In the last few years there has been a renewed interest in the “protest” songs of Latin America. In the absence of rigorous academic studies, however, the genre has been reductively characterized as an exotic, picturesque tradition – a characterization unable to account for the role it has played in moments of historic transformation. This mischaracterization is precisely what Pablo Vila and his co-contributors seek to address in his edited collection, The Militant Song Movement in Latin America: Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina.
While studies in English tend to refer to the “protest” genre with the Spanish terms Nueva Canción or Nueva Trova, for lack of a meaningful literal translation, Vila employs the term “militant song”, explaining his choice as follows: “Because ‘militant’ prefigures, without determining or narrowing it, a committed political position” (p. 4). “Militant” therefore becomes a very inclusive rather than exclusive term which incorporates diverse leftist sectors, as well as a wide gamut of political organizations with distinct levels of political commitment. In this work, Vila well illustrates the profound levels of commitment present in Latin America artists who constantly risked exile, imprisonment, torture, and other forms of political repression and persecution. Some, such as Víctor Jara, were killed for creating songs that promoted revolutionary change.
Vila has collected essays that provide an impressive account of artists and their militant songs in order to show how these artists were instrumental in fueling Latin American social movements. One of the most novel aspects of this collection is Illa Carrillo Rodríguez's chapter that focuses on the problematic representation of gender within the Nueva Canción movements throughout Latin America. While Chile's Violeta Parra was a well-known founder of this movement, and the voice of Argentina's Mercedes Sosa was a distinguished interpreter of protest songs, throughout the rest of Latin America masculine voices have prevailed. In addition, Rodríguez shows how, via the masculine inflected promotion of gender equity in Nueva Canción, women tend to be idealized or romanticized. Carrillo points out that this idealization within Nueva Canción carries an “auratic quality discernible in songs that metaphorized the New Man as a sacred source of (en)light(enment)” (p. 236). According to Carrillo, therefore, the masculine/feminine dyad tends to replicate within the political organizations of the left and within the discourse of the revolutionary song, manifesting as a vision of “the feminine as the impotent site of love and self-sacrifice and the masculine as the empowered locus of discipline, reason, and transcendence” (p. 224).
Many of the songs that were written during the height of the contestations and mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s are now more than forty years old. Some of them have survived the passing of years, political contexts, and musical styles in order to become part of the musical and poetic cannon of Latin America. In the Chilean context, openly political songs, such as “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (“The People United Will Never Be Defeated”), and others that combine the political reality with romantic elements, as “Te recuerdo Amanda” (“I Remember You, Amanda”), are juxtaposed in the collective memory alongside more allegorical songs that have no obvious political content, such as “Gracias a la vida” (“Thanks to Live”) and “Volver a los diecisiete” (“To Be 17 Again”) by Violetta Parra. While the songs mentioned refer to specific events in Chile, similar situations arose in Uruguay and Argentina. Several of the contributions to the volume trace the diverse forms of reception and response to the songs that remain active in the Latin American repertoire, and show how in some cases political songs that were born in reaction to urgent social causes in the past are depoliticized in the present. Nevertheless, these songs remain alive in the popular memory as references to a time in which dreams of liberty and social transformation confronted military dictatorships throughout Latin America.
In addition to the “Introduction” in which Vila explains the objectives of his research, the book is divided into nine chapters. In the first, “New Song in Chile: Half a Century of Musical Activism”, Nancy Morris analyzes how this form of artistic as well as political intervention was born and developed within political turmoil. She studies the form in which the militant song was edified from within, with poetic strategies that facilitated the evasion of censorship under the dictatorship of Pinochet. She also explores the work of those artists that served as voices of opposition and resistance in exile.
Chapter 2, “Remembrance Is Not Enough (No basta solo el recuerdo): The Cantata Popular Santa María de Iquique Forty Years after its Release” by Eleen Karmy Bolton, centers on the study of the trajectory of the first political and folk cantata, composed in 1969 by the Chilean Luis Advis and recorded in 1970 by the group Quilapayún. In the third chapter, “The Chilean New Song's cueca larga”, Laura Jordán González writes about how the traditional musical form called cueca played an important role in the musical, poetical, and choreographic form of the Nueva Canción. The author uses this adoption of the cueca as a case study to explore the sonorous qualities of the movement, demonstrating the relationship between the “selection/exclusion/predilection” of musical traditions within the musical repertoires and the political discourse of the musicians (p. 71).
The fourth chapter, “Modern Foundations of Uruguayan Popular Music” by Abril Trigo, focuses on the cultural and ideological legacy of the founding generation of trouvadors, musicians, and poets such as Alfredo Zitarrosa, Daniel Viglietti, and the duo Los Olimareños. Chapter 5, “Popular Music and the Avant-garde in Uruguay” by Camila Juárez (translated by Peggy Westwell and Pablo Vila), studies a much more experimental group of Uruguayan musicians and songwriters, such as Leo Maslíah (also a writer), Jorge Lazaroff, and Luis Trochón, as well as the composer Coriún Ahoronián. Always within the framework of resistance to dictatorship, these artists were able to combine elements of diverse musical genres, and among them were twentieth-century avant-garde and popular styles such as rock and folklore.
Chapter 6, “The Rhythm of Values: Poetry and Music in Uruguay, 1960–1985” by María L. Figueredo, examines a theme that has been recently gaining interest in academia: the ekphrastic exchange of poetry and music (understanding ekphrastic as art derived from other mediums and artistic disciplines) within the genre of the militant song and its ties with the socio-political movements of the region (p. 141). In this sense, the resignification of a poetic text transformed in song brings new interpretations that revitalize the notion of cultural identity within the framework of new political circumstances. In the seventh chapter, “Atahualpa Yupanqui: The Latin American Precursor of the Militant Song Movement”, Carlos Molinero y Pablo Vila presents the work of the Argentine singer and writer Yupanqui as a pioneer troubadour who built what would become the themes and shape of the militant song.
In Chapter 8, “A Brief History of Militant Song in Argentina”, it is again Molinero and Vila who present a story of the development of the militant song in Argentina between 1950 and 1970, demonstrating above all how the traditional folkloric song became, in the voice of its interpreters, a “representation” of the past within the present, a political weapon that announced the socialist future envisioned by those interpreters. Finally, in Chapter 9, “The Revolutionary Patria and Its New (Wo)Men: Gendered Tropes of Political Agency and Popular Identity in Argentine Folk Music of the Long 1960s”, Illa Carrillo Rodríguez analyzes aspects of gender within the development of the militant song that will hopefully spark a polemic and necessary discussion of the critical process of cultural and literary analysis.
As is well-known, songs have throughout history played an often overlooked, and very important part in contentious mobilizations of all sorts. This book represents not only an important contribution that helps understand, in a profound way, the historical and artistic value of the militant song in Latin America; it also suggests a series of important conceptual angles in the study of these, not least by introducing the very notion of “militant song” into the debate.
