The "Nueva Canción" Movement and Its Mass-Mediated Performance Context

There is a movement coming out of Latin America identified rather broadly as nueva cancion, or "new song," which combines the musics of different Latin American folk cultural traditions with new renditions of old favorites from urban and mass media venues. Through the mass media these songs of Chile, Brazil, Cuba, and the Hispanic U.S. community-to name the most prominent sources of nueva cancion-reach beyond the borders of the Latin American countries of South and Central America and cultivate audiences throughout the world, among Latino and non-Latino cultural groups alike (see Vigliette 1986). Despite the mass media performance context of nueva cancion, this music embodies more than commercial value for these musicians and critical Latin American scholars. For many of its practitioners nueva cancion symbolizes a search for political, economic, and cultural identity in order to counteract widespread cultural stereotyping, economic domination by transnational corporations, and political manipulation by North American policy.