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Music as Political Actor in Latin America

“Poetic, combative, lyrical, militant, romantic, committed, idealistic, inspirational, and hauntingly beautiful . . . la Nueva Canción Chilena, or Chilean New Song, is all of these.” J. Patrice McSherry’s opening words in Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s–1973, capture the sentiments of millions of people around the world. Her compelling book introduces readers to the emotional and political power of the cultural movement that stirred generations of people in Latin America and the world during a revolutionary period in Chile (see also McSherry, 2017). It is unique among the works under review in that it focuses on the interaction of music and politics from the 1960s to the coup that overthrew the Allende government in 1973. The edited volumes of Lauren Shaw, Song and Social Change in Latin America, and Pablo Vila, The Militant Song Movement in Latin America: Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, expand both the temporal and the geographic scope of analyses of the music known variously as nueva canción, canto nuevo, canción popular, and canción protesta with essays by scholars of the arts, culture, literature, sociology, political science, and history. Their common focus, similar to McSherry’s, is the work of multigenerational artists who create and perform for social change. The socially conscious music that has evolved in both urban and rural settings speaks to the conditions of the poor and working classes—indigenous people, Afrodescendants, industrial workers, and peasants—and reflects the cultural and demographic particularities of the nations in which it emerges. For most of the contributors to these books, the protest music born in the mid-twentieth century was a vehicle for including marginalized voices and histories in social and political dialogue, inspiring movements for radical change and socialism in Latin America despite the best efforts of brutal regimes to censor and eradicate its influence. (A notable exception is Pablo Vila [in his introduction], who seems far less enthusiastic about the movements inspired by what he calls the “militant song movement” in Latin America.) The creation of music as social protest persists in the work of contemporary artists in old, new, and hybrid forms as the soundtrack for movements for social justice today. McSherry’s book is theoretically insightful and empirically grounded in the structural and historical conditions that gave rise to New Song and the popular, socialistleaning movement that brought Allende to power in 1970. The music was not only a reflection of social conditions but a main actor in the mass movement for economic, political, and social justice. McSherry intertwines a chronological view of the music’s