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About the authors
Maria Elena Cepeda earned her Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she completed a dissertation on Colombian popular music and Miami's transnational Colombian community. Her research to date focuses primarily on US Latino/a popular music, language politics, and literature. She has recently published pieces in Popular Music and Society, Revista Canadiense, Discourse, and Global Pop, Local Language, among other publications, in addition to numerous translations.
"Like many of the spanglish generation, Shakira is a walking, living, breathing, singing contradiction. Born and raised in Colombia, she lived for bands like Led Zeppelin, The Cure, The Police, the Beatles and Nirvana. Rock was her first musical love, but her Arabic culture was her life .... Despite the fact that she was once named the queen of the Barranquilla carnival and was crowned by Colombian salsa great Joe Arroyo, Shakira is above all a rock chick.(Morales, 2001: 40)"
The emergence of transnationalism among US colombianos
In the most elementary of senses, transnationalism entails what Daniel Mato describes as "the social practices of 'transmigrants' and their organizations" (1997: 168-169).1 In a more official capacity, a transnational dynamic emerges when, in response to a significantly numerous immigrant population, government officials in a given sending nation set out to reconfigure the nation-state's borders in such a fashion as to include even those residing outside the state's physical boundaries. The result, a "deterritorialized transnational nation-state," encompasses the immigrants themselves as well as their descendants (Glick Schiller and Fouron, 1998: 133).
Nevertheless, it is essential to bear in mind that the dynamics of transnationalism are not limited to the bodily movement of individuals alone (Smith and Guarnizo, 1998: 19). In this light, cable television has emerged as a key means by which the transnational flow of cultural values, images, and ideals is facilitated between Latin America and the United States as well as within Latin America itself (Goldring, 1998: 166). In recent press articles, both Latin American recording artists and music industry figures cite Latin American cable television's prodigious growth within the last several years as a driving force underlying the rise of numerous market-generated categories and genres, such as the ongoing rock en espanol movement (Rohter, 2000). For...