The highly anticipated 2021 GRAMMY awards took place last March, but the much less hyped up Latin GRAMMY nominations were announced last Tuesday for their Nov. award ceremony. Nominees include fan favorites like Karol G and Rauw Alejandro alongside newer artists like Paloma Mami and Bizarrap; a fine lineup that makes me wonder why none of our favorite Latinx artists can make it onto the “real” GRAMMYs.
The Latin Recording Academy was founded by the original Recording Academy in 1997 because the so-called “Latin music universe” was too expansive to fit into the traditional GRAMMY awards. In other words, Latinxs were too Latinx to be ranked alongside Angloamericans, so a separate award space was created for Latin music. The Academy distinguishes Latin music as music recorded in Spanish or Portuguese and released in the Americas or Iberia: a framework that leaves many unanswered questions.
First of all, the Spanish and Portuguese languages are colonial legacies in Latin America, and “Latin” as a category does not include Iberia —in fact, that is one of the main distinctions between Hispanic and Latino. Setting aside superficial issues of terminology, why should the “Latin music universe” include colonial languages but not Nahuatl, Quechua, Guarani and other indigenous languages that resisted colonization? Also what about francophone, anglo, or Creole-speaking countries of Latin America?
The language restriction also erases the plenitude of migration experiences by rejecting a Latinx person’s latinness should they not speak Spanish or Portuguese fluently. Most Latinxs in the United States, regardless of their generation and proximity to migration, speak some degree of Spanglish. For institutions like the Recording Academy to police Latinxs’ fumbles with the Spanish language upholds colonial expectations of the colonized.
The Latin GRAMMYs were created to redeem the Academy and make more space for Latinxs in award ceremonies, but they effectively distort nuanced Latinx identities and confine Latinx artists to a less coveted space. The reality is that so-called Latin music could easily be integrated into traditional GRAMMY award categories—Latin singers perform rap, rock, pop, and so on, but the Academy will not allow Latinx artists to be ranked alongside Angloamericans.
Many international music scenes face similar erasure by the Academy despite their huge fan bases in the US. The notorious “Best World Music Album” category may be the only space in the award ceremony that talented artists from diverse genres and countries are nominated for, competing for a single prize.
Last year, one of my personal favorite “world artists,” Nigerian singer Burna Boy, received the award for his fifth studio album Twice as Tall. To quote the first song on this album, “The Grammys have me feeling sick as fuck… asking questions like, why it wasn’t us?… tell dem say dem can’t bury us ’cause the love, make me stand up every time when me fall. Come back standing twice as tall.”
(Image by Emilia Tamayo ’23)
