By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
I remember the first time João Gilberto’s voice filled my room. It was soft, unhurried, a secret being told in half-light. “Chega de Saudade” flowed as simply as breath. What I didn’t know yet was that this serene sound, often celebrated as the birth of bossa nova, carried with it older rhythms: the pulse of samba de roda from Bahia, and Candomblé chants where enslaved individuals came together to create art. Before bossa nova’s subtle harmonies reached Rio’s middle-class apartments, its spirit already lived in the percussive heartbeats of those at the margins.
This history reminds us that Latin and Afro-diasporic music have never been just entertainment; it is also a site of struggle between cultural erasure and reclamation. The story of bossa nova, and later of reggaeton, reveals a continuous cycle in which the voices of the marginalized are reinterpreted for mass consumption. Only to be reclaimed again by artists who remember where these rhythms came from.
Gilberto’s sound, though beautiful, contributed to the softening of samba’s communal energy into something more introspective and urbane. Several cultural critics have called this a process of “whitening,” sanitizing the ongoing inequalities from which this music emerged for Brazil’s white, middle-class audiences in the 1950s. And its ascent was clearly tied to the machinery of the music industry itself, where radios, record labels, and elite patrons determined which voices would represent Brazil to the world.
Yet hegemony always breeds contestation. By the late 1960s, artists such as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso reinfused Brazilian popular music with rebellion. Through tropicália, they consistently credited the Afro-Brazilian and folk roots of their music, using their influence to amplify marginalized traditions within national and global contexts. Their music became an act of resistance — where the polished surface of this culture was cracked open to reveal its spiritual and social ancestry that bossa nova had polished away.
We are witnessing similar tensions today, as Latin music increasingly shapes global pop. The reggaeton you are familiar with is far removed from its Afro-diasporic crosscurrents: of Panamanian reggae en español echoing Jamaican dancehall, later fused with Puerto Rican hip-hop in the barrios of San Juan. However, as the genre has globalized, its imagery and sound tend to gravitate toward lighter-skinned, non-Black performers, like J Balvin and Maluma. Meanwhile, Afro-Latinx pioneers like DJ Playero, Tego Calderón, and Amara La Negra, who foreground Afro-diasporic identity in their work, receive far less attention and recognition globally. Again, this imbalance reflects a music industry that continues to be structured by colonial patterns of extraction and profit. The glossy videos and festival aesthetics sold to global audiences mask the reality that the neighbourhoods birthing these sounds remain sites of systemic neglect and racialized inequality.
To love Latin music, then, is not just to move with its rhythms in our dance clubs but to honour its deep roots of rebellion.
As listeners, we can choose to feed an industry that packages culture as spectacle, or we can seek artists who keep the lineage alive. Like Luedji Luna, who not only celebrates Candomblé as part of her music and identity but also founded Palavra Preta, a movement aimed at bringing together Black women composers and poets across Brazil. Or iLe, who was an active voice in Puerto Rico’s resistance against its corrupt administration. Or Renata Flores pushing back against underrepresentation by singing in Quechua.
These artists remind us that Latin music’s future does not lie in the algorithmic pursuit of virality, but in the deliberate act of honouring the people and places, and all their complexities, from which these irresistible rhythms are born. We must challenge the industry’s appetite for aestheticizing suffering. Because our playlists are political, and each stream is a choice to either sustain erasure or amplify the voices that kept these rhythms alive.
