About Radio Latino
Partnership with Smithsonian Global Sound
Radio Latino (click to hear Radio Latino )
Over 42 million Latinos make the United States their home. One out of eight Americans uses labels like Latino, Hispanic, Tejano, Chicano, Mexicano, New Yorican, Cuban, Nuevomexicano, salvadoreño, and colombiano to point to their Spanish-speaking heritage in Latin America or the United States. ront page news proclaims Hispanics the largest minority group and the fastest growing segment of the population, having more than doubled since 1980 and accounted for half the total population growth since 2001. In the past decade, the highest rates of Hispanic growth have been not in California, Texas, New York, Miami, Chicago, and other long-time Latino strongholds, but in states such as Arkansas, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Hand-in-hand with the burgeoning Latino population has come an equal infusion of Latino music, usually called música latina in the windows and bins of record stores.
In 2001, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage joined the Smithsonian Latino Center in a collaboration to bring grassroots Latino musicians and music to the fore of Smithsonian programming and American life. Since then, nineteen new recordings of Latino music, three major programs of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and a new virtual exhibit in the making, Música del Pueblo, have taken the sounds and faces of música latina to many million s of visitors and listeners. Radio Latino is the latest addition to this collaboration. It draws from the Latino audio holdings of the Folkways Collections—old and new—creating a cultural pastiche of sounds, styles, and cultures that hint at the vast cornucopia of music and cultural expression in the Latino world.
Sentimiento
