Hay Que Divertirse Un Rato: Mexican Bands and Bailes in Metro Atlanta, 1980s-1990s

• In Event: Queerness and Race in Atlanta

Abstract

Sitting at her kitchen table in 2018, Carola Reuben reminisced about the loud and wild nights of managing Mexican bands in Atlanta during the 1990s. A time when “the most humble factory worker on his wedding day would have bands and a mariachi,” Reuben was one of the first promoters to offer a line-up of local acts to Atlanta’s growing Mexican community. Reuben laughed as she recalled young Mexican men telling her about “how hard they worked all week, so ‘hay que divertirse un rato [you have to have fun for a while]’.” Having fun and access to entertainment were, after all, crucial aspects of making a new destination feel like home for a community working long hours in service and construction industries. Interdisciplinary studies of the Nuevo South have paid important attention to questions about regional demographic shifts, labor, education, policing, and immigration enforcement as they pertain to Latina/o communities across the United States South. There remains, however, a need to further examine local forms of Latina/o cultural production and practices as migrants arrived and settled into non-traditional southern destinations. This paper examines the arrival of Mexican migrants to Atlanta beginning in the 1980s and continuing throughout the 1990s. Drawing on local Spanish-language media, interviews, and the personal archive of Carola Reuben, a pioneering Mundo Hispanico journalist and Mexican band promoter, this presentation traces the gradual emergence of working-class Mexican bands, bailes (dances), and entertainment sites across Metro Atlanta. It argues that these sites of music and leisure are key to understanding the process of Latina/o community formation across a sprawling southern metropolitan region. It is on the dance floors of Mexican Atlanta’s nightlife that we can also examine the gender dynamics of early labor migrations, the development of an Atlanta Latina/o market, and the beginnings of a local music scene for working-class migrants.

Author

• Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez, Yale University