Listening to young female Romani identity

Las Chuches (2004) between palos and pop

Abstract

This article examines how Las Chuches (2004) produces and circulates a young female Romani identity in Spanish pop-flamenco. Drawing on documentary and musicological and visual-verbal content analyses and a situated reflexive diary, it shows how the album musicalises Romani and neighbourhood everyday worlds and constructs a plural Romani adolescent figure. Pop formats amplify the artists’ audibility and turn Romani practices and signs into commercially legible refrains, images and bodies, articulating the group’s forms of self-expression with the underlying logics of racialised commodification.