Music as Political Actor in Latin America

“Poetic, combative, lyrical, militant, romantic, committed, idealistic, inspirational, and hauntingly beautiful . . . la Nueva Canción Chilena, or Chilean New Song, is all of these.” J. Patrice McSherry’s opening words in Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s–1973, capture the sentiments of millions of people around the world. Her compelling book introduces readers to the emotional and political power of the cultural movement that stirred generations of people in Latin America and the world during a revolutionary period in Chile (see also McSherry, 2017). It is unique among the works under review in that it focuses on the interaction of music and politics from the 1960s to the coup that overthrew the Allende government in 1973. The edited volumes of Lauren Shaw, Song and Social Change in Latin America, and Pablo Vila, The Militant Song Movement in Latin America: Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, expand both the temporal and the geographic scope of analyses of the music known variously as nueva canción, canto nuevo, canción popular, and canción protesta with essays by scholars of the arts, culture, literature, sociology, political science, and history. Their common focus, similar to McSherry’s, is the work of multigenerational artists who create and perform for social change. The socially conscious music that has evolved in both urban and rural settings speaks to the conditions of the poor and working classes—indigenous people, Afro-descendants, industrial workers, and peasants—and reflects the cultural and demographic particularities of the nations in which it emerges. For most of the contributors to these books, the protest music born in the mid-twentieth century was a vehicle for including marginalized voices and histories in social and political dialogue, inspiring movements for radical change and socialism in Latin America despite the best efforts of brutal regimes to censor and eradicate its influence. (A notable exception is Pablo Vila [in his introduction], who seems far less enthusiastic about the movements inspired by what he calls the “militant song movement” in Latin America.) The creation of music as social protest persists in the work of contemporary artists in old, new, and hybrid forms as the soundtrack for movements for social justice today.

McSherry’s book is theoretically insightful and empirically grounded in the structural and historical conditions that gave rise to New Song and the popular, socialist-leaning movement that brought Allende to power in 1970. The music was not only a reflection of social conditions but a main actor in the mass movement for economic, political, and social justice. McSherry intertwines a chronological view of the music’s development and a thematic treatment. In her introductory chapter she describes how New Song opened new cultural spaces and encouraged, thrived in, and contributed to the “culture of participation” in the 1960s. A subsequent chapter is devoted to the reciprocal relationship between the development of New Song and the Unidad Popular, another to the artists whose political commitments and social critiques led them to the recovery of traditional music and instruments and the development of hybrid forms that produced new melodies, and another to the political contributions of New Song as a cultural development and performance for and within popular sectors rather than for elites. What makes the book so powerful is the rich evidence McSherry brings from the musicians themselves about the organic development of New Song through interaction with the people of the towns and the countryside. The musicians nurtured the new cultural production of the period collectively, contrary to the notion that great art comes from the talented individual. Through McSherry’s multiple interviews of some 20 musicians over the course of four years, readers hear the voices of the protagonists themselves as they speak of their cultural and political commitments and recall the inspiration they received from Chileans’ enthusiastic response to their music. For McSherry the music was (like the Renaissance) both recovery of Latin America’s musical roots and innovation. From Violeta Parra in the 1940s to Victor Jara and his generation, artists brought the music of the countryside—of indigenous people playing charangos, quenas, and zampoñas— to the masses of Chileans, whose musical choices had been previously limited by the music industry to Eurocentric and American commercial arts and styles. New artists built on indigenous music, writing lyrics that shared the hardships, laments, and hopes of working people and the poor.

McSherry’s theoretical framework is derived from Antonio Gramsci’s contention that organic, counterhegemonic movements in the cultural arena were essential for challenging the dominant, elite-led conception of life as it should be that permeated the dominant institutions of society. Gramsci asserted that, faced with the ideological hegemony of the ruling class, organic intellectuals and popular movements needed to reshape the cultural environment with a counterhegemonic narrative in order to establish a new, rational civil society that reflected the political interests of the masses. Applying Gramsci’s discourse to the interaction between politics and culture in Chile, McSherry theorizes that the New Song movement was instrumental “in uniting people in common cause” against the deep structural inequality that existed even in Chile’s formally liberal-democratic system by articulating through music a counterhegemonic narrative that focused “on the lives of the peasants and workers and the injustices committed against them,” encapsulated the aspirations of the masses, and inspired people to pursue the political changes that spoke to those aspirations (11). As the New Song movement grew, it “represented a rising challenge to the hegemonic conception of life in Chile. Culture became an arena of political contestation and hegemonic-counterhegemonic struggle” (8).

From Chilean New Song we learn how deeply the music was embedded in the political campaigning for Allende’s election in 1970. What was built in those years of hope and determination flourished (though not without challenge) during Allende’s government, a social revolution by vote, not by arms. Following the coup that ripped Allende from office in 1973 (discussed in the book’s last chapter), New Song and its musicians became targets of government repression so severe that many were forced into exile. Victor Jara was tortured and assassinated by the military. In the words of Max Berrú of Inti-Illimani, speaking of the mass reception they received at concerts upon their return to Chile after 16 years of exile (160),

What made such an impact on me was that the people knew all of the lyrics and sang along with us. . . . What this said to me, and to my comrades, was that somehow they had heard the tapes, copied them clandestinely and passed them around to others. This was something so enormous, so important, that we’d entered the heart and soul of the people.

In Song and Social Change in Latin America, Lauren Shaw identifies the unifying theme of her collection in terms similar to McSherry’s: “Song can help give voice to a people who otherwise are not heard . . . and can help create solidarity” (1). The seven essays in the book’s first section, “Music and Agency,” all link music to sociopolitical change in Latin America, though not all claim a reciprocal relationship between song and social movements. Rather, particular songs of various genres contain stories that speak to political atrocities, give voice to and claim identities for groups that are ignored in the dominant political discourse, or contest the social, political, and economic narratives of political rulers. Given the history of U.S. economic and political interference in the region, many song lyrics inevitably decry outside interference, U.S. imperialism, and the struggle for sovereignty. Each essay focuses on a musical phenomenon in one or several countries to claim that “song, with its ability to put into words a particular moment in time and the experience of a whole collective of people, accesses and articulates the feelings of individuals who might otherwise consider their plight a singular struggle” (5).

For instance, Carmelo Esterrich describes the popular music of Cortijo y su Combo in Puerto Rico in the 1950s as “inserting working-class, urban culture, and Afro-Puerto Rican life into the social imaginary of the island . . . in guaracha, in plena, in mambo, in bomba,” at a time when the island’s government was collaborating with U.S. manufacturers to transform the country’s economy (11). The music contested the government-led shaping of Puerto Rican cultural identity as steeped in the idyllic country life of the jibaro while rapid industrialization in collaboration with U.S. manufacturers undercut the agricultural economy and caused massive migration to urban areas. The band’s songs served “to register the life of the inhabitants” of urban spaces in San Juan that previously had not been “recognized as legitimate spaces” (12, 14).

Diana Rodríguez Quevedo writes about the Vallenato, which speaks to the marginalization of Afro-descendants of the Chocó region of Colombia; Lauren Shaw covers the rich poetry of Cuba’s postrevolution nueva trova; and, by way of Shaw’s interview of him, Panamanian-born Ruben Blades recalls the underlying regional motivations for some of his compositions, especially “Buscando América,” which calls attention to the atrocities of military regimes. The collection also includes scholarly essays on the use of rock music in Argentina, Chile, and Peru to combat the politics of fear advanced by the military regimes in those countries during the 1980s, on the oppositional commentary on race in Brazil’s Tropicália movement, on the power of songs of rebellion in Central America, and on the political consciousness of rock en español in Mexico. In the second section, “Conversations on Music and Social Change,” there are interviews of Blades, Roy Brown of Puerto Rico, and several others. Song and Social Change in Latin America is the best of the books under review for its overview of the breadth, scope, and longevity of protest music in Latin America.

Pablo Vila’s collection The Militant Song Movement in Latin America includes three selections on New Song in Chile (by Morris, Bolton, and González). As does McSherry, Nancy Morris (who has also written on the persistence of New Song in Chile under Pinochet [Morris, 1986]) credits New Song’s political consciousness to the work of the folklorist Violeta Parra, who spent years documenting traditional musical styles from the North and the South of Chile and “melded folkloric music with socially conscious lyrics” (21). After the coup, Pinochet’s regime slaughtered some of the musicians, including the beloved Victor Jara, crushed the music and its supporting institutions, and forced many of the musicians and their families into exile. Both Morris and Bolton note that groups such as Quilapayun (based in Paris), Inti-Illimani (based in Rome), and Illapu (exiled in France after a European tour in 1981 and after 1986 based in Mexico) continued from exile to spread the message of “democratic will” around the world. The U.S. concerts of all three groups were important political and highly emotional events uniting Chilean exiles and solidarity activists.

In the same volume, Carlos Molinero and Pablo Vila write that the groundbreaking music of Atahualpa Yupanqui in Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s provided the sense of mission essential to the movement they call “indo-criollismo” by making visible the indigenous sectors of the population, whose social and political conditions of marginalization had been ignored by popular culture (166). Maria Figueredo traces the historical roots of protest music in Uruguay and its fusion of genres, and Camila Juárez focuses on what she identifies as a second phase of this protest music, from 1977 to 1985.

Vila, however, makes several puzzling claims that indicate his skepticism of the progressive role of the music embraced by others. For example, he argues that political actors “often risk their lives following ideologies they barely comprehend” (1) and, specifically regarding Argentina, that “the massacre that followed the Peronist government of the 1970s, to which the guerrilla groups that continued their armed struggle under the democratic government of Cámpora and Perón contributed to a certain degree, disavows any naïve remembrance of the ‘heroic’ revolutionary time of the early 1970s in Argentina nowadays, their militant songs included” (8). Neither claim is elaborated or substantiated. In stark contrast to the others, Vila treats the “militant song movement” as something that ended in the 1970s, with few songs (mostly the overtly political ones) remembered. Both McSherry and Morris (in Vila’s own volume) suggest, to the contrary, that the popularity and political power potential of New Song in Chile persist among old and young. Likewise, Shaw’s book brings the study of “song for social change” well into the new millennium. Her interviews of Ana Tijoux and Mare (of Oaxaca, Mexico) teach us that social critique through culture reinvents itself as conditions and generations change.

By whatever measure, “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” recorded first in Chile by ensembles such as Quilapayun and Inti-Illimani, has become something of a worldwide anthem identified with the power of unity, collective action, and the belief in ultimate victory for people seeking justice. Older musicians inspire and collaborate with new artists, many of whom incorporate salsa, rock, and hip hop into their social commentary. The music they give us to recall and explore is more accessible than ever on the Internet and in commercial venues throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The notion the music imparts, explicitly or implicitly, is that a better world is possible.