Immigrant Communities

People have always migrated in search of a better life, fleeing war, famine, or persecution, or simply looking for new experiences. Although not a new phenomenon, it is considered that migratory movements have intensified in the 20th century due to globalization, the increased interconnectedness between cultures, economic networks, and political organizations that has erased the boundaries between the local and the global. Migration often results in the establishment of new communities, known as diasporas. Both movement and the establishment of immigrant communities have had an impact on the way music is experienced, circulated, and produced, as well as on the way musical tastes are shaped by encounters with culturally different “others.”

Immigrant communities or diasporas are groups that share memories of the ancestral home, the experience of departure, travel, and possible alienation or discrimination during resettlement. These groups may or may not desire an eventual return but they continue to have an ongoing cultural relationship with the homeland. Such communities are defined by their relationship with multiple cultural (and hence musical) spaces: that of the homeland and the ones encountered at destination.

Music travels in the process of migration and undergoes certain transformations. Migrants take with them the music of their homeland but also appropriate the music or musics that they encounter en route and at destination. This phenomenon is known as hybridization. Musical taste can change during this process and the experience of migration itself may become a source of musical creativity. A typical example would be that of bhangra, a genre born in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom out of the experiences of Punjabi immigrants, who were keen to combine traditional Punjabi music with Western rhythms and styles. Thus, hybridization allows non-Western musics to enter the repertoire of popular music, consumed globally, and sits at the core of music innovation.