{"pk":57051,"title":"The Raja’s Nicaraguan Dream: Exoticism, Commemoration, and Nostalgia in Luis A. Delgadillo’s \"Romance Oriental\"","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Toward the end of a protracted U.S.-American intervention in Nicaragua (1909–33), a catastrophic earthquake and fire razed much of the capital city of Managua on 31 March 1931. Nicaraguan composer Luis Abraham Delgadillo (1884–1961), while residing in New York City, responded to the tragedy with his \nRomance Oriental\n (\nEastern Romance\n) for flute and piano, dedicated to María Huezo, a friend who had perished in the earthquake. The work appears to fall within the nineteenth-century French exoticist musical tradition, but its commemorative purpose departs from the typical Orientalist representation. Delgadillo musically transformed Huezo’s memory from that of a “virtuous” woman in life into an “alluring,” voiceless female Other, which revealed particular desires. In this article, I argue that the \nRomance Oriental\n manifests a veiled escapist desire and an acute nostalgia for home. His musical response to the tragedy exhibits a binary interplay of spatial (Here/There) and temporal (Present/Past) landscapes, as the composer yearned for a return to the Managua of his childhood. The work was not a mere break with European exoticist tradition, but a resignification of Western musical convention by a Latin American composer.","language":"en","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\n\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[{"word":"Luis A. Delgadillo"},{"word":"musical exoticism"},{"word":"nostalgia"},{"word":"Nicaragua"},{"word":"Latin America"},{"word":"Central America"},{"word":"exotismo musical"},{"word":"Latinoamérica"},{"word":"América Central"}],"section":"ARTICLES","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83b8z44x","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Bernard","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gordillo Brockmann","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS)","department":""}],"date_submitted":"2020-03-05T15:51:55-08:00","date_accepted":"2020-03-05T15:51:55-08:00","date_published":"2019-12-31T16:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/diagonal/article/57051/galley/43251/download/"}]}