Recording Scouts

Abstract This chapter is devoted to the nearly fifty sound recording expeditions deployed by Edison, Victor, Columbia, Odeon, and other metropolitan corporations to Latin America and the Caribbean between 1902 and 1926. By focusing on the labor of recording scouts and their encounters on the ground with musicians, dealers, intermediaries, and other local actors, it examines the improvisatory character of the business and the many intercultural dramas that accompanied the surreptitious establishment of makeshift recording laboratories across the region at the time. The multiple stories of these expeditions reveal, ultimately, the unevenness of corporate colonialism and how, rather than a matter of effective executive decisions, imperial domination grows out of everyday, mundane interactions.