Cuban author and musicologist Alejo Carpentier wrote that Latin American music is a phenomenon like an explosion whose history and evolution, unlike the history of European music, cannot be traced in a linear or coherent pattern. According to Carpentier, Latin American music arises from nowhere as a series of accidents, unplanned events and startling surprises. One might argue that all culture is an accident, but Carpentier's point is intended to emphasize the arbitrary and even violent roots of Latin American music. The music now associated with the countries and regions of Latin America originated from three cultural formations: indigenous American, European and African, but the genealogies of the many products of these sources are not easily traced. Once the Europeans had arrived in the Americas, followed later by the Africans they brought as slaves, the three traditions began to mix and alter, so that it was no longer possible to speak in terms of pure forms, whether European, African or indigenous.

The history of Latin American music is therefore a complicated affair. There are conflicting versions of the origins of many forms, often the result of calculated speculation from uncertain evidence or the consequence of a particular politics of identity. Some musicologists have sought the origins of Argentinian tango in English country dancing of the mid-seventeenth century and have offered a genealogy that passes through the Cuban dance forms, the habanera and contradanza. Their genealogy exemplifies the accidental transformations likely to be undergone by any genre, but overlooks important local phenomena, including the wave of European immigration to South America in the late nineteenth century and the earlier significant presence of black communities in the River Plate republics where tango first appeared.