Latin American New Song and the Salvadoran Context

(In class there will be overhead projection of English translations for Spanish song lyrics included in the essay.)

Introduction

The visit of Charlie King and Karen Brandow to Edgewood College (November 11, 2000) helped illustrate in music and narrative just how important forms of popular and folk-song are in building a consciousness of the workers and rural sectors both in the U.S. and Latin America. Throughout the last hundred years or so, as Charlie explained, song has become an essential medium for transmitting the dreams, visions, dissatisfactions and protests of America’s underclass, or in popular parlance “the common man”, so long excluded from the realms of political power. Many songs, in particular some drawn from the folk tradition, have since passed into our collective consciousness, as anthems for certain times, events, heroes or social and political movements (e.g. the Great Depression, World War Two, Vietnam, the labor movement, the nuclear disarmament movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Peace Movement, the Women’s’ Liberation Movement). They articulate a spirit of collaboration, solidarity and hope for the future that cuts across class boundaries and expresses a shared vision for an improved and more just world in which the poor and marginalized may come to play a greater role. Karen and Charlie showed how folk song, a simple and accessible art-form, reaches out to a varied and dispersed public with themes of anti-authoritarianism, labor rights, social justice, and anti-war campaigning; songs that are often underpinned with a sense of humor to compensate the harsh realities with which they deal. They can, in some instances, help promote and define the aims of grass-roots social movements as they campaign for social justice in areas such as employment, housing, health-care, trade union organizing, the environment, disarmament, pacifism, and gender issues. The upcoming visit of David Lippman (April 3^rd, 2006) with doubtless follow in that cultural and musical tradition.

Karen Brandow took Charlie’s introduction to the aesthetic of the folk tradition and set it within a Latin American context of the “nueva canción” (or “canto nuevo”, as it is also known). The origins of the folk movement on both continents have much in common. They speak of and to the marginalized poor, both rural and urban; to those excluded from access to power; to those excluded from systems of education that traditionally have catered only to the needs of the rich elites. In vast swathes of South and Central America (not to mention parts of the U.S.) where illiteracy and semi-literacy are rife, folk-song (and its more literate counterpart, poetry) play an increasingly important role in the process of popular education, involving the people in the issues that confront them and even helping shape and radicalize their consciousness of events in the political world. As we listen to songs and study their lyrics, we begin to process and reflect upon the various meanings that lie within them and, perhaps, begin to question the assumptions and values that underlie hegemonic ideologies. (By hegemonic ideologies, I mean those patterns of thought, discourse, distribution of information, and education by which ruling sectors of the population disseminate, control and thereby maintain their social influence and power.)

In societies where the dominance of certain corporate, mass cultural forms (radio, television, music industry) has not been quite so professionally and ubiquitously developed as in North America, the persistence of older forms of music performed often spontaneously and publicly is evident. For example, the corrido: a Mexican folk ballad stemming from way back in colonial history but reaching a kind of apotheosis in its role in the Mexican Revolution) acquires great significance as a tool of popular education in transmitting and cementing a sense of historical collective identity, be it community or class-based, ethnic, tribal, or national. This emerges more and more in face of the hegemony of rich, landed oligarchies that traditionally have held power in Latin America. The much more recent emergence of the narco-corrido, championing the outlaw drug-smugglers of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in his fight against authority, is further evidence of this phenomenon. In Latin-America, the last thirty or forty years have seen in increasing polarization between rich and poor, exacerbated by the ravages of a neoliberal economic model of globalization and the economic strife it provokes. Reinforcing the economic powers, repressive militarization has often been governments’ preferred method of social control. Against this backdrop, the role of the artist as a crucial agent in the mobilization of public sentiment, encouraging resistance to oppression, has become more pronounced. Artists became the avatars of a new political sensibility. In El Salvador, we need only think of the work of ASTAC-the Asociación Salvadoreña de Trabajadores de Arte y Cultura-as an example, or the music of the group from the Universidad Centroamericana Simeón Cañas, Exceso de Equipaje.

Another prime example is the case of Cuban “new song”. The term “nueva trova cubana” (“The New Cuban Troupe”) brings to mind the historical role of the troubadours in Southern France and Northern Spain, who back in the 12^th through 14^th centuries were famed as the lyricists and poets of courtly love, but whose influence extended beyond love poetry and often entered the socio-political realm. (“Their social influence was unprecedented in the history of medieval poetry. Favored at the courts, they had great freedom of speech, occasionally intervening even in the political arena, but their great achievement was to create around the ladies of the court an aura of cultivation and amenity that nothing had hitherto approached.” Encyclopedia Britannica) Just as the old troubadours interspersed their lyric poetry with songs that spread the word of news events around the countryside, the “nueva trova” in Cuba from the 1960s onwards has its own political message and significance in the contemporary period. These historical resonances are instructive because they point to the centrality of song to the human condition. Song began life in primeval times in the religious context of ritual chant to embody the sentiments and emotions of a group. In our modern world the meaning is in many ways the same.

In Latin America, a continent in so many instances characterized by immense social injustices and patterns of oppression and violence, the need for a voice for the victims (the poor, the indigenous, the disenfranchised, the workers) was particularly acute. To this point we have outlined some of the primary motives for folk song in general, and nueva canción in particular: to tell histories as yet untold; to speak for the unrepresented; to offer humorous relief from and resistance to oppressive circumstances; to honor martyrs and heroes; to provide anthems for rallies of mass movements for social change; and, finally, to draw international attention to issues of global importance. All these factors play into the development of the Latin American New Song movement over the last forty years, since it first came to prominence back in the 1950s. One of the pioneers in this movement was Violeta Parra, a Chilean who became famous not only as a singer/ musician, but first as a musical ethnographer, who sent much of her life traveling up and down Chile (and other parts of the South American continent) collecting ancient musical forms, melodies, songs, instruments and recording them for posterity. Her aim, later to become a primary aim of so many Latin American musicians, was to recover the historical identity of their indigenous and African ancestors, to recover their ethnic and racial roots through musical manifestations of the cultures that had preceded them and provided the backbone of their current reality. Later efforts by Chilean counterparts, Inti-Illimani, echoed Parra’s mission. That is evident from their choice of an old Inca name. The inclusion of indigenous motifs in the music and the incorporation of pre-Colombian instruments were essential to this process.

Inti Illimani: Samba Landó. A title taken from the Yoruba language of Africa, connecting with the slave experience in the Americas, picks up on a famous musical motif in the African tradition (Samba Landó) and gives it a very militant edge with the tone of vehement protest against the injustices of slavery. Contrast the two versions, one by Peruvian Susana Baca, sung in the more traditional,romantic and lyrical mode, and that of Inti-Illimani, where the same refrain acquires a defiant, urgent, almost angry tone.

Samba Landó de Inti-Illimani (Chile) Sobre el manto de la noche está la luna chispeando asi brilla fulgurando para establecer un fuero: "libertad para los negros cadenas para el negrero." Samba landó, samba landó ¿qué tienes tú que no tenga yo? Mi padre siendo tan pobre legó una herencia fastuosa: "para dejar de ser cosas - dijo con ánimo entero - ponga atención mi compadre que vienen nuevos negreros." Samba landó . . . La gente dice: ¡qué pena que tenga la piel oscura! como si fuera basura que se arroja al pavimento, no saben que el descontento entre mi raza madura. Samba landó Hoy día alzamos la voz como una sola memoria, desde Ayacucho hasta Angola, de Brasil a Mozambique, ya no hay nadie que replique, somos una misma historia. Samba landó

Zamba malató de Susana Baca (Perú) Zamba malató Landó Zamba malató Landó La zamba se pasea Por la batea Landó Zamba malató Landó Bailando se menea Pa’ que la vea Ese pajarillo Pecho colorao Ese te sucede negro Por enamorao Landó landó Zamba landó Landó Bailando se menea..... A la mucurú A loña loña A la recolé Hoguerequeté Babalorishá A la mucurú Oyokororó Oyokororó A la mucurú Babalorishá Babalorishá Eee tiritiri Mandé mandé La zamba passes through The watering trough Landó Dancing, shaking it So we can see her This little bird Red painted breast That’s what you get For falling in love Zamba malató Landó Zamba malató Landó

Continuing with Violeta Parra’s work were her children, Angel and Isabel, who came to prominence with protest songs against the Pinochet régime in Chile. Another was Patricio Manns. And also from Chile came one of the great martyrs of the New Song Movement, Víctor Jara. Jara was an ethnologist, sociologist and University professor, and most importantly a self-taught musician and performer, who was arrested and murdered by the Pinochet military shortly after the 1973 military coup. Before his death he left a legacy of folk music that drew, like Parra before him, on the rural folk traditions of the Chilean countryside. One of his most famous songs relates to the connection of religious motifs to the New Song. During the period of increased involvement of the church in popular movements and the growth of Liberation Theology throughout the continent in the 1960s, and increasing cooperation between progressive Catholics and Marxists, Jara picked up on this important link between politicized consciousness and religiosity in his song “Plegaria a un labrador”. The prayer form of the ballad blends with the militant political message reclaiming social justice for the poor. Many of Jara’s songs were recorded in public concerts, including this version from a student rally:

Plegaria a un labrador.

Levántate y mira la montaña

de donde viene

el viento, el sol y el agua

tú que manejas el curso de los ríos

tú que sembraste el vuelo de tu alma.

Levántate y mírate las manos

para crecer estréchala a tu hermano.

Juntos iremos unidos en la sangre

hoy es el tiempo

que puede ser mañana.

Líbranos de aquel que nos domina

en la miseria.

Tráenos tu reino de justicia

e igualdad.

Sopla como el viento la flor

de la quebrada.

Limpia como el fuego

el cañon de mi fusil.

Hágase por fin tu voluntad

aquí en la tierra.

Dános tu fuerza y tu valor

al combatir.

Sopla como el viento la flor

de la quebrada.

Limpia como el fuego

el cañon de mi fusil.

Levántate y mírate las manos

para crecer estréchala a tu hermano.

juntos iremos unidos en la sangre

ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte

amen, amen, amen.

Another singer who makes much of the folkloric-religious connection is Mercedes Sosa of Argentina, who, in the path of her compatriot and founder of the New Song movement, Atahualpa Yupanqui, borrowed traditional hymns, lullabies and farm-workers songs and gave them a fervent, personal warmth with her unmistakable voice. Her celebrated return concert to Buenos Aires towards the end of the military dictatorship following the Falklands War in 1982 captured the mood of a generation who had lived through Argentina’s “dirty war”.

Moving away from the religious influences, we have the Cuban model of New Song, as best manifested in the internationally renowned work of Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanés, to a lesser extent with Fernando Delgadillo, Angel Quintero and more recently Carlos Varela. Their work was deeply influenced by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the necessarily politicized, militant and atheistic tone of artists caught up in the need to defend a social and cultural revolution under attack from the neighbor to the North.

Here is an example of the triumphal, onward marching spirit of revolutionary victory, sung with the repetitive, percussive beat of a military march. Compare the two versions, one the original studio recording by the author Silvio Rodríguez, and the other recorded live at a folk festival in El Salvador. The second betrays the lack of production values and the diminished quality of musicianship which is compensated for only by the enthusiasm and crowd participation of a political rally, as if to prove the point that what matters is the spirit of cooperation and popular involvement, rather than the underwriting of the professionalized music industry.

Vamos a andar.

Vamos a andar

En verso y vida atentos

Levantando el recinto

Del pan y la verdad

Vamos a andar

Matando el egoísmo

Para que por lo mismo

Reviva la amistad

Vamos a andar

Hundiendo al poderoso

Alzando al perezoso

Sumando a los demás

Vamos a andar

Con todas las banderas

Trenzadas de manera

Que no haya soledad

Vamos a andar

Para llegar

A la vida

The explosion of energy, dogmatism and militancy, often with the didactic use of lyrics drawn from Leninist-Marxist political ideologies, was summed up in the Spanish expression “volcanto”, a fusion of the words “volcán” (“volcano”) and “canto” (“song”). It was used particularly in the period of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, in the music of Guardabarranco, the Mejía Godoy family, and Salvador Bustos, a young nuevo cantor who received backing from the prominent U.S. musician Jackson Browne. Browne’s financial support and publicity backing lent international credence and visibility to the New Song Movement. In a period when Central America was in all the newspapers and television screens in North America, such a mainstream intervention was a very timely boost for the popular movements. (In addition, a collection of poetry titled “Volcanto” was published by Curbstone /Lighthouse press in San Francisco, but the same publishing house that produced the translations of Salvadoran revolutionary poet Roque Dalton.)

The involvement of U.S. musicians has played a significant role in Latin America. Together with Jackson Browne, Sting, David Byrne, and several folk musicians have collaborated on projects with their Latin American counterparts. Most noticeably the folk singer Holly Near has recorded with several New Song pioneers, such as Inti-Illimani, and has participated along with other U.S. groups like Sabiá, Human Condition, Madison’s own Sotovento, Paraguas and Laura Fuentes in expanding the audience. Madison is on the tour map for many Latin American musicians when they visit the U.S., with several visits from Inti-Illimani over the years, recently Carlos Varela from Cuba, and the progressive jazz band Irakere, and here at Edgewood College we have hosted Rumillajta from Bolivia, Tlen-Huicani from Mexico, Irene Farrera from Venezuela, and the Chilean group Congreso. International exposure for Latin-American musicians not only stems from voluntary foreign tours, but also derives from necessity due to the forced exile of artists: Inti-Illimani took refuge in Rome after the 1973 Chilean military coup until their return in 1988; Patricio Manns took exile in Switzerland. For, as symbols of liberation movements supporting the poor, they were also targets of repression: Víctor Jara was tortured before his death along with hundreds of other political prisoners in the Estadio Nacional in Santiago.

There are also several musicians who live and work on the border between the two cultures. Irene Farrera is a case in point. Bilingual and bicultural, she works within the U.S. market but her songs talk primarily about the Latin American experience. More prominent examples would be the Puerto Rican Roy Brown, the Dominican Juan Luis Guerra and the Panamanian Rubén Bladés, who for many years have filled dance clubs and concert halls on the East Coast, especially New York, with their mix of dance music and songs of social commentary. Roy Brown speaks of the immigrant experience and the sense of isolation and alienation felt by Caribbeans coming to New York. He, like other musicians, likes to take poetry (in his case by the Puerto Rican nationalist poet Juan Antonio Corretjer) and put it to music, widening the audience for poetry in the process. Rubén Bladés has collaborated with Sting, and others, in songs of vehement protest against political injustices in Latin America, and his role as a prominent Hollywood actor has added to his visibility on social issues.

An alternative to the sometimes somber tone of Silvio Rodríguez, are the upbeat tempos of compatriot Pablo Milanés, also a singer/songwriter of world renown, who infuses many of his political songs with rhythms taken from the Cuban son, fast paced, melodious and spirited. Such stylized, popular dance forms avoid the narrow classification of political song--although, as the lyric attests, the criticism of U.S. foreign policy is not far beneath the surface (“A long line of giant trees standing against the North wind, brutal and arrogant.”). “Buenos Días, América” is a call to action for an entire continent to come together in solidarity in the fight against injustice and racism. And in the lengthy enumeration of Latin American countries united in Hispanic brotherhood the song is much in the vein of Panamanian Ruben Bladés’ famous exhortation “Muévete” (“Get Moving”) from his album Escenas.

Buenos Días, América

Siento que todo está cambiando a nuestro alrededor

respiro un aire cada vez mejor

que exalta el grito de mi corazón

hacia esta región.

Me he despertado susurrando una nueva canción

y mi ventana se llenó de sol

salgo a buscar el hecho y la razón

de tanta emoción.

America despierta nuevamente

y no es que sea feliz su despertar

pero es que esta mañana se le advierte

su decisión unida de luchar.

No dejará al destino y a la suerte

la deuda que le tienen que pagar

si enriqueció otras vidas con su muerte

hoy renace y al fin ha echado a andar.

Me he despertado susurrando una nueva canción

y mi ventana se llenó de sol

salgo a buscar el hecho y la razón

de tanta emoción.

Buenas, buenos días, América,

¿cómo estás?

muy buenas.

Buenos días, América,

buenos días, ¿cómo está usted?

Buenos días, Brasil, mi gigante,

cuánto tiempo sin tí,

adelante.

Nicaragua sin Somoza

sigue más hermosa que ayer.

Haití, la negra,

llorando está.

Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina

van creciendo para hacerlo mejor.

Una larga fila de árboles gigantes

contra el viento del norte, brutal y arrogante.

Mientras le imploro y lo adulo

me ha de coger por el cuello.

América mía,

nos va aquí la vida para crecer.

La unión de la dignidad

genera la libertad, de una vez.

Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina

van creciendo para hacerlo mejor.

Me he despertado susurrando una nueva canción

y mi ventana se llenó de sol

salgo a buscar el hecho y la razón

de tanta emoción.

With time the New Song has taken on several different characteristics. Lately, access to the finest technologies has improved the production values available to musicians and their producers. Recording with the best instruments in the best studios, virtuoso technical instrumental performances are becoming more frequent, witness the later recording efforts of Pablo Milanés in Cuba or, particularly, Congreso in Chile, whose jazz inflected, highly stylized version of new song is a far cry from the old hand held recordings of street rallies of the 60s, even though the political content of the songs has been little attenuated. At the same time it must be said that, for many musicians, with the collapse of the hopeful utopic visions of the 60s and 70’s, there has been an inevitable move inward to creative personal self-stylization in order to separate out new musical identities from those of their predecessors.

As political moods change, so does the focus of the songs; in the eighties and early nineties the questions of Central America and the oppression of an entire rural underclass and of indigenous people (in Guatemala, especially) were of high order. More recently the deepening economic hardship brought on by globalization and the structural adjustment regimens imposed by multi-lateral financial institutions have found their way into the messages of songs concerned with the negative impact of neo-liberalism (with the Canadian Bruce Cockburn, for example). The Human Issues study tour to El Salvador in March 2006 again highlighted the political uses of culture and musical forms, as both the electoral campaign and the ensuing mobilizations around the hotly debated San Salvador election results were accompanied by popular protest rallies and abundant political song.

In light of this overview of Latin American New Song, what music can you bring to class to contribute the discussion as examples of socially-conscious lyrics? Any language or culture will do, it certainly doen not need to be in Spanish. More likely, you are much more familiar with something in your ‘home’ culture. In class we will listen to each other’s music and share our interpretations.