Music and Identity in Paraguay: Expressing National, Racial, and Class Identity in Guitar Music Culture
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LJMU Research Online Krüger Bridge, S Music and Identity in Paraguay: Expressing National, Racial, and Class Identity in Guitar Music Culture http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/14204/ Article Citation (please note it is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from this work) Krüger Bridge, S Music and Identity in Paraguay: Expressing National, Racial, and Class Identity in Guitar Music Culture. Journal of the Royal Musical Association. ISSN 0269-0403 (Accepted) LJMU has developed LJMU Research Online for users to access the research output of the University more effectively. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LJMU Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of the record. Please see the repository URL above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. For more information please contact [email protected] http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/ Music and Identity in Paraguay: Expressing National, Racial, and Class Identity in Guitar Music Culture Simone Krüger Bridge, Liverpool John Moores University, UK ([email protected]) Abstract This article illustrates, with particular focus on Rolando Chaparro’s rock fusion album Bohemio (2009), the way that music operates in expressing Paraguayan national, racial, and class identity. It first reviews the literature on music and identity more generally, and music and identity in Paraguay more specifically. It then explores expressions of nationalism and paraguayidad in folkloric “popular” musics (música popular), and the concept of raza Guaraní in the construction, maintenance, and expression of identity. Finally, it explores three waves of Barrios revival (1950s, 1970s, early noughties) and people’s class consciousness before arriving at the article’s conclusions. Acknowledgements My sincere gratitude goes to all Paraguayan musicians, professionals, fans, colleagues, and friends, and especially to Luis Szarán, Rolando Chaparro and his band members, Berta Rojas, Luz María Bobadilla, Tania Ramos, Carlos Salcedo Centurión, Carlos Schvartzman, Alvaro Morel, Leonardo Barreto, Efrén “Kamba’I” Echeverría, Diego Solis, Felipe Sosa, Heinz Fast, Tere Alvarenga Princigalli, Manuel Martinez, Sergio Cuquejo, Guitarras del corazón music society and the Corrales family (in particular, Maria Selva Corrales and Dalila Corrales Martino), Florentín Gimenez, Jorge Gross Brown, and staff at the Zeppelin music shop, whose interest in and support of my research since its conception in 2011 has formed the solid basis for this article. I am also indebted to musicologist Alfredo C. Colman and Paraguayan music researcher and singer Romy Martínez, as well as the journal editor, Freya Jarman-Ivens, and the five anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and comments on the article. Keywords: paraguayidad; polca paraguaya; classical guitar; rock paraguayo; Agustín Barrios Mangoré; nationalism; class status; Guaraní 1 Introduction In contemporary Paraguay, certain traditional and folkloric “popular” musical styles (música popular), such as the Paraguayan polca and the guarania,1 and as well as two “iconic” instruments – mainly the guitar and the harp – evoke and reflect Paraguayan identity, often referred to as paraguayidad (Paraguayan-ness). Paraguayidad is closely interlinked with nationalism following the proclamation of independence from Spain in 1811, and the subsequent nation-building projects of the various Paraguayan governments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During my fieldwork experience in Paraguay and throughout my past and current interactions with Paraguayans, I found that paraguayidad shapes people’s consciousness in their everyday lives, and it provides many Paraguayans with an imagined shared sense of community and belonging, memory and heritage. This is not surprising, since paraguayidad was actively constructed and reinforced through the state’s creation and promotion of local “popular” traditions, including religious festivities, folk music, folk dances, crafts, and food, which still today represent and evoke tangible elements of national identity. Moreover, nationalism continues to dominate the historiography, which has, for at least the past 100 years, narrated and constructed the myth of Paraguayan “desconocimiento” (unknown-ness/ignorance) and linguistic, cultural, geographic, and historic “excepcionalidad” (exceptionalism) (Chesterton 2018). Continued Paraguayan nationalism combined with the belief of Paraguayan exceptionalism and the notion of “exoticness” and disconnection to the region more broadly continue to dominate the regional historiography and social science literature (ibid.). To most Paraguayans, certain musical genres, instruments, and musical characteristics reflect Paraguayan national identity most directly: the polca paraguaya and guarania; the diatonic harp in performances of Paraguayan traditional and popular (folklore) music (known as música popular); the use of the Paraguayan polka rhythm in 6/8 (ritmo paraguayo); the combination of harp and guitar; and the use of Guaraní and Jopará (a mixture of Spanish and Guaraní) lyrics. All of these—musical genres, instruments, and musical characteristics—embed a series of aural signifiers through which many Paraguayans today articulate a shared sense of identity as inherently linked to the nation of Paraguay. Besides the continuation of local “popular” traditions in contemporary Paraguay and their constructed significance for expressing paraguayidad, I found through interviews and interaction with local performers that other musical styles and instruments too, including classical and rock music along with the guitar, are platforms for the articulation of national distinctiveness. Moreover, some rock music is used to reflect a certain political stance in opposition to mainstream 2 societal values, while classical “art” music serves as a symbol of taste and for particular social groups to distinguish themselves from other, low-status social groups. In other words, music reflects the hierarchical divisions of society, or its patterns of social stratification. Music reflects and shapes the structural conditions that underpin social relationships in Paraguay today, and is an important signifier of class-based “imagined community” at local, trans-local, and affective levels (Anderson 1983). Paraguayan identity is thus more encompassing than paraguayidad, and the purpose of this article is to illustrate the way that music operates in creating, constructing, articulating, negotiating, and reflecting Paraguayan identity as it is informed by nationalism, racial, and class-based beliefs and perspectives. Illuminating the ways in which Paraguayan identity is expressed in and through music, I will take contemporary guitar music recordings that commemorate the work of Agustín Barrios as a starting point in order to explore Paraguayan national, racial, and class-informed identity, specifically within the context of guitar music culture, spanning music genres and styles from traditional and folklore to art and popular music. Specifically, Rolando Chaparro's rock fusion album Bohemio (2009), which contains rock arrangements of musical compositions by Agustín Barrios, helps to show the various ways that Paraguayan identity is reflected in its various expressions, including national identity (i.e., via the inclusion of Barrios’ nationalistic pieces), ethnic identity (i.e., guaraní constructed identity), and class-based identity in contemporary Paraguay. Chaparro’s album thus serves as an analytical lens through which to understand contemporary identity expressions in Paraguay. This article has grown out of my ethnographic fieldwork and continuing engagement with Paraguayan music, while featuring anecdotal evidence based on personal observations and informal interviewing, alongside musical and semiotic analyses. Opening this article will be a somewhat lengthy review of existing academic debates on music and identity more generally, and music and identity in Paraguay more specifically, in order to provide due contextualizations, as well as to address Timothy Rice’s critique of a general lack of critical engagement with literature on identity in ethnomusicology, whose scholars “who have produced this corpus of work seem to take for granted identity as a category of social life and of social analysis” (2007: 7). The literature review will thus contribute toward an understanding on how identity is being defined and discussed more generally in the social sciences and humanities, and to build on the publications of those who had written on this theme before us. Second, the article will introduce my ethnographic research and explore the way that nationalism and paraguayidad is expressed in, what I term here, folkloric “popular” musics (known in Paraguay as música popular), 3 followed by discussions of the role played by the concept of raza Guaraní in the construction, maintenance and expression of national and nationalist identity. In the final section, the article will explore three waves of Barrios revival in the 1950s, 1970s, and early noughties,