Raspacanilla: A subaltern music scene in Venezuela from its genealogy, identity construction, and phonographic practices

Abstract

Raspacanilla is a Venezuelan musical practice with more than sixty years of history, which emerged as a variant of Colombian cumbia in the states of Lara and Zulia within a context of migration and social and cultural transformation. This study aims to make raspacanilla visible and to critically address it as a subaltern and peripheral music, excluded from the recording industry and academic discourse, yet sustained through community-based and self-managed dynamics. The research adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines the sociology of music—through the concept of musical scenes—and musicology applied to phonographic production, using open interviews with performers, audiences, and recording technicians, as well as an organological and stylistic analysis of recordings identified by musicians themselves as raspacanilla. The results show that the genre is characterized by the use of the organ, accelerated tempos, and circulation outside the recording industry, functioning as a space of social cohesion, cultural resistance, and identity construction among popular and migrant communities. As an independent and peripheral music, raspacanilla constitutes a musical scene that resignifies cumbia within the Venezuelan context and reveals new ways of understanding subaltern musical practices.