Fernando Rios is Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland. His research interests include Latin American (especially Bolivian) folkloric, indigenous, and popular music; folklorization and nation-building; music and social-political movements; the politics of cultural appropriation; and historical ethnomusicology.
Fernando Rios' meticulously researched and fascinating history is an indispensable resource for understanding how Andean folk music came to take the world by storm. Although powerfully invoking ideas and images of indigenous Andean culture, Panpipes and Ponchos demonstrates that the conjunto (with its standard line-up of kena flute, charango, guitar, bombo drum, and later panpipes) was thoroughly transnational, middle class, and rooted in Bolivia's turbulent twentieth-century history. * Henry Stobart, Royal Holloway University of London, author of Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes * Fernando Rios is the preeminent historian of what the world knows today as 'Andean music.' In this meticulously researched and theoretically profound book, he offers a model of well-crafted historical ethnomusicology: deeply grounded in the details of Bolivian musical nationalism and its transnational connections, yet offering broad insights about the intersections of music, ethnicity, class, and politics in Latin America in the twentieth century. * Jonathan Ritter, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of California Riverside *