences. It began with vigorous debate among Marisol, Shannon, and Michelle in which we shared our diverse disciplinary perspectives and methods from ethnomusicology, cultural studies, Chicanx feminist theory, and performance. As our conversations extended to collaboration with a vast circle of senior curators, scholars, artists, and activists, and senior press editors, we were impressed with the way that knowledge is produced through relationships, and realized that it cannot be separated from the form and context in which it is communicated.