During the 1930s and 1940s, the Hollywood industry, with the support of the US State Department, produced an enormous amount of propaganda films with themes around Latin America. In these productions, music played a fundamental role, being one of the most persuasive and strategic resources that the government and the film industry had to appeal to the emotionalities of their audiences, in order to favor a project of hegemony. Assuming as a problem the weak presence of the sound dimension – and within this, the musical dimension – within the academic literature that addresses this phenomenon, this research proposes a rereading, from the musical point of view, of a representational phenomenon that meant, among other things, the configuration of what from then on is understood in the global music industry as “Latin music”

This book is included in DOAB.