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Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) is recognized as one of the most influential Latin American authors of the twentieth century. Although he helped establish the field of Afro-diasporic studies, his writings are still relatively unknown to the English-speaking world. In Fernando Ortiz on Music, accomplished ethnomusicologist Robin Moore has collected and translated an essential selection of Ortiz's publications. These essays on Afro-Cuban expressive culture, music and dance are now available for the first time in English. Ortiz's writings are accompanied by an extended introduction that contextualizes the author's life, intellectual influences, and collaborators as well as his fieldwork and interviews. Fernando Ortiz on Music also charts the writer's changing views of black heritage through the years. This comprehensive anthology, which includes examples of his early scholarship as well as publications from the 1940s and '50s, extends the life and legacy of this important and under-known scholar of Latin American and Caribbean music. Contributors include: David Garcia, Sarah Lahasky, Cary Peñate, Susan Thomas, and the editor

El legado lexicográfico del antropólogo cubano Fernando Ortiz adquirió renovado valor en las últimas décadas. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, entre otros críticos literarios y culturales, encontraron en ese acervo los fundamentos de configuraciones simbólicas más amplias y heterogéneas que las sostenidas durante el auge cultural del período revolucionario. En este artículo se revisan someramente los textos lexicográficos que fueron reconsiderados en las últimas décadas; se señalan algunos hitos de la recepción de esa producción lingüística y se analizan sus consecuencias sobre el proceso de reinvención de tradiciones filológicas en la literatura cubana actual.

In 1910 the Cuban intellectual Fernando Ortiz published El caballero encantado y la moza esquiva, as part of his book La reconquista de América. Reflexiones sobre el panhispanismo. It was the rewriting of a work by Benito Pérez Galdós belonging to the end of his career, El caballero encantado (1909), published in the context immediately after 1898, criticizing contemporary Spain. This article compares both works to analyze the criticism of Panhispanism by Ortiz based on a work of contemporary Spanish literature.

References to food are pervasive in Cuban popular music. Why do we have such an abundance of gastronomic signs in Cuban songs? How do gastronomic signs work in conjunction with Cuban music and its distinctive aesthetic values? This essay addresses these questions by looking at a broad repertory of Cuban songs, combining historical musicology, music analysis, and ethnographic research to show how food has informed theories of identity, how the aesthetics of sabor (flavor) intersects with the sense of taste in meta-musical language. The analysis of gastronomic references in popular music is based on the evaluation of expressive potentials inherent in the song form used in the son tradition, the influence of street cries, the text setting of gastronomic terms within the clave pattern, and the use of gastronomic double entendres in African-rooted Cuban culture. Resumen: En la música popular cubana, las referencias a la comida son omnipresentes. ¿Por qué abundan tanto los signos gastronómicos en este repertorio? ¿Cómo funcionan estos signos en conjunción con la música cubana y sus valores estéticos? Este ensayo aborda las preguntas recién planteadas, al examinar un amplio repertorio de canciones cubanas y utilizar de manera combinada la musicología histórica, el análisis musical y la investigación etnográfica. Con esto, se busca dilucidar cómo la comida ha informado las teorías de la identidad y cómo la estética del sabor se cruza con el sentido del gusto en el lenguaje meta-musical. El análisis de las referencias gastronómicas en la música popular aquí expuesto se basa en la evaluación de las potencialidades expresivas inherentes a la forma canción utilizada en la tradición del son, la influencia de los pregones, la posición de las referencias gastronómicas dentro del patrón de la clave y el uso del doble sentido gastronómico en la cultura cubana de raíz africana.

In the 1960s, Miami began its transformation into a Latin city. When this transformation began, Spanish-speakers, primarily Cubans, clustered together in what is now known as Little Havana. At the time, the place between 37th Street and Highway 95 was full of low-income, multi-family homes, creating a perfect space for the incoming Cuban refugees to make their home. Because of their initial place-making as a community, Little Havana is now a thriving place known around the world as a Cuban cultural center. However, the mass exodus of Cubans entering Little Havana has slowed and more and more Latin people have settled into the area, changing the demographics and, inevitably, the culture of the place. Today, one can walk down the infamous Calle Ocho (8th Street) and enjoy Cuban culture with a side of Mexican, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, and others. In this article, we argue that this change in demographic representation is leading to a change in the community, which now does not identify solely as Cuban but as Latin—a more inclusive term — in an act of transculturation. We sought to discover, using semi-structured interviews and participatory mapping, how this change is affecting the overall cultural landscape of Little Havana. En la década de 1960, Miami comenzó su tranformación a una cuidad Latina. Cuando esta transformación comezó, hispanoparlantes, mayormente cubanos, se fueron agrupando en lo que hoy se conoce como Pequeña Habana. En ese momento, el lugar entre la calle 37 y la autopista 95 estaba lleno de viviendas multifamiliares de bajos ingresos, lo que creaba un espacio perfecto para que los refugiados cubanos que llegaban hicieran su hogar. Debido a su reconocimiento inicial como espacio creador de comunidad, la Pequeña Habana es ahora un lugar próspero conocido en todo el mundo como un centro cultural cubano. Sin embargo, el éxodo masivo de cubanos que ingresan a La Pequeña Habana se ha ralentizado y cada vez más latinos se han asentado en el área, cambiando la demografía e, inevitablemente, la cultura del lugar. Hoy, uno puede caminar por la infame Calle Ocho y disfrutar de la cultura cubana con toques de la mexicana, peruana, puertorriqueña y otras. En este artículo argumentamos que este cambio en la representación demográfica está provocando un cambio en la comunidad, que ya no se identifica únicamente como cubana sino como latina —un término más inclusivo— en un acto de transculturación. Buscamos descubrir, mediante entrevistas semiestructuradas y mapeo participativo, cómo este cambio está afectando el panorama cultural general de la Pequeña Habana.

The North American Indigenous College Students Inventory (NAICSI) was designed to measure cultural integrity (preservation of cultural tradition and cultural identity) through six support factors (family, tribe, peers, staff, faculty, and institution) and the effects of these support factors on cultural reciprocity, cultural resiliency, GPA, and persistence for Native American college students through the lens of transculturation. Transculturation is a socialization process that assesses how Native American college students maintain their cultural integrity through different dimensions of support. Statistical analyses revealed the NAICSI yielded high levels of internal consistency, content validity, and construct validity. Additionally, the confirmatory factor analyses supported the hypothesized factor structure. The NAICSI was validated on 1,066 Native American college students from 75 institutions and representing more than 200 tribes. The NAICSI could be used as a valid metric for evaluating on-campus support factors for Native American college students.

Fernando Ortiz introduced his account of transculturation to replace Melville Herskovits’s notion of acculturation as a way of describing the historical contact between cultures. Ortiz understood the idea of acculturation to be promoting a kind of assimilationist model very different from what he witnessed in his native Cuba. Transculturation conforms neither to the model of cosmopolitanism promoted by Kant’s universal history, nor to the kind of multiculturalism that is rooted in Herder’s rival approach to history. Instead, it presents a concept of cultural contact and cultural transformation that highlights the way the material and economic conditions of social existence shape the institutions in which cultures more narrowly conceived are embedded and relate to each other. By bringing transculturation into dialogue with the idea of the porosity of cultures initially promoted in 1925 by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Naples, we find a way to free transculturation from Ortiz’s tendency to lapse into biological metaphors with the danger of retaining a reference to cultural purity that he would not endorse. Transculturation, thus revised, recommends itself as a term helpful for thinking about a world shaped by mass migration and the new technological forms of ever more rapid cultural exchange. Properly understood, it promotes a future where openness and sharing are valued over ownership and preservation.

Deploying Fernando Ortiz’s ethnological contrast, in Cuban Counterpoint, between the generality of sugar and the particularity of tobacco, this article argues that the practice of anthropology is best compared to the latter. Anthropology’s constitutive investment in the particulars of ethnography renders it a “science of the contingent” par excellence, inherently averse to necessities and generalisations of all types. With reference to the recent literature on the “ontological turn” in anthropology, I argue that this investment consists above all in the attempt to turn contingent ethnographic materials into equally contingent conceptualisations. Such a procedure, however, is not contrapuntal in its nature. This is because the relationship between ethnography and its conceptualisation is not symmetrical on the horizontal axis in the way counterpoint is. Unlike counterpoint, therefore, it is the basic difference in kind between ethnographic realities and the concepts they generate that makes their relationship in the process of anthropological analysis interesting.

El fondo personal del polígrafo cubano Fernando Ortiz es uno de los conjuntos archivísticos más valiosos y representativos del patrimonio documental cubano. La presente investigación expone a este fondo dentro del universo de los archivos personales. Desde la fase de la identificación archivística, se analiza al sujeto formador del fondo y se caracteriza la documentación. Se sugiere, a partir de su división y diseminación en instituciones no archivísticas después de la muerte de su formador, la posibilidad del restablecimiento de su estructura original.

Este artículo analiza el papel que ha jugado la teoría de la transculturación en los campos de las ciencias sociales y de los estudios humanísticos referidos a América Latina. El texto realiza un resumido recuento de las distintas etapas de elaboración del concepto y su funcionalidad en debates actuales marcados por los conceptos y las experiencias de la migración, la fragmentación social, etc. Además, se pregunta sobre la utilidad de la elaboración sobre la transculturación en los escenarios de la postmodernidad.