Alberto Stangarone is a Venezuelan musician, producer and creative director. Through Todosantos, he was part of an independent Venezuelan music scene that emerged at the intersection of electronic production, the internet, global musical references and a country with very little infrastructure for the kind of music they wanted to make. His trajectory later took him from Venezuela to New York and eventually Mexico, where he has lived for more than a decade.
I spoke with Alberto for more than two hours.
I had prepared an interview, but the conversation did not behave much like one. We moved between Todosantos, Simón Díaz, Rawayana, New York, Mexico, migration, class, technology and Venezuelan identity. Because I knew many of the references, I was not simply collecting his memories. I was remembering alongside him.
That matters to my research.
My own relationship with Venezuelan music and migration influenced what I noticed, which stories I followed and what felt significant. The conversation became less about extracting Alberto’s experience and more about what could emerge when two differently positioned Venezuelans tried to make sense of a cultural history they had both inhabited.
One apparent contradiction stayed with me.
Alberto describes his identity as something generated in Venezuela but matured elsewhere. Yet when he was young in Venezuela, he was not particularly interested in becoming more Venezuelan. Quite the opposite.
He remembers looking outside the country for cultural references. Foreign music felt more exciting, sophisticated and contemporary. With the exception of figures such as Simón Díaz, traditional Venezuelan music was something he explored much more seriously as an adult.
New York complicated this.
Alberto had imagined himself as belonging to an international cultural world. He even jokes that, from the privileged position he occupied in Venezuela, he could imagine himself as “Julian Casablancas.” Leaving changed the coordinates.
In New York he was also positioned as Latin American, as an immigrant and, at times, as marginal. He describes discovering that he was “more Latin and more Venezuelan” than he had previously thought, partly because other people and institutions now encountered him through those categories.
This distinction feels important.
Migration did not reveal an authentic Venezuelan identity that had been hiding underneath.
It changed the position from which Venezuelanness could be understood.
Thinking through Stuart Hall, this moves me away from identity as a possession—something we have, lose or preserve—and towards identity as a process of positioning. The interesting question is not simply Who is Alberto? but: under what circumstances does being Venezuelan become meaningful to him?
The conversation about Tuki made this even clearer.
Alberto remembers tuki being used within his own relatively privileged social environment as a derogatory category: something vulgar, marginal, something a sifrino might use to describe what was socially beneath them.
Then Alberto experienced marginality himself.
After returning from New York, Todosantos began engaging with Tuki sounds. Not by attempting to reproduce them faithfully—they mixed them with IDM, 8-bit electronics and their own references. Alberto explicitly calls it their interpretation.
What interests me here is not simply musical hybridity.
It is a change in cultural value.
A form previously encountered from a position of social distance became meaningful after Alberto’s own position had changed. His encounter with marginality elsewhere altered how he could relate to marginality at home.
So the movement is more complicated than:
Venezuela → migration → nostalgia.
It might look more like:
privilege → distance from local culture → migration → marginalisation → recognition → reinterpretation.
Culture does not remain in the same place during this process. Neither does the person interpreting it.
The interview also made me think differently about the historical moment in which Todosantos appeared. Alberto describes the project as emerging during a technological transition: from expensive studios and physical recording formats towards laptops, FruityLoops, Pro Tools, Ableton, MySpace and YouTube. At the same time, Venezuela offered very little music-industry infrastructure, while New York represented what he calls a space of maximum cultural possibility.
His biography therefore cannot be separated easily from the conditions around it.
A particular generation of Venezuelan musicians was looking outward at the same moment that digital technologies made looking outward radically easier—and while political, economic and cultural conditions increasingly encouraged many of them to leave.
The interview begins to look less like the story of one musician and more like a small window into a historical conjuncture.
This also changes how I understand Alberto’s comments about Rawayana.
He describes them as having consciously become a band of the Venezuelan diaspora. Seeing them perform in Mexico, he experienced the concert almost as “the Venezuela possible”: a version of the country capable of producing an optimism that his generation had struggled to experience in the territory itself.
That phrase fascinates me.
Because perhaps diaspora does not simply remember a nation.
It can also represent a nation that does not yet—or no longer—exist in quite that form.
And representation is never neutral. The Venezuela produced through Rawayana is one possible Venezuela among many. The Tuki reconstructed by Todosantos is one articulation of Tuki. Alberto’s memories of Venezuela are produced from the position he occupies now, after New York, after eleven years in Mexico, after everything that happened in between.
This may be the most important shift produced by the conversation.
I started my research concerned with what survives migration.
After speaking with Alberto, I am becoming more interested in what migration rearranges.
Perhaps the question is not whether Venezuelan identity survives intact, but how its meanings are repeatedly reorganised through class, displacement, cultural encounters, technology, marginalisation and time.
Towards the end of this reflection, another question remains open. Alberto’s daughter is growing up from a different cultural position from his own. What she understands as Venezuela cannot simply reproduce what Venezuela meant to him.
That feels less like an answer than a direction for the next stage of my research:
How do these changing, contradictory versions of Venezuelanness travel between people who occupy different places, generations and historical positions?
For now, Alberto’s interview has made one thing much harder for me to believe: that there is a single Venezuelan identity waiting somewhere to be preserved.
Perhaps the more interesting work is to understand when, where and under what conditions we keep becoming Venezuelan.