Nueva Canción is a song movement that stands up for one's own culture, for one's own people, in the face of oppression by a totalitarian governments or in the face of cultural imperialism from abroad, notably the United States and Europe. It developed first in the southern cone of South America—Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay—during the 1950s and 1960s, and it has spread throughout Latin America. As we know from our own history, the 1960s in particular witnessed violent upheavals, assassinations and urban violence in the United States that were echoed in Latin America.  Nearly every country in South America, as well as Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, saw revolution, massacre, underground warfare, or other forms of violent social and political confrontation.

In Argentina, the Perón regime saw the country prosper, bringing rural dwellers, many of indigenous ancestry, to the city of Buenos Aires, with their own musical heritages. In addition, Argentinean radio stations were instructed to program substantial amounts of national music. Thus, where the tango had dominated popular music until the mid-1950s, a new Argentinean music began to be created in the late 1950s and early 1960s, by such groups as Los Chalchaleros, Los Fronterizos, and notably, by the guitarist-composer-singer Atahualpa Yupanqui. A careful researcher into Argentinean musical folklore, Atahualpa Yupanqui combined a remarkable guitar technique with evocative melody and poetry to create a truly new music. The metaphoric thrust of Jara's "EI lazo'' appears prominently in Yupanqui's poignant "Camino del Indio," for example, in which the composer depicts a rural path as the window through which we see the sufferings of the Indian of the campos, or countryside. Yupanqui and his fellow Argentinean artist-pioneers sought to create songs with profound musical and textual meaning, songs rooted in their country's rural folklore, songs instilled with the goal of renewal, of reinvigoration (Carrasco Pirard 1982:605-6).

Many of its pioneering artists had done their own fieldwork, traveling widely through the Chilean countryside to hear and document principally rural traditions in music and music-related customs. Thus, the Nueva Canción musicians sought to reproduce wherever possible authentic, traditional styles and instruments (Violeta Parra's preference for the charango), to express their views on contemporary events and issues. The 1969 Primer Festival de la Nueva Canción Chilena, sponsored by the "Universidad Católica in Santiago", gave the now-recognizable movement a name (Morris 1986:119-20).

Like Jara's "El lazo," Violeta Parra's own songs may draw on natural contexts: "Rin [a Chilean rhythm] del angelito" (1964-65) depicts the joyous atmosphere of a Chilean wake for a dead child—a subject that also drew Victor Jara to compose a song ("Despedimiento del angelito" ["Farewell of the Little Angel"]). On the other hand, Parra's music may be highly satirical, as in "Qué dirá el Santo Padre?" (What will the pope say?) The Chilean writer Fernando Alegría comments that Parra first cries out here against injustice, then appeals to the pope to make a statement on these conditions—yet he remains silent throughout the song. Like the majority of Latin Americans, most Chileans are Roman Catholics; the Catholic Church has frequently been in the forefront of the struggle for human rights in Latin America. [Although in other countries the church contributed to the violation of the same.] Ultimately, though regrettably after her death in 1967, Violeta Parra's plea brought a response from the Vatican: in April 1987 Pope John Paul II visited Chile, spoke out against conditions of oppression, and met with indigenous peoples, encouraging them to sustain their cultural values (Levy 1988).

Finally, though by no means have we exhausted the full range of song types produced by this great artist, Violeta Parra has composed love poetry. In the highly moving "Gracias a la vida," ironically written just before her 1967 suicide, the artist thanks life for having given her the eyes, ears, words, feet, heart, laughter, and weeping through which she might perceive and approach the man she loves.

Nueva Canción artists seek to reinvoke and revalidate traditional life ways of forgotten but valued persons and peoples. These musicians also express their social consciousness. They speak out in a clear voice against conditions of oppression, advocating social change. Victor Jara's "Preguntas por Puerto Montt" (1969), notably devoid of metaphor and speaking in a direct and accusatory tone, is a stream-of-consciousness monologue decrying a March 6, 1969, government sanctioned attack on unarmed peasant families in this Chilean port city. In the 1970 Chilean presidential campaign, Quilapayún, an important Nueva Canción ensemble formed in the mid-1960s, accompanied speakers for Salvador Allende's broad-based Popular Unity party, which had brought together workers, peasants, and students into a mass movement. A musical example of this remarkable spirit of unity is Jara's "Plegaria a un labrador" ("Public Prayer to a Worker"), which was composed for the 1969 first Festival of Chilean Song. Modeled on the Lord's Prayer, it is an impassioned call for worker solidarity. "Stand up and look at your hands."

In 1973 the elected Marxist government of President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a bloody coup; Allende and some 2,800 others lost their lives, hundreds disappeared, and thousands were jailed. On September 18, 1973, a young man ushered Joan Jara into the Santiago city morgue, where she found the body of her husband, Victor Jara, "his chest riddled with holes and a gaping wound in his abdomen. His hands seemed to be hanging from his arm at strange anngle though his wrists were broken" (Tare 1984:243). The singer who had cried out in word and song on behalf of "him who died without knowing why his chest was riddled, fighting for the right to have a place to live" (Lyrics to "Preguntas par Puerto Montt'), the singer whose songs had so often lauded eloquently the hands of his people (in "El lazo," "Angelita Huenumán," and "Plegaria a un Labrador"), had met his fate—in a stroke of terrifying irony—with his own chest riddled with holes. his own hands made lifeless.

Numerous Nueva Canción musicians were imprisoned or remained in exile, but to gain support for human rights in Chile they continued to spread the message of Nueva Canción in performances abroad. Within Chile, the movement went underground and was transformed into Canto Nuevo.

After the overthrow of Allende, the music of Nueva Canción was prohibited on the airwaves and removed from stores and destroyed. Certain prominent folkloric instruments associate with Nueva Canción, such as the charango, were also prohibited (Morris (1386:123). In the repressive political and cultural atmosphere, the metaphoric character we have seen in the songs of Atahualpa Yupanqui, Victor Jara, and Violeta Parra now became exaggerated and intensified, in order to express thoughts that would have been censored if stated directly. In "El joven titiritero" ("The Young Puppeteer"), by Eduardo Peralta, for example, a puppeteer's departure and hoped-for return served as a metaphor for exile and renewed hope.

The status of Canto Nuevo was precarious. The government issued permission to perform a concert, but the permission was abruptly revoked; radio programs featuring its music were established, then eliminated; Jara cassettes were at one moment confiscated, subsequently sold openly in stores. With changing political conditions, banished musicians have been permitted to return to Chile; the group Inti Illimani returned from Italy in 1988, after fifteen years in exile.

The New Song is still a living international movement. It is traditional and regional in its roots, yet modern and socially conscious in its musical style and message. It reacts to the penetration by foreign cultures, seeking instead to draw attention to the people-often forgotten people- and to their struggles for human dignity.