Tensiones raciales y visuales en el trópico colombiano: Discografías de orquestas sabaneras Pedro Laza y sus pelayeros y La Sonora Cordobesa.

This article analyzes the album cover visuality of the tropical music orchestra Pedro Laza y sus pelayeros in Colombia (1954–1973) with other "sabanero sound" orchestras of the time, such as La Sonora Cordobesa (1959–1969), the orchestra of Clímaco Sarmiento, and big-band sound orchestras, such as that of Lucho Bermúdez. This corpus's graphic, geographic, and racial symbolisms form racial tensions similar to a "contact zone" in which different visual and sonic expectations interact. My analysis shows that, unlike a sonic color line, there is not one single public this music is oriented toward, nor a type of racial representation linked to one single consumer expectation. Instead, I find a series of tensions in the use of white-mestizo and Black bodies and geographical references. My analysis supports two arguments: one, that bodies of color appear metonymized in musical instruments to authenticate geographically, racially, and generically-sexually the Caribbean rhythms as "Black" and "hot." Metonymies are one of the ways the recording industry "tropicalizes" the Colombian Caribbean. I explore other strategies, such as portraying rural environments with an intent to appeal to wider audiences, both rural and urban. Two, the woman's figure as a "modern girl" authorizes the mass consumption of this music in mestizo and creole layers of the Colombian urban middle class and nationalizes the idea of Colombian mestizaje as an unmixed racial juxtaposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]