Book excerpt: I demonstrate that popular music genres have constructed a series of transnational oral communities whose members vary in age, sex, race, and country of origin, thus casting the definition of Caribbean identity in a different light. This particular perspective is the subject of novels such as Musiquito. Anales de un despota y de un bolerista by Dominican author Enriquillo Sanchez; and in Parece que fue ayer. Cronica de un happening boleristico by Venezuelan Denzil Romero. Both authors use bolero as an instrument to spread a political ideology, in the first case, and to give voice to those who are not represented by the political regime, in the second.