2.1 Elite Aversion to popular Culture

In Chile, since colonial times, the relationship between the elite and the people developed based on what historian Armando De Ramón described as the ‘fear of the indigenous and other «castes»’.Footnote ¹⁹ The author suggests that such groups from seventeenth-century urban peripheries in Santiago might have been prone to disorder and excess, given their unbearable conditions of existence.Footnote ²⁰ Above all, chaos took place in festive spaces, which were in turn legally regulated with measures dating from as early as 1625. During the eighteenth century, the ruling class’s fear gave rise to a socially legitimised system of repression over those subordinated, that is, the great majority of the population, whose customs and modes of sociality ‘became suspicious per se’.Footnote ²¹

In the republican era (the nineteenth century), this colonial legacy of contempt for popular culture became evident, among other things, in the ruling classes’ dissemination of their categories of morals and good manners. Theatre was a fundamental tool to this end, fulfilling a pedagogical function in the nineteenth-century elite’s civilising agenda.Footnote ²² The chinganas – popular taverns or brothels located on the urban outskirts – were in clear opposition to such a programme. In 1832, Andrés Bello described such taverns as spaces where recreation went directly against the State’s civilising efforts, through ‘insolent’, ‘licentious’ acts and ‘pernicious vice’.Footnote ²³

This aversion to forms of popular enjoyment – what some have called the fiesta popularFootnote ²⁴ – and, ultimately, to the mechanisms of laughter has its roots in the values and priorities inherited from Western culture through colonial domination. In medieval Europe, ‘A boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal cuIture.’Footnote ²⁵ Both humorous and serious elements spread across the Americas since the Spanish colonisers’ arrival in 1492, as, according to Maximiliano Salinas, Arab Spain between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries also had a distinct orientation to humour and laughter.Footnote ²⁶ Furthermore, pre-Hispanic cultures already had a propensity towards these comic manners.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, the clash between the Catholic monarchs’ evangelising endeavour and festive cultures, present among both their own and across local pre-colonial communities, was unavoidable.

Now, festive culture not only appeared to be dangerous to the elites for transgressing their morality and good customs, but also because of its potential for subaltern resistance. Following Bakhtin, James Scott argues that such potential is present in the forms of popular culture and the carnivalesque. Resistance is enabled through an intermediate position between hidden and overt political contents, creating ‘a politics of disguise and anonymity that takes place in public view but is designed to have a double meaning’.Footnote ²⁸ This politics of disguise may take the shape of peasant folk traditions and rituals,Footnote ²⁹ and, indeed, ‘ideological insubordination of subordinate groups … takes a quite public form in elements of folk or popular culture’.Footnote ³⁰ Moreover, Scott presents the carnival as a ritualistic sphere that constitutes a ‘realm for release’ of the social inhibitions suffered by subaltern groups.Footnote ³¹ In other words, popular culture’s counter-hegemonic potential rested in its ability to transmit masked ideological discourses – beyond the reach of those foreign to their codes. And, simultaneously, the carnivalesque appeared as an ideal arena for these concealed subversive discourses to become public; all of which caused the fear and aversion that is still present among Chilean elites.

The Chilean elite’s ‘historical fear’ of indigenous and subaltern peoples continued developing throughout the twentieth century. The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 instilled fear among capitalist elites throughout the world,Footnote ³² and Chile was no exception. The emerging Partido Obrero Socialista (Socialist Worker Party) was a threat to the interests of the Chilean ruling class not because of the likelihood of them being elected, but because of the subversive ideas they circulated among the working class through their grassroots education agenda.Footnote ³³ Half a century later, the expropriation of agricultural lands through the Agrarian Reform in 1967 and the political rise of Salvador Allende (1908–1973), the first socialist president in Chilean history (1970–1973), provoked a new wave of fear and anger among the ruling class. Such fear materialised in Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990), which profoundly curtailed the symbolic production in Chilean society, with folkloric practices being particularly affected.Footnote ³⁴ Only in recent decades has the fiesta popular resurged among Chilean urban youth,Footnote ³⁵ and with it, a powerful spirit of popular resistance which became evident in the social uprising of October 2019, when a group of secondary students initiated a huge protest movement against a state of chronic economic hardship and social disparities. The power of protest was such that it led to the calling into question of the constitutional foundations of Chilean society. Incidentally, women singers have been notably present throughout this process, which is still ongoing.

2.2 Patriarchy and the Restriction over Women’s Creative Practice

The disreputable nature of festive and popular cultures attained higher levels of condemnation when associated with women, as they then also acquired a connotation of sin. This relates to the portrayal of women as impure, prevalent in Christian European culture, which later spread across colonial Latin America. An example of this is Pope Leo IV’s exclusion of women from sacred music spaces since the ninth centuryFootnote ³⁶ – a ban re-implemented in Chile during the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁷ On the other hand, women could then access the music of Spanish-Arab ‘minstrels, street beggars, scoundrels’, and were recognised for their skills on the tambourine, the vihuelaFootnote ³⁸ and the guitar – instruments otherwise looked down upon by ecclesiastical authorities.Footnote ³⁹ This association between women and ‘undignified’ customs reflects the elemental patriarchal connection between women and sin, which contributed to shaping gender stereotypes in musical practice, both in Europe and across the colonised Latin American territories.

I interpret women’s restricted development in festive and creative roles in public life as indicative of two intertwined patriarchal principles. Firstly, the strict moral demands imposed on women since (at least) medieval Christianity have situated them in the impossible dichotomy between saint and sinner. William Washabaugh argued that the imaginary of women between ‘Madonna and whore’ is a ‘cultural fundamental’ in Andalusian society.Footnote ⁴⁰ As Kristine Ibsen stated: ‘Like most of the Western world, in both learned and popular sectors of Spain and Spanish America man was associated with the soul, spirit and reason, while woman with the body, carnality and sinfulness.’Footnote ⁴¹ Such a dichotomy triggered, among other things, the confinement of women to the domestic sphere. Examples of this abound in Spanish literature, with some of Don Quixote’s quoted proverbs being particularly telling: ‘la mujer honrada, la pierna quebrada y en casa’ (the honourable woman: at home with a broken leg).Footnote ⁴² Such an imposition also applied to female musicianship. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, classical music was most commonly performed by women within the limits of the household, while popular music from the streets belonged to male dominions. And while women’s musical activity was celebrated within these private limits, their participation outside them was generally condemned.Footnote ⁴³ Thus, in the Andalusian context, women who entered the public space of ‘the noisy street music of the humble classes’Footnote ⁴⁴ were reduced to stereotypes of dishonour and ‘ill repute’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The association between women and the festive, therefore, also acquired a decadent tone. As the Quixotesque proverb goes on to say: ‘ … y la doncella honesta, el hacer algo es su fiesta’ (… and to the honest maid, doing any work is her joy).Footnote ⁴⁶ The word fiesta means ‘feast’, ‘festival’, ‘party’, or ‘celebration’, implying that the social expectations for young women in terms of their relationship with the festive were mostly that they entertained themselves with household work. In colonial Chile, the opposing nature of aristocratic and subaltern women perfectly embodied the saint/sinner binary. While aristocrats were ruled by a virginal moral code – as their virginity was essential for marital negotiationsFootnote ⁴⁷ – subaltern women, as objects of continuous sexual abuse, were educated with a different set of values. In other words, ‘Neither virginity nor fidelity, … constituted norms of historical and moral validity for popular women during the colonial and post-colonial period, despite the fact that they were always publicly repressed for being neither virgins nor faithful.’Footnote ⁴⁸

One of the critical contents of the dichotomy between saint and sinner is the demonisation and degradation of the female body and its functions. In this regard, Bakhtin argues that an essential element of the culture of laughter has to do with degradation – that is, lowering something or someone that was high up (also signalling the opposition between the spiritual concepts of heaven and earth). In his own words, ‘laughter degrades and materialises’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such degradation through laughter often resorted to themes related to the ‘lower stratum of the body’ which engages in activities such as ‘defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The author understood the centrality of these activities in renaissance folk culture as part of a ‘rehabilitation of the flesh’, an effort that opposed the ascetism of medieval European culture – which wholly rejected such corporeal dimensions.Footnote ⁵¹ The relationship between laughter, the body, and degradation can thus contribute to explaining the higher disparagement of festive culture in women.

Such contempt for the female body is connected to the second patriarchal principle that is restrictive against women’s creative and public activity: the objectivisation of women and their bodies. Through the lens of this principle, women were understood as ‘objects’ of affection, reproduction, and sexual pleasure, deprived of any form of agency. Such a mentality was evident in the Spanish colonising process in Chile, wherein, during the first two centuries, women endured an enslaving regime in terms of both labour and sex.Footnote ⁵² The fact that a key colonial domination mechanism was the act of rape has meant that a character of violence linked to the sexual was imprinted on Latin American power relationships. The roles of women as passive and men as active were thus forged through the violent imposition of Hispanic culture, religion, and language. As Octavio Paz pointed out, under colonial culture, the feminine and masculine were constructed based on the archetypes of la chingada and el chingón, where

In Chile, for instance, subaltern women are often called chinas, a Quechua word that generally refers pejoratively to women that are indigenous, lower-class, servants, and/or lovers.Footnote ⁵⁴ The construction of genders in Latin America thus obeyed a logic of hegemonic struggle through sexuality,Footnote ⁵⁵ operating in public and private spheres, that is, through the colonisation of land and women. The hacienda concept in Chile reveals this logic of the landowner’s property, ‘which is also the space of the nation’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this context, the conceptualisation of women and men functions through racial oppositions. While powerful white men appear as the chingón, mestizo men appear as the huacho (fatherless). And while white women hold a virginal, desexualising character, mestizo women appear as the chingada – or the china in Chile.Footnote ⁵⁷ These oppositions define women through a dichotomy between private, pure chastity and public, sinful festivity.

Objectifying women and their bodies has also deprived them of their agency, thus limiting their potential for creative activities. Stacey Schlau comments on the patriarchal evaluation of women’s reproductive function in relation to the sexual division of labour, where women’s reproductive faculty – with all its related aspects, such as the tendencies towards affection and community – was seen as an inferior mode of creativity, certainly subordinated to intellectuality, which was in turn attributed to men.Footnote ⁵⁸ These meanings can throw light on the rationale behind the development of the role of interpreter, transmitter, and entertainer – rather than author, composer, and improviser – present across the Hispanic American regional variants of the cantora. But when and how did these patterns of thought originate? While trying to understand, through an assessment of material culture, the origins of male domination over women, archaeologist Almudena Hernando concluded that it could not be explained by any biological condition – such as maternity.Footnote ⁵⁹ Rather, a slow, gradual, and probably unintentional process that started around 2500 BCE – a time of significant productive innovation which generated labour diversification and the first signs of variation in power positionsFootnote ⁶⁰ – led men and women to adopt two different modes of identity, based on their levels of mobility and technological control: a relational identity, which became gradually associated with the female gender, and an individuated identity, gradually associated with the male gender. Once men acquired a higher level of power than women through these dynamics, they required women to continue developing the relational mode of identity that would allow men to keep increasing their power.Footnote ⁶¹ These gender dynamics were validated already in the social order in the Bronze age (around 1500 BCE).Footnote ⁶² Throughout human history, the author argues, there were two crucial aspects through which women’s agency was thus restricted: lack of mobility and constraints to their writing.Footnote ⁶³

Women’s forced passivity has thus operated through their restrictions on mobility – being constrained to the domestic sphere – and technological control – with writing as an essential ‘intellectual technology’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Aside from allowing individuals to process and make better sense of reality, thus increasing their level of control over it, writing was also a tool for breaking out of confinement, constituting a point of access to public audiences. And although women have historically held fundamental roles in music and local community spaces in Hispanic America, their relationship with the written word has been somewhat more conflictive. An example is the very few Hispanic American women writers present in literary anthologies of the region.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the Chilean case, there are only five names of women writers during the colonial period of over two centuries (1598–1810): Úrsula Suárez (1668–1749), Sor Josefa de los Dolores (1739–1822), Sor Tadea de San Joaquín (1750–1827), Sor Juana López and Sor Teresa de San RafaelFootnote ⁶⁶ – and all of them were nuns. It is thus no coincidence that convent life became a viable and attractive alternative for women whose families could afford that luxury. In colonial times, convents were exclusive educational spaces for daughters of rich families.Footnote ⁶⁷ The most emblematic example in Latin America is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695), whose brilliant breakthrough into Spanish American theatre earned her the recognition as the greatest figure of Latin American colonial literature even though she was a woman.Footnote ⁶⁸ As Hernando argues,

Conventual life was an opportunity for women to become ‘desexualised’ and enjoy certain privileges, one such being that of writing. Indeed, Stacey Schlau referred to nuns as ‘the third gender’,Footnote ⁷⁰ occupying an intermediate position between the weak, passive, and vicious portrayals of women, and men’s universal power.Footnote ⁷¹ Through nuns, Latin American women’s voices – otherwise largely underrepresented in public life – became thus immortalised. One notable example, constituting the earliest record of women improvisers in Chile, was a nun who, already in the eighteenth century, mastered the male-dominated tradition of verse improvisation. At the request of her priest superiors, Chilean nun Sor Tadea De San Joaquín used to improvise eight-syllable verses in the style of a troubadouresque tradition called canto a lo poeta.Footnote ⁷² Up to this day, however, her name has never been mentioned as part of the field of Chilean improvised popular poetry. Rather, skills related to such a tradition have been consistently associated with the male gender in Chilean historiography, with Rodolfo Lenz’s text as a seminal reference – and repeatedly cited – in this regard:

Let us note that the polarity between the adjectives ‘light’ and ‘cheerful’ assigned to women practitioners, and ‘epic’ and ‘serious’ in men’s case, confirms the series of opposing pairs of traits which draw the artificial limits between male and female fields of both intellectuality and activity. As we saw, whenever women have infringed those limits, assuming more active, festive, creative, and public roles, they have been called out for engaging in dishonourable behaviour, to say the least.Footnote ⁷⁴

To recapitulate, the relationship between women and the festive sphere in Hispanic America is marked by the restrictions maintained by two fundamental patriarchal principles: the impossible position of women between ‘Madonna and whore’, which has reinforced their confinement within the private space; and the ontological objectification of women which, among several horrific mistreatments in a colonial culture of institutionalised sexual abuse, has historically curtailed their creative agency. I will now explore women’s transgressive mechanisms against these patriarchal principles through a brief assessment of feminisms across the globe, and how these can relate and also differ from the Latin American context. Although ‘The belief in God-given inferiority of women and in women’s subordinate position did not begin with Christianity’,Footnote ⁷⁵ in Latin America, the two are imbricated to such an extent that feminism in the region cannot be conceived of separately from a decolonising effort.Footnote ⁷⁶ An overview of global and local feminisms will thus serve as context to better understand the historical development of Chilean cantoras.

2.3 Women’s Historical Subversion Mechanisms: Feminisms across the Globe

The history of women’s fight for equal rights comprises dissimilar battles, theories, and chronologies among the different regions of the world, and the Latin American region has its own particularities. Upon its colonial and republican configuration, Latin American societies have been widely exposed to Western cultural values and philosophic schemes, and thus their feminist strands are infused with theories developed in Europe and the United States. In its origins in nineteenth-century Britain and shortly after in the United States, the suffragette movement challenged women’s traditional socio-cultural roles, which emphasised marriage and motherhood, and fought against female labour exploitation and relegation to domestic duties.Footnote ⁷⁷ The first country to ever give women the vote was New Zealand in 1894, and by the end of the 1920s, most Western countries had done so as well. In Latin America, Uruguay was the first country where, in 1927, women’s free vote was obtained;Footnote ⁷⁸ in Chile, it was first obtained in 1949.Footnote ⁷⁹ Made up of women of dissimilar backgrounds and interests, the suffragette movement went through several crises caused by their internal differences after the battle for the vote was won. Most notably, the social distinction between white middle-class women and other social groups’ realities rendered visible the conflicting nature of their interests, thus triggering, for some of its factions, an ideological shift towards ideas of common welfare and state intervention.Footnote ⁸⁰

Having institutionally attained the right to participate in public life through the vote and education, the fight for gender equality took a turn to focus on the injustices within private life during the second half of the twentieth century. For Western feminism, such a turn involved philosophically questioning the patriarchal conceptualisation of sex, gender, and the social construction of the category of woman.Footnote ⁸¹ This process of calling into question rigid gender roles and stereotypes and the restrictive allocation of women within the domestic sphere characterised Western feminist struggles of the second half of the twentieth century; their fundamental slogan, inspired by Carol Hanish’s speech in the 1960s, was ‘the personal is political’.Footnote ⁸² This was a process of acknowledging the political implications of personal life which took place in Europe and the United States from the 1960s onwards. Chilean society saw a similar process two decades later, during Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990), under the slogan ‘democracia en el país y en la casa’ (democracy in the country and at home).Footnote ⁸³ Such a movement sought to eliminate the limits imposed on women when opposing public and private fields,Footnote ⁸⁴ and to render publicly visible and accountable the privately oppressive situations in which women around the world were treated as objects. Similarly, several ‘private’ actions – such as writing – became political per se, insofar as they allowed women to defy ‘the status quo of masculinist thinking’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Philosophically speaking, one key outcome of introducing personal life into the public arena was the rejection of the notion of victimhood against a ‘universal oppressor-man’,Footnote ⁸⁶ recognising instead the existence of multiple layers of oppression and marginalisation. Black Feminism had an important role here, with the introduction of intersectionality as a fundamental framework for feminist theory. Such a paradigm allowed feminism to convey that violence against women has oftentimes entailed other identity aspects such as race or class.Footnote ⁸⁷ Post-colonial and decolonial feminisms both build on the intersectionality framework to pursue a better understanding of the complicated and interconnected natures of oppression that colonial endeavours have imposed over colonised peoples. They also both go a step further to warn against the discriminatory dangers of ‘othering’ when misusing the categories of difference. An example is the use of the category of third-world women by Western feminists – often both misrepresenting and silencing real third world women.Footnote ⁸⁸ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggests that ‘hegemonic First World intellectual practices’, feminism included, produce ‘the colonial object’.Footnote ⁸⁹ With regard to Western feminism, she identified these ‘othered’ colonial objects as the ‘gendered subalterns’ who were virtually forced to adopt Western feminists’ episteme.Footnote ⁹⁰

Similarly, the ‘decolonial turn’ in Latin America has meant an interrogation of the epistemic construction of America as ‘a product of modernity … [whereby] Europe constitutes itself against its peripheral reference’.Footnote ⁹¹ Such epistemic construction has involved the establishment of hierarchic dichotomies between ‘human and non-human’Footnote ⁹² on the one hand, and the institution of homogenising categories that make minority identities disappear, on the other. In this regard, Ochy Curiel argues that Hispanic American nations were built under a ‘mestizaje ideology’ by virtue of which blackness and indigeneity have tended to disappear under the homogenising category of the mestizo. The mestizo category has also silenced (and thus perpetuated) the social, political, cultural, and gendered discrimination against black and indigenous people in Latin American and Caribbean countries.Footnote ⁹³ The main contemporary concerns of decolonial-antiracist-feminist scholars and activists thus relate to overcoming the idea of universal oppression sustained by academia, which has perpetuated hierarchies through ‘apparently liberating movements (such as [Western] feminism)’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Moreover, the concept of intersectionality has been highly instrumental to emphasise the pertinence of the connexions between race and gender in the Hispanic American colonisation process, and the consequent recognition of women’s dual subordination in terms of these two identities.Footnote ⁹⁵

Indeed, the intersectionality framework is highly pertinent when analysing the history of women’s gender struggles in the Chilean context, which has been divided between dissimilar experiences of discrimination and consequent conflicting interests as well. While the colonial experience has affected whole populations, it has done so differently across the social spectrum. That said, and at the risk of taking part in essentialising conceptualisations – which I am doing my very best to avoid – I have chosen to use the problematic term of subaltern throughout this Element to refer to dissimilar female subjects under dissimilar situations of subordination in Chile, but who have an essential aspect in common: they do not belong to the creole aristocracy. Thus, their fight against the patriarchal system has been radically different from that undertaken by women aristocrats, the latter being the ones obtaining more visible results. In this sense, the subaltern women’s struggle against patriarchy remains unfinished. I will thus proceed to review the history of the Chilean cantora – which, in many aspects, coincides with the history of Chilean subaltern women – as framed within the broader context of gender construction in Latin America.

3.1 Gender Construction in Folklore and popular Culture

The gender norms and identities imposed by the colonising process can also be observed in local customs and popular traditions. In the case of Chile, the cueca genre is an interesting arena to analyse such aspects. As with many other Latin American dances – like cumbia in Colombia, or tango in Argentina – the Chilean cueca has developed through ambivalent paths between social recognition and prohibition. Written records of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are centred on the discussion of its origins and its ethnic influences, in the broader context of the construction of the nation and its symbols. One can easily find in those writings the appearance of two types of cueca: one that was a recognised and celebrated ballroom dance, and the other, a despised and often prohibited one, associated with a group of popular picaresque dances which took place in urban taverns and brothels. This environment was constituted by the exuberance of popular sociality and behaviours, whose rejection by elites is well-documented. Already from the 1820s, we can find evidence of such contemptuous views:

Such contemptuous, moralistic, and condescending comments clearly evidence the culturally constructed social/racial codes that dominant white observers assign to the peoples’ bodies. Once again, we see the saint/sinner dichotomy, this time applied through racial categories, where white people are related to sanctity whereas non-white people are associated with sin,Footnote ¹²¹ thus revealing the intersectional nature of colonial oppression. The result is the prevalence of Eurocentric critical discourses over the cultural and aesthetic values of a festive racialised popular culture and its expressions, one such being the cueca.

Over time, these hegemonic patriarchal values have pervaded popular cultures, becoming visible across Latin American folklore, and of course, in the cueca genre as well. By means of thorough archival research, musicologist Felipe SolísFootnote ¹²² wrote about the patriarchal principles that are omnipresent in most Chilean cueca poetry. Lyrics featuring open violence against women or pejorative female role assignments are found in innumerable traditional cuecas that remain widely disseminated to this day. The following fragment of the popular ‘Chicha de Curacaví’ (Table 1) is an example of violence as openly expressed by a male figure.Footnote ¹²³

Table 1Chicha de Curacaví (fragment)

Another (dramatic) example is found in a cueca collected by Violeta Parra around 1957 from rural cantora María Alejandrina Tapia, denouncing a woman’s physical abuse at the hands of first her father and later her husband (Table 2). This song was later included on her LP, La Cueca Cantada por Violeta Parra (1959).

Table 2Para qué me casaría

Table 3Arremángate el vestido (Mario Catalán, 1951)¹²⁴

Regarding gender roles, a controversial, yet still very popular, cueca was written by the famous singer and composer Mario Catalán, first recorded in 1951. The lyrics give a woman advice on what she has to do in order to get a husband, what men will like about her, and what she has to change once she has ‘secured’ her man.

At the time of its first recording in the 1950s, the cueca’s most prominent style featured guitar, piano, harp and/or accordion accompaniments, mostly in major scales, with a general use of I-V intervals, of a duration of 48 measures or roughly 90 seconds, all of which are present in this particular example. The stylistic nuances of this urban popular variant include a swung-paced instrumental interpretation; a high-pitched nasal singing style by male singers, featuring off-beat beginnings; 3/4 or 6/8 metres (often alternating, creating hemiolas); and syncopated paces that worked to hide the downbeat and stressing the second and third quavers (or fifth and sixth correspondingly: see Figure 1). Also, singing in this style involved a recreation of the canto a la rueda (singing wheel) tradition of the first half of the twentieth century, where participants continuously improvised cueca songs forming a circle in the context of night-life festive social environments. The four song stanzas were orderly distributed following the circle formed by the cantores, who sung in parallel thirds or sixths, and in high pitches (possibly reaching G₄ or even A₄), called canto gritado (shouty singing). This traditional way of singing was replicated in the recording industry, becoming a distinctive feature of the urban popular cueca style. The stylistic nuances mentioned here became essential features of the revival cuecas since the 1990s, as a way to glorify a formerly disparaged popular culture. Since its first release, this cueca song has been widely disseminated and re-recorded several times, holding a central position in the musical canon of the current urban popular cueca scene.

Figure 1

Arremángate el vestido (1951) score transcription.

(Source: produced by the author)

Another interesting example of naturalised patriarchal values in cueca poetry is ‘El diablo se fue a bañar’ (The devil went for a swim), which humorously describes a situation of sexual connotation. I have found several different examples of this cueca song, with multiple melodic and lyrical variations, presenting, at the most sexist extreme, homophobic commentary (as featured in the traditional urban popular cueca songbookFootnote ¹²⁵ which includes repertoires belonging to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and the use of graphic sexual metaphors exhibiting masculine pride and somewhat hierarchic gender categories (also in the Isla de la fantasia version, 2009, see Table 4). On the other hand, I have found some examples where musicians with different gender outlooks have replaced these traditional verses with others including more profound messages – ‘La muerte se fue a bañar’ (Death went for a swim), which can be found in the LP La cueca cantada por Violeta Parra (The cueca sung by Violeta Parra), 1959 – a challenge to male overconfidence (Millaray version, which can be found on their LP Cuecas con Brindis [Cuecas with Toasts], 1970), and more empowering feminist statements (Las Mestizas version, 2015, see Table 15). For reasons of space, I will only present two of these examples here. The first one was included on an album called Memoria Porteña (Port Memories), recorded in 2009 in the port city of Valparaíso in an effort to safeguard and revitalise the musical history of the popular singers and musicians who participated in the city’s bohemian life of the mid twentieth century. One of the emblematic places for such bohemian life was once a family house which gradually became the famous communal musical-cultural centre, La Isla de la Fantasía (Fantasy Island). Musicians associated with such a place are also often grouped under the same name, most of whom were featured on this album.

Table 4El diablo se fue a bañar (Isla de la Fantasía, 2009)¹²⁶

Being a part of the urban popular cueca revival, this example is interpreted in the canto a la rueda style, including alternating male singers who sing in parallel thirds with a rhythmic section that comprises a drum kit, a pandero (hexagonal tambourine common to this genre), platos (two ceramic plates rhythmically clacked against each other), and rhythmic thumps on the table, guitars, or other wooden surfaces. This version presents no melodic accompaniment, which heightens the syncopation feel as well as the connection to an informal social gathering rather than a studio recording situation (see Figure 2). All of this highlights the bohemian, festive nature of this musical style, which, during the time evoked by this style (1930s-1960s), was off-limits for women. In the next section, I analyse a different version of this song, recorded by Las Mestizas in 2015 (see Table 15), revealing how they work with the song to subvert some of the gender assumptions included in this example.

Figure 2

El diablo se fue a bañar (2009) score transcription.

(Source: produced by the author)

A restrictive environment of hegemonic masculine culture, as James Scott suggested, allows for the emergence of a disguised culture of resistance, which permanently seeks alternative conditions of existence. Thus, amidst the Chilean elite’s colonial patriarchal order, a culture of resistance has persisted whose expressions have remained underlying in the forms of ‘the zamacueca, … the cueca’, and other forms of troubadouresque popular poetry.Footnote ¹²⁷ In other words, resistance has become evident precisely in the codes of popular festive culture, which eloquently illustrates such a struggle between domination and resistance. Some cueca lyrics appear to be especially revealing about the insubordination of subaltern positions. ‘Ciento Cincuenta Pesos’ is one example. Originally a seguidilla poem, versions of these cueca lyrics can be found in several songs of diverse genres of Hispanic American music, such as an Andalusian seguidilla bolera, a bulería, and a Mexican huasteco song (Table 5), among other versions found in Colombian and other Hispanic American songbooks. Most of the versions I have found contain lyrics that mock the Church’s double standards by portraying the romantic relationship between a widow and a priest.

Table 5Ciento Cincuenta Pesos (bolera fragment)¹²⁸

The sarcastic power of the poem was such that it was actually reported to the Inquisition in 1796,Footnote ¹³⁰ precisely revealing the hegemonic antipathy against picaresque, comic, popular culture discussed earlier. The song was collected by Violeta Parra as well, around the late 1950s from rural cantora Eduvigis Candia, and later recorded in a duo with her sister Hilda Parra, calling themselves Las Hermanas Parra. In their version (Table 6), the mockery extends from the Church to all men when the lyrics invite women to cheat on their husbands and ‘flounce up their dresses’.

Table 6Ciento Cincuenta Pesos (cueca fragment)¹²⁹

These bold lyrics suggest the potential for subaltern resistance in the form of a ‘wise mockery of the established order’Footnote ¹³² which resorts to humour as the unforgiving weapon of anonymous popular cultures ‘to ridicule the owners of power’.Footnote ¹³³ One last example of cuecas of this sort, also collected by Violeta Parra during the late 1950s from rural cantora Sebastiana Castillo, is ‘El Cuartel’ (Table 7), which directly evidences the mistrust against military power as it has often been used by dominant elites to control the people of their own territory.

Table 7El Cuartel (fragment)¹³¹

While there are a few more examples of this mischievous critique of the establishment in the cantora’s traditional repertoires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – many of them collected and disseminated by Violeta Parra, whom I will return to in a later subsection – most of the lyrics of the Chilean cueca reflect a situation of women’s inferiority and prescriptive patriarchal norms. Such norms prioritised women’s limits within marital and reproductive life, while strictly condemning all behaviours deviating from such Catholic monogamous heteronormative rules, such as women’s infidelity, prostitution and homosexuality.Footnote ¹³⁴

At a given moment around the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, Chilean subalterns began to rise up against their unfair living conditions, producing a more revolutionary popular poetry whereby they would protest in order to liberate ‘the slave who used to sing … «in tune with their own chains»’.Footnote ¹³⁵ This new revolutionary impetus had to do with the consolidation of a movement that, from around 1890, began to engage in political action against the dominant classes’ systematic abuse.Footnote ¹³⁶ Demonstrations were met with brutal repression, raising public awareness of the need for social change,Footnote ¹³⁷ which gradually contributed to popular poetry of the time being marked by signs of resistance. This chant of resistance has remained in Chilean popular expressions, taking multiple shapes and nuances under the historical development of the Chilean society. One of the most highly documented of these popular poetic forms is the décima strophe, which is employed in several forms of improvisational games and traditions. The décima is also a fine example of the gendered impositions and restrictions imposed on cantoras and their practice, while revealing some of the most emblematic cases of their counter-hegemonic expressions, with some archival poetic verses as testimony (Table 8).

Table 8Décima verse by a feminist pipiola in 1830¹³⁸

a

b

Décima practitioner – or decimistaFootnote ¹⁴¹ – Rosa Araneda (ca.1850–1894) is another exemplary case. In developing her poetic practice, Araneda had to face the continuous questioning and critique of fellow male poets. They even went so far as to claim that her male partner, Daniel Meneses, wrote her verses for her,Footnote ¹⁴² from which she had to defend herself (see Table 9).

Table 9Rosa Araneda’s defence (fragment)¹⁴⁰

Antonio Acevedo defended Araneda’s authorship in light of her artistic superiority against any other male poet who might have been credited with being the real author of her verses.Footnote ¹⁴³

German philologist Rodolfo Lenz (1863–1938), who devoted his research to nineteenth-century poetic-musical traditions in Chile, maintained that there existed clear boundaries between the poetic-musical activity of men and women in the Chilean countryside. In his account, women were more closely related to roles of entertainer and interpreter, and men to those of improvisator and creator. Furthermore, the male subdivision of Chilean folk traditions was devoted to improvisational practices and the décima strophe, with a considerable historical (Catholic) religious influence and with a more serious tone. The practice was accompanied by the guitarrón, a 25-string guitar-like instrument, also mostly played by men.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ On the other hand, Lenz associated the female subdivision of Chilean folklore with the cheerful genres of the cueca and the tonada. One of the first characteristics that emerge when investigating the figure of the cantora is her role as the entertainer and hostess of the feast in rural contexts. With her guitar, she animated festivities, creole sports and games, meetings, and other social events, being the main access to festive music.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Lenz’s seminal text has laid the foundations for a long-standing historiographical tradition that has ignored the presence of women in the canto a lo poeta tradition. Nonetheless, there is a fair amount of documentation containing evidence of such a presence.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Before Rosa Araneda, the nun Tadea García de la Huerta (1750–1827), commonly known as Sor Tadea De San Joaquín, improvised verses as early as the eighteenth century. She wrote the verses of an extensive historical narration of the Mapocho River overflow in Santiago in 1783. Her confessor often asked her to write or recite religious poetry as to ‘test Sor Tadea’s vivid intellect’, even challenging her to improvise, a test in which ‘she always resulted triumphant’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ During the nineteenth century, aside from the aforementioned Rosa Araneda, there was Magdalena Aguirre, a virtuous guitarrón practitionerFootnote ¹⁴⁸ who is rarely mentioned in historiographic accounts of the instrument. And in the twentieth century, Águeda Zamorano (1919–2005) and Violeta Parra (1917–1967) appear as notable figures in the world of the décima. Zamorano was a female worker and union leader in the shoe industry, and she was the president of the Asociación de Cantores y Poetas Populares (Popular Singers and Poets Society) during the 1950s. She prolifically wrote décima verses, many of which were published between 1952 and 1957 in El Siglo (The Century), a communist newspaper. Violeta Parra is perhaps the most influential case. A large part of her work reflects how she exceptionally mastered the male-dominated art of the décima – which she most often used to manifest political dissent, entering another male-dominated arena: that of political activism and public life. On the other hand, the creative component of her artistic and musical work is undeniable. She was an excellent interpreter of peasant traditions, and an exceptional artistic, musical, and poetic creator. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Violeta Parra has been perhaps the most important reference for women in Chilean music.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Her ability to transgress the gender norms for female musicians of her time, and her efforts to salvage certain expressions of a popular culture otherwise permanently disparaged by a hegemonic class that prioritised colonially inherited ‘civilising’ values, have made her highly relevant in the Chilean musical landscape.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

3.2 The cantora as Embodied by Violeta Parra

Violeta Parra was born in 1917 in San Fabián de Alico, a village in central Chile, around 250 miles south of Santiago. She absorbed her knowledge of popular music and poetic traditions from her father, a music teacher. Upon his death, when Violeta was twelve, she and her siblings had to sustain themselves through performing in nearby cities and villages from a young age, until they moved permanently to Santiago in 1932. Her performing activities briefly ceased in 1938 when she married Luis Cereceda and devoted herself to bringing up their children. From 1944, however, she gradually started performing again with a Spanish repertoire that granted her some public recognition and the artistic name of ‘Violeta de Mayo’ (May Violet).Footnote ¹⁵¹ This renewed artistic life brought incessant conflict into her marriage, which ended in 1948.

Around that time, she and her sister Hilda formed Las Hermanas Parra duo, which gave life to diverse repertoires, incorporating Chilean cuecas and tonadas, most of which they recorded between 1949 and 1952 with RCA Victor. This project brought them broader public recognition as folklore artists. Even when the Parra sisters enjoyed ample attention within the prominent folkloric music scene of those years, their artistic approach focused more on the popular aesthetics of local cantoras and poets, through which they incorporated a mischievous social critique into the scene.

After almost two decades of a prolific career as a performer Violeta’s trajectory took a turn in 1952 towards learning, collecting, and interpreting the music of the rural and urban poor, which had no representation in the music industries. Encouraged by her brother, Nicanor, she gradually began to collect such music both in the countryside and from rural migrants in the city. This new path earned her several prizes and invitations to radio programmes, seasonal educational workshops, international festivals, and so on.Footnote ¹⁵² One of them was an invitation to participate in the World Youth Festival in Warsaw, held in 1955.Footnote ¹⁵³ During her stay (1955–1956), she experienced perhaps the greatest tragedy of her life when her infant daughter, Rosa Clara, died in late 1955. A desolate mother, woman, and artist, she decided to stay in Europe, arriving later in Paris where she was warmly welcomed. There she recorded some of her most famous original songs, such as ‘La Jardinera’ (The [female] Gardener). It was also during this time that she came across the Parisian Latin American folkloric scene for the first time. Such a scene was a result of the exchange dynamics proper to a Latin American folkloric boom which eventually led to the nueva canción (new song) musical-political movement of the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Upon her return in late 1956 and until 1960, she undertook extensive research on folk practices across the southern region of Bio Bio, in close collaboration with Universidad de Concepción, founding the Museo Nacional del Arte Folklórico Chileno in 1958. Several new albums emerged during this research period. Most of the songs referenced earlier belong to these compilations. The musical style that Parra adopted during this time reveals how she intended to remain close to the traditional cantora popular referent through her performative style, which includes the simple texture of just her voice and guitar, a rhythmic richness produced by complex guitar strumming and syncopated singing, and a particular vocal placement in high pitches (frequently reaching E₅) that emulated the cantora popular singing style.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Between 1961 and 1965 she resided in Europe for the second time, and this period consolidated her trajectory as a cantautora or singer-songwriter. As a folklorist, she directed her efforts towards a critical perspective of Chile’s structural social injustice by retrieving part of the disparaged culture of subaltern cantoras and popular poets. As a cantautora, such social critique acquired more radical tones through verses that denounced the political abuse of the ruling classes, with multiple examples, such as ‘La Carta’ (The Letter, see Table 10). Several of her political songs, including ‘La Carta’, were only posthumously discovered, however, as they were deemed too revolutionary for public release by Parra at the time of their composition.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Table 10La Carta (fragment)¹⁵⁶

The songs that she composed during this period reflect most notably how she stylistically moved away from the romantic peasant imaginaries that modelled the aristocratic concept of national identity, to adopt styles that stood closer to the Latin Americanist inspirations of the nueva cancion. Although most of her socially engaged songs remained hidden from the public eye, they were distributed within Parra’s inner circle of musicians and artists. She thus initiated a tradition of protest song through vernacular musics, which was later taken up by nueva canción musicians, who labelled her as the ‘mother’Footnote ¹⁵⁸ or the ‘authentic founder’Footnote ¹⁵⁹ of such a musical-political movement. Violeta Parra returned to Chile in 1965, setting up La Carpa de La Reina (the Queen’s Tent). This was a sort of large marquee, a temporary structure that served both as her home and a community centre. Sponsored by Fernando Castillo Velasco, then Mayor of La Reina district in Santiago, it was dedicated to traditional popular music education and dissemination. This is where she spent the last years of her life, before tragically committing suicide in 1967.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Since then, her fame would only grow, establishing her as the referent par excellence of each cantor and cantora from the nueva canción or New Chilean Song until today.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Contemporary urban cantoras have often found in Violeta Parra a gateway to Chilean vernacular music, female musicianship, and musical activism. The combination of roles embodied by Parra and how she conducted her life as a folklorist, composer, researcher, mother, household administrator, and an advocate against injustice resonates with many of the challenges and aspirations experienced by cantoras today.Footnote ¹⁶² Moreover, Violeta Parra offered them a renewed model of transgression through engaging in multifaceted aesthetic approaches that made her music(s) unclassifiable, thus developing what Lorena Valdebenito called her ‘multiform musical authorship’.Footnote ¹⁶³ Such creative freedom also allowed her to both abandon the stylised peasant referent predominant on the Chilean folk music scene – offering in turn a reinterpretation of the discredited festive popular culture – and to burst into male-dominated music scenes such as those of the décima, the nueva canción – a movement of ‘revolutionary masculinity’Footnote ¹⁶⁴ – and even that of art music.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Lastly, the social critique she expressed through her poetry opened up a space that had historically been largely inaccessible to both cantoras and vernacular musical practices. In the next section I explore how contemporary cantoras have built on this unprecedented role, establishing a historical continuity.

The past three decades have seen a popular culture and urban folklore revival process in Chile, wherein subaltern groups have found a space to build and exercise their popular resistance within political, social, and gendered spheres.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ In terms of the elite’s oppression of subaltern groups, Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990) can be seen as an echo of the domination mechanisms employed during the colonial period.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Likewise, this revitalisation process of popular musical practices and traditions – which started upon the return to democracy in the 1990s – can be interpreted as emerging mechanisms of subaltern resistance. Women’s massive irruption into the genres of the cueca and the décima can illustrate such mechanisms. In the case of the cueca genre, resistance is expressed through changes deployed by women on certain sexist unspoken rules and customs within the contemporary practice of the genre, such as vocal uses, performative styles, and patriarchal lyrics.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In the case of the décima, the sole act of a woman performing on stage and playing the guitarrón is revolutionary, and it was only allowed for the first time in 1998, when Cecilia Astorga (1967–2024) was officially recognised as a payadora and invited to perform and improvise décima songs at a public event.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ In the following section, drawing on ethnographic material collected during my PhD between 2016 and 2018, I examine the discourses and activities of contemporary cantoras and female cueca groups who are currently developing these new artistic approaches.

4.1 Cantoras during the Twentieth Century

While throughout the eighteenth century the cantora became consolidated as a figure of social and cultural relevance among local rural and semi-rural communities, during the nineteenth century the new republic’s civilising project made it virtually impossible for women to keep pursuing their economic independence through festive musical practices. In the course of the twentieth century, thanks to heightened developments in the cinematographic and music industries, the figure of the (formerly peasant) cantora – who gradually relocated from ranchos into urban tenements on the outskirts of the city – underwent several stylistic transformations. During these urban developments, they held ambivalent roles. According to contemporary cantora Miloska Valero (1981), who remembers the testimonies of her great-grandmother, also a cantora, it

Since the emergence of mass-cultures in Chile during the 1920s, new and more egalitarian modes of sociality emerged where working-class men and women found better opportunities to participate in public life, all of which implied new challenges to the elite’s hegemony. The elite responded through efforts to preserve folkloric traditions that revitalised certain cultural aspects of their landowning past.Footnote ¹⁷¹ In this way, new spaces opened up for cantoras in the music industries, by which they adopted new roles in broadening the access to Chilean folkloric music, with their aesthetics starting to represent an aristocratically fashioned, romanticised peasant imaginary. This is how cantoras became artistic singers by the 1950s, gaining, in some cases, tremendous national and international recognition – especially when participating in the cinema industry. This renovated version of the cantora also came with new gender roles and limitations. Traditional cantoras in the nineteenth-century ranchos had presented themselves in self-curated aesthetics, mastering their repertoires and their guitars, and administering popular amusement around familiar circles – even being labelled as ‘the empress of the fiesta’.Footnote ¹⁷² In contrast, even the most prominent artistic singers of the 1950s often had to be accompanied by male guitarists, who were also in charge of ‘manly’ activities such as contract negotiations, publicity, copyrights, and tour organisations.Footnote ¹⁷³ At the same time, cantoras often took part in radio sketches that reflected openly sexist conceptualisations of women. And even in the cases where these singers managed to rise on their own and succeed within the folkloric music scene, their success was continuously compromised by the social expectations within the limits of marriage, children, and domestic life.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Chabelita Fuentes (1931–2023) was a nationally famous Chilean cantora, founder of the folkloric group Las Morenitas Cantoras (1954–). While in many ways she defied the gender restrictions of her time, creatively leading her artistic project and skilfully playing the guitar and the harp, she was still affected by some of these limitations:

In this sense, while gaining massive recognition within the music industry, cantoras saw a decline in their authority over their own musicianship and creativity – which partly explains why Violeta Parra was such a revolutionary figure in her time. Her lasting national and international prominence is not so much tied to her participation in the music industry, but rather to her academic and political contributions. This is the path that contemporary urban cantoras have sought to retrace and expand since the 1990s.

In Chile, the resurgence of contesting youth cultures and the revival of traditional music that has taken place during the past three decades has coincided with the historical contingencies implicated in the process of return to democracy since 1990 – including the intensification of the feminist struggles that have followed, especially during the last decade. Thus, it is worth acknowledging that such a dynamic revitalisation process has been embedded in a process of substantial cultural, social, and political changes in the country, especially concerning women’s social situation. In this sense, the process of insertion of women into male-dominated music-poetic worlds – especially those of the décima and the urban-popular cueca – accurately illustrates this paradigmatic cultural change. As historian and cantora Leslie Becerra narrates, it is about reclaiming access to a practice that has historically belonged to the cantora lineage:

As we will see, this sort of re-appropriation of female traditional festive musical practices has been infused by contemporary feminist ideas, which have affected how the cantoras have been able to endure and challenge a persistent patriarchal hostility in the context of their musical practice.

During the last decades, fourth wave feminism has deepened its analysis over the issue of gender-based violence. Such analysis emerged in feminist theory since the concept of femicide – defined as the killing of women because of their status as women – was first coined by Diana Russell in 1976.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Although some institutional steps have been taken to tackle this since the 1970s,Footnote ¹⁷⁷ the problem continues to be of high relevance and validity in the present time.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ In this context, during the past decade, the articulation of a robust feminist movement has taken place across Latin America, starting in Argentina and spreading globally. Under the slogan of Ni una menos (not one [woman] less), the first public demonstrations occurred in June 2015 due to the murder of two women in Argentina, which detonated massive protests in several Argentinean cities, as well as in Santiago (Chile) and Montevideo (Uruguay). Since then, the movement has spread internationally, making a huge impact. Social networks have held an important role in connecting feminist organisations and individual women across the world who have been able to exchange theoretical, political and practical aspects of their demands, as well as their particular experiences of violence, thus reaching large scales.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ The following subsections delve into how contemporary cantoras have taken part in this process, and how they have endured, denounced, and challenged ongoing patriarchal oppression through diverse creative approaches.

4.2 Remnants of Colonial Culture in Contemporary cantora Practice

To briefly recapitulate, the two main oppressive patriarchal legacies of the colonial period discussed earlier operated through (1) dimensions of class and race, concerning the elite’s aversion to popular culture; and also through (2) a gender dimension, with regard to the patriarchal restriction over women’s creative practice and access to public life.

In terms of the elite’s aversion to popular culture, it is important to note that the process of revitalisation of urban folkloric traditions that has been ongoing in Chile since the return to democracy has held an emphasis on the popular aspect of such traditions. In this sense, considering that the practices women have burst into during the past few decades are not elite but rather popular, these colonial legacies are here expressed through external reactions from hegemonic circles against these renewed interpretations of tradition. An example of this happened in 2000, during Ricardo Lagos’s presidency inauguration ceremony. The male group Los Chileneros were invited to perform along with dancers Rita Núñez and Hiranio Chávez – all of them emblematic representatives of the urban popular cueca style that has been revived since the 1990s – in a formal musical presentation. This event was a strikingly important milestone, as it was the first time in many decades that a cueca not related to nationalist representations of Chilean identity was presented at such an official event. Moreover, it was the first time that this urban popular cueca was given the dignity and recognition of being presented as a showcase of Chilean culture in front of a huge international audience of fifteen presidents and seventy international delegations. Evidently, it was condemned by people in hegemonic circles, with parliament members even writing an official letter to denounce the style of cueca that was performed in such an important public act:

Such external criticism is also expressed by the fact that the current practice of this kind of cueca as a social ritual – where large groups of young people recurrently get together in several cities across Chile to improvise cueca songs from evening until dawn – has struggled to find regular authorised venues, being oftentimes rejected by neighbours and displaced by local governing institutions.Footnote ¹⁸¹

On the other hand, an internal conflict observed within the class dimension of this urban-popular cueca relates to the identification with and performance of the roto archetype – a Chilean urban popular character – in the practice. This performative style has often entailed a masculinising representation of working-class and sometimes lumpen backgrounds, frequently creating hostile environments of competition, challenge, sexism, and unsafety. It has hence generated tensions in the context of the female entrance into this music scene.Footnote ¹⁸²

The second colonial legacy – restrictions over women’s access to public life and creative practices – operated through a gender dimension, thus exhibiting abundant examples of the way it functions today, imposing limits over the practice of contemporary cantoras. As argued earlier, two patriarchal principles sustained such restrictions: (1) the position of women in the dichotomy between saint and sinner; and (2) women’s consideration and treatment as (passive) objects. These two principles are expressed in the contemporary cantora practice in several different ways. The association between women and sin can be observed in contemporary scenes of Chilean traditional music through a persistent exclusion of women from particular male-dominated spaces and traditions which, as in colonial times, mostly relate to nightlife and certain urban settings:

4.3 Contemporary Urban cantoras Subversion Mechanisms

While examples like the ones presented earlier still abound on the scenes of urban popular traditional music in Chile, women have found ways to subvert those limiting mechanisms, giving rise to fairer and more inclusive conditions to develop their cantora activities. I do not discuss the class/race legacy of the aversion to popular culture in this subsection as, given the popular nature of this music scene, the subversive mechanisms developed to counterbalance such a legacy are not intrinsic to contemporary cantoras but rather to the whole variety of participants on the scene, no matter what gender they identify with. On the other hand, regarding the gendered legacy of patriarchal restrictions against women’s active, creative and public activities, it is worth presenting the wide range of strategies they have developed in order to challenge the limits imposed on them; I have grouped these limits into different categories, as shown next.

We have seen that one of the immediate consequences of the association between women and sin has to do with the confinement of women within private spheres, limiting their access to the public both in terms of mobility and of writing, thus affecting their chances of building up their voices as women and making themselves heard among wide audiences. Contemporary cantoras have thus worked to challenge such limitations through diverse mechanisms.

Between Saints and Sinners: Making Women’s Voices Heard

Cantora and payadora Caro López has explained to me how, in her writing, she aims to deliver a multifaceted poetic expression, stating that cantoras need to engage in more intricate poetry in order to continue broadening women’s path in the world of Chilean popular poetry. For her, this means going beyond the mere statement of being women entering the worlds of men, to actually be able to raise women’s philosophical, ideological, and aesthetic discourses:

… it’s OK to sometimes position oneself as a feminist woman, but today I see several things. As a payadora, the sexism that I experience is tough, and the more I have gotten involved, the more difficult it has gotten. [If] I get on stage with the [payadores] …, I don’t have to say that I am a woman so much because they can see that I am a woman. … What do we want to say? What interests us? … Men set out their topics [without second thoughts or explanations], you see, they don’t constantly affirm ‘I am a man.’ In the end, it means standing on the same level as [men] do. And that one can do through discourse. It is not about constantly saying ‘I’m a woman, I’m a woman.’ It’s an exercise that we haven’t come to master yet because it is too new, both in the cueca and in the paya [traditions].

(Personal communication, 15 November 2017)

Flor de Juanas is a cueca ensemble created with the aim of making an innovative cueca by presenting it in a new format, never before attempted: a murga cuequera. Murga is a form of Uruguayan popular musical theatre usually performed during carnival season. According to Josi Villanueva (1983–), the band leader, just as the murga is the Uruguayan carnival, the cueca is the carnival of Chile. For Josi, one of the greatest motivations of this project is to be able to, through innovative aesthetics, set out a female point of view on the scene:

We talk about women … in every sense of the word. Beyond political or politically correct standpoints, we speak from the gut. Women go through stuff, and that can be described through the cueca, … through singing, see? … And it is necessary because the cueca is the queen of the party, but we must say more things, … and use this space to say what we think, what we feel, you have to throw everything up … women’s voice is necessary, it’s strong, it’s powerful, and it is powerful to see fourteen female singers on stage, expressing themselves from [their] women perspectives; … that already makes an impression.

(Josi Villanueva, personal communication, 12 January 2017)

Alongside being denied access to public life, women’s voices have been denied access to the sphere of ‘the serious’. This has reinforced their stereotype as entertainers in local festivities with exclusively cheerful and light songs. However, especially during the last decade, cueca music in Chile has held a relevant role in terms of denouncing injustice, and cantoras have played an integral part in this process.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ An example is Las Indignadas (The Outraged [Women]), a cueca group that emerged in response to the social demands related to the student protest movement in 2011. They started supporting community and political activities related to student demonstrations and also to other working-class demands in and around Santiago. ‘We started with traditional repertoires, and at a given moment, there was the need for writing cueca songs that spoke of [the causes] we were supporting’ (personal communication, Kathy Soto, January 2018). Although many supported them because they filled an empty gap in the world of the cueca, they also had multiple detractors:

Many said that we didn’t sing cuecas. They said that the cueca couldn’t be related to political issues. They said it behind our backs, because, as we were women, nobody told us [directly], and later we would find out that people were saying these things.

(Kathy Soto, Personal communication, 18 January 2018)

The soloist Miloska Valero has also addressed social and political issues through popular poetry, along with other more general topics. Social injustice has been a particularly sensitive topic in her life, and she wrote a cueca song (Table 11) about it when she was seventeen years old.

Table 11Se me acaba la paciencia (Miloska Valero)¹⁸⁵

Regarding the consideration and treatment of women as passive objects, contemporary cantoras have worked to challenge this patriarchal principle in terms of asserting and empowering their creative, poetic, and musical skills; in terms of denouncing violence against women; and in terms of confronting the views of women as mere bodies.

Women as Passive Objects: Denouncing Violence against Women

On the scene of Chilean urban popular musical practices, the number of cueca songs and décima poems written to denounce violence against women is today becoming increasingly high. Cantora and payadora Caro López composed one such cueca song, inspired by the case of Nabila Rifo, a woman who was brutally attacked by her ex-husband in 2016. This was a high-profile case in Chile, firstly, because of the cruelty of the attack (in which, after beating her until she fell unconscious, the attacker gouged the victim’s eyes out). Secondly, because around a year later the Supreme Court ruled to lower the sentence from twenty-six years (for frustrated femicide and serious injuries) to eighteen years, as the evidence was not enough to demonstrate the attacker’s intention of murder, therefore eliminating the charge of frustrated femicide. This generated fury among the public and accusations against the Chilean State for sponsoring sexist violence. Caro López wrote a cueca song about this for a festival, though it did not get selected (Table 12).

Table 12Uno que juró quererte (Caro López)¹⁸⁶

This song is part of her first album Una mujer como usté (A woman like you) (2017), which received the national recognition of Premios Pulsar (a music prize granted by the Chilean Copyrights Society [SCD]) in 2019. Both her poetry and her musical approach in this song express her intention to honour the anonymous, popular, subaltern women of Chile, recognising her role as a cantora in ‘making visible the complaints of the people, or of a part of the people: women’ (Caro López, personal communication, 16 August 2017). She adopted a style that directly refers to the cantora popular much in the way Violeta Parra did back in her days (see Section 3.2), by singing on her own with her syncopated strummed guitar, which was tuned in a traditional peasant fashion called ‘Guitarra Traspuesta’ (transposed guitar),Footnote ¹⁸⁷ and by creating a melody that stylistically approached the cantora popular referent, featuring a major scale and repeating I-V intervals (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

Caro López, Uno que juró quererte (2017) score transcription.

(Source: produced by the author)

In the context of the urban cueca scene in Valparaíso, some cases of physical sexist abuse were outspoken and actively rejected by cantoras and other supporters. In this scenario, based on experiences of gender violence in their local environment, Tatiana Passy Lucero (La Taty) composed ‘Mal Sueño’ (Bad Dream).

This cueca song (Table 13) is part of her award-winning album, Küla (2020), featured among the top 20 in the October 2021 World Music Charts Europe.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ La Taty is a cantora, craftswoman (luthier), musician, and researcher who has travelled around Chile and South America to learn and experience the traditional sounds in the region. Her musical approach is thus infused with incredibly diverse sounds which she cleverly combines with contemporary folk and pop music, as featured in this example. Here, she presents a slow-paced 6/8 cueca rhythm marked by the pandero, merged with a steady 3/4 rhythm marked by the drums and reinforced by the double-bass, both emphasising beats 2 and 3. All of this is accompanied by an acoustic guitar that is rhythmically plucked, while an electric guitar, a synthesiser, and a violin introduce short melodic solo-like phrases filling the silent spaces. The minor scales and more complex harmonic arrangement immediately situate this cueca song in an urban setting, as opposed to rural representations which are mostly characterised by featuring major scales and I-V intervals (see Figure 4). La Taty presents a pop song singing style which mixes a quiet, breathy vocal placement with mild belting technique, revealing her intention to subtly move away from the traditional canto a la rueda singing style, where the one who sings loudest is the toughest, and thus the one who triumphs.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ It also reveals her intention to add a certain musical complexity while at the same time remaining loyal to the traditional substance of the urban popular cueca sound.

Table 13Mal Sueño (Tatiana Passy Lucero)¹⁸⁸

Figure 4

Tatiana Passy Lucero, Mal Sueño (2020) score transcription.

(Source: produced by the author)

Women as Passive Objects: Rejecting the Belief in Women as Mere Bodies

Las Pecadoras (2009–) constitute a fine example of a cueca group that aims to introduce women’s perspectives into the urban popular cueca scene, and they mainly do this through poetry. Most of their cuecas have been written by their band leader, Daniela Meza (1982–), who either creates new songs or modifies traditional ones in order to eliminate certain patriarchal values that are embedded within the lyrical language of the cueca. An example of this is their new version of the famous ‘Arremángate el Vestido’ (Table 14; see Table 3 for original version), which they included on their album Cuecas por Rebeldía (Rebel Cuecas), interpreted by the established Valparaíso cueca singer, Lucy Briceño (1931–).

Table 14Arremángate el vestido (Las Pecadoras)¹⁹¹

In this song, the lyrics replace the views of women as requiring to present certain physical traits or attitudes in order to be more desirable to men (see Table 3) with an empowering perspective of women rolling their dresses up and dancing freely, just to release their power and to ‘make death tremble’; thus, the belief that women are mere bodies destined for men’s pleasure is challenged. These kinds of cueca songs are written in a way that replaces sexist contents and includes feminist or gender-perspective lyrics; they are commonly called contra-cuecas (counter-cuecas).Footnote ¹⁹³

In terms of the music, this example features melodic and rhythmic characteristics that are quite similar to the 1951 version (Figure 1), the main differences resting on instrumentation, incorporating the accordion and the more contemporary sound of the drum kit. Also, while both versions are in the same key signature, the original version is sung by men and the present one is sung by a woman, Lucy Briceño, one of the few female historical referents of urban popular cueca in Valparaíso. She sings in a low pitch (between G₃ and F#₄, see Figure 5), alongside a male singer who accompanies her doing parallel thirds. Her low-pitched singing is due to the fact that, back in the mid twentieth century, urban traditional cantoras in Valparaíso had to adapt their pitches to those of their most commonly male band partners, who were often the ones who played the instruments.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Such a female vocal approach started to change with the post-1990 eruption of contemporary cantoras onto the scene, who gradually adopted higher pitches while rightfully incorporating themselves as instrumentalists.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

Figure 5

Arremángate el vestido (2016), arr. Daniela Meza score transcription.

(Source: produced by the author)

Another contra-cueca was written in 2015 by Las Mestizas, an all-female cueca band born in Valparaíso in 2014, at a time when most of the cantoras that participated on the urban popular cueca scene, and who were few in number, became mothers, thus acquiring new requirements in order to continue to practice the tradition.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ The original version’s lyrics presented sexist humour resorting to certain graphic allegories that revealed male pride during sexual intercourse; such pride, however, implicitly brought about a hierarchical order where women were placed in a passive position (see Table 4). Las Mestizas’s version (Table 15) directly embraced the sexual tone of the lyrics but redefining its gender perspective when celebrating women’s sexual freedom, and taking away any sort of hierarchical elements.

Table 15La diabla se fue a bañar (Las Mestizas, 2015)¹⁹⁷

The melody of this song was composed by cantora Manuela Venegas (1990–), stylistically complying with the peasant cantora referent by featuring major scales and I-V intervals. At the same time, the canto a la rueda referent can be identified in the instrumentation (with the piano and the platos as the most characteristic of that style) and in the rueda alternating singing style. In contrast with the previous example, here the cantoras reach higher tones (the melody ranging from C₄ to C₅, see Figure 6), making the most of their natural vocal ranges rather than adapting to male vocal ranges. In this sense, both poetically and musically, this example reveals how cantoras are subverting the belief in women as passive objects and mere bodies.

Figure 6

La diabla se fue a bañar (2015), arr. Manuela Venegas score transcription.

(Source: produced by the author)

On a different note, we saw in the example of Las Torcazas earlier how cantoras in the Chilean music industry have largely been compelled to conform to certain traditional aesthetic stereotypes, thus revealing how their physical appearance was more important than their musical creations. Challenging these stereotypes and proposing new, innovative, and liberating aesthetics was, at the time of the interview, one the central aims of the all-female cueca band, Calila Lila. According to cantora Paulina Martínez (1991–), they wanted to change the image of the cueca, bringing it together with the contemporary world of drama, the professional background of most of the band members. Thus, they used to perform with masks inspired by traditional urban popular characters, offering an exciting, colourful, and radical visual project that was quite distanced from folkloric aesthetics, ‘using skirts and trousers with bright colours, [with] printed letters and straight lines [rather than the traditional] curves and manuscript typographies’, giving it an ‘electric’ touch. Rather than working from poetry, they based their project on ‘theatricality’, being ‘dedicated to strengthening the scene, for example, because this is our priority, to be able to offer forty minutes of magic’ (Paulina, personal communication, 19 January 2017).

4.4 Cantoras and Violeta Parra in the Political Uprisings in October 2019

As discussed – and against the conventions that limit the cueca only to the festive, setting it apart from the political – several contemporary urban cantoras have maintained strong political discourses in terms of gender and social inequalities. Historically, such a politicised approach to traditional sung-poetry had been attempted by a few cantoras and decimistas who are part of the cantora lineage, such as Rosa Araneda or Águeda Zamorano with their décimas and, most notably, Violeta Parra with her cuecas and décimas. In using the otherwise apolitical genre of the cueca to express and mobilise political dissent (for an example, see Table 18), Violeta Parra set an unprecedented path for future cantoras to follow. Six decades on, the sole fact of practicing the urban popular cueca or improvising with the décima strophe constitutes a political act for some contemporary cantoras. Some others even got involved in direct political activism, which has become increasingly socially validated since 2019, a year in which ‘music has fulfilled a referential role’ for political engagement.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

Table 18Los Pueblos Americanos²⁰⁸

A series of uprisings erupted in Chile in October 2019 to protest about ongoing social inequalities and historical abuses by the ruling class. Women writers, musicians, performers, cantoras and payadoras played a prominent role in providing aesthetic content to these demonstrations, reflecting a movement that had gained force over the previous decade, awakened also by the anti-femicide campaign Ni una menos (Not one [woman] less). An example of such performances is ‘Un violador en tu camino’ (A rapist in your path) by the feminist collective Las Tesis. This has travelled around the world, appearing in numerous feminist protests since the first performance in Santiago in November 2019.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Another example took place in the internationally famous Festival de la Canción de Viña del Mar (Viña del Mar’s Song Festival) – held every year without interruption since 1960. For the second time in the history of the festival (folkloric competition aside), Chilean folk musicians were invited to take the main stage and perform cueca songs.Footnote ²⁰⁰ It was the Chilean artist Mon Laferte (1983–) who gave the space in her show to around fifty cantoras to sing two original cuecas, one written by Charawilla (Table 16), and the other one by the cantora Andrea Andreu, and the payadoras Cecilia Astorga (1967–2024) and Fabiola González, also known as La Chinganera.Footnote ²⁰¹

Table 16Mujer Revolucionaria (by Charawilla)²⁰³

The two cuecas were accompanied by a décima verse, written by Fabiola González and recited by the four cantoras named earlier (Table 17). The politically engaged use of these genres by cantoras in such a prominent cultural event is a powerful homage to the musical activism rehearsed by Violeta Parra in the 1960s, which was, however, deemed ‘too revolutionary for her times’.Footnote ²⁰² Several decades later, contemporary cantoras were able to fully embrace and expand this subversive historical role.

Table 17El canto de la mujer²⁰⁴

Undeniably, this was a historical moment for female Chilean music, and especially for the Chilean cantoras. It is not just about popular female singers being able to sing to the people on a mainstream platform of the size of the festival, because that has happened several times before in history – with Palmenia Pizarro (1941–), Myriam Hernández (1965–), and Mon Laferte herself as good examples. It is also about these women singing musical traditions that have been historically excluded from the music industry and, more importantly, from the hegemonic conception of Chilean identity. The exclusion of this music also entailed the elimination of a whole set of popular cultural practices and modes of sociality,Footnote ²⁰⁵ which is why the festival was such a crucial moment. Here, the cantoras once more fulfilled their historical roles – denouncing social injustice and providing a ritual space of popular festivity amidst a turbulent socio-political context – but now from the most prominent musical stage in Chile. It is worth noting that this festival was an essential cultural space during Pinochet’s dictatorship,Footnote ²⁰⁶ always sponsored by the establishment. The fact that it continued to function during the recent riots in Chile was thus evidently complex, with most artists using it as a platform to engage in performances that denounced the social crisis. The presence of the fifty cantoras performing cuecas and décimas on that stage was thus decisively political, effectively opening up a space for the marginalised urban popular music. This reflects how Violeta Parra’s legacy of musical activism continues to confer political and aesthetic substance to contemporary cantoras, who are now reclaiming their political roles. Notably, Parra’s cueca ‘Los Pueblos Americanos’ (The American Peoples, Table 18) was sung by all the contestants of the folkloric competition of the festival in February 2020.Footnote ²⁰⁷