Fernando Rios

Fernando Rios (ethnomusicology) presented his paper “Escuchen Nuestras Voces (Hear Our Voices): Salvadoran Refugee Songs and the Challenge of Using ‘The Music of the People’ in Social Justice Movements” at the 2022 Annual National Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in New Orleans in November 2022, where he also served as chair and organizer of a panel titled “Transnational Solidarity in Latinx and Latin American Social Justice Movements in the US.”

Since the late 1960s, the Andean conjunto has served as Bolivia’s paramount expression of “national” folkloric-popular music. This book illuminates how this musical tradition obtained such an elevated status in Bolivia, arguing that it represented the culmination of over four decades of criollo-mestizo musical activities that framed Andean indigenous music as the roots of national culture. More broadly, Panpipes & Ponchos offers the first book-length study of the Bolivian folkloric music movement that chronicles how it developed in close dialogue with state projects and transnational artistic trends for the critical period spanning the 1920s to 1960s.

In recent years, the estudiantina (a type of plucked-­‐string orchestra of Spanish origin) has become a topic of increased interest among music historians, including Latin Americanists. The Bolivian case, however, has not been the focus of detailed historical research, even though music scholars long have acknowledged that in the early-­‐to-­‐mid twentieth century the estudiantina represented one of Bolivia’s most popular ensembletypes and served as an important vehicle for the performance of typical criollo-­‐mestizo musical expressions. This article traces the trajectory of La Paz’s estudiantina tradition, from its emergence in the 1880s as an upper-­‐class criollo form of music making that centered on European repertoire, to its peak of popularity in the late 1930s and mid-­‐1940s, when working-­‐class mestizo musicians predominated in the milieu and most ensembles performed local genres (e.g., huayño, cueca) and indigenista (Indigenist) works. The principal goal of this essay is to document this major shift. In the pages that follow, I discuss various groups, but devote special attention to the Orquesta Típica La Paz. Founded in 1945, this estudiantina represents the earliest instance of a Bolivian state-­‐sponsored music group whose establishment formed part of a broader state attempt to court urban blue-­‐collar workers

In writings on the early history of mass-mediated Bolivian folkloric music, the La Paz-based female vocal duo Las Kantutas is almost invariably mentioned as one of the most pioneering acts. This recognition, however, rarely extends beyond the mere listing of the group and its members, alongside the names of contemporaneous artists. This essay fills this void in the historical literature on Bolivian music, not only by providing many details on the career of Las Kantutas in their heyday of the late 1930s and 1940s, but also by exploring the ways in which the group’s musical activities intersected with the tumultuous political developments of the populist Villarroel-MNR period (December 1943–July 1946) and conservative-reactionary sexenio era (July 1946–April 1952). I also examine the western highland fashion for eastern lowland folkloric genres (known as música oriental), a trend that reached new heights in La Paz city in the Villarroel-MNR years, and represented an important countercurrent to Bolivian musical indigenismo. As leading folkloric-popular music artists of the 1940s, Las Kantutas, ever present on nationally broadcast La Paz radio shows, played a critical role in establishing lowland genres as mainstays for highland criollo-mestizo musicians, although this aspect of their legacy has long been forgotten.

The Bolivian perception that foreigners often misrepresent the true national origin of many local folkloric musical expressions has long been prevalent. This article examines the conditions within which that perception initially became widespread, by discussing the uproar that ensued in 1973 in response to Jaime Torres's performance in the film Argentinísima. I argue that this Bolivian reaction was linked not only to local nationalist apprehensions over Argentine musical folklorists' Andean-inspired repertoire but also to urban Bolivian musicians' assimilation of Argentine folkloric-popular music practices. My goals are to offer a critical analysis of the Argentinísima controversy and to illuminate the historical context within which Bolivia's presently ubiquitous nationalist discourse concerning transnational musical appropriation arose.

The Andean conjunto and Bolivian sikureada are two vastly different folkloric representations of the Southern Andean tropa (indigenous wind consort). This article examines the extent to which these folkloric portrayals sonically resemble and have stylistically influenced rural indigenous community music-making in the Southern Andes. I argue that these case studies provide evidence that a folkloric musical representation's sonic resemblance to the rural genre or style it is said to be chiefly derived from can be conceptualized along a continuum and that this approach elucidates the feasibility of musical borrowings from a folkloric enactment back to its so-called root form. The final section compares the Andean conjunto and Bolivian sikureada to the Cuban ‘international’ rumba and ‘classic era’ son, respectively, to position my findings within a wider comparative perspective and to illustrate that the categories of ‘folkloric’ and ‘popular’ music frequently obfuscate similar stylistic modification and resignification processes.

Juxtaposing two contrasting yet contemporaneous urban La Paz musical trends, this essay discusses how Bolivians localized the internationally fashionable bolero trio style and folklorized the mestizo panpipe tradition in the twelve-year period following the 1952 Revolution. My main goal is to provide a nuanced perspective on how Bolivian musical practices and their receptions connected with the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario; Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) government’s nation-building project at a time of momentous political, economic and social change. As I document, mainstream urban La Paz musical tastes rarely adhered to MNR nationalist ideology in a straightforward or predictable manner, in part because the specific type of “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) that Bolivian state officials envisioned and promoted largely failed to earn widespread citizen approval. This study also reveals that the MNR era’s most popular form of national music was an ineffective conduit for inclusive Bolivian nation-building.

This article chronicles the early history of Andean folkloric-popular music in France and discusses its impact on the Nueva Canción movement's emergence in 1960s Chile and reception in post-1973 Europe. I explain that Argentine artists from Buenos Aires introduced highland Andean instruments and genres into Paris's artistic milieu, where Andean music became associated with leftism well before the arrival of exiled Nueva Canción artists. This article not only documents yet another instance of nonindigenous (mis)representations of Amerindian musical traditions, but also reveals an early moment in the politicization of non-Western music for European mass markets that has been overlooked in World Beat scholarship. I argue that this case study lends credence to Thomas Turino's general observation (2003) that transnational musical processes usually viewed by scholars as cross-cultural interactions between the local and the global can be often conceptualized more accurately as phenomena occurring within the same cosmopolitan cultural formation. Rounding out this essay are some closing thoughts and a brief postlude.