The Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation Awards $20,000 to Preserve Samba, Dominican Composers, Chilean Reggaeton, and a Lost Cuban Violinist

The Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation has announced the winners of its 2026 Latin Music Research and Preservation Grant Program, awarding a total of $20,000 across four grants of $5,000 each. The projects span Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, and address music histories at risk of being lost.

Cassio Nobre of Brazil will consolidate scattered field recordings, film footage, photographs, and oral histories of samba chula — a Samba de Roda style from the Recôncavo Baiano region of Bahia built around the viola machete, a rare instrument of Iberian origin found exclusively there. UNESCO recognized Samba de Roda in 2005, yet the existing archives remain split between academic repositories and private collections. The project will digitize the materials and publish them in an open-access archive, including material documenting the last living bearers of viola machete knowledge.

Arelis Benítez of Spain will catalog the music of Ana Margarita Silfa Finke (1946–2023), a pianist, composer, and educator who spent more than five decades at the Dominican Republic's National Conservatory of Music and National Symphonic Orchestra. Her music remains uncataloged and spread across three archives. Andrea Ocampo Cea of Chile will document the first generation of Chilean reggaeton (2004–2012) through interviews with the scene's pioneers and a collection of albums, home recordings, and digital files.

Miriam Escudero and José Raúl López of the United States will search for the lost works of Antonio Raffelin (Cuba, 1786–1881), a violinist, composer, and cultural entrepreneur who shaped Havana's musical life for six decades. His symphonies and string quartets were performed and published in Paris and Philadelphia, but only about a quarter of his roughly ninety works have been found. Since its inception in 2015, the Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation's grant program has awarded more than $305,000 to preservation projects.