Hemispherically Organized Sound: Navigating Politics Through Music and Music Through Politics in the Americas
The increasingly interdisciplinary character of music research has enabled scholars from political science, Hispanic studies, African diaspora studies, cultural studies, and cultural anthropology to write about hemispheric relations in the Americas using diverse epistemologies rooted in music. While these wide-ranging approaches naturally raise the question posed in our title—whether we come to know politics through music or music through politics—they nonetheless offer valuable contributions both to their home disciplines and to music scholarship as a whole.
The books considered here revisit essential questions about music and performance throughout the Americas: In what ways does US policy in Latin America become audible in music? How can music turn policy into lived, material realities that go beyond the purely sonic realm? Who wields music as a political tool, and for what purposes? How is agency distributed across these dynamics? And how might examining music illuminate the connections between sweeping hemispheric political and economic shifts and evolving ideas about sexuality, gender, spirituality, culture, and race across North and Latin America? These five works together demonstrate that the ongoing negotiation among global, national, and local forces in music remains a fertile topic for scholarly investigation.
The authors focus on the deep and multifaceted links between politics, geopolitics, and music. They explore new expressions of Black identity in Puerto Rican reggaetón and Cuban hip-hop under neoliberalism; the reception of twentieth-century Latin American art music in the United States; and songs demanding justice, elevating subaltern voices, and denouncing violence and inequality throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
As scholars working at the intersection of musicology and ethnomusicology, we examine the theories and methods each author employs. These vary considerably in quality and reach, even though the prose is consistently strong throughout. Which music-based ways of knowing lead us to understand what Carol A. Hess (1) calls a hemispheric framework? Along with the questions listed above, this inquiry guides our evaluation.
Representing the Good Neighbor: US Reception of Latin American Art Music
Carol A. Hess's Representing the Good Neighbor stands as the only strictly musicological study among these books. It offers a sharp exercise in reception history, probing how music historiography has shaped understandings of a Latin American other. Hess asks a central question: "What do we in the United States know about Latin American art music, and how do we know about it?" (1). She applies transnational and cosmopolitan historical models to trace how the reception of Latin American art music in the United States shifted—from an embrace of sameness to a Cold War–driven preoccupation with difference. Hess enters the underexplored terrain of sameness, including appeals to the supposedly universal, while carefully observing how "hegemonic powers often take advantage of the subaltern's impulse to mimic" (6). With this framework, she introduces the "representational machine" (8) that operated through specific concepts of gender and race within hemispheric boundaries. After mapping Pan-Americanism, the Monroe Doctrine, and American exceptionalism, the book's main narrative examines how US critics engaged with the canonical "Big Three" of Latin American composition: Carlos Chávez, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Alberto Ginastera.
The opening chapters explore reactions to Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, known for representing indigenismo in his music. Hess examines how critics like Paul Rosenfeld and composers such as Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell wrote about Chávez during the 1920s, a period of "enormous vogue of things Mexican" in the United States. She illuminates a favored Pan-Americanist concept, that of tabula rasa, and the "freshness" it suggested within a framework where music "united the usable past of ancient America with the universal whole" (48). A similar analysis follows the staging and reception of Chávez's ballet H.P. (Horsepower), which critics ultimately rejected. Yet Hess shows how this very failure makes the work valuable for studying difference. She frames the ballet's conflicted portrayal—contrasting an industrial North with a problematic, "backward" South—through the concept of dialectical indigenism, the coexistence of indigenous culture with mechanization, and reveals its semiotic and subversive potential.
Moving chronologically, chapters 4 and 5 consider Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and his skillful maneuvering within the US culture industry during the height of the Good Neighbor policy. Hess underscores the contradictions between two seemingly opposed categories: the national and the universal. She guides readers through New York's 1939 World's Fair, where critics often emphasized Villa-Lobos's "primitiveness"—a card the composer himself played effectively. Her account of US composers' depictions of Latin America during the golden age of Pan-Americanism, including Disney films, is refreshingly insightful. It helps explain how works now regarded as musical curiosities—Henry Cowell's Fanfare to the Forces of Our Latin American Allies or Aaron Copland's El Salón México—actually came into being.
Chapter 6 presents a comparative study of Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera's second opera, Bomarzo, which premiered in 1967. Hess describes it as a "tale of sex, violence, neurosis, and other ills of contemporary anomie" (142). By tracing the opera's reception—praised in the United States, banned and censored by Argentina's military regime—she explores the changed status of Latin American music in US eyes and the role of antinationalist discourse during the Dirty War.
In the final chapter, Hess delivers a masterful, though somewhat disconnected, analysis of US composer Frederic Rzewski's 36 Variations on "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!"—a piece ironically commissioned for the United States' bicentennial. Rather than focusing solely on reception history, Hess traces the possible meanings carried in the historical memory of that socialist anthem by Chilean Nueva Canción artists Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún, then shows how Rzewski's composition reconfigures those meanings. This reveals the conflicting agendas at play in representing one of the "bleakest chapters in US-Latin American relations" (172).
Despite its focus on Pan-Americanism as conceived and experienced solely within the United States, Representing the Good Neighbor offers an innovative and efficient model for transnational scholarship. Hess rightly states that she does not intend to speak for Latin Americans. Still, this work will undoubtedly encourage other narratives, sparking a broader dialogue that incorporates Latin American voices and perspectives. Ideally such conversations would move beyond the Big Three to include women composers like Jacqueline Nova-Sondag or cultural agents like Guillermo Espinosa, who organized Pan-American events across the Americas. As Hess herself puts it, "there is simply no point in overlooking the presence of one continent in the history of the other" (193).
Chilean New Song: Politics, Truth, and the Academy
This admonition proves especially relevant given how North-South relations soured during the Cold War. In Chilean New Song, political scientist J. Patrice McSherry surveys the history of Nueva Canción chilena, asking: "What were the social and political settings that gave rise to new popular movements, including the wave of New Song?" (xvii). She adopts a "Gramscian analytical framework" (xix), concentrating on institutions and relationships among key figures in the movement.
Nueva Canción refers to an articulated musical movement rooted in reconfigured folkloric, indigenous, and Afro–Latin American sonic materials, responding to the social and political convulsions occurring with particular intensity from the 1930s onward. Chilean Nueva Canción already holds a reputation as one of the most politicized genres in Latin American history, which justifies a political science book on the topic. However, because the movement is already extensively documented, a project of this sort should open new theoretical ground or uncover fresh information—a considerable demand.
Still, gathering an extensive discussion of the politics of Nueva Canción chilena within a single English-language volume has distinct advantages. The opening chapters describe the movement's emergence against a backdrop of consolidated power among a small conservative elite (with their own nationalist folklore) and widespread poverty and suffering. These chapters retrace a well-known process of folklorization in which pioneering figures like Margot Loyola, Violeta Parra, Gabriela Pizarro, and Héctor Pavez collected songs from rural and urban working-class sectors at midcentury. Guided by icons like Loyola and Víctor Jara, groups such as Cuncumén, Quilapayún, and Inti-Illimani transformed these collected songs into a new repertoire that included many original compositions.
McSherry accurately situates Nueva Canción chilena within Cold War geopolitics, drawing on her training as a political scientist. Nonetheless, these geopolitical events—like the music itself—are already well documented. Recent scholarship on Chilean politics, the Agrarian Reform, and social movements includes sophisticated analyses of shifting gender roles, racial constructions, and indigenous participation or exclusion. McSherry, however, does not embrace any particularly innovative approach beyond positioning political history alongside the history of Nueva Canción.
Where she does make an interesting contribution is in citing the differing viewpoints of movement participants regarding the political usefulness of their music from the very start. Inti-Illimani member José Seves writes in the foreword: "The terms 'protest song' and 'revolutionary song' were used to disparage the movement; to reduce its complexity, lessen its importance, and even demonize it" (xiv). McSherry notes that Víctor Jara "rejected the original characterization of the movement as 'protest song' as narrow and dismissive" (53). Yet the fraught relationship between Nueva Canción and the Allende government remains central to the book's narrative and, arguably, to the music itself. Despite detailed examples illustrating the complex relationship between politics and music, a deeper theoretical discussion of this dynamic from a political scientist's perspective would have been enlightening.
McSherry handles this tension constructively in places. She points to Ángel and Isabel Parra's concern for social and political issues as key to their motivation to return from Paris and open the historic Peña de los Parra in 1965. Yet, as she also notes, Violeta Parra expressed something deeper than politics in songs like "Yo canto la diferencia" (1960): "I sing in the style of Chillán, if I have to say something" (41). The author also discusses the artistic freedom promoted by the Communist Party, whose label DICAP provided institutional support for many artists. Even without deeply theorizing the point, McSherry uses well-organized examples to demonstrate that the bold politics of Nueva Canción chilena are rooted more in fundamental notions of truth than any party agenda.
Here lies a central shortcoming: McSherry brings readers to the edge of this important issue—whether Nueva Canción chilena is primarily protest or truth—but does not pursue deeper analysis. Folklore in Chile and Latin America, as both research and art, is rich with debates about authenticity that connect directly to these issues. Preexisting musicological work on the subject could combine fascinatingly with theoretical analysis from a political science perspective. Yet the book sidesteps these areas. Instead, the theoretical framework hangs together through a brief discussion of Gramsci and hegemony and an uncritical view of music's ability to create social cohesion, attributing its deeper effects to "mystery" and "magic" (127). The author also declares that "music is nonverbal, primordial, essential" (xvii). She cites relevant theories about the role of music in social life—such as those of Mark Mattern, William G. Roy, and Thomas Turino—but a deeper analysis could have elevated these rather than merely summarizing them.
Chapters 5 and 6 contain some of the book's strongest material. Through interviews, McSherry ventures into musicians' personal histories, creative processes, collaborations, and contributions to both music and politics. Foregrounding artists' own testimonies might have helped address the difficulties of assessing the political instrumentality of the movement; instead she lets the musicians explain this thorny matter in their own words. These two chapters also summarize interesting connections within the movement, including collaborations with visual artists that musicological work often overlooks. McSherry draws conclusions about the political impact of the music—conclusions that are not deeply theoretical or innovative but remain relevant. She writes that the music "embodied an alternative worldview and the possibility of a new future of social justice" (156).
Globalized Roots: Reggaetón, Race, and New Frameworks
The book's strength lies in its compact, detailed recounting of the political history of Nueva Canción chilena, combined with a palpable fascination for the material that makes for engaging reading. Despite a thin theoretical framework and the fact that much content is already well known, McSherry writes with freshness and curiosity—perhaps springing from her surprising angle as a political scientist engaging with music.
By contrast, well-honed studies of the intersections between globalized popular music and racial identifications in the twenty-first-century Caribbean necessarily introduce new theoretical frameworks, because the subject matter requires it. Reggaetón, with its strong association with a nonwhite and urban working class, has positioned itself as an essential subject for examining race, identity, and neoliberalism in the region.
Scholarly discourses on folklore and authenticity in modern Chile trace back to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnological research, shaped by German thinkers influenced by Herder. Key figures include Rodolfo Lenz (author of Programa de la Sociedad de Folklore Chileno, Santiago: Lourdes, 1909) and Tomás Guevara (Folklore araucano, Santiago: Cervantes, 1911). Mid-twentieth-century musical folklore scholarship is best represented by Loyola, Parra, Pizarro, and Pávez, among others.
The role of folkloric and indigenous elements in Chilean art music and Nueva Canción—and whether these elements convey overt political positions, truthful representations of Chilean culture, or both—has been explored in several recent studies. Notable works include Eduardo Carrasco, “The Nueva Canción in Latin America,” International Social Science Journal 34, no. 4 (1982); and Juan Pablo González, “‘Inti-Illimani’ and the Artistic Treatment of Folklore,” Latin American Research Review 10, no. 2 (1989): 267–286, “Estilo y función social de la música chilena de raíz mapuche,” Revista Musical Chilena 47, no. 179 (1993), and “Evocación, modernización y revindicación del folclore en la música popular chilena: El papel de la performance,” Revista Musical Chilena 50, no. 185 (1996).
Intersections of transnational flows with the complexities of race and class politics in Latin America and the Caribbean have drawn scholarly attention. In Remixing Reggaetón, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau enters this conversation by examining reggaetón’s potential to challenge persistent social inequalities in Puerto Rico. Building on diaspora studies traditions, her book offers a fresh articulation of race’s nuances and its intersections with class, gender, sexuality, and nation within Puerto Rico’s so-called racial democracy.
Rivera-Rideau’s central aim is to show how “reggaetón integrates aesthetics and signifiers from other sites in the African diaspora to produce new understandings of Puerto Ricanness that center blackness and diasporic belonging” (5). She maps blackness onto the island’s racial topography (exemplified in chapter 3, “Loíza”) and establishes a theme guiding her narrative: the relationship between specific, bounded places and ideas of blackness. In “Iron Fist against Rap” (chapter 1), for instance, she discusses reggaetón’s precursor genre “underground” and its links to “urban blackness,” tracing artists Vico C. and DJ Negro through the 1980s and 1990s, especially during PR’s Mano Dura campaign, an anticrime initiative targeting urban black places like caseríos or housing projects. Similarly, Rivera-Rideau demonstrates how diasporic remittances—cultural traits brought by “remigration,” such as US hip-hop—can counter longstanding discourses of a raceless society or racial democracy.
Noteworthy is the author’s focus on agency and how women reggaetón singers, dancers, and fans articulate their gendered difference and select different diasporic resources than their male counterparts while aiming to disrupt racial hierarchies. In “Fingernails con Feeling” (chapter 4), Rivera-Rideau examines both blackness and gender, incorporating queer subjectivities. She centers on Ivy Queen, reggaetón’s self-proclaimed queen, who has “troubled many of the questionable aspects of race, gender, and sexuality, found not only in racial democracy, but also within reggaetón itself” (105). While the focus on LGBT community is somewhat slight—Ivy Queen identifies as heterosexual, and Rivera-Rideau links her to the LGBT community only through Ivy Queen’s advocacy and perceived deviancy due to her masculine presentation—this chapter, with its engaging approach, constitutes a valuable contribution to social science. Rivera-Rideau offers an alternative reading of the already canonical analysis of Ivy Queen’s new blondness, which appears to adhere to “tropes associated with respectability that undergird hegemonic discourses of racial democracy” (106). Instead of concentrating on the blond transformation, Rivera-Rideau examines Ivy Queen’s long, elaborate acrylic fingernails. She interprets these nails as a site of excessive artificiality and alternative signifiers opposing white heteronormativity. She concludes that Ivy Queen’s change is not compliance but a strategy that “brings into stark relief the very unnaturalness of dominant constructions of race, gender, and sexuality that position whiteness as respectable and modern and render blackness hypersexual, uncivilized, and outside of the boundaries of ‘real’ Puerto Ricanness” (114).
Similarly, in “The Perils of Perreo” (chapter 2), Rivera-Rideau examines the Puerto Rican government’s 2002 antipornography campaign, which targeted reggaetón as it gained mainstream popularity. Ostensibly opposed to explicit sexual content, the campaign subtly sought to “accommodate reggaetón into Puerto Rican national space, [and] transform reggaetón from a signifier of blackness to one of Puerto Ricanness” (53). The campaign raised concerns over representations of women in music videos, demanding “cleaner” versions, but inadvertently highlighted intersecting perceptions of gender, race, and class. The author adeptly shows how hypersexuality is mapped onto the bodies of working-class women of color.
While the book is impressive, leaving readers anticipating Rivera-Rideau’s next work, some quibbles arise. The study could have benefited from qualitative ethnographic methods; the relationship between methodology and how interlocutors speak is not always clearly developed. Fandom in Puerto Rico, explored through interviews throughout much of the narrative, is absent in “Enter the Hurbans” (chapter 5), which focuses on reggaetón in the United States. This leaves open questions about how Latinx and Afro-Latina/Afro-Latino reggaetón fans navigate the narrow spectrum of US racial classifications. Unlike McSherry, Rivera-Rideau did not interview artists herself, which might have revealed valuable insights, especially with figures like Ivy Queen who avoid racial classification but whom the author nonetheless analyzes as black.
Cultural anthropologist and African studies scholar Marc D. Perry’s Negro Soy Yo more effectively demonstrates ethnography’s capacity to examine popular music’s role in redefining citizenship, racial identity, and belonging amid changes.
The book’s premise is sophisticated yet straightforward: as the Cuban Revolution cedes to neoliberalism, racial constructions embedded in hegemonic Cuban national identity yield to new possibilities. Consequently, “some black and darker-skinned young people have turned to hip hop to craft new understandings of black selves born of the racial materiality of a particular moment and tension of local-global convergence” (14). The term “neoliberal Cuba” confirms a paradigm shift, but hip-hop is not simply a commercial import; it indicates patterns of Afro-diasporic agency transmitted via popular music’s global flows and through large and small networks of artists and activists.
The book opens with lyrics from “Lágrimas negras” by Hermanos de Causa: “I feel profound hatred for your racism/I am now no longer confused by your irony” (1). Hip-hop, Perry argues, offers deliverance from confusion about Afro-diasporic identities in Cuba, where revolutionary discourses have long framed blackness as a historical, transcultural ingredient rather than a lived, contemporary reality.
Perry effectively alternates between lyrics, house parties, run-ins with police, music festivals, conversations, and theoretical reflections in a multilayered “raced ethnography” (16) that glimmers with his desire to capture a wide range of details about life in neoliberal Cuba. He importantly notes that “the participation of racially marked subaltern youth in hip hop communities across the globe frequently involves . . . a semiotics of black marginality . . . reworked in ways that provide cogent expression to local experience and sites of struggle” (59). Hip-hop journalist Ariel Fernández Díaz, for example, whose lighter skin places him under different labels in Cuba’s “degrees of nonwhiteness,” has experienced an “evolving and deeply invested sense of black identity” through hip-hop (60). Fernández’s journey informs Perry’s concept of hip-hop as a locally rooted “whole way of life” (5, original emphasis). An initiate into the Afro-Cuban religion of Ocha-Lucumí who has traveled to the United States and connected with rappers there, Fernández received spiritual advice to remain on the island and expand Cuban hip-hop.
Perry meticulously describes how neighborhood-level networks fostered numerous small rap gatherings, culminating in the first national hip-hop festival in 1995. By 2000, the festival attracted US stars and organizational support from Black August, a historic Afro–North American activist organization. Perry’s ethnographic account of the 2000 festival forms a key part of the book, including performance descriptions and testimonials from Cuban artists such as Pablo Herrera and Rodolfo Rensoli about the impact and solidarity of the visiting North American rappers, who reaffirmed the Cuban hip-hop movement and strengthened networks devoted to music and social justice on the island. These networks represent points of African diasporic identification transcending national borders and inspire an entire chapter on alternative definitions of revolution, akin to what Lauren Shaw explores in her chapter on Cuban [term] (reviewed below).
Perry excels at examining rappers’ identifications with historical struggles, providing deep background to their lives and work mediated by their interactions with historical discourses. For instance, in their 2000 song “Mambí,” the duo Obsesión liken themselves to modern-day mambí—“machete-wielding largely black and formerly enslaved regiments of soldiers” fighting for independence in the late nineteenth century (98). This powerful identification “ty[ies] Afro-Cubans inseparably to national-revolutionary citizenship” (100).
The chapter “Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering” examines rappers’ systematic academic study of Afro-Cuban history. Perry also explores how, for male groups like Hermanos de Causa and Anónimo Consejo, “reclaiming a black radical past is frequently predicated on appeals to masculinist narratives of heroic valor” (149). In some cases, the male domain of rap intersects with fraternal Afro-Cuban religious societies such as Abakuá, as with DJ Alexis D’Boys (153).
In a refreshing move for hip-hop studies, Perry contrasts these patterns with “black feminist queerings” (156), referring to the deliberate subversion of masculinist tropes by all-women groups including Instinto, Explosión Femenina, Sexto Sentido, La Positiva, and Las Krudas. He describes the song “La llaman puta,” in which Magia, the woman member of Obsesión, highlights “the struggles of young women involved in Cuba’s tourist-driven sex trade”—another aspect of neoliberal Cuba Perry keenly explores.
The last two chapters address state–rapper relations and reggaetón. Despite hip-hop’s rise amid serious challenges for state socialism, rappers hold complex relationships with the Cuban Revolution, which they both endorse and criticize. Perry examines details from song lyrics to everyday conversation to parse identifications and ideologies. He carefully distinguishes situated critiques of the revolution from “injurious designs out of Miami or Washington” (24).
Like Rivera-Rideau on reggaetón, Perry demonstrates how African diasporic identifications surpass the black and transcultural identifications that historically aligned with the revolutionary project. In doing so, he contributes significantly to Latin American and Caribbean studies, African diaspora studies, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and ethnomusicology.
Song and Social Change in Latin America, edited by Lauren Shaw, is an accessible interdisciplinary collection of seven scholarly essays on topics including Cortijo y Su Combo amid Puerto Rico’s modernization; myth and tropicália in Brazil; Central American Nueva Canción; 1980s rock in Argentina, Chile, and Peru; Mexican [term]; forced displacement and Colombian Vallenato music; and Cuban [term] as possibility and revolution/evolution. The volume also includes interviews with Rubén Blades, Roy Brown, Ana Tijoux, Mare, and members of Habana Abierta.
Shaw’s collection presents song—combining words, rhythm, and melody—as resistance and remembrance, emphasizing the “footprint of US policies throughout Latin America” (2) while prompting readers to view song as a “testament to the discrepancy between official rhetoric and reality, exposing the injustice of the recent past and the current challenges of practicing genuine democracy” (6).
Shaw does not develop a conceptual framework for the volume as a whole, which resembles a loosely connected journal issue. Like McSherry, she focuses on explaining Latin American song’s political nature, even if she avoids certain salient arguments in her own. She writes, “It is my contention that song, with its combination of lyric, rhythm, and melody set to a specific moment and place in time, can identify, question, and help the listener understand and remember incidents that should never be repeated” (2). This broad statement overlooks ample ethnomusicological work on reception, listening, trauma, and memory that could have strengthened Shaw’s theoretical approach.
Additionally, most essays tend toward contextualizing lyrics, and some, like Lisette Balabarca’s chapter on 1980s rock in Chile, Argentina, and Peru, do even less.
Nonetheless, Shaw compensates as an author where she falls short as editor. Her own chapter, “Rich Poetry: Cuban Voices of Possibility,” foregrounds her expertise in Hispanic literature, weaving Adrienne Rich’s ideas about poetry’s (r)evolutionary potential into a comparative study of Cuban [term]. She juxtaposes the work of “traditional” troubadour Sindo Garay with contemporary musician Pedro Luis Ferrer. Shaw draws poetic parallels between trova tradicional (Garay) and nueva trova (Ferrer) through an optimistic vision of trova, which she sees as a “poetry of possibility . . . to help us see and hear what is otherwise ignored” (154). By connecting Rich’s critique of free markets from a US perspective with Garay’s and Ferrer’s music, Shaw creates a fascinating dialogue exposing the pitfalls of both a capitalist-dominated world and socialism as an alternative to market-driven consciousness. Her conciliatory model proves effective in navigating the conflicted relations between the United States and Latin America.
Ignacio Corona’s chapter, “The Politics of Language, Class, and Nation in Mexico’s Rock en español Movement,” is also particularly strong. Corona aims to demystify “the aura of supposed cultural autonomy and preponderant anti-establishment rebelliousness long crafted for the genre of rock” (in Shaw, 91). He deconstructs discursive representations of language and nation in Mexico’s [term] movement of the 1980s and 1990s, analyzing it as a middle-class phenomenon shaped by transnational markets. Among the volume’s authors, Corona most effectively fulfills Shaw’s prefatory call to address lyrics alongside “form and content, context, production values, dissemination, framing, and reception” (Shaw, 1). Through clear prose, deep historical analysis, and semantic exploration of [term] language, Corona skillfully addresses the crisis of the nation-state and fears of cultural homogenization, a theme echoing throughout works reviewed here.
Juan Carlos Ureña’s chapter in Shaw’s volume complements McSherry’s monograph and transitions to a discussion of musical activism across historical periods. Its title, “The Mockingbird Still Calls for Arlen,” references a song by Nicaraguan Carlos Mejía Godoy honoring Arlen Siu, a woman killed in combat against Somoza’s dictatorship. Mejía composed the song as Central American Nueva Canción adopted increasingly confrontational politics amid strife caused by Somoza and the Cold War. Ureña describes how Nueva Canción on the isthmus evolved from midcentury folklore research by figures like Emilia Prieto Tugores, combined with compositions and interpretations by Mejía and contemporaries, plus pan-Latin American influences.
To explain Nueva Canción’s politicization, Ureña draws on Antonio Gramsci: “According to Gramsci,
Studying a culture’s history inevitably requires examining its folklore as the expressive voice of subaltern classes, making folklore a unifying signifier that spans past and present. Mejía drew on these currents for his tribute to Siu, structuring it as a dialogue between two birds, a device rooted in the Spanish romance tradition. This choice reinforced the song’s stance, linking it both to the contemporary conflict and to deep-seated Hispanic poetic conventions.
Ureña marks a pivotal shift in Central American Nueva Canción, a period when Cold War tensions eased and musicians struggled to navigate the commercial record industry. Emerging environmental crises, however, have reignited activism among these same artists, including the author. The intersection of music and environmentalism in Latin America is now crucial, as ecological damage is seen as a consequence of unrestrained neoliberal capitalism.
Musicians in the twenty-first century who inherit Nueva Canción’s legacy and its role as artists of conscience face a political landscape shaped by ambiguous blends of exploitation and multiculturalism, requiring a different approach from the polarized left–right context of earlier generations. Shaw enriches her study by interviewing artists from various generations, such as Ana Tijoux, a celebrated Chilean rapper born in France to parents exiled after the 1973 coup. Although we noted Shaw’s lack of a cohesive theoretical framework, we appreciate how these interviews broaden the book’s scope.
Tijoux holds deep respect for Nueva Canción but grounds her music in a blend of hope and disillusionment drawn from Chilean hip-hop’s urban minimalism, along with admiration for surrealism and Dadaism. She observes the volatile discontent among urban youth worldwide, signaling potential for solidarity and upheaval. Yet, as other reviewed works show, that potential depends on musicians’ ability to both use and challenge new global power structures and resource distributions.
In closing, Tijoux’s perspective echoes a central question from this essay’s opening: What music-based epistemologies help us grasp the current state of what Hess calls a “hemispheric framework”? In answering this, along with questions about music’s political agency, its ties to US foreign policy in Latin America, and its role in the African diaspora’s ongoing reshaping of racial, cultural, national, sexual, and gender identities, our journey has taken us from Carlos Chávez to Ivy Queen to Ana Tijoux. Essentially, the music-based epistemologies revealed across these five books range from modernist dialectical indigenism in Latin American art music to the layered revolutions Perry and Tijoux invoke in their analyses of hip-hop, itself arguably a postmodernist art form.
Does the priority fall on politics through music, or music through politics? We posed this question initially, given these books’ consistent political focus and their authors’ backgrounds outside musicology. These writers generally address politics with greater assurance than sound. Still, they often achieve a more complex analysis of music’s political contexts than typical ethnomusicological or musicological literature, clearly demonstrating that music’s transnational movements are invariably political.
In critiquing these authors’ theories and methods, we have aimed for disciplinary relativism, not favoring one approach over others, as US–Latin American relations demand multiple methodologies.
Across these books, we find a concerted effort to locate individual and community agency within sweeping sociocultural, economic, and political changes, grounded in music’s deep embeddedness in both broad social events and intimate human particularities. Ethnography paired with a substantial historical perspective—as in Perry’s work—yields remarkably nuanced insight into the global–local relationship within the hemispheric framework. Although our original questions remain unresolved, we assert that a dynamic, multifaceted research approach, equally weighing political processes and musical expressions, is exactly what is needed to understand music’s ever-changing role in the Americas and its power to articulate new identities, ideologies, and revolutions.