Abstract

In the late 1920s, in the context of an emerging cultural industry in the United States, new technical possibilities in the film industry made it possible to add sound to moving images. These new possibilities, in turn, would force directors and producers to rethink musical characterizations of "Latino” characters and archetypal stories. Music thus played a role in the construction of otherness and in the consolidation of stereotypes. Starting from this foundational moment when the category of “Latin music” was coined and began to circulate in the US music and film industries—of decidedly global reach—this study seeks to explore the following questions: What notions and examples of Latin American music did Hollywood’s musical directors, composers and arrangers have at the outset of film produced with sound? What musical resources were used to represent and/or characterize Latin Americanness in film productions of the period? And how did these elements contribute to the construction of this very notion of Latin Americanness? In order to tackle these questions, we examine three Hollywood productions from the 1928-1932 period, and propose that the sound dimension became an unavoidable factor in making films and their codes of representation, generating a “foundational” moment in the construction of the category of “Latin music.”