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Song and Social Change in Latin America

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2641487

1527-1900

Kristin Mann,

Music History and Culture

Lauren Shaw's edited collection of essays and interviews examines the way in which music has provided a strong voice for resistance to forces of modernization, globalization, and state power in contemporary Latin America. Many genres of Latin American music appear in this volume — guaracha, bomba, plena, tropicália, trova, vallenato, salsa, rock, and hip-hop — although it is not the intent of the book to discuss their genesis or describe the music. Instead, the authors and musicians consider how national and global social, political, and economic conditions reverberated through song, including the ways in which song critiqued and challenged power structures.The first section contains chronologically ordered essays on music and agency. Some of these selections consider the sociopolitical commentary of an entire genre (tropicália, rock), while others focus more narrowly on performers or song lyrics. The scholars draw theoretical inspiration from a variety of disciplines, including literature, political science, and sociology. Each essay in this section includes a discography, footnotes, and a bibliography. Carmelo Esterrich's essay demonstrates how the Puerto Rican band Cortijo y Su Combo gave prominence to urban, Afro–Puerto Rican, and working-class critiques of modernization and rural-urban migration. Scholar and musician Juan Carlos Ureña examines nueva canción movements of Central America through the lens of folklore. Like Cortijo y Su Combo in Puerto Rico, trovadores created songs centered on the marginalized: in their case, workers, revolutionaries, peasants, women, and even the environment. Coauthors Phillip Chidester and John Baldwin examine Brazilian tropicália via the concept of myth, concluding that its musicians constructed a new national mythology. Lisette Balabarca finds that rock in Argentina, Chile, and Peru gave voice to those, particularly youth, who endured authoritarian exercises of power in climates of violence. Similarly, rock en español in Mexico, which Ignacio Corona examines, helped reconstruct cultural identity in the face of political and economic globalization. The globalization of the war on drugs provides the backdrop for the next chapter, on Afro-Colombian vallenato music. Diana Rodríguez Quevedo discusses the way in which this music tells the history of, and solidifies group identity for, a marginalized, displaced population. The final chapter in section 1, a contribution by Shaw, explores the music of two Cuban trovadores, a century apart, as poetry, probing their political possibilities.The book's second part, “Conversations on Music and Social Change,” reminds readers and listeners that song is not only a means toward social change but also an escape as well as a venue for exploring and communicating new ideas and identities. Each chapter begins with a biographical overview of the musicians and includes their responses to questions about their music and the sociopolitical contexts of their lives and work. The first and strongest interview, with well-known salsero Rubén Blades, includes conversation about his music as well as his thoughts about and experiences with politics and globalization. Like Blades, Roy Brown views music as a vehicle for transmitting ideas and stimulating thoughts, but additionally as an amusement, an escape. Interviews with Cuban band Habana Abierta and Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux reveal the globalization of musical culture through the Latin American diaspora in Europe. A consideration of gender in contemporary Latin American music is most prominent in the volume's final two interviews, with Tijoux and Zapotec rapper Mare. The interviews are an illuminating addition to the volume. For those readers unfamiliar with the artists' works, a selected discography at the end of each interview would have been helpful.The variety in this volume's essays, as well as the conversations with musicians, will appeal particularly to students of Hispanic and cultural studies as well as those in the fields of political science, sociology, history, and music. Unlike many anthologies about contemporary Latin American music, this volume spans a wide geographic area, musical field, and time period. This is both a strength and a weakness; those looking for a reader to supplement courses in Latin American culture will find variety from which to teach, but some readers may not be familiar with the contexts in which the varieties of music are produced. In all, however, the volume holds together as it highlights the ability of music to provide a space for commentary, even against the backdrop of oppression and overwhelming power structures.