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Boleros, guarachas, and other popular music rhythms resonate across Gabriel García Márquez’s work. Despite this, only a few mentions of cumbias appear in his novels, letters, short stories, and other writing. The present study analyzes the changes in Gabo’s capacity to listen to cumbias and cumbiambas in his work across time. I show that, in early work, cumbia appears as an event incapable of producing semiosis, and Gabo is unable to fully listen to it. This inability gradually shifts, however, towards a listening for cumbia as sameness when reproduction technologies like film and vinyl make Caribbean music widely available and desirable.
Analyzing GGM’s columns for the newspaper El Universal (1948) and personal correspondence about the documentary Un carnaval para toda la vida (1961), I read Gabo’s shifting attention to cumbia as a result of what I call “distant listening,” a listening practice and positionality in which the authorial I perceives certain sound events as alien, thus preventing sound from entering the literary archive. Cumbia elicits GGM’s attention when Caribbean music becomes available in reproducible media such as film and vinyl. Cumbias on vinyl help him produce what I call a “reproducible authentic,” associated with a letrado listening positionality that listens for generic features in cumbia. That is, a cumbia that represents an authentic cultural manifestation using reproducible media such as vinyl records and film while maintaining the properties of a non-semiotic event.
