Between flows and migrations in the Black Atlantic: the musical configuration of rumba and candombe of Buenos Aires

This article presents some results of a musicological research project on the affinities and connectivities between the Afro-Argentine music of Buenos Aires and Afro-Cuban music, resulting from migratory flows and cross-cultural processes. The work implies a specific theoretical and methodological sense that points at once to existing analytical gaps concerning musical and ethnographic materials surveyed by other researchers, and to pathways of agents not sufficiently considered until now. First, the article presents a comparative musicological analysis, based on secondary sources such as Latin music guides and local phonographic recordings by other researchers. Second, the article traces the career of Isaac Tantalora, an Afro-Cuban musician who immigrated to Buenos Aires in the late 1920s, inquiring about his relevance to the Afro-Argentinian community in this city, and about his musical practices. Re-semanticizations and re-symbolizations will be pointed out, demonstrating the importance for popular music studies of attending to migrations, cultural flows, and the affinities of musicians and their practices.
Finally, the case studied here allows us to suggest aspects of unity and musical diversification in the so-called Black Atlantic, and a form of cosmopolitanism based on the superposition of different Afro-descendant diasporas.