¿A fairy godmother at the servant dance? Ramona Galarza’s Argentinean littoral music records in the sixties

This paper presents an approach to the study of Argentinean singer Ramona Galarza (1940), who was relevant for the national and international diffusion of the litoraleña popular music in the 1960s. It focuses on the Odeon records in Argentina between 1958 and 1969. From the analysis with a gender perspective of the different features of the LPs (visual, sound, cover texts) a deliberate construction of a neat, urban and stylized image of the artist by the recording company was found. Numerous “decent-making” and commercial strategies are observed under the logic of the cultural industry produced in two senses. First, the “whitening” of the litoraleña music and chamamé dance, which was associated with the working class and pejoratively categorized as "servant music" by the middle or higher classes of this period and linked to a disorder and promiscuity atmosphere. Hygienism was required to enable higher rates of social acceptance and consumption. Second, the “decent-making” strategy can be seen in the transmission of a model of women that is based on the entrenched social gender structures, disregarding social conflicts and reaffirming the traditional roles of women as daughter, wife and mother.