Can Spaniards also be Latinos? Spanish identity in Latin popular music: C. Tangana’s case

This paper examines the identity construction of the Spanish urban music artist C. Tangana during a specific stage of his career, marked by the incursion into a variety of musical genres encompassed within the Latin music category. The artist’s appropriation of reggaeton, salsa or funk carioca permits him to enter the Latin mainstream, which nowadays has an important presence in Spain, as well as at a global level. To approach the study of identities, we adopt a constructivist perspective, which, as Timothy Rice suggests, takes into account their changing and context-dependent nature. It is also important to keep in mind the history of the transnational music industry shared by Latin America and Spain, where an essential role is played by the Latino communities of the United States. In this way, we will observe which aspects define the cultural identity of an artist who, although at first he rejects his national identity, recalls some of its elements to define himself in a globalized market that endangers the stability of identities and, at the same time, facilitates the emergence of new forms.