It focuses on the life and work of one of the main exponents of the Mexican protest song, singer-songwriter Gabino Palomares (b. This article attempts to reignite academic interest in this story with the goal of encouraging future critical and theoretical studies regarding socially-engaged Mexican singers and songwriters from the 1960s through the 1990s. The story of these musicians has remained unknown for too long. It is, nevertheless, a story of resistance whose heroes-singers, songwriters, and performers-spent the decades between 19 denouncing poverty and corruption, condemning governmental violence, marching side by side with students, activists, women, workers, and peasants, and supporting civil rights and grassroots movements both nationally and internationally. It exists as scattered references in newspapers, as anecdotes, and as a collection of songs sung in a disorganized manner by a group relegated to the margins of the cultural landscape.
The story of modern Mexican troubadours is absent from the annals of history. While figures such as Silvio Rodríguez and Mercedes Sosa managed to convince a sector of the Mexican public to stand in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of Latin America, figures such as Amparo Ochoa, Óscar Chávez, and Gabino Palomares did not succeed-apparently-in convincing the Mexican public that there were also reasons to protest in Mexico. Without a clearly articulated narrative of oppression and violence, the voices of resistance did not find a place in the national affective imagination. The civil wars, military coups, dictatorships, and revolutions that marked the histories of Cuba, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay during the second half of the twentieth century propelled the socially-engaged singers of the Nueva Canción to stardom, granting them a privileged place in the emotional tales of the nation.
It offers a brief historical analysis of the Mexican Canto Nuevo movement and establishes a much-needed chronology of Palomares’s work, essential to our understanding of the contemporary cultural history of Mexico. The story of modern Mexican troubadours was, nevertheless, a story of resistance whose heroes-the singers, songwriters, and performers-spent the decades between 19 denouncing poverty and corruption, condemning governmental violence, marching side by side with students, activists, women, workers, and peasants, supporting civil rights and grassroots movements both nationally and internationally with their songs. The story of these musicians has remained unknown for too long. The absence of these culturally traumatic events positioned Mexican protest songs in the periphery of the affective narrative of the nation. During the second half of the twentieth century, there were no spectacular events in Mexico-civil wars, military dictatorships, or revolutions-capable of fracturing the social, political, or cultural structures of the country.
0 kommentar(er)
