The Cuban Research Institute (CRI) is pleased to host Susana de la Cruz Rodríguez between October and December 2024. A Ph.D. student in musicology at the University of Oviedo in Spain, Ms. de la Cruz Rodríguez will conduct archival research and interviews for her doctoral dissertation titled “Bagpipes and Asturian and Galician Music in Cuba: Cultural Spaces and Sound Transculturation.” The main objective of her dissertation is to study the insertion, consolidation, and development in Cuba of Asturian and Galician music for/with bagpipes, as part of the transculturation and hybridization that crystallized throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in different artistic and educational manifestations.
During her research stay at CRI, Ms. de la Cruz Rodríguez plans to access the documentary collections of the FIU Libraries in order to delve into the translation of the musical practices of the Asturian and Galician groups who emigrated from Cuba to the United States and thus complement and compare the information located in Spanish-Cuban sources. Of special interest among these collections are the Díaz-Ayala Collection of Cuban and Latin American Popular Music, and other archival collections in the FIU Libraries, such as periodicals, photographs, programs of parties and social gatherings, memoirs, and recordings. Furthermore, Ms. de la Cruz Rodríguez expects to establish contact with scholars affiliated with FIU, to find possible convergent points in terms of research strategies and methodologies used in the analysis of the cultural and musical processes of the Asturian-Cuban-American and Galician-Cuban-American diaspora. Finally, during this stay she will assess the possibility of contacting and working with local cultural institutions, migrant associations that can provide sources for the study.
Ms. de la Cruz Rodríguez is conducting her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Dr. Julio Raúl Ogas Jofré. She has received a grant from the Severo Ochoa Program for research and teaching training of the Principality of Asturias. Her work is carried out within the Diapente XXI GIMCEL Research Group on Contemporary Music of Spain and Latin America and the project on "Music in Spain and the Southern Cone of America: Transculturation and Migrations (1939–2001)."
Susana de la Cruz Rodríguez is a Ph.D. student in the Program in Art History and Musicology at the University of Oviedo. She holds a master's degree in Teacher Training for Secondary Education, Baccalaureate, and Vocational Training from the same institution. In addition, she earned a bachelor's degree in Music from the University of the Arts in Havana and a bachelor's degree in Informational Design and Visual Communication Design from the Higher Institute of Design in Havana. She has published articles and made presentations at national and international conferences in Spain and Cuba. She was trained as a performer linked to wind instruments: the flute, the recorder, and the bagpipe.
