Mexican Canto Nuevo Music, Politics, and Resistance

Mexican Canto Nuevo: Music, Politics, and Resistance explores the vibrant history of Canto Nuevo, a musical and cultural movement that influenced Mexican music, politics, and culture from the 1960s to the late 1980s. Author Claudio Palomares-Salas delves into every aspect of Canto Nuevo's evolution, from its origins during the 1968 student movement to its peak and eventual decline two decades later. Palomares-Salas offers a comprehensive, rigorous, and easy-to-follow path to understand Canto Nuevo in all its complexity, discussing Canto Nuevo's nomenclature and temporality, the Marxist-humanist principles that defined the movement's lyrical production and governed the lives of its participants, as well as the folklorization processes that were at the core of Canto Nuevo's origins and development. He examines Canto Nuevo's relationship with other militant song movements, such as Chilean Nueva Canción, Cuban Nueva Trova, and Uruguayan Canto Popular, reasserting Mexican Canto Nuevo in current academic discussions on the pan-Latin American Nueva Canción movement of the 1960s-1980s. The chapters offer much-needed chronological analysis of main events, peñas, artists' organizations, record labels, festivals, and albums that allow the reader to make sense of the politics, aesthetics, and goals of a broad and multifaceted movement that spanned over two decades. Notably, Palomares-Salas clarifies the complex relationship between the Mexican state and Canto Nuevo, clearly explaining the climate of hostile tolerance in which it developed. The book thoroughly explores the work of the movement's most prominent and influential singers, singer-songwriters, and groups, among them Los Folkloristas, Judith Reyes, José de Molina, León Chávez Teixeiro, Óscar Chávez, Los Nakos, Margarita Bauche, Enrique Ballesté, Amparo Ochoa, La Peña Móvil, Gabino Palomares, and several others. A crucial academic resource and a must-read for those passionate about Mexican and Latin American music, politics, and culture, readers will gain a chronological perspective on key events, artists, and organizations that defined the politics and aesthetics of the Canto Nuevo movement.

1 - Setting the Stage: Rationale, Scholarly Influences, and Book Outline
2 - Toward a Definition of Mexican Canto Nuevo: Features, Principles, and Themes
3 - Mexican Canto Nuevo's Calls and Responses: Rock 'n' Roll, Folklorization, and Latin American Nueva Canción
4 - 1968: The Birth of Mexican Canto Nuevo
5 - The Rising (1969-1976)
6 - Consolidation (1977-1981)
7 - Peak and Decline (1982-1989)

Claudio Palomares-Salas is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at Queen's University. He holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde, the novel El lugar más triste para soñar (The Saddest Place to Dream), and of numerous academic articles. His areas of specialization are the Hispanic avant-garde movements (1910-1927), twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American literature and music, and the Nueva Canción movements in Latin America (1960-1990), particularly Mexico. An active drummer, he has toured and recorded with various artists in Mexico, Canada and abroad.