Movement Music
“There’s a visual that shows how movements of people have influenced sound,” says Miriam Zoila Pérez ’06, of their forthcoming book Muévelo [Move It], co-authored with Verónica Bayetti Flores. “[It shows] the flows of Black people who were trafficked from West Africa to the Caribbean through the slave trade, and how that’s influenced all the sounds that we associate with Latin music. You also have influences from Spain and [other parts of] Europe with certain instruments, and, of course, Indigenous influences.”
For the past eight years, Pérez and Bayetti Flores have been co-hosting the Latin music podcast “Radio Menea.” (Menea translates loosely from Spanish to English as “shake” or “wiggle.”)
The podcast covers everything from Mexican regional music to Argentine tango, and so will Muévelo, coming from Running Press in 2026. Bayetti Flores illustrated Muévelo and the co-hosts collaborated in curating playlists to accompany it.
“The idea is for the book to be something that people who are already into Latin music, and people who are new to it, can use as an entry point to explore,” says Pérez, who is also celebrating the publication of Camila Núñez’s Year of Disasters, a queer young adult novel that Pérez has spent five years writing, which Page Street Publishing will release in March.
Muévelo includes deep dives into specific albums, like Shakira’s 1998 ¿Dónde Están los Ladrones? [Where are the Thieves?], which Pérez describes as iconic. “Vero and I are both elder millennials, so that album was a big moment for us, and also for the crossover of music from Latin America into the pop mainstream in the United States.”
Other sections explore themes including Blackness, indigeneity, and queerness in Latin music. “We both are activists and see the world through a political lens,” says Pérez. “That shows up in our show and in the book.”