Nostalgia, internal migration and the return of Cuban street-vendor songs

ABSTRACT When evaluating contemporary pregones, or street-vendor songs, most Cubans tend to resort to comparisons between the sounds of the present and sonic imaginaries of bygone times, often describing the sound of current vendors as an impoverished version of what were once beautiful, unique songs. At face value, these assessments point to the formal features of street-vendor songs, crystallizing around what appear to be direct descriptions of sounds heard on a daily basis. After enough probing, however, an analysis of these judgments reveals how such aesthetic descriptions are layered with multiple meanings, pointing to questions which are not contained in their literal signification nor sufficiently interrogated through formal analysis alone. My research suggests that when Cubans say something like ‘present-day vendors have forgotten how to sing’, they are also tacitly enunciating, through musical discourse, opinions on adjacent, specific issues. In this article, I focus on a cluster of questions around the musicality of street vendors that is directly related to issues of gender, race, and internal migration from the Cuban Eastern provinces to the capital. My analysis includes literary and ethnographic sources, the latter derived from extended interactions with consumers and listeners of pregones as well as vendors themselves.