Song and Social Change in Latin America

Song & Social Change in Latin America offers seven essays from a diverse group of scholars on the topic of music as a reflection of the many social-political upheavals throughout Latin America from the 20th century to the present. Topics covered include: the Tropicália movement in Brazil, the Nueva Canción in Central America, Rock in Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Peru, the Vallenato in Colombia, Trova in Cuba, and urban music of Puerto Rico in the mid-20th century. The collection also includes five interviews from prominent and up-and-coming musicians —Ruben Blades, Roy Brown, Habana Abierta, Ana Tijoux, and Mare— representing a variety of musical genres and political issues in Central America, the Caribbean, South America, and Mexico.

[This book] is a must-read for all those interested in building an emancipatory politics of the twenty first century. It opens a poetics of possibility which shines new light on the importance of taking seriously the cultural, the popular and the everyday in social change and political transformation. The collection takes us on a journey that crosses geographical, cultural, political and epistemological borders. . . .[The book's] playful use of form, combining traditional scholarly analysis of song with six interviews with musicians . . . contributes to its ability to stimulate the critical imagination and to open emancipatory horizons. The thirteen unique contributions highlight some of the generic ways in which song-poetry facilitates social change. . . .This volume is to be actively and tenderly explored. Through an embodied act of reading we can become active interlocutors with the text, listening to the traditions discussed. Through savouring the text in this way, we enter a dialogue of knowledges that engages our head, heart, body and imagination. Song and Social Change in Latin America transgresses borders. For this reason it is a gem., Like a patchwork quilt, the book offers its readers insights into a variety of historical situations and geographical locations, all characterized by similar, though by no means identical, political circumstances. It shows readers a mosaic of various ways in which music has been deployed to chronicle, contest, and transform historical developments in Latin America between 1950 and 2000.... Given its wide-ranging disciplinary scope, accessible presentation, and the absence of unduly technical musical analysis, this book has the potential to appeal to a broad readership. It will be of interest to historians as a guide to ways of appreciating more deeply the role of music in the making and changing of history; to scholars of popular music and ethnomusicologists interested in the specific impact and role of music in its respective social and geographical context; to literary and Spanish studies scholars and even to religious studies scholars, given that some of the contributors have also incorporated analyses of religion and theological movements in the region into their discussion.... This volume underlines the benefits of academic interaction across disciplinary boundaries. Historians, ethnomusicologists, and literary and cultural studies scholars stand to benefit greatly from the deeper understanding of historical and social contexts that greater engagement with music could facilitate., Song and Social Change in Latin America, edited by Lauren Shaw, is an accessible, interdisciplinary collection., With a light hand, Lauren Shaw and the contributors to her edited collection, Song and Social Change in Latin America, wonderfully interpret the importance of song in postwar Latin American history, linking it to experiences of work, family, protest, and migration. The collection, which includes interviews with a number of musicians, reads like a poem or the liner notes to the soundtrack of a generation that took to heart Emma Goldman’s insistence that to be a revolutionary meant to affirm ‘life and joy’ though music and dance., This volume presents useful documentation and perspectives on an important dimension of modern Latin American culture. Through song texts, scholarly interpretations, and revealing interviews with articulate artists, it provides much insight into an important chapter in the cultural history of the Americas, from Argentina to the Bronx.

Lauren Shaw is an associate professor of Spanish at Elmira College where she teaches Hispanic Studies in the Romance Language Program and hosts a Spanish language radio program called Voces.