From Protest Song to Social Song: Music and Politics in Colombia, 1966-2016
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2017 From Protest Song to Social Song: Music and Politics in Colombia, 1966-2016 Joshua Katz-Rosene The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2172 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] FROM PROTEST SONG TO SOCIAL SONG: MUSIC AND POLITICS IN COLOMBIA, 1966-2016 by JOSHUA KATZ-ROSENE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 © 2017 JOSHUA KATZ-ROSENE All Rights Reserved ii From Protest Song to Social Song: Music and Politics in Colombia, 1966-2016 by Joshua Katz-Rosene This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Music in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Jane Sugarman Chair of Examining Committee Date Norman Carey Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Peter Manuel, Advisor Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, First Reader Jane Sugarman Patricia Tovar THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT From Protest Song to Social Song: Music and Politics in Colombia, 1966-2016 by Joshua Katz-Rosene Advisor: Peter Manuel Based on archival and ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Bogotá and Medellín, this dissertation documents the development of canción protesta (protest song) in Colombia in the 1960s, and tracks its evolution in subsequent decades. At the turn of the 1970s, songwriters affiliated with a grassroots canción protesta movement in Bogotá used music as a vehicle for disseminating leftist political ideology and extolling the revolutionary guerrilla groups that had formed in the Colombian countryside in the preceding years. However, canción protesta was an urban phenomenon that emerged in tandem with other countercultural currents, and their confluence in the late 1960s facilitated the rise of a commercial variant of protest song in the 1970s, the reception of which was politically mixed. By the 1980s, many activist-musicians were breaking away from what they viewed as the crudely propagandist song texts of the prior decade. To make sense of protest song’s shifting guises, I situate them in broader discourses of and about resistance, emphasizing the ways in which the resistant dimensions of oppositional music have been discursively articulated in changing political contexts. During the 1990s, the category of canción social (social song) began to replace the term canción protesta in public discourse. While canción social generally denotes the same music that was formerly labelled as canción protesta, it embraces a wider range of artists and carries different associations. One of the central arguments of the dissertation is that the terminological shift from canción protesta to canción social represents a profound transformation, over the iv course of five decades of civil conflict, in Colombian society’s relationship with the idea of pursuing political change through armed resistance. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The creation of this dissertation would have been impossible without the generosity and support of numerous people. Above all, I am grateful to the Colombian musicians who, having never met me, agreed to be interviewed for this project. Many welcomed me into their homes and offices, and prepared the requisite cups of tinto. Others gave me access to their extraordinary personal archival collections, donated recordings, or provided contact information for other prospective interviewees. All the people I spoke with imparted fascinating accounts of their lives and careers, as well as their views on Colombian culture and politics. Their testimonies form the backbone of this study, and I hope to have represented them justly. These experts on diverse aspects of musical activism in Colombia are quoted throughout the following chapters, and I have listed their names in appendix B following scholarly convention; I extend to them my sincerest thanks. Several people who are not mentioned elsewhere in the dissertation facilitated my research directly or indirectly, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. Claudia Ramírez, manager of Grupo Suramérica, coordinated my interview with the ensemble’s members, as well as repeated visits to their headquarters to consult their extensive documentary trove. Martha and Norberto from the Escuela Nacional Sindical in Medellín provided an initial introduction to protest music in the City of Eternal Spring, and put me in touch with key musicians. At the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH), María Teresa Salcedo expedited my affiliation as Visiting Researcher and organized a presentation of my research, which resulted in invaluable feedback and new contacts. Julio Bonilla supplied a solid orientation to the world of Andean music-making in Bogotá. vi I was fortunate to count on many fine folks in Bogotá for camaraderie, moral support, and a place to sleep. I am grateful to Paula Esguerra for making helpful introductions, and to her and her family for hosting me during my first fieldwork trip. Life in Bogotá would not be the same without the extended Osorio Guzmán clan. My heartfelt thanks go out to Irene, Mark, Cristina (La Tremenda), Felipe, and the other Ana y Jaime for their friendship, hospitality, accompaniment to concerts, sharing of music collections, and my Colombian name(s). I prize my friendship and political discussions with the inimitable Juan Carlos Lozano, who was responsible for my first ever visit to Colombia. His and Alice’s frequent invitations to dinners and out-of- town retreats helped sustain me through intensive periods of work, and Alice graciously worked her contacts to arrange a crucial interview. Thanks also to the sikuris of Comunidad de Zampoñas Urbanas, and especially to Rumi, for welcoming me into their group. My various fieldwork trips to Colombia were supported by several funding sources, which I wish to acknowledge here: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Doctoral Student Research Grant program at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Graduate Center; a Provost’s Summer Research Award; a Summer Research Travel Fellowship from the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies; and grants from the Franziska Dorner Fund for Musical Research. The write-up period was aided by a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Graduate Center. The academic journey that has culminated in this dissertation in many ways began over a decade ago at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). My advisor in the master’s program at UCSC, John Schechter, profoundly shaped my approach to ethnomusicological research, and he has continued to offer honest and incisive feedback on my work. Gracias, John! After moving across the country to New York City, I was pleased to join the congenial vii intellectual community fostered by my fellow students in the ethnomusicology PhD program at the CUNY Graduate Center. I am deeply grateful to Peter Manuel and Jane Sugarman, my mentors at the Graduate Center, for too many things to begin to list here. Many thanks to Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste for rolling with a shifted reading schedule, and to both him and Patricia Tovar for their helpful comments on the dissertation. When I wasn’t writing about protest music, I could sometimes be found playing it in the streets of New York with my comrades in the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, who I thank for teaching me precious lessons about the rewards and challenges of organizing a political-artistic project. Thanks, of course, to my various families— biological, chosen, and in-law—for their widely cast nets of emotional sustenance and encouragement, and to Mel for accompanying me on this unforeseeably long journey. I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my mother, Sheila Katz, who has everything to do with the following pages. She had her own long-time involvement with Colombia and its politics: decades after teaching Spanish at the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Bucaramanga, in the late 1960s, she made solidarity with beleaguered Colombian trade unions a pillar of her work at the Canadian Labour Congress. Sheila was also a participant in the transnational nueva canción (new song) movement, which is thoroughly intertwined with Colombian protest song. She collaborated in an editorial capacity on Chilean nueva canción singer Ángel Parra’s album Tierra Prometida (Promised Land), which he recorded in Toronto in 1974 to raise funds for a human rights organization in Chile. In the mid-1980s, she helped organize a Canadian tour of the Cantata centroamericana (Central American Cantata), a large- scale work that came out of the nueva canción movement in Costa Rica. My mom also contributed to this study in indispensable ways: Her airline points enabled one of my research trips. The activists she connected me with in Bogotá and Medellín were pivotal to my early viii research progress. When we coincided in Colombia one summer, she invited me to join her on a trip to a union event in Puerto Gaitán, which gave me important insights into contemporary oppositional organizing in Colombia. She regularly forwarded me relevant news articles,