Latin GRAMMY grants target music archives from Brazil to Chile
Four $5,000 awards will support projects on Bahian samba chula, early Chilean reggaeton, Dominican composers and Cuban works.
The foundation’s official 2026 music research and preservation grant graphic. Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation · No licence claimed; official publicity image used only with related news coverage · Resized for display.
The Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation awarded $20,000 across four research and preservation projects, with each receiving a $5,000 grant. The work ranges from traditional music in Bahia to the first generation of Chilean reggaeton, linking different eras through the records and stories that are at risk of disappearing.
The research spans a rare instrument, an overlooked composer and a scene with few surviving records
In Brazil, Cassio Nobre will bring together recordings, film, photos and oral histories around samba chula in Bahia’s Recôncavo region. The project centers on the viola machete, a rare five-string instrument associated with the tradition, and plans to place digitized material and context in a free public archive.
A separate project will document Chilean reggaeton from 2004 to 2012 through interviews, albums, home recordings and video. That early scene’s history is barely recorded, so the research aims to show how it developed and circulated rather than leaving its story to scattered memories.
The other grants address Dominican composer Ana Margarita Silfa Finke, whose music remains uncataloged across three archives, and Cuban composer Antonio Raffelin. Researchers plan a free online catalog of Finke’s scores and a search for Raffelin’s missing works; only about a quarter of his roughly 90 compositions have been found.
