The Latin American Songbook in the Twentieth Century: From Folklore to Militancy takes an unprecedented comparative analysis approach to the complex relationship between popular music and culture, society, and politics in Latin America as it relates to representations of national identity. Tânia da Costa Garcia analyzes archival research in Chile, Brazil and Argentina, which have very similar cultural and political processes. This book is divided into two different parts: the first focuses on how the folk studies movement was legitimized in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina; while the second emphasizes the rich history of how the militant song movement in Spanish America was received, transformed, and transmitted to Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century. This book will be especially useful to scholars of Latin American studies, music studies, cultural studies, and history.

A reference guide to the vast array of art song literature and composers from Latin America, this book introduces the music of Latin America from a singer's perspective and provides a basis for research into the songs of this richly musical area of the world. The book is divided by country into 22 chapters, with each chapter containing an introductory essay on the music of the region, a catalog of art songs for that country, and a list of publishers. Some chapters include information on additional sources. Singers and teachers may use descriptive annotations (language, poet) or pedagogical annotations (range, tessitura) to determine which pieces are appropriate for their voices or programming needs, or those of their students. The guide will be a valuable resource for vocalists and researchers, however familiar they may be with this glorious repertoire.

Memory and History in Argentine Popular Music examines Argentine popular music of the 1990s and early 2000s that denounced, immortalized, and reflected on the processes that led to the socioeconomic crisis that shook Argentine society at the end of 2001. It draws upon the three most popular genres of the time—tango, rock chabón, and cumbia villera, a form of cumbia from the shantytowns. The book analyzes lyrics from these three genres detailing how they capture the feel of daily life and the changes that occurred under the neoliberal economic model that ravaged the country throughout the ‘90s. The contention is that these are canciones con historia, songs that depict historical events and tell personal stories. Therefore, the lyrics from all three genres serve as accounts of historical events and social and economic changes, denouncing the social inequalities caused by neoliberal economic policies. Furthermore, the book explores how the process of remembering and forgetting takes place on the Internet. It examines how users navigate video-sharing portals and use music to create “virtual sites of memory,” a term that extends Winter’s conception of physical sites of memory to digital environments as virtual sites of commemoration.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a great number of TV shows and music acts blossomed in Colombia, all of which resorted to regional identity as the narrative core for a renewed idea of national identity. Among them was “Clasicos de la provincial,” an album by Colombian singer Carlos Vives and his band La Provincia (1993), which marked the beginning of a successful career that has spanned nearly three decades. Vives´s work not only earned much deserved recognition in the musical industry from the beginning, but most importantly, has come to be renowned as a landmark in the cultural history of Colombia. This book is the first in-depth analysis focused on the creation and production process of Vives´s work, its main musical and literary features, and its influence on other musicians and in the construction of a narrative about national identity that is still relevant today. More than fifty interviews with Vives and members of the band, musicians, journalists, radio programmers, musical producers, and other key players of the process, together with an extensive review of hundreds of documents, are the sources for this book, which earned its authors a national award in Colombia (2015).

winner of the 2021 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization considers how neoliberal capitalism has upset the symbolic economy of “Mexican” cultural discourse, and how this phenomenon touches on a broader crisis of representation affecting the nation-state in globalization. This book argues that, while mexicanidad emerged in the early twentieth century as a cultural trope about national origins, culture, and history, it was, nonetheless a trope steeped in ‘otherization’ and used by nation-states (Mexico and the United States) to legitimize narratives of cultural and socioeconomic development stemming out of nationalist political projects that are now under strain. Using music as a phenomenological platform of inquiry, contributors to this book focus on a critique of mexicanidad in terms of the cultural processes through which people contest ideas about race, gender, and sexuality; reframe ideas of memory, history, and belonging; and negotiate the experiences of dislocation that affect them. The volume urges readers to find points of resonance in its chapters, and thus, interrogate the asymmetrical ways in which power traverses their own historical experience. In light of the crisis in representation that currently affects the nation-state as a political unit in globalization, such resonance is critical to make culture an arena of social collusion, where alliances can restore the fiber of civil society and contest the pressures that have made disenfranchisement one of the most alarming features characterizing the complex relationships between the state and the neoliberal corporate system that seeks to regulate it. Scholars of history, international relations, cultural anthropology, Latin American studies, queer and gender studies, music, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.