A Field Guide to Latin Music Genres

“Latin music” is a label of convenience. It covers some twenty countries, two main languages and five centuries of mixing between Indigenous, African and European traditions. A tango from Buenos Aires and a corrido from Sinaloa have about as much in common as a waltz and the blues.

This guide sorts the main genres by where they come from, because geography explains most of what you hear. Each entry gives you the short version: where and when it started, what to listen for, and one song to play. Press any highlighted song title and it starts in the player at the bottom of the page.

How to tell genres apart by ear

Two questions settle most cases.

What keeps the beat? Congas, bongos, timbales and a cowbell point to the Spanish Caribbean: salsa and its parent, son. A metal scraper and a two-headed drum racing along together mean merengue. A drum machine repeating the same boom-ch-boom-chick in every song is reggaeton.

What carries the melody? Trumpets and violins together are mariachi. A full brass band with a tuba playing the bass line is banda. An accordion usually means norteño in Mexico and vallenato in Colombia, and it leads traditional merengue too. A bandoneón, the accordion’s darker cousin, is tango. A bright, plucked lead guitar is bachata, and a nylon-string guitar played almost in a whisper is bossa nova.

The Spanish Caribbean

Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic are three Caribbean nations with an outsized influence. Most of what the world calls “tropical” music starts here.

Son cubano

Son is generally traced to the highlands of eastern Cuba in the late 19th century, and it reached Havana in the early 1900s. It joined Spanish song and string instruments, including the Cuban tres guitar, with African percussion and call-and-response singing, all organized around a five-stroke pattern called the clave. Salsa, and much of what gets called “tropical” music, is built on it. Start with ▶ Chan Chan, the opening track of the 1997 album by the Buena Vista Social Club. More in son cubano.

Mambo

Mambo began in Cuba in the late 1930s as a syncopated offshoot of the danzón, then became a big-band dance craze in the late 1940s and 1950s, in Mexico and the United States above all. Its great popularizer was the Cuban bandleader Pérez Prado. Listen for the punching brass in ▶ Mambo No. 5.

Salsa

Salsa is less a new rhythm than a new city. In the New York of the 1960s and 1970s, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican musicians took son and mambo, added jazz harmony and a harder, brassier attack, and the label Fania Records sold the result to the world as salsa. The lyrics often told street stories, none more famous than ▶ Pedro Navaja by Rubén Blades and Willie Colón, from 1978. More in salsa.

Merengue

The national music of the Dominican Republic dates to the mid-19th century. Since the late 19th century its classic trio has been accordion, the güira (a metal scraper) and the tambora (a two-headed drum), and its beat is a fast, even two-step that is easy to dance to. UNESCO added it to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016. Try ▶ La Bilirrubina by Juan Luis Guerra. More in merengue.

Bachata

Bachata is also Dominican, but slower and built on guitars. For decades it was looked down on as the music of bars and the rural poor, and was nicknamed amargue, “bitterness”, for its heartbroken lyrics. It modernized in the 1990s and went global in the 2000s through Aventura, a group formed in the Bronx, whose ▶ Obsesión was an international hit. More in bachata.

Bolero

The bolero is the slow romantic song of Latin America. It emerged in eastern Cuba in the late 19th century; the first is usually said to be “Tristezas”, written by Pepe Sánchez in 1883. It spread to Mexico and beyond, where guitar trios such as Los Panchos, formed in New York in 1944, made it a continental language of love. Hear ▶ Sin Ti. More in bolero.

Colombia

Cumbia

Cumbia started on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, where Indigenous flutes, African drums and European song met. Its loping, shuffling beat proved so adaptable that Mexico, Peru, Argentina and other countries each grew their own version, and it is often called the musical backbone of Latin America. A Mexican example shows how far it travelled: ▶ Cómo Te Voy a Olvidar by Los Ángeles Azules. More in cumbia.

Vallenato

Vallenato comes from the region around Valledupar, inland from the same Caribbean coast. It is storytelling music for accordion, a small drum called the caja and a scraper called the guacharaca. UNESCO listed it in 2015 as heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. In the 1990s Carlos Vives carried it to a pop audience with updated versions of classics such as ▶ La Gota Fría. More in vallenato.

Mexico

The industry groups Mexico’s traditional styles under the name “regional Mexican”. They sound very different from one another.

Ranchera and mariachi

These two are often confused. Ranchera is a kind of song: proud, emotional, rooted in rural life. Mariachi is the ensemble that most often plays it, from western Mexico, with violins, trumpets, guitar, the small high vihuela and the big bass guitarrón. For the song style at full force, play ▶ Volver, Volver by Vicente Fernández. More in ranchera and mariachi.

Norteño

The music of northern Mexico and the Texas border is built on the button accordion and the bajo sexto, a deep-voiced twelve-string guitar that supplies bass and rhythm. The accordion and the polka rhythms arrived in the 19th century with Central European immigrants, largely German and Czech, to Texas and northern Mexico. Norteño is the best-known home of the corrido, a narrative ballad, often about real events and people. Los Tigres del Norte have told those stories for half a century; start with ▶ Contrabando y Traición. More in norteño.

Banda

Banda is brass-band music from the Pacific state of Sinaloa: clarinets, trumpets, trombones, a booming tambora drum and a tuba handling the bass. It grew out of 19th-century military and village bands. Its modern sound is polished and romantic, as in ▶ El Color de Tus Ojos by Banda MS. More in banda.

Corridos tumbados

The newest branch appeared in the late 2010s, when young artists led by Natanael Cano kept the guitars and storytelling of the corrido and added the attitude and vocal style of trap. In 2023 ▶ Ella Baila Sola, by Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma, became, by Billboard’s count, the first regional Mexican song to reach the top five of its Hot 100 chart. It peaked at number four. More in corridos tumbados.

Brazil

Brazil sings in Portuguese and followed its own path. Its music grew from the same African and European roots as its neighbors’, but with little exchange with the Spanish-speaking countries around it.

Samba

Samba has older roots in Bahia, and took its urban form in Rio de Janeiro in the early 20th century among Afro-Brazilian families who had migrated from there. It became the sound of Carnival and a symbol of the country. Behind the massed percussion of the parades there is also a quieter, songwriter’s samba. Hear it in ▶ As Rosas Não Falam by Cartola. More in samba.

Bossa nova

In late-1950s Rio, João Gilberto reduced samba’s rhythm to a single guitar and an almost spoken voice, and Tom Jobim supplied harmonies influenced by jazz and classical music. The result was bossa nova, roughly “new trend”. Gilberto’s own 1958 recording of ▶ Chega de Saudade is generally treated as its starting point. More in bossa nova.

MPB

Música popular brasileira is the broad current that followed bossa nova in the late 1960s, when songwriters such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, leaders of the movement known as Tropicália, mixed Brazilian tradition with rock and anything else they liked. This was during the military dictatorship that began in 1964. Both men were arrested in December 1968, jailed, and then lived in exile in London from 1969 to 1972. Start with ▶ Alegria, Alegria, the 1967 song whose electric guitars scandalized purists and helped launch Tropicália. More in MPB.

Sertanejo

Sertanejo is Brazil’s country music, born in the rural interior and usually sung by duos in close harmony. It has long been the most played genre on Brazilian radio. The song every Brazilian seems to know by heart is ▶ Evidências by Chitãozinho & Xororó. More in sertanejo.

Funk carioca

Despite the name, this is not American funk. It is fast, bass-heavy party music that came out of Rio’s favelas in the 1980s, shaped by Miami bass and hip hop, and is also known abroad as baile funk. Anitta, who came out of the funk scene, carried it into pop with hits like ▶ Show das Poderosas, which is pop with a funk carioca base, not a pure example of the style. More in funk carioca.

The Southern Cone

Tango

Tango took shape in the port neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the late 19th century, among European immigrants, the descendants of enslaved Africans and local-born criollos of the urban working class. Its signature instrument is the bandoneón, a concertina of German origin with a mournful tone. The singer Carlos Gardel became its greatest star and carried sung tango across the Spanish-speaking world through records and films; play ▶ Por una Cabeza, from 1935. Decades later Astor Piazzolla rebuilt it with jazz and classical ideas in pieces such as ▶ Libertango. More in tango.

Nueva canción

The “new song” movement of the 1960s and 1970s set socially committed lyrics to folk instruments and rhythms, first in Chile and Argentina and then across the continent. Its founding voices were Chile’s Violeta Parra and Argentina’s Atahualpa Yupanqui. Parra’s best-known song became an anthem in the version by Argentina’s Mercedes Sosa: ▶ Gracias a la Vida. The movement paid a price. The Chilean singer Víctor Jara, author of ▶ Te Recuerdo Amanda, was detained, tortured and shot by the military in the days after the 1973 coup. More in nueva canción.

Rock en español

Rock sung in Spanish existed from the 1950s, but it became a shared movement in the 1980s. In Argentina it got an unexpected push during the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War, when English-language music was taken off the radio and local bands filled the space. The best-known band of the wave that followed is Soda Stereo, whose 1990 song ▶ De Música Ligera is one of the most recognized rock songs in the language. More in rock en español.

The urban wave

Reggaeton

Reggaeton began with Spanish-language reggae in Panama in the late 1980s and found its form in Puerto Rico in the 1990s, where it mixed with hip hop. Its constant beat is called dembow, after Shabba Ranks’s 1990 dancehall track “Dem Bow”. The song that carried it around the world was ▶ Gasolina by Daddy Yankee, in 2004. Its current leading figure is Bad Bunny; try ▶ Dákiti, recorded with Jhayco. More in reggaeton.

Dembow and Latin trap

Two close relatives are worth knowing. In the Dominican Republic the dembow beat sped up into a raw club genre of its own, also called dembow. And in Puerto Rico, Latin trap, which borrowed the slow, heavy sound of Atlanta hip hop, took off in the mid-2010s; many of today’s reggaeton stars, Bad Bunny among them, started there.

Spain

Flamenco

Flamenco is the art of Andalusia in southern Spain, in whose development the Gitano (Spanish Romani) community played an essential role. It combines song (cante), guitar (toque) and dance (baile), with handclaps keeping intricate rhythms. UNESCO added it to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010. Two figures changed it in the 1970s: the guitarist Paco de Lucía and the singer Camarón de la Isla. Start with ▶ Entre Dos Aguas, the 1973 instrumental that made de Lucía famous. It is a rumba, the lightest and most accessible flamenco form. More in flamenco.

Where to go next

• Hear all of this in one sitting: A Tour of Latin Genres in One Playlist plays one song for every genre in the catalog.
• Follow the story through time with Latin Music Decade by Decade.
• Browse all genres, each with its own short history and artists.