Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics

in Latin American Arts

SENSING DECOLONIAL
AESTHETICS IN
LATIN AMERICAN ARTS

x
Juan G. Ramos

University of Florida Press

Gainesville
Copyright 2018 by Juan G. Ramos
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

SUDAMERICANO EN NUEVA YORK

ALCEN LA BANDERA
Words and Music by ARIEL RAMIREZ and FELIX CESAR LUNA
Copyright © 2005 WARNER CHAPPELL MUSIC ARGENTINA (SADAIC)
All Rights Administered by WB MUSIC CORP.
All Rights Reserved
Used By Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

This book may be available in an electronic edition.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ramos, Juan G., author.
Title: Sensing decolonial aesthetics in Latin American arts / Juan G. Ramos.
Description: Gainesville : University of Florida Press, 2018. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017032198 | ISBN 9781683400240 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Counterculture—Latin America. | Decolonization in art. |
Decolonization in literature. | Aesthetics, Latin American.
Classification: LCC HM647 .R36 2017 | DDC 306/.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032198

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To Ruth, Virginia, Tito, Azu, and J.S.
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1. Sensing Otherwise 19

2. The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses in Antipoetry

and Conversational Poetry 39

3. Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción 92

4. Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema 142

5. Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America 187

Conclusion: Sensing the Irresolute Past in the Present 213

Notes 223

Works Cited 235

Index 251
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Completing this book would not have been possible without the initial
support and motivation of David Lenson, Edwin Gentzler, Jose N. Or-
nelas, and Angel Rivera. As the manuscript took on new directions, I was
extremely fortunate to have the intellectual and moral support of Anto-
nia Carcelén-Estrada, Tara Daly, and Sara Ceroni. Thank you for your en-
couraging words and patience along the way. At the College of the Holy
Cross, my colleagues in the Department of Spanish have been very sup-
portive throughout the entire publication process, particularly Isabel Ál-
varez-Borland, Cynthia Stone, John Cull, and my two department chairs,
Estrella Cibreiro-Couce and Daniel Frost. Working on revisions of the
manuscript would not have been possible without the institutional sup-
port of the Robert L. Ardizzone (’63) Fund for Junior Faculty Excellence
and the Research and Publication Award, both from the College of the
Holy Cross. I would also like to express my gratitude to Margaret Freije,
Provost and Dean of the College, for her constant support.
At the University of Florida Press, I would like to thank my editors
Stephanye Hunter and Erika Stevens for believing in this project and for
guiding me through the entire publication process. I also would like to
extend my words of gratitude to the rest of the production and marketing
staff at the University of Florida Press. Without the advice and recom-
mendations of my two anonymous reviewers, this manuscript would not
be in its current form. Thank you for your insightful comments.
Sections of chapter 2 appeared in a very different form in the article
“Utopian Thinking in Verse: Temporality and Poetic Imaginary in the Po-
etry of Nicanor Parra, Mario Benedetti, and Roque Dalton,” published in
x · Acknowledgments

Hispanófila: Ensayos de literatura 178 (2016): 185–203. I would like to ex-

press my gratitude to Juan Carlos González-Espitia, editor of Hispanófila,
for granting me permission to reprint sections of the article. Likewise, I
would like to extend my gratitude to the editors and licensing personnel
who granted me permission to reprint verses, lyrics, and translations as
they appear in chapters 2 and 3. I would also like to thank Juan Sebastián
Kingman and Avelina Kingman for granting me permission to make use
of Eduardo Kingman’s painting “Músico callejero” (1956) for the book
cover.
Finally, I would like to thank my family in Guayaquil, Ecuador, for their
support and encouragement throughout these years of research, writing,
and revising. Muchísimas gracias tía, papi y ñaños por todo su cariño in-
condicional y motivación. Sin esto creo que el proyecto hubiera sido más
difícil de completar.
 Introduction

As two key authors deeply engaged in the production, exchange, and cir-
culation of literature produced in the context of post-1959 Latin America,
Roberto Fernández Retamar and Mario Benedetti agree upon the central-
ity, originality, and truly unprecedented global reach of Latin American
letters of this period, albeit from slightly different perspectives. Even by
acknowledging the undeniable importance and contributions of authors
such as José Martí, Rubén Darío, César Vallejo, Gabriela Mistral, Jorge
Luis Borges, and Alejo Carpentier, among others, Fernández Retamar ar-
gued that “solo a partir de la década del sesenta puede hablarse realmente
de una entrada de la literatura latinoamericana en el mundo, de su articu-
lación orgánica con la literatura universal” [only starting in the 1960s one
can really talk about Latin American literature’s entry into the world, and
of its organic articulation with universal literature] (“La contribución de
las literaturas” 25). This might seem like an overstatement, and one might
even disagree with such a claim. One ought to keep in mind, however, the
context of such a rotund assertion, since Fernández Retamar read this es-
say at the 8th International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA)
conference held in Budapest in 1976. Fernández Retamar does not make
his claim lightly regarding the innovative and profound reach of the 1960s
generation. In fact, he touches on the canonical names one might expect,
ranging from colonial authors to the boom writers, and places them in
context in Latin American letters. His point is that by the late 1950s and
1960s, there had been significant historical progression and maturity in
Latin American letters that enabled a generation of writers to collaborate,
2 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

exchange ideas, and shape each other’s works. This generation of the
1960s also happened to be one that has been widely translated and thus
widely disseminated. Fernández Retamar’s argument about Latin Ameri-
can literature’s “organic articulation” with universal or world literature is
one that certainly resonates today in academic circles.1
Benedetti made a similar argument about the context of the 1960s in
Latin American letters as one that enabled artists to develop their own
voice and reach an unparalleled level of creativity. Even if there were in-
stances in Latin American literature in which there was some measure of
originality, such as in the case of modernismo, Benedetti makes the claim
that Latin American literature before the 1960s was almost always lagging
behind, imitating the fashions, techniques, and models coming primar-
ily from Europe. It is in this context that Benedetti writes: “El escritor
de América Latina ya no imita fielmente; tiene la necesaria libertad para
crear, sea a partir de variaciones ajenas, sea a través de descubrimientos
propios, un lenguaje afortunadamente original” [A Latin American writer
no longer dutifully imitates; she/he has the necessary freedom to create
a fortunately original language, whether based upon variations of foreign
influences or upon his or her own discoveries] (“Subdesarrollo y letras de
osadía” 32). Written in 1968, Benedetti’s claim has specific resonances in
the political and cultural landscape that enabled writers of this generation
to produce “original” works, many of which have become landmarks of
Latin American literatures.2
Beyond concurring upon the centrality of the 1960s generation of writ-
ers and artists in creating truly distinct works of literature emerging from
various locations throughout Latin American on an unprecedented scale,
perhaps a more subtle point of encounter between Fernández Retamar’s
and Benedetti’s respective positions is their emphasis on literature as only
one dimension of art. This emphasis on the divisibility or separation of
the arts in the Latin American context of the 1960s is one that has always
struck me as particular and assumed as the norm. Part of what Sensing
Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts seeks to do is to bring the arts
into a dialogue, rather than treating them as entirely divorced from each
other. If one accepts Fernández Retamar’s and Benedetti’s singling out of
Latin American literary and poetic production of the 1960s as that of a
generation of authors that truly had a global, unprecedented reach and
impact, one can also argue for the contribution of Latin American films
 Introduction · 3

to third-world cinema or nueva canción songs to the widespread appeal

of folk, socially committed, and countercultural music. And yet these art
forms are treated and studied in isolation, as though each form reached
its worldly potential in a silo or on an island. Instead, this book aims to
recast attention to these art forms as an archipelagic network of artistic
contributions that collectively marked a temporal division in Latin Amer-
ican arts by producing artworks that sought to engage larger sections of
the population, rather than just elite circles. It is this investment in seek-
ing transparent, democratic, colloquial means of aesthetic and affective
expressions that allows me to focus on just some of the most salient fig-
ures of this generation of the 1960s and their representative artworks.
Certainly, there were important films before this decade, for instance, in
Mexican cinema’s so-called Golden Age (1930s–early 1960s). But the de-
velopment of film techniques truly distinct from those of Hollywood or
European cinema, and their lack of political and social engagement, are
what make this cinema so different from what emerged in the 1960s. This
is just one example, dealing with film. One can think of other such ex-
amples in reference to poetry or music.
My focus in this book on the generation of the 1960s and its distinc-
tive contribution to a redefinition of the arts echoes the positions stated
earlier by Fernández Retamar and Benedetti, but also those of more re-
cent studies such as Jean Franco’s The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City
(2002), Diana Sorensen’s A Turbulent Decade Remembered (2007), Samuel
Steinberg’s Photopoetics at Tlatelolco (2016), or Juan J. Rojo’s Revisiting the
Mexican Student Movement of 1968 (2016). Where my contribution and
study differ is that I will not focus on the novels from the Latin Ameri-
can boom or a single country, but rather on the productive intersections
that might ensue if we emphasize the relations among poetry, music, and
film as connected art forms. This, in short, is one of the points I make
about the need to sense otherwise. Later in this introduction I will briefly
engage with some key positions that have informed my framing of this
project as one that focuses on the possible unity of arts by tracing threads,
networks, relations among artworks, and emphasizing what Daniel Al-
bright has called “comparative arts.”
But what is the sense we give to “art”? How do we sense artworks
as seemingly diverse or distinct as poetry, music, or films? A partial
answer emerges when we situate these questions in the context of a
4 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

thought-experiment or a hypothetical scenario that may not, in fact, be

so hypothetical after all. How do our undergraduate students sense a song
such as Violeta Parra’s “Volver a los 17,” or a poem such as Roque Dalton’s
“América Latina,” or a film such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of
Underdevelopment (1968)? What is their aesthetic and affective response
to such works either in isolation (on their own) or when they are stud-
ied alongside each other in a comparative framing? At best, even if the
instructor situates these works within their historical contexts and in re-
lation to relevant secondary sources, students more often than not will
see these examples as art strictly belonging to Latin America’s post-Cu-
ban Revolution era and, by extension, as tinted by the artists’ socialist or
communist ideologies, which infuse their artistic and aesthetic proposi-
tions. This is why there is a need to sense otherwise, particularly when
confronted with works from the past that have been read or critiqued in a
reductive historical, political, and ideological context. The key to recover-
ing alternative readings of such artworks is twofold: to read such works
as producers of their own aesthetic propositions (related to Badiou’s con-
cept of inaesthetics), and to bring them into dialogue with contemporary
aesthetic thought. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou suggests ways to
redefine the relationship between philosophical aesthetics and the arts.
Rather than assuming that philosophy must make art its object of study,
Badiou suggests that the arts are their own producers of truths and can
thus be independent and on equal ground with philosophical discourse.
In my understanding of my chosen corpus of artworks, I treat them as
producers of their aesthetic propositions, which collectively are founda-
tional to an archive of what is now called decolonial aesthetics. As such,
decolonial aesthetics simply names a process of undoing the hierarchical
relationship between philosophy and art, as well as Eurocentric concep-
tions of art in relation to those artworks produced elsewhere in the world.
What follows is only an option, one alternative among various possible
aesthetic models seeking to resituate the importance or validity of works
from the past not simply as artistic artifacts retrieved from the archive,
but as things that reveal important keys to understanding contemporary
cultural and artistic productions.3
 Introduction · 5

On the Decolonial Turn toward Aisthesis and Sensing

As a critical project emerging from various disciplines, fields, and prac-

tices, including painting, film, philosophy, and art criticism, the notion
of the decolonial has gradually appeared and gained prominence in aca-
demic scholarship, art exhibits, and installations, as well as conferences
and alternative art biennials.4 A prime example of this line of thinking
comes from the introduction to an online Social Text Periscope issue from
2013 titled “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Heal-
ings.” In this introduction, Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vázquez provide
a brief account of how decolonial challenges to aesthetic thinking and
practices have been gestating since 2003 in South America and the United
States, and how such lines of thinking have now traveled to other parts of
the world, including Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the
Caucasus. As part of this intervention, Mignolo and Vázquez articulate
how the decolonial emerges as an option for undoing and revealing the
embedded legacies and the totalizing and normative forces that moder-
nity/coloniality have come to mean. As is now well-known, coloniality
describes the perpetuity of colonial and imperial forces and phenomena
that emerged with modernity and continue today. Coloniality also refer-
ences the occluded side of modernity by positioning itself as constitutive
of modernity, rather than merely a derivative effect of Western Europe’s
global expansion since 1492. Furthermore, coloniality helps us to under-
stand the complex grid of subjugation and domination that intersects
race, gender, knowledge, being, various forms of capital, and aesthetics.
In Mignolo and Vásquez’s own words, “Decolonial aestheSis starts from
the consciousness that the modern/colonial project has implied not only
a control of the economy, the political, and knowledge, but also the con-
trol over the senses and perception” (“Decolonial AestheSis,” n.p.). In
this attempt to question the modes in which the senses, perception, and
aesthetics have been controlled by the rhetoric of modernity and Euro-
centric understanding of philosophy, a group of scholars has activated de-
colonial aestheSis as an alternative to dominant or normative aesthetics.
On the one hand, scholars working in South America, such as Adolfo Al-
bán Achinte or Zulma Palermo, have worked toward the “re-valuation” of
popular culture and popular arts, which have been rendered “invisible or
devalued by the modern-colonial order” (“Decolonial AestheSis,” n.p.). A
6 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

second and interrelated trajectory of decolonial aesthetics focuses on the

types of arts related to contemporary artistic practices appearing in art
exhibits, biennials, and other related curatorial projects that seek to give
prominence to alternative artistic practices that at once deploy and artic-
ulate how the decolonial might serve to question aesthetics by becoming
“a radical critique to modern, postmodern, and altermodern aestheTics”
(“Decolonial AestheSis,” n.p.). As Mignolo and Vázquez point out, the
activation of decolonial aesthetics has the possibility of illuminating art-
works, including theater, music, literature, visual arts, that would perhaps
otherwise be invisible or neglected under dominant aesthetic categories.
At this juncture, it becomes important to discuss briefly and connect
the decolonial turn of aesthetics in relation to some key rearticulations of
aesthesis/aisthesis and sensing that become instrumental to Sensing Deco-
lonial Aesthetics. As articulated by Mignolo, Vázquez, and others, decolo-
nial aesthesis distinguishes and distances itself from Western European
thinking as part of its own articulation, and also for its own expansion as
an operation or concept that can be easily adapted and deployed in a mul-
tiplicity of geographical and cultural coordinates. And yet, in the work of
Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière, for instance, it is possible to detect
engagements with a re-valorization and reconceptualization of aisthesis,
precisely in order to update what has become an imperative for contem-
porary aesthetic thought, namely a direct confrontation with history and
politics. Already in the 1990s, Nancy had presented in “Art, a Fragment”
a reformulation of aisthesis in relation to fragmentary art and what he
perceived to be a fragmentary and even fragmented world, despite the
world’s totalizing gesture under the practices and rhetoric of globaliza-
tion. In this particular piece, Nancy frames aisthesis as implying neither
“transcendence nor immanence,” by which he means to zoom-in on the
entangled “heterogeneous entelechy of the sensing/sensed” (128). An en-
gagement with aisthesis dwells, out of necessity, on this double operation
of sensing and being sensed, given their duality and entanglement as two
faces of the same coin.
Aisthesis for Nancy allows for the possibility of engaging with a work of
art as a thing that simultaneously senses and can be sensed. This duality
or complementarity of Nancy’s notion of aisthesis finds a useful expres-
sion for Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in the following statement: “What
art does is to please: and so it is neither a poiesis nor a praxis, but another
 Introduction · 7

kind of ‘doing’ altogether that mixes together with both of the other kinds
an aisthesis and its double entelechy” (134). For a work of art to sense and
to be sensed—and let us think of Nicanor Parra’s Poemas y antipoemas
(1954) as an example—it means that an artist is attuned to the intended
audience’s sensibilities and how best to connect with them, to affect them
politically and sensorially. In this sense, the emergence of Parra’s quintes-
sential poetic collection is attuned to the need to update not only poetic
language in Chilean and Latin American contexts alike, but also the role
that poetry plays in connecting to audiences so as to shock them and pro-
duce laughter and discontent when reading rather unconventional poems
and verses for the time in which they were published. Following this in-
vitation, a discussion of Parra’s poetic proposition needs to engage with
other contemporary propositions so as to understand its way of connect-
ing with and differentiating itself from what Benedetti, Roque Dalton, or
Ernesto Cardenal was seeking to do, and this is discussed in chapter 2,
“The Poetics of Sensing.” To return to Nancy, I take his emphasis on the
fragmentary nature of art as an invitation to reflect upon the possible sites
of relation, the connective threads that generate new modes of sensing
relations, themes, ideas, responses, and dialogues among works of art, but
also between the works and their audiences without necessarily reducing
or dwelling on reception as one of the predominant parameters of aes-
thetics. Ultimately, what we find is an invitation to think comparatively, to
think relationally, rather than dwelling on the absolute singularity of the
artwork and the marked divisibility of the arts.
This possibility of rethinking aesthetics as a relational or comparative
practice finds its roots in Rancière’s key concept of the distribution of the
sensible, which he defines as “the system of self-evident facts of sense per-
ception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in com-
mon and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions
within it” (Politics of Aesthetics 7). By calling attention to the sets of opera-
tions that categorize the arts and the senses, Rancière is also drawing our
attention to the sometimes subtle and unrecognizable modes in which
certain sectors of the population or social actors are grouped and divided
for social purposes, which have political and aesthetic repercussions. This
same Rancierian system of the distribution of the sensible describes the
processes by which we participate in the set of operations that allow for
the clustering or grouping of certain things (art objects/works of art),
8 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

while other things are kept apart. One mode in which this divisibility or
distribution of the sensible becomes prevalent, for instance, is thinking
of genres as categories that enable grouping, separation, and categoriza-
tion. In allowing such operations of distribution to happen (grouping/
separation/categorizations), what are our responsibilities and our roles
as viewers, readers, consumers, and spectators in allowing such uneven
distribution of the sensible? Rancière’s distribution of the sensible is in
itself a political gesture that creates a common ground for aesthetics and
politics. But which type of aesthetics is created? And what are the ends of
such politics—the aestheticization of the political or the politicization of
the aesthetic?
As much as it might seem that the decolonial project of rethinking
aesthetics is completely at odds with a rethinking of aesthetics from the
perspective of European thought (such as Nancy or Rancière), there are
some detectable common points in their respective gestures of retracing
how aesthetic categories and ways of thinking about aesthetics have come
to us. Mignolo, Vázquez, Achinte, and Pedro Pablo Gómez, among other
Latin American decolonial scholars working to rethink alternative models
to Eurocentric aesthetics, could argue that Nancy’s and Rancière’s respec-
tive philosophical projects only serve to instantiate a Eurocentric view of
aesthetics. Indeed, one detects a lack of engagement in Nancy or Rancière
with artworks that are not from Western European or North American
traditions. Yet, what is useful in their respective works is exactly the im-
plicit and subtle gestures of self-criticism wrapped up in pointing to the
need to rethink Western European aesthetics to allow for engagement
with art’s role and effects in contemporary times. That lack of engage-
ment with what is beyond the purview of Western Europe is an undeni-
able characteristic of both Nancy’s and Rancière’s work. Nonetheless, it is
also undeniable that one could extrapolate from their examples and think
of ways in which the “distribution of the sensible” or Nancy’s emphasis
on the separation and fragmentation of the arts can be applied to Latin
America’s artistic legacies. These concepts also have something to con-
tribute to the rich and productive conversations taking place among de-
colonial circles of scholarship. The key distinctions between these seem-
ingly oppositional sides of aesthetic thinking are the sites of enunciation
and positionality.
 Introduction · 9

In Mignolo’s work, for instance, the locus of enunciation becomes a

way to circumvent dealing with the rhetoric and language of representa-
tion, which is so prevalent when dealing with art.5 By this Mignolo means
that an artist can simply be an observer and someone who perpetuates
the very same mechanisms and modes of rendering visible or sensible
those bodies that are merely objects (as represented or representable)
and not as subjects of art. As Mignolo put it in an interview, “enunciation
is constituted by certain actors, languages, and categories of thoughts,
beliefs, and sensing” (Gaztambide-Fernández 199). The locus of enun-
ciation demarcates specific sites and positions in geographical, ideologi-
cal, and experiential terms from which a decolonial subject, as one who
engages in decolonial thinking and doing (which involves border think-
ing, dwelling, and other series of operations), can enunciate and render
her- or himself sensible (as sensing others and being sensed). This double
move that enunciation affords is relatable to the “heterogeneous entel-
echy of the sensing/sensed,” as discussed above in relation to Nancy’s
rethinking of aesthetics. By focusing on this locus of enunciation, which
allows the individual to find modalities of self-positioning and self-artic-
ulation, the possibility emerges for that person to find relatable, sensible
bodies, other humans who have been categorized and segregated under
the double-sided rhetoric of modernity/coloniality. An undoing of such
categories, borders, and other forms of divisions and fragmentation con-
nects with Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible. The con-
joining factor among these three reframings of aesthetics is an attempt to
open art beyond its narrow definitions, so that it becomes reactivated and
reclaimed as one way of thinking the political in contemporary times. An-
other common factor is the way in which individual social actors coalesce
as a community to reach a common social and political goal.
In this vein, in Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics, I treat artists as diverse as
Roque Dalton, Mercedes Sosa, and Humberto Solás as forming a com-
munity or a generation of artists that, from the vantage point of the long
decade of the 1960s, shared a number of common features in their respec-
tive attempts to challenge and undo what we now call coloniality or the
distribution of the sensible. Rather than simply dismissing continental
philosophy’s engagement with aesthetics, I seek to bring into conversa-
tion what I am here calling decolonial aesthetics with certain strands of
10 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

European or continental aesthetics. My move is to activate continental

aesthetics and confront it with a certain type of non-philosophical think-
ing and doing that emerges from a wide set of artists. In other words, I
am interested in testing out some of the insights and limitations of con-
tinental aesthetics. I do so not with the intention of evaluating European
artworks, which is more often than not the Eurocentric blind spot of au-
thors like Rancière, Nancy, Badiou, or Agamben, but rather to bring onto
equal ground the contributions that artists and philosophers can make to
undoing aesthetics from a distinct Latin American perspective that inter-
venes and responds to Eurocentric interventions that have often sought
to silence Latin American, non-philosophical ideas on aesthetics. Such a
dialogue is one of the meanings I give to decolonial aesthetics.
Returning to aesthesis, as a dual mode of making and sensing artworks,
it must also be related to the idea of the inseparability of the arts, which
helps to frame the case studies present in Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics. In
Daniel Albright’s Panaesthetics (2014), he argues for the need to pursue
a type of comparative arts by which he means to trace some of the lega-
cies that have reached contemporary audiences in our fixation on separat-
ing the arts. This emphasis on the disunity of the arts is one that appears
in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Muses (1996), which is one of the philosophical
works informing Albright’s approach. What I find intriguing and inviting
in Albright’s articulation of comparative arts, or panaesthetics, is precisely
what might emerge from the interaction between a poem and a musical
composition. In treating the arts not in isolation, but rather by focusing
on the possible points of contact, Albright’s model is one that informs the
framing and elaboration of chapters 2, 3, and 4.
While this book takes as its premise the simultaneity of the senses in
relation to art, any discussion of artworks enters the realm of language,
and by extension, the means of conveying such a discussion is writing.6
For instance, while a discussion of one of Violeta Parra’s songs could be
done entirely in terms of musical composition by employing technical
musical language (notes, keys, pitch, timbres, etc.), my interest in her
songs rests precisely on the sensorial interplay between her musical ar-
rangements and lyrics, though more often than not my emphasis will
be on the latter (which are primarily meant to be written and heard). A
song’s lyrics can be adapted to a different musical arrangement, as was the
case when Francisca Valenzuela arranged Violeta’s song “Run Run se fue
 Introduction · 11

pa’l norte,” in which Valenzuela played a piano, instead of Violeta’s tradi-

tional guitar accompaniment.7 Such types of connections are part of an
extended discussion in chapter 3 and this work’s conclusion. This simple
example becomes important to underscoring three points. First, while I
emphasize a discussion of the written word over musical composition, I
do so with the intention of highlighting a decolonial gesture on the part of
nueva canción musicians. I contend that one can hear, understand, memo-
rize, repeat, and make sense of a song’s lyrics, even if one is not fully able
to read or write. But to understand the formal intricacies of meter, rhyme,
and versification or the intricacies of musical composition is an altogether
different matter, which detracts from what I perceive to be the primary
goal of nueva canción musicians: to reach a wide audience first and fore-
most through lyrics. Second, let us remember that many of the nueva
canción musicians, including Violeta Parra, were not formally trained in
music theory or composition. Instead, in Violeta’s case, she was an autodi-
dact musician who learned music through an extensive but informal (she
had no academic training) ethnographic compilation of popular music,
and who taught herself to play a variety of stringed and wind instruments.
Third, perhaps because of my own academic training, I frame my anal-
ysis of musical compositions as accompaniments to the lyrics in which
the former layer the latter with affective resonances. Furthermore, an im-
position of an academic musicological study would further reiterate the
coloniality of academic discourses, which displaces popular Latin Ameri-
can music to the reductive terrain of ethnomusicology, folklore, or world
music.8
The primary reason for turning to this period for case studies and ex-
amples that help to illustrate decolonial aesthetics in this book project as
an instance of what it might mean to sense otherwise is because literary
or cultural scholarship in English focusing on the 1960s in Latin America
has often neglected a comparative analysis of key figures in poetry, music,
and film. Instead, Latin American literary and cultural studies scholar-
ship has placed heavy emphasis on and given renewed attention to the
Latin American boom authors, key examples of New Latin American
Cinema, and other genres of artistic production of the decade, but almost
always focusing on the disunity of the arts. Such studies, more often than
not, still privilege the treatment of artworks in isolation (the separation
of the arts for Nancy or the distribution of the sensible for Rancière) or
12 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

continue to place an emphasis on the boom novels as the highlight of this

period of the lettered, cosmopolitan city.9 By focusing on key poets, film-
makers, and musicians of this period, and reading them as contributors
to what I am calling decolonial aesthetics, I do not mean to claim that no
artists before the 1960s engaged in decolonial gestures, albeit somewhat
avant la lettre. After all, it is only in the last two decades that coloniality
as a critical concept has gained currency and that decolonial interven-
tions as such (in academic and non-academic contexts) have emerged as
responses to various modalities of coloniality.10 What I am seeking to do
is to add possible contributors to the genealogy of what we understand as
decolonial thinking today, via a type of thinking and doing that emerges
from the arts. Suffice it to say that authors and artists going back to Inca
Garcilaso and Guamán Poma de Ayala through to Gamaliel Churata
and the recent architectural interventions of Freddy Mamani are part of
a multi-art archive of decolonial interventions seeking to disrupt, undo,
and challenge the coloniality of aesthetics or the coloniality of sensing.11

Sensing Poetry, Music, and Film Otherwise

This book’s original emphasis on the 1960s had to do with looking at

other modes of artistic production beyond the critical attention the novel
in Latin America has had and continues to receive. Much of the research
around the 1960s and early 1970s in Latin America has focused on what
is known as the “boom,” or on the study of antipoetry, nueva canción, and
third cinema (sometimes placed under the broader category of New Latin
American Cinema) in isolation, as though they were independent of each
other. I should emphasize here that I chose not to focus on the narrative
“boom,” since much of the scholarship of the period and even today con-
tinues to privilege a literary approach to understanding the culture of the
period. There has also been some relatively recent scholarship that has
studied how the atmosphere of the Cold War shaped literature and cul-
ture in Latin America. This book could have easily been expanded so that
each of the chapters on poetry, music, and film became a book in its own
right. Such a move, however, would betray the perspective that Sensing
Decolonial Aesthetics seeks to offer, which is to underscore how some po-
ets, musicians, and filmmakers individually, relationally, and collectively
 Introduction · 13

contributed to new aesthetic configurations and other ways of thinking

about aesthetics.
Throughout this introduction and the rest of the book, the term “de-
colonial” appears in a number of ways. A few words are necessary to
clarify from the outset how this term differs from, while building upon,
postcolonial discourses. The term decolonial, as I am employing it, comes
from recent scholarship by Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson
Maldonado-Torres, María Lugones, Rita Segato, and a number of other
scholars working in the United States, across Latin America, and in other
parts of the world.12 In the introduction to Globalization and the Deco-
lonial Option (2010), Walter Mignolo asserts that “de-coloniality names
critical thoughts emerging in the colonies and ex-colonies, Jewish criti-
cal traditions in Europe, since the nineteenth century, materialized as the
internal response to European formation of imperial nation-states” (1).
Elsewhere in the introduction, Mignolo adds that decolonial thinking is
a “particular kind of critical theory” and that the decolonial option is “a
specific orientation of doing” (1). Thus, my use of the term “decolonial”
follows Mignolo’s lead, particularly by focusing on critical thought in the-
ory and in the arts that has emerged from Latin America. In fact, even if
at times it is implicit, my approach to writing the subsequent chapters has
been informed by a decolonial way of thinking and doing.
One may wonder why there is a need to employ a decolonial critical
strategy in relation to aesthetics. Part of the response comes from Ro-
dolfo Kusch—a recently rediscovered Argentine philosopher—who ar-
gued the following: “In América [Latin America] we treat philosophy in
one of two ways, an official way and a private way. From the university we
learn of [the] European problematic translated philosophically. The other
is an implicit way of thinking lived every day in the street or in the coun-
tryside” (1). This is to say that we should not readily dismiss European
philosophical traditions simply because it is how we are trained to think
academically. Instead, we need to think of alternative ways of conceptu-
alizing and imagining how aesthetics plays itself out in relation to and
also beyond Eurocentric philosophical discourses, especially in everyday
scenarios and the arts. Following the work of Mignolo, Kusch, and other
Latin American thinkers, I seek to draw a distinction between Eurocen-
tric and elitist ways of thinking about aesthetics and how aesthetics can
14 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

be connected to decolonial work. If decolonial thinking is preoccupied

with an “undoing” and rethinking of dominant discourses and traditions,
then decolonial aesthetics is my approach to reframing conventional as-
sumptions and articulations about aesthetics.
As a continuation of some of the concepts presented in this introduc-
tion, in chapter 1, “Sensing Otherwise,” I elaborate further on the return
to aesthesis as it has appeared recently in both decolonial scholarship and
continental philosophy. The chapter begins with a brief exploration of
what it means to sense works from Latin America’s cultural past, particu-
larly from the 1960s. This exploration is then a distinction between aisthe-
sis as related to some concepts that appear in the works of Rancière and
Badiou and the meaning that Mignolo has given to aesthesis in line with
decolonial thinking. This exploration allows me to engage with what it
might mean to think about sensing in terms of relations and assemblage.
Following the theoretical possibilities that sensing otherwise and de-
colonial aesthetics might proffer, in chapter 2, “The Poetics of Sensing:
Decolonial Verses in Antipoetry and Conversational Poetry,” I focus on
exploring how poetry can be used to challenge its own terms of produc-
tion, reception, and consumption. I extend the category of antipoetry be-
yond a Chilean model, as proposed by Nicanor Parra, so that it includes
alternative voices and ways of writing poetry. In doing so, one finds differ-
ent gradations of antipoetry, which is to say, different levels of social cri-
tique that have as much to do with the place where such poetry is written
as they do with the subjects of critiques, the conjugation of leftist politi-
cal ideologies, and the procurement of a distinct poetic voice. Antipoetry,
then, refers to a mode of writing poetry that goes against poetic conven-
tions, challenges canonical poets, and seeks to make poetry more acces-
sible to the everyday reader, but also takes an interest in addressing more
urgent social concerns. To use Mario Benedetti’s concept of the poet as
communicator, such poets are guerilla fighters, engage with liberation
theology and various strands of Marxism, and work as journalists, editors,
and professors; some are persecuted into exile, assassinated, or ostracized
by canonical poets and critics. In this chapter, decolonial readings of se-
lect poetry by Nicanor Parra, Mario Benedetti, Ernesto Cardenal, and
Roque Dalton allow me to explore how these poets moved toward col-
loquial and accessible poetry intended for a wide readership and under-
represented voices in the historical narratives of the region. While paying
 Introduction · 15

close attention to examples of their respective poetry, I also illustrate their

different approaches to writing antipoetry or poetry that seeks direct
communication with readers.
The relationship between Nicanor Parra and his sister, Violeta Parra,
bridges chapter 2 and chapter 3, “Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes
of Nueva Canción.” This chapter centers on nueva canción and some of the
musicians in Latin America who sought to converge an interest in folk-
lore, socially committed lyricism, and the use of autochthonous instru-
ments and musical styles. Sometimes known as nueva trova (the new trou-
badour music), such a term is nowadays restricted to Cuban troubadours
after the Cuban Revolution. Other times, such music is referred to as can-
ción de protesta (song of protest), which denotes the sociopolitical dimen-
sion of certain songs, but it does not embrace other artists who were not
as overtly political in their lyrics. Likewise, la nueva canción (new song) is
often used to refer to Chilean music of this period, though the principles
of the musical movement spread and had a profound impact across Latin
America. The potential of the term nueva canción offers the possibility of
including under one umbrella new troubadours, folklorists, and those
who were protesting against injustices through their music. Much like the
previous chapter, because of the wealth of material that can fit into this
category, the music analyzed in this chapter is also highly selective. None-
theless, this chapter presents the major voices in this movement by study-
ing select songs by Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, Mercedes Sosa, and Silvio
Rodríguez as salient voices of a committed generation that sought radi-
cal societal changes, and whose music continues to have an appeal with
newer social struggles. By exploring select examples of their songs, I argue
for the relationship that sensing and decolonial aesthetics can have in our
reevaluation of the work of these musicians.
The relationship between musicians of nueva canción and New Latin
American Cinema can be seen in the early participation of Silvio Ro-
dríguez in a group that created scores for Cuban films or Chilean musi-
cians, such as composer Patricio Manns, who left Chile due to Pinochet’s
dictatorship. Violeta Parra’s work also marks a transition between these
two chapters by showcasing her artistic versatility in creating arpilleras,
weavings that were once displayed at the Musée du Louvre. In chapter 4,
“Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema,” I situate some
distinct cinematic expressions that emerged in the region around the
16 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

principles of third cinema or New Latin American Cinema, which served

as an umbrella term for cinema novo, peasant cinema, militant cinema,
revolutionary cinema, and imperfect cinema, among other approaches to
filmmaking in Latin America. For this chapter, I decided to discuss some
of the most representative films of the period, while also underscoring
aesthetic choices in the work of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino
in their seminal film La hora de los hornos (1966–1968), Tomás Gutiér-
rez Alea’s Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968), Humberto Solás’s Lucía
(1968) and Cantata de Chile (1975), and Raymundo Gleyzer’s México, la
revolución congelada (1971). In choosing these films, I wanted to present
examples from fiction films and documentaries, some of which are well-
known and others that have been less-studied. In this chapter, I examine
the specificities of each film, while also paying close attention to each di-
rector’s aesthetic propositions. The chosen films are essential in my study
of national and regional preoccupations with developing new cinematic
languages and depicting histories of colonialism, racialization, failed revo-
lutions, the oppression of women, and tensions among the bourgeoisie
and various labor movements.
As a way to connect the various readings deployed in the preceding
chapters, in chapter 5, “Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America,” I make
the case for the importance of decolonial aesthetics as a way in which to
understand Latin America’s relationship to aesthetic discourses, while
also serving as a tool to analyze examples of antipoetry, nueva canción, and
New Latin American Cinema. Although a decolonial approach serves as
a point of departure, I provide a brief account of anticolonial and anti-im-
perialist discourses from intellectuals to ground the use of this approach,
precisely because I seek to make a critical distinction between an antico-
lonial stance and a decolonial critical position. In a different section of
this chapter, I lay out the connections and differences between decolonial
aesthetics and the philosophy of liberation as articulated by Enrique Dus-
sel. Of particular interest for my project is Dussel’s emphasis on the need
to rethink aesthetics in non-European and non-elitist terms. In a different
section, I underscore the theoretical foundations and debt that decolonial
aesthetics owes to Aníbal Quijano’s concept of coloniality, and its connec-
tion with select thinkers from the 1950s and 1960s. Because the concept of
coloniality is broken up into axes along which access to power is enacted,
in the next section of chapter 5, I connect decolonial aesthetics with one
 Introduction · 17

of these axes, namely coloniality of knowledge. Coloniality of knowledge

describes the mechanisms through which some people have access to
knowledge, while others do not, as well as the types of knowledge that
are deemed valid. Related to coloniality of knowledge is coloniality of
being. In the next section of the chapter, I underscore the importance
of thinking about the ontological problem of who can produce “valid”
forms of knowledge, particularly because popular and indigenous forms
of knowledge and culture have often been undervalued or dismissed in
Latin America. In the last section of the chapter, I argue for decolonial
aesthetics as an approach to discern the specific ways in which antipoetry,
nueva canción, and third cinema challenged dominant ways of doing art,
as well as ways of interpreting and evaluating them.
In the conclusion to this book, “Sensing the Irresolute Past in the Pres-
ent,” I trace the importance and relevance of some of these artists today,
particularly when contemporary musicians such as Francisca Valenzu-
ela or Los Bunkers are doing covers of Violeta Parra or Silvio Rodríguez
songs, when biopics about Mercedes Sosa and Violeta Parra are appear-
ing, or when poets like Nicanor Parra or Mario Benedetti are awarded
prizes or have university buildings named after them. Technology’s role is
also explored as tools such as the Internet and television afford renewed
attention to the works of some of these musicians, poets, and filmmak-
ers. As I argued in the earlier chapters, antipoetry, nueva canción, and
New Latin American Cinema were invested in seeking new and socially
committed means of expression. These movements were concerned with
changing the way language (in poetry, music, and film) was used and, by
extension, the way in which aesthetic practices could be modified and
adapted to suit the specific needs of Latin America. In other words, the
main concern with all three artistic movements was the aesthetic power
of language in poetry, song, and film, and seeking new directions in which
to transform it, make it more accessible, give it political meaning, and de-
fine a different intended audience for it. My concluding argument here
is that, contrary to what some critics may like to think, the work of these
artists still holds an aesthetic and political significance for today’s genera-
tion of Latin Americans and global audiences. Differently put, the past
is not entirely closed down and still has a bearing in our contemporary
(decolonial) aesthetic sensibilities and thus offers cross-disciplinary ways
in which to sense these artworks otherwise.
18 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Keeping in mind what each chapter sets out to do, I define four main
objectives for Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts. The
first is to rethink contributions from Latin American musicians, poets,
and filmmakers in order to discern what their work can tell us about al-
ternative modes of aesthetic thought and practice. The second is to estab-
lish relations and create a dialogue along aesthetic and ideological lines
among select poets, musicians, and filmmakers with the aim of providing
a larger and more nuanced picture of this vital decade’s cultural history.
Third, in order to articulate the aesthetic and theoretical foundations of
decolonial aesthetics, I turn my attention to intellectuals with loci in phi-
losophy, history, and the social sciences, and explore how concepts such
as coloniality of power or decolonial thinking might apply to cultural and
literary studies. Finally, I examine how sensing these artworks otherwise
through decolonial aesthetics elicits a different look at antipoetry, nueva
canción, and third cinema as a means of rethinking the construction of
the cultural canon between 1960 and 1975, but also of seeing what these
artworks can offer today, particularly given their renewed profile in Latin
America.
To conclude, as I argue in the following chapters, antipoetry, nueva
canción, and New Latin American Cinema were interested in seeking a
new means of expression. These movements were concerned with chang-
ing the way language (in poetry, music, and film) was used in their ar-
tistic media. By producing artworks that were self-aware and concerned
with artistic propositions, defining new directions for music, poetry, and
cinema, these artists and their works allow us to understand that current
interests in decolonial aesthetics in Latin America also need to be mind-
ful of its precursors and what they have offered to contemporary articula-
tions of aesthetics.
 1
x
Sensing Otherwise
The colonized intellectual, however, who strives for cultural authenticity, must
recognize that national truth is first and foremost the national reality. He must
press on until he reaches that place of bubbling trepidation from which knowl-
edge will emerge.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 161

Marginalia of a given epoque doesn’t simply become its memorabilia; it might

contain the kernels of the future.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia 31

Sensing and thinking about the past can easily fall prey to the power of
nostalgia. It is in this light that Boym’s words become a critical invitation
to rethink how we treat cultural texts from the past and the place we as-
sign them within our cultural canon today. By drawing attention to “our
cultural canon,” the intention here is not to rekindle or rehearse debates
about which texts edify a shared laundry list of cultural artifacts closely
linked to ideas of mastery or an immanent quality of perfection, whether
in the spheres of the literary, music, painting, or other arts.1 Instead, in
Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts, the interest lies in
the exploration of two interrelated concerns, namely, locating the place
of specific texts of antipoetry, nueva canción, and New Latin American
Cinema, and proposing a framework through which we might sense oth-
erwise (in other ways) artworks constituted as marginalia to Latin Amer-
ica’s cultural canon and Western traditions. To define the marginality of
an artwork is to be conscious of one’s position in relation to it in tem-
poral, ideological, affective, and aesthetic terms. For someone interested
in championing the aesthetic values of artworks as canonical objects, the
20 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

poetry of Roque Dalton or the music of Violeta Parra, to give two exam-
ples, were deemed as marginal in their own time, since they appealed to
popular sectors of Salvadorian and Chilean populations or those aligned
with the political left under the influence of Marxism. Today, they are
seen as mere products of their historical and political contexts and thus
assigned a place as side-notes to Latin America’s larger historical and cul-
tural narrative or regarded as minor artworks. Even if some might argue
that these artists have become canonical, one might ask how often Violeta
Parra’s Décimas: autobiografía en verso (1970) or Dalton’s Taberna y otros
lugares (1969) appear as mandatory readings for doctoral exams or in po-
etry courses. Despite their somewhat disputable canonicity, I would ar-
gue that they are examined with a certain nostalgia, to echo Boym, for the
unfulfilled promises of the 1960s. To invert Boym’s phrase, the artworks
that serve as the foundation for Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics became
memorabilia due to their relative status as marginalia in their epoch and
today. I am interested, however, in following the critical invitation inher-
ent in Boym’s phrase, which is to revisit artworks labeled as marginalia
or memorabilia with a critical look toward the past, as a way to open new
critical possibilities in the present and future.2
It is precisely this way of thinking about the role of the present in the
making of the future that links Boym’s words to Frantz Fanon’s radical
thinking. In the epigraph above, Fanon presents a challenge to the intel-
lectual who intervenes in processes of cultural production in the after-
math of independence and who must ground his art by questioning the
modes of artistic expression available to his craft. The artist as intellectual
must be aware of the failures that await if he does not realize “he is us-
ing techniques and language borrowed from the occupier” (Fanon 160).
Fanon’s strategy is to establish a marked distinction between two types of
colonized intellectuals. On the one hand, there is the artist as intellectual
who merely succumbs to unearthing a nation’s traditions without realiz-
ing that social and political struggles alter the meanings of such traditions,
along with the significance of the nation’s past. Here, for instance, we can
think about indigenista or social realist authors in the first half of the twen-
tieth century in Latin America. This same artist forgets that “modes of
thought, diet, modern techniques of communication, language, and dress
have dialectically reorganized the mind of people” and that such modali-
ties of culture undergo “enormous radical transformations” (Fanon 161).
 Sensing Otherwise · 21

Foreign and local cultural products shape people’s forms of knowledge

and their ways of sensing through a dialectical relationship that erases
differences and, instead, proffers products that meet the tastes of main-
stream audiences and what the market wants to sell. On the other side,
which we might today call the decolonial side, the artist as intellectual
looks for the place from which radical change can give way to trans-
formed knowledge, which is key to the creation of artworks that are in
tune with the challenges and needs of the nation straddling its status as
a postcolony and neocolony. The emphasis here is placed on seeking the
most pressing issues and challenges in a given society, while intuiting the
effects of these knowledges on the future. The intellectual as artist, then,
must forge new knowledge from sites of turmoil and instability to con-
tinue aiming toward art that is critical, effective, communicative, and “au-
thentic” to a nation’s present concerns. For some contemporary readers,
Fanon’s critical challenges may seem anachronistic, and for others, they
may seem resolved issues. However viewed, these challenges will serve
here as a companion to the examination of select works of art, broadly
conceived, emerging from Latin America in the long decade of the 1960s,
precisely because thinking about the role of the artist as intellectual, as
producer of culture, as someone putting forth aesthetic propositions by
crafting artworks are not superseded or resolved concerns.
Fanon’s propositions in the early 1960s were moving in a similar di-
rection to Mario Benedetti’s thinking in that tumultuous and key year of
1968 when Benedetti argued that rather than following modeled or pre-
established paths toward artistic creativity, underdeveloped parts of the
world ought to create art by taking a certain ethics of rebelliousness as
its point of departure. A deep sense of social justice must accompany
this ethics, but it must also display its own critical means through which
places like Latin America can interpret their own history and art through
their own means and in their own terms (57). Benedetti is advocating
here for an ethics of rebellion that defies the uneven and interrelated
structures of power—or what Aníbal Quijano decades later termed the
coloniality of power—that dictate the modes of production, distribution,
reception, and consumption of arts within Latin America and elsewhere
in the world. The rebellious artist is concerned with engagement with a
wider audience, rather than how his or her work might be received by
critics who build canons (“críticos de sostén”) or critics seeking to prove
22 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

why certain works lack merit or value (“críticos de derrumbe”) (“Subde-

sarrollo” 51). As such, the artist who engages with such an ethics, accord-
ing to Benedetti, will be in tune with the needs and reality of his social
and political milieu.
Thinking about the usefulness of striving toward cultural authenticity
(Fanon) or an ethics of rebelliousness (Benedetti) in reexamining art-
works from the 1960s in Latin America is partially what provides a foun-
dation for the current project. From today’s perspective, the temporal dis-
tance that separates our current attitudes toward artworks from those of
the 1960s in Latin American renders them as products of what some have
called a turbulent decade or as marking the decline of the lettered city.3
Rather than returning to this decade out of a sense of nostalgia, a renewed
ideological utopianism, or in the spirit of revisionist historicism, Sensing
Decolonial Aesthetics explores how poetry, music, and cinema shed light
on new ways of understanding aesthetics as a way of both thinking and
doing art whose social and political engagement turns aesthetics upside
down by highlighting and uncovering the hidden logic of what Rancière
has called the aesthetic regime of art, which serves as a way to discern
what is categorizable and “recognizable as art” (Aesthetics and Its Discon-
tents 8). It is in this way that I employ decolonial aesthetics to unveil what
is occluded by the primacy of aesthetics as linked to distinct legacies and
trajectories of philosophical thought. Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics con-
siders the ways in which non-philosophical ideas regarding aesthetics
emerge from specific works of poetry, music, and cinema in Latin Amer-
ica during the 1960s as indirect responses to dominant and Eurocentric
discourses on aesthetics. This project looks at the relationship among
these works of art, rather than at works in isolation, while providing a sec-
ond look at what it might mean to sense these works of art in a diffused
light and through different lenses.
To be clear: this study is not about works of art examined purely from
the perspective of philosophy or art history. Art here is taken to encom-
pass forms of artistic production beyond what might be on display at
a museum or a public installation, although they are not altogether ex-
cluded. Instead, Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics seeks to broaden what we
mean by art and returns our attention to certain genres and concepts
within the realm of art by examining their aesthetic contributions. Sens-
ing otherwise can happen if we shift our perception and understanding
 Sensing Otherwise · 23

of what aesthetics has come to mean in academic disciplines—namely,

something related to ways of studying the philosophy of art or to literary
studies, or simply a discourse that has established categories of taste and
traditional models concerned with parameters of beauty or the sublime.
To this end, decolonial aesthetics becomes a means to liberate and delink
aesthetics from Western or Eurocentric concepts that have become com-
mon currency through imperial and global designs.4

Aesthetics, Aisthesis, and Sensing

Aesthetics is often invoked as both a noun and adjective, but rarely is it

qualified or substantially and overtly explained. The underlying assump-
tion is that the meaning of aesthetics is already understood or that there is
shared or common history of the usage and underlying references behind
the word. This is indeed the point of departure in this section, because
if there is an understood lineage and history of aesthetics as a category
for discussing art, its precise meanings are rooted in Enlightenment and
post-Enlightenment philosophical thought, and its validity or authority is
seldom questioned.
Aesthetics, as a philosophy of art, is embedded in a tradition that ex-
horts and explores the fine arts, while demanding from them scientific
rigor. The first remarks found in Hegel’s Introductory Lectures to Aesthetics
already define a clear path to what would become of philosophy of art
and how art would be conceived. Hegel announces that the focus of the
series of lectures will be on aesthetics, and that their “subject is the wide
realm of the beautiful, and, more particularly, their province is Art—we
may restrict it, indeed, to Fine Art” (3, original emphasis). Hegel here is
defining his usage of aesthetics by linking it to the idealized and restrictive
version of what constitutes fine art. More importantly, Hegel draws a clear
distinction between art at large and fine art, which is narrowly reduced
to specific forms of poetry, painting, sculpture, and, to a lesser degree, to
what we now understand as classical music. Part of Hegel’s preference for
fine arts must be contextualized in terms of how his immediate precur-
sors and contemporaries found ideals (such as beauty or harmony) in
Greek art, which later became normative ways of conceiving and delimit-
ing the contours of valued and accepted art. In Hegel’s thinking, however,
there are other points that are of particular interest for Sensing Decolonial
24 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Aesthetics. Toward the end of his opening remarks on his lectures, for in-
stance, Hegel also admits to his preference for the scientific study of art
under the possible names of “‘Philosophy of Art,’ or more definitely, the
‘Philosophy of Fine Art’” (Introductory Lectures 3). Hegel’s reticence re-
garding the use of aesthetics has to do with the fact that, for him, in the
wake of Christian Wolff ’s German Metaphysics (1719), “‘Aesthetic’ means
more precisely the science of sensation or feeling” (Introductory Lectures
3). Accepted feelings or aesthetic experiences of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries were restricted to “feelings of pleasure, admi-
ration, fear, pity, etc.” (Introductory Lectures 3). Despite Hegel’s reserva-
tions, then, how is it that the philosophy of art came to control aesthetics,
understood as a sphere of sensing and knowledge, as well as doing and
thinking? Part of the answer has to do precisely with the terms of engage-
ment with aesthetics through the rigor of scientific knowledge, which
sought perfection and harmony, but also sought to normalize, categorize,
and define modes of sensation, perception, and feeling. Such philosophi-
cal discourses fused with aisthesis/aesthetics, as related to the senses,
which then became the parameters by which art (fine arts) were studied
and categorized.
The invocation of aesthetics in Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics emphasizes
its original linkages with sensorial perceptions, sensorial experiences, and
sensuous relationships to art. I am also thinking of sensing the arts as a
return to art at large and not exclusively to a narrow relationship between
aesthetics and fine arts. Some contemporary philosophers and thinkers
have beckoned a shift in aesthetics by drawing attention to the set of pos-
sibilities that aisthesis can offer. German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch,
for instance, understands aisthesis as “our modes of sense perception,”
which go beyond the long-standing privileging of sight as the sense that is
most closely linked to aesthetics (182). Bringing aisthesis to contemporary
debates around aesthetics enables other types of work around aesthetic
questions by focusing on the relationships among works of art and hear-
ing, touch, smell, and taste as possible, but not exclusive, ways of sens-
ing. In Rancière’s recent work, there is also a return to aisthesis, which
appears as a way to bring into question the very category of art as it has
been understood in the West over almost three centuries. Rancière, for
instance, argues that aisthesis appears as a concept that elicits discussions
of how “we perceive very diverse things, whether in their techniques of
 Sensing Otherwise · 25

production or their destination, as all belonging to art. This is not a matter

of the ‘reception’ of works of art. Rather, it concerns the sensible fabric of
experience within which they are produced” (Aisthesis x). By turning our
attentions to the conditions in which works of art are produced, rather
than the way we have received them, the concept of art can be broadened
beyond the narrow confines of fine art, which has been the very subject
of aesthetic discussions governing sensibilities, tastes, and canons, while
also defining what is worth preserving, collecting, exhibiting, admir-
ing, studying, and critiquing. Rancière’s project is useful in many ways,
since it forces us to look again at the rooted linkages between aisthesis and
aesthetics. And yet, many of the texts chosen for his study fall under the
Western and Eurocentric canon. Commendable, however, is Rancière’s
effort to move beyond paintings and sculptures by bringing to discussion
the emergence of film, decorative art, photography, fiction, poetry, and
theater, among other art forms in Europe. Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics
follows a similar move by engaging with modalities of sensing artworks,
while looking at what has been left to gather dust or omitted from the
archives of art.
Rancière’s recentering of aesthetic questions to encompass the po-
litical has caught the attention of renowned scholars of Latin American
letters. In a recent issue of the journal Parallax, the editor of this special
issue, Silvia L. López, focused readers’ attention on what Rancière’s aes-
thetic thought might have to contribute to a rethinking of aesthetic mo-
dernity in Latin America beyond the tripartite sensorium (the visible,
the audible, and the sayable). As inviting as this exercise may be, López
devotes much of her attention to reviewing Rancière’s work, but not to
indicating how his thinking might contribute to a reformulation of Latin
American aesthetics per se. This is a task that falls upon the contributors
to the issue.
One such example is Bruno Bosteels’s article “Global Aesthetics and
Its Discontents,” in which Bosteels takes issue with Rancière and works
through some of the theoretical and practical limitations of concepts such
as “the distribution of the sensible” or the “aesthetic regime” when con-
fronted with “the global dynamics of center and periphery, empire and
colony, North and South” (Bosteels 386). Bosteels engages with Alejo
Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World (1949) to test the limitations of
Rancierian thought due to its reliance on Western European examples,
26 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

mainly from France and Germany, and to problematize a facile extension

or transposition of such ideas “onto other regions or areas, perhaps even
including the Third World” (386). From a brief engagement with Car-
pentier, Bosteels moves to a discussion of Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the
Earth to illustrate the geopolitical limitations and historical blind spots
present in Rancière’s claim to an aesthetic revolution, and further notes
how “today we should rather be surprised that anyone can still present
an account of processes such as the aesthetic revolution without taking
into account the violent and unequal legacy of colonial expansion” (Bo-
steels 391). Aside from a brief engagement with Carpentier, most of the
examples Bosteels provides to critique Rancière’s Eurocentrism in fact
come from Western Europe, namely Balzac, Mallarmé, and Huysmans,
among others. Bosteels’s gesture of pointing to the necessity of seriously
accounting for the colonial expansion of Western Europe into other parts
of the globe is certainly present in his essay. Yet, that gesture of critique
does not fully materialize into more substantial engagements with the
examples he provides from an array of Latin American writers spanning
from Rubén Darío’s first poetic phase and continuing through works by
the likes of César Aira or Roberto Bolaño. Without fully endorsing his
stance, I do welcome Bosteels’s invitation to show the usefulness and
limitations of Rancierian thought when confronted with Latin American
literature throughout the following chapters.
If in my introduction I argued for the need for decolonial aesthetics to
engage with Rancière’s concept of “the distribution of the sensible” and
Albright’s beckoning to move toward “comparative arts” or “panaesthet-
ics,” I did so with the aim of opening up theoretical and practical possibili-
ties that a return to aisthesis can offer for a decolonial project of rethinking
and undoing pervasive aesthetic categories that not only create hierarchi-
cal and uneven frameworks, but also continue instantiating a disunity and
divisibility of artistic forms. In so doing, sensing otherwise calls for the
need to trace relations between artists and their aesthetic propositions in-
sofar as they have a common project of responding to dominant Western
aesthetic terms.
For instance, one could think about the relational affinities between
Silvio Rodríguez’s “Santiago de Chile” from his album Días y flores (1975)
and Humberto Solás’s film Cantata de Chile (1976), as both artworks seek
to denounce and critique Pinochet’s coup d’état in Chile in 1973 and its
 Sensing Otherwise · 27

immediate aftermath. A more detailed discussion of these artworks ap-

pears in chapters 3 and 4. Suffice it to say, for now, that a conjoining fac-
tor in Rodríguez’s and Solás’s respective aesthetic engagements is a direct
confrontation through the aesthetics of music (lyrics and sound) and film
(the visual and sound) with dictatorial politics, primarily through their
beckoning of resistance to Pinochet’s regime. In the case of Solás, he ac-
tivates an archive of moments of resistance in Chile that span from the
colonial presence of the Spanish and the resistance of indigenous popu-
lations, to the mestizo and creole revolution in the nineteenth century,
to a worker-led revolt against capitalist forces in the early twentieth cen-
tury, and how these ultimately connect to the spirit of revolution under
Allende’s government. The ultimate suggestion, as I read the film, is that
Chileans will once again overcome forces seeking to control and suppress
their collective subjectivity, or what Rancière calls “the distribution of
the sensible” in terms of organized state, police, and military mechanisms
used to disperse citizens, and thus more readily control them. In a simi-
lar vein, Rodríguez’s song traces moments of affective change in Santiago
de Chile, which span happiness, falling in love, fear, rage, and ultimately
wishing to transform song into an instrument with which to respond to
Pinochet’s dictatorship. I call on these two examples to illustrate how a
critique of coloniality operates on the most subtle levels in art, as in the
case of the figures of the early twentieth-century British investors in So-
lás’s film, or as a direct critique of the how the U.S. facilitated Pinochet’s
coup. One can begin detecting a trajectory or legacy of the “distribu-
tion of the sensible” and the coloniality of power in various modalities
(race, gender, capital, knowledge, aesthetics, etc.) and how the two can
be productively activated as critical tools. In placing these two examples
in a brief dialogue, I seek to bring into conversation Albright’s model of a
comparative aesthetics or panaesthetics in seeking to trace commonali-
ties, rather than distinct differences, among artworks.
While concepts such as the decolonial are of relatively recent usage, the
gestures of undoing colonial and Eurocentric legacies of control, includ-
ing forms of knowledge, cultural production, and affective parameters, are
by no means recent. As suggested in the introduction to this work, the
genealogy of decolonial interventions, albeit avant la lettre, can be traced
to figures such as El Inca Garcilaso and Guamán Poma through contem-
porary indigenous and Afro-descendant artists such as Freddy Mamani,
28 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Antonio Preciado, or Chocquibtown. The emphasis on the generation of

the 1960s has to do with what I perceive to be an unprecedentedly wide-
spread interest in revisiting and challenging Eurocentric categories across
various art forms in the name of finding distinct Latin American aesthetic
alternatives and responses. For instance, Chilean scholar Patricio Rodrí-
guez-Plaza accounts for some of the ways in which aesthetic questions
need to respond in different ways to Latin America’s social and political
spheres following decades of military dictatorships. Rodríguez-Plaza also
points to the need to think about these questions not only in terms of
the contemporary, but also by retracing some of these concerns in the
longue-durée, and he engages in a useful though brief dialogue with Mi-
gnolo’s ideas on postoccidentalism as a key to rethinking Latin America’s
relationship to Western European aesthetic genealogies.5
Moving in a similar and yet divergent direction from Rancière’s and
my own, Walter D. Mignolo’s recent work has turned to questions link-
ing coloniality of knowledge to questions of aesthetics. For Mignolo, the
epistemic sphere is of prime importance in what Aníbal Quijano termed
the coloniality of power, in which the political, economic, and epistemic
spheres converge to form axes through which various modalities of domi-
nation operate (Mignolo, “Lo nuevo y lo decolonial” 37; Quijano, “Co-
loniality of Power” 549). For Mignolo, the epistemic sphere serves to
control modes of feeling—what constitutes knowledge—while also dis-
tinguishing between reason and modes of sensing (“Lo nuevo y lo deco-
lonial” 37). Mignolo proposes a liberation of aisthesis (which he spells as
aiesthesis) from what we understand as aesthetics by delinking modes of
sensing from rules and norms (as proposed by Kant in his Observations on
the Beautiful and the Sublime [1767]) that govern and regulate modes of
feeling, thinking, and doing art (“Lo nuevo y lo decolonial” 40).
In Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts, delinking aisthe-
sis from aesthetics also means paying attention to what has been left out
of discussions pertaining to the Rancierian concept of “the distribution of
the sensible,” as discussed in the introduction, or to “the aesthetic regime
of art” (Rancière, Aisthesis xii). The emphasis in the present study is on
the exploration of aesthetic interventions emerging from Latin American
poetry, music, and film in the 1960s. The examples chosen establish close
relationships between aesthetics and politics, but also revolve around
questions that seek to delimit which types of poetry, music, and film are
 Sensing Otherwise · 29

valued and the ways in which we sense and experience such artworks. In
Rancière’s critical language, this divisibility and categorization of the arts
is what he calls “the representative regime of art, i.e. a regime in which art
in general does not exist but where there do exist criteria of identification
for what the arts do, and of the appreciation for what is or is not art, for
good or bad art” (“Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-aesthetics” 219). While
the specific examples of poetry, music, and film are situated in countries
such as Argentina, Chile, and Cuba, or Uruguay, El Salvador, and Nicara-
gua, these artworks are also invested in exploring linkages that go beyond
the geographical and political borders of said countries. Quite often, in
fact, artists such as Mario Benedetti, Mercedes Sosa, or Humberto Solás
created art that was deeply in tune with their national realities, to echo
Fanon’s and Benedetti’s ideas highlighted in the opening of this chapter.
Yet, their artworks had a way of making people feel the urgency of art
beyond national borders. In many instances, the artworks studied here
had profound aesthetic repercussions at a transnational level in Latin
America.

Sensing and Decolonial Aesthetics

Decolonial aesthetics does not want to become an alternative philo-

sophical model, nor is it intended to supersede the philosophical project
around aesthetics that emerged in the West, primarily in Europe. Think-
ing about aesthetics from a decolonial perspective is more of an option,
rather than an outright rejection of modern/colonial European thought
(Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity xv–xvi). The decolonial
perspective tries to move away from theory per se and seeks to model
itself on quotidian experiences of resistance to ongoing modes of sub-
jugation. Decolonial aesthetics emerges from practice, from an invest-
ment in linking poiesis (as doing) to aisthesis (as sensing). In this vein,
decolonial aesthetics is simultaneously a way of understanding decolonial
thinking through artistic practice and artistic practice through decolo-
nial thinking. Part of the claim of Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics is that the
non-philosophical views emerging from music, poetry, and film are reflec-
tions on aesthetics, by which I mean a return to the roots of the term and
what it can offer to critical thinking today. What this return to aisthesis,
as a form of sensing or perception, forces us to do is to move away from
30 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

thinking about aesthetics in relation to a pure philosophical discourse on

the philosophy of art or with reflections that have to do with scientific
or schematic/organized lines of thinking about the function of art and
its relation to audiences. A return to aisthesis, as linked to the sensory or
the sensuous, shows us the occluded side of aesthetics. It points us in the
direction of thinking about what is left out, what has been obviated from
specific articulations of aesthetics within Western modernity.
Hereafter, then, my invocation of the word aesthetics has to do with
this incursion into what aisthesis can offer. This is why I emphasize aes-
thetics through practice rather than as a type of philosophical thinking.
Rather than achieving ideals, rather than focusing on a dominant percep-
tion of aesthetics or thinking of a system through which aesthetics can be
organized, here we are looking at ways in which decolonial aesthetics are
linked to local histories, to particular ways of reflecting on the role of aes-
thetics/aisthesis in relation to social and historical conditions as interven-
tions into cultural discourses and dynamics that have often privileged cer-
tain types of art over others. Decolonial aesthetics, then, becomes a way
to return to the question of which types of art get privileged and the type
of attention they receive (critical and commercial, on a local, national,
regional, hemispheric, continental or global scale). These questions are
taken up in a variety of ways. Of course, looking at non-philosophical
propositions on aesthetics does not mean that these particular ways of
thinking about aesthetics/aisthesis or sensing the arts, which will be here-
after termed decolonial aesthetics, exclude engagement with philosophy
or theoretical thinking. I want to emphasize, instead, a type of theory that
for Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih is “becoming a minor of Theory
and the becoming theory of the minor” or Judith Halberstam’s call for a
“low theory” (Lionnet and Shih 14; Halberstam 16). To think about de-
colonial aesthetics as a low theory or a minor theory, which is to say as
a type of theoretical thinking that distances itself from Theory, becomes
a useful way to be critical of master narratives and grand theories from
which aesthetics has obtained a grounded and yet disputed genealogy.
Decolonial aesthetics as theory (with a lowercase initial letter) is at once
an intervention in modes of practice and modes of sensing, while also
having theoretical implications grounded in local histories. By making
a claim for its position as a low theory or a minor theory, my intention
here is not to undermine this perspective but rather purposely to avoid
 Sensing Otherwise · 31

Theory’s legacy and its self-positioning in a central stage of discursivity

and theorization. Differently put, decolonial aesthetics does not seek to
be totalizing. It is actually anchored in its opposite, which is to say that
decolonial aesthetics is in tune with its multiplicity, its multivalence, and
allows us to view aesthetics through several lenses. Sensing Decolonial Aes-
thetics and decolonial aesthetics itself take their points of departure from
the need for undisciplined thinking. If we think of decolonial aesthetics
as a type of low theory, then, it “might constitute the name for a coun-
terhegemonic form of theorizing, the theorization of alternatives within
an undisciplined zone of knowledge production” (Halberstam 18). As I
stated earlier, decolonial aesthetics is invested in exploring the underside,
or what has been left out of the legacy of aesthetics as a discipline, and
thus locates itself in an undisciplined zone that does not follow the logic
and rules of dominant and long-standing articulations of aesthetics.

Ways of Sensing the Nation in Times of Postnationalism

and Cosmopolitics

In recent theories germane to literary and cultural studies, the idea of the
nation has been greatly resisted and heavily contested. Instead, discourses
around postnationalism and cosmopolitics have become common cur-
rency in both national literature and comparative literature departments,
though these concepts have also been extensively questioned. These de-
bates, of course, are not new, but they have indeed taken on a renewed
intensity in the last decade. Despite numerous attempts to announce the
death of the nation-state in the face of globalization, Pheng Cheah, for in-
stance, has argued that “Neither the nation-state nor the division of cen-
ter and periphery have been superseded” (382). Instead, the figure of the
ghostly or spectral nation has become a conceptual metaphor to discuss
its persistent cycle of life, convalescence, death, resurgence, and haunting.
Such a conceptual metaphor “is epitomized by the post-colonial nation,
whose haunted life or susceptibility to a kind a death that cannot be un-
equivocally delimited and transcended suggests the need to reconceptual-
ize freedom’s relation to finitude” (Cheah 383). Rather, thinking about the
nation as a specter or as having a ghostly dimension, sensing the nation in
times when it is resisted, must take into account its contested and difficult
past and its present as ways to envision the future.
32 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

In entering discussions about cosmopolitanism, we might wonder

what is at stake, particularly when we think about who is allowed to enter
into such global or cosmopolitan transactions of culture, modes of feel-
ing, and politics through arts. Here we can link this question to Etienne
Balibar’s proposition in “Toward a Diasporic Citizen?” (2011). Part of the
problem with Balibar’s position on the freedom of circulation of people
across national boundaries, which is inscribed in the International Dec-
laration of Human Rights, is precisely his insistence on exploring the di-
mension of citizenship while losing sight of what such citizens want, and
their self-determination to identify with a given demarcation of space un-
der the rubric of the nation. It is not up to us as academics or intellectuals
to make these calls. Balibar affirms that
Each individual is supposed to have his or her own country, which
refers to membership as well as belonging. I belong to the country
whose membership I share with others, this is my country as well as
other people’s country, our shared membership makes us part of it as
it also makes us its co-owners, as it were. That each of us is said to
be able to change place, change nationality, change membership and
belonging, “pass” from one country to another following certain
procedures, does not alter this structure of belonging; on the con-
trary, it highlights that it is considered as the rule or norm. (210–211)
Such a position is effective in delineating the dangers of mass migration
and what legal discourses have to say about it. Yet, there is no mention of
the affective ties linking the migrant or the exile to the idea of nation, or
what Guattari calls an “existential Territory” (102).6 It is objects belonging
to art and culture that often help create that linkage to the idea of home,
a nation to which one needs to belong, even if academic and global poli-
tics and economics would like to think otherwise. This is where sensing
works of art otherwise is important from the perspective of decolonial
aesthetics. Art from this pivotal and turbulent decade conjures up mem-
ories, affective connections, and unprecedented consequences that are
still felt today, as I suggest in the conclusion to this book. Discourses on
cosmopolitics, globalization, and postnationalism more often than not
lose sight of the individual and give primacy to the multitude in looking
broadly at the theoretical implications of their own discourses from the
perspectives of the state, corporations, and transnational actors (Balibar
 Sensing Otherwise · 33

223).7 What these discourses have in common is precisely their unwill-

ingness and inability to account for intangible categories such as sensing
and feeling from the perspective of audiences, the people. Decolonial aes-
thetics allows for an intervention that looks at the imbricated connection
between political and affective membership of people in the idea of the
nation, as much as that is resisted and thought to have been superseded.
At the heart of cosmopolitics is a certain concern with transcend-
ing binaries, whether in discussions around culture or around politics,
since “Most of the nations that gained freedom from colonization have
tended to form around an idea of power—the totalitarian drive of a sin-
gle, unique root—rather than around a fundamental relationship with
the Other. Culture’s self-conception was dualistic, pitting citizen against
barbarian” (Glissant 14). Binaries are precisely what lay the very founda-
tion for discussions about culture from a Latin American perspective,
though these were heavily influenced by Eurocentric understandings of
culture and aesthetics. When thinking about cultural production in Latin
America, the binaries of the nineteenth-century distinction between civi-
lization and barbarism as presented in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Fa-
cundo (1845) continued to have an impact well into the twentieth century.
Whereas civilization was equated with following European influences,
barbarism was represented as a retrograde and backward way of life, re-
ferring to peasants and people living in remote spaces with little access
to education and knowledge. If ports, capitals, and major cities were the
points of contact with civilization (i.e., Western European civilization),
working fields, jungles, and plains were associated with the perpetual
barbarism and backwardness inherent in the Americas. To move toward
progress, thinkers such as Sarmiento proposed to embrace civilization
fully at the expense of barbarism, which meant that to become civilized,
all traces of barbarism needed to be removed. In terms of cultural produc-
tion, this amounted to privileging foreign cultural imports over popular
culture coming from non-educated, barbaric peoples, while also uphold-
ing aesthetics of “buen gusto” (good taste) stemming from neoclassicist
and romantic aesthetic ideals.8
Such cultural values and mandates had a profound effect among the
emerging Latin American republics during the nineteenth century, and
would be taken up once again at the turn of the century in José Enrique
Rodó’s Ariel (1900). While Rodó also equated civilization with the
34 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

admiration and emulation of aesthetic values coming from Western Eu-

rope, particularly France, England, and Spain, he also sought to distin-
guish a Latin American culture from influences coming from the United
States. In this sense, Rodó simultaneously presents a Eurocentric and
anti-imperialist critique that would pervade much of the next three-quar-
ters of the twentieth century. At the same time, Rodó followed Sarmien-
to’s earlier line of thinking by rejecting barbarism, which was now equated
with ideas, values, and tastes coming from popular sectors. Whether
popular thought came from the cities or the countryside did not matter.
Such distinctions of aesthetic values and sensitivity were projected onto
the metonymic contrast between Ariel and Caliban. Whereas Ariel repre-
sented the highest form of human sensitivity, knowledge, truth, and the
enlightened human being, Caliban stood for materialist and positivist val-
ues coming from the United States, but also linked to irrationalism, base
emotions, and the raw sensuality of the popular sectors of Latin America.
In Rodó’s attempt to instill among Latin American youth (to whom the
book was dedicated) the desire to emulate European culture and values,
there is also the inherent acceptance that Latin America will always re-
main an incomplete approximation and semblance of Europe without
finding its own (autochthonous) means of expression.
Seven decades later, in that long decade of the 1960s, Roberto Fernán-
dez Retamar voiced a critical challenge to both Rodó and Sarmiento. For
Fernández Retamar, Latin America’s cultural ancestor is encapsulated in
the symbol of Caliban, which stands for the indigenous, the mestizo, the
enslaved, and the one forced to employ the master’s language. While the
invocation of Caliban is fitting to subvert Rodó’s Eurocentric embrace of
the symbol of Ariel, Fernández Retamar seems to make no distinctions
among those thinkers, authors, and artists operating under the symbol
of Caliban. Instead, he creates a litany of names associated with revolu-
tionary or leftist figures (including Simón Bolívar, Toussaint-Louverture,
Benito Juárez, Rubén Darío, José Carlos Mariátegui, Alejo Carpentier,
Pablo Neruda, Aimé Césaire, Violeta Parra, and Frantz Fanon, among
others). Likewise, Fernández Retamar follows José Martí’s own rejection
of Sarmiento’s false dichotomy of civilization and barbarism. As Martí
had noted, what exists is a tension between “false erudition and nature”
(Fernández Retamar 22).
In the works of poets, filmmakers, and musicians that comprise Sensing
 Sensing Otherwise · 35

Decolonial Aesthetics, in one way or another, there is an awareness of and

a reflection on such tensions and binaries. For instance, Ernesto Carde-
nal’s poetry is indebted to his own work with liberation theology, while
also being indebted to the poetic example of César Vallejo and the critical
thought of José Carlos Mariátegui and Augusto César Sandino. Put differ-
ently, Cardenal finds his poetic inspiration in the indigenous peoples of
Nicaragua, particularly in the remote area of Solentiname. Whereas previ-
ous poets might have gravitated toward the city or looked toward Europe
for inspiration, Cardenal looks toward what was once perceived as the
root of barbarism, Latin America’s indigenous populations. Cardenal is
only one example of the artist seeking to challenge the false dichotomies
that Martí and Retamar had pointed out almost eight decades apart. Af-
ter all, to reject one’s own roots and dismiss them as barbaric in favor of
foreign cultural models can be linked to a pervasive characteristic that has
plagued Latin America, namely xenophilia. In this sense, for those seeking
high or fine art exhibiting good taste, foreign cultural artifacts, especially
if they come from a perceived “first” or “developed” world, are received
more favorably than autochthonous cultural products. This is precisely
the legacy of the coloniality of knowledge and aesthetics that has become
so ingrained, naturalized, and normative that questioning a profound love
and admiration for great works of art and cultural models coming from
Europe is simply deemed unthinkable, unnecessary, or even heretical.
For Europe, in contrast, the question of determining its culture was
never an issue. It was already assumed and accepted as the epicenter and
the framework against which other cultures would be evaluated. For
Latin America, of course, this meant not defining itself in terms of what
it could contribute to aesthetics as a field, but rather merely defending
itself as having the right to produce valuable culture and to access what
Rancière calls the “aesthetic regime of art” (Aisthesis xii). It was not until
the generation of the 1960s, perhaps because of that decade’s widespread
and collective work throughout the arts, that Latin America finally sought
to assume its position as producer of culture without imitation or without
having to look toward Europe as a model of aesthetic values. It is not that
1960s decolonial artists altogether rejected European aesthetic values, but
rather that they were more interested in producing art for consumption
by popular audiences of Latin America, and to communicate more effec-
tively with popular sectors than with elite groups.9
36 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Keeping in mind these tensions and perspectives surrounding ques-

tions of the nation in Latin America, as well as the role of culture, we are
reminded that today
Nationalism is one form of identification confronting the homog-
enizing forces of globalization. Globalization has two sides: that of
the narrative of modernity and that of the logic of coloniality. Those
narratives engender different responses. . . . Postnationalism in the
West means the end of nationalism, while in the non-European
world it means the beginning of a new era in which the concept of
nationalism serves to reclaim identities as the basis of state sover-
eignty. (Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity 5)
Part of the impetus behind this study is precisely this push to think about
nationalism as a tangible, affective, and political category that is closely re-
lated to modes of sensing and aesthetic sensibilities that serve to reclaim
identities precisely at a moment when such identities are often subsumed
under broader categories (Latin American, transnational, trans-Atlantic,
global/world, etc.) that seek to erase differences and local histories, and
give more weight to specific areas within area studies.

Sensing Relations

As discussed in the foregoing sections of this chapter, my interest in aes-

thetics lies in the possibilities of returning to sensing, the sensuous, and
modes of sensibility beyond the visual and beyond works of art that ap-
pear in exhibits or installations. In fact, my take on aesthetics focuses pre-
cisely on opening up the trove of aesthetics to see what lies at its bottom.
A discussion of decolonial aesthetics does not seek to set itself in opposi-
tion to European thought. After all, talking about Eurocentric categories
such as aesthetics, the novel, literature, or film is inescapable, since these
have been historically understood and framed from a European posi-
tion. This is not say, however, that one cannot resist, reinvent, and rede-
fine what these categories mean. In fact, I argue that this is precisely what
my chosen artists have done: redefine, stretch, and contest the limits of
aesthetic categories and modes of artistic practice. For the sake of clar-
ity, allow me to state that this project is aware that aesthetics is in origin
a Western invention—as a discipline, in its discourse, in its terminology,
 Sensing Otherwise · 37

through to its very foundation in Greek and Latin. German, French, Eng-
lish, and other European languages become part of this lineage of West-
ern languages preoccupied with aesthetic categories. On a basic level, it
becomes almost impossible to avoid using such discourse and categories.
What we can do, however, is to think about such categories in a different
way and not become trapped by using the same rhetoric and terms that
have been used to introduce a specific line of thinking that perpetuates a
certain Eurocentric epistemological position relative to aesthetics.
Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics is not interested in replicating center-pe-
riphery binaries. In fact, what I am proposing throughout the book is that
decolonial aesthetics can help us move within and outside such dialecti-
cal relations by introducing other sets of possibilities into this discussion.
Indeed, through a relational model, it is possible to move away from tra-
ditional and well-defined genre studies (i.e., literature as a genre of art or
the novel as a sub-genre of literature). What we can do instead is establish
particular relations among texts and specific relations within and across
particular genres of arts, which is in fact what each of the following chap-
ters sets out to do—finding those relations, tracing linkages and points of
connection as we transition from chapter to chapter. In other words, rela-
tion here is another way of framing comparisons, since “Comparison as
relation means setting into motion historical relationalities between en-
tities brought together for comparison, and bringing into relation terms
that have traditionally been pushed apart from each other due to certain
interests, such as the European exceptionalism that undergirds Eurocen-
trism” (Shih 79). My intention is not necessarily to shy away from Euro-
pean discourses or avoid them altogether. In fact, in each chapter there is
a consistent engagement with European texts and philosophy. By mov-
ing the spotlight away from European texts, however, this project places
other modes of thinking and sensing at the same level as their European
counterparts, with the ultimate goal of engaging them in a conversation.
This is, in part, why there is an investment in exploring non-philosophical
ideas and practices emerging from art, precisely because I firmly believe
that artworks can offer us alternative models for thinking about aesthet-
ics. An exploration of what artworks can tell us about aesthetics is part of
the decolonial move of Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics, which seeks a shift in
the traditional relationship between aesthetics and arts. Aesthetics, as a
discipline, traditionally looks at art objects and thus offers ideas, readings,
38 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

interpretations, and normative evaluative categories. In addition to this

interpretive dimension of aesthetics, in this book I am interested in teas-
ing out from the artworks themselves ideas and positions about aesthet-
ics in relation to sensing. The decolonial move of this book is to place an
emphasis on artist and artworks, since they are no longer mere objects of
study. Rather, the arts can themselves offer complementary and relevant
options to philosophical discourses, which is another dimension of deco-
lonial aesthetics. In short, sensing otherwise allows us to enter into these
conversations whereby discourses of center-periphery and binary axes
of relation are avoided. Glissant reminds us that “The more it [relation]
works in favor of an oppressive order, the more it calls forth disorder as
well. . . . Relation is learning more and more to go beyond judgments into
the unexpected dark of art’s upsurgings. Its beauty springs from the stable
and the unstable, from the deviance of many particular poetics and the
clairvoyance of relational poetics” (138–139). Unexpected relations come
to light, forcing us to sense differently, and enabling us to look at the in-
terrelations of artistic genres. Relational readings or comparisons of the
arts enable us to look at what poetry might tell us about music and vice
versa, but also at what a particular poet might reveal about another poet’s
proposition. These points of connection are key to giving a broader and
more nuanced picture of the long decade of the 1960s in Latin America.
 2
x
The Poetics of Sensing
Decolonial Verses in Antipoetry and Conversational Poetry

La literatura vive en relación con su época, pero también en relación con la

literatura.
[Literature lives in relation to its time, but also in relation to literature.]
Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Antipoesía y poesía conversacional en Hispanoamérica”

Following Fernández Retamar’s critical suggestion that literature is at

once rooted within its time and also exists in relation to literature writ
large, one of the goals of this chapter is to establish points of connection
and correlation among four distinct and even fragmentary approaches to
using vernacular language to write poetry, specifically in examples drawn
from Nicanor Parra, Mario Benedetti, Ernesto Cardenal, and Roque Dal-
ton. A second issue that I seek to address is poetry’s contribution to a ge-
nealogy of decolonial thinking and sensing. To begin engaging with these
two questions, there will be two connecting threads: Mario Benedetti and
Nicanor Parra.
Benedetti is particularly useful in the present chapter with his articu-
lation of the “poeta comunicante” [poet-as-communicator], since the
term encompasses the poetic approaches of Parra, Benedetti, Cardenal,
and Dalton. Benedetti defines the poet-as-communicator in two ways.
On the one hand, the poet-as-communicator becomes preoccupied with
establishing a clear and direct line of communication with his or her
reader, and thus invites the reader into a dialogue. At the same time, in
Benedetti’s conception, the poet-as-communicator bridges historical
and cultural gaps, while transmitting changes in generational attitudes
40 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

(Benedetti, “Prólogo” 14–15). Moreover, Benedetti ascribes a sense of ur-

gency in political and social terms to the poet-as-communicator’s craft,
which explains why the language of communication must be straightfor-
ward and clearly say what it needs to say. Writing poetry becomes a way
to create art that is primarily addressed to an everyday audience, with the
objective of delivering a message, inviting the reader into a dialogue, and
shifting perceptions of poetry as a form that uses a hermetic and apolitical
language that fails to connect with pressing and material concerns of vast
sectors of the population. In this conception of poetry’s directness, shift-
ing the focus of poetry’s primary intended audience is already an invita-
tion to decolonize the legacy of poetry’s hermeticism, running from Latin
America’s romanticism through modernismo and many of the historical
vanguards.
For instance, critic Alberto Julián Pérez situates the poetic contribu-
tions of César Vallejo in his Poemas humanos (1923–1938), Pablo Neruda
in Canto General (1950), and a later generation that includes Benedetti,
Dalton, Claribel Alegría, Antonio Cisneros, and Cardenal as contributing
and belonging to a progression and growth in social realist art. Regarding
this grouping of authors seeking to distance themselves from hermetic
poetry and instead move poetry toward social and political engagement,
Pérez writes: “La poesía hispanoamericana alcanza especialmente su gran
madurez artística con este arte realista socialista, gracias a su feliz incor-
poración del referente social y politico, la historia y la cultura de Hispano-
américa” [Spanish American poetry specifically reaches its great artistic
maturity with this social realist art, which productively incorporates po-
litical and social references, and Spanish America’s history and culture]
(274). Such a grouping under the category of social realist art, particu-
larly in terms of poetry, is appropriate due to the variety of ways in which
these poets engage social, political, historical, and cultural Latin Ameri-
can referents. While I tend to agree with this overall grouping as one
that aims to put poetry in more direct relation to a heterogeneous ques-
tioning of social, political, and historical issues afflicting most sectors of
Latin American society, it is also widely known that Benedetti, Parra, and
Dalton sought to align themselves more with Vallejo’s poetic legacy than
with Neruda’s, despite the fact that Neruda has been widely read as one of
Latin America’s most Marxist and more ideologically focused poets of the
first half of the twentieth century. While there is value in continuing to
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 41

read these poets as part of a social realist genealogy of committed poetry,

Benedetti’s category of poet-as-communicator serves to establish more
nuanced distinctions in poetic production and intention among the poets
in this group. Part of the act of communicating through poetry implies a
heterogeneity in poetic expression that mixes politics and a clear sense
of poetry’s transformational purpose. Clarity, directness, and openness
in communication between the poet and an intended (vast) audience is
one of the characteristics I identify as decolonial gestures, particularly in
terms of shifting the uses of poetry beyond pure aesthetic pleasure and
literary value or worth.
As another way to establish points of connection among Parra, Bene-
detti, Cardenal, and Dalton, I will employ antipoetry as a second point of
departure. In the following section, I will delve more fully into the insta-
bility and playfulness of the term “antipoetry.” Essentially, however, the
connection I emphasize between the poet-as-communicator and antipo-
etry is best summed up in Parra’s words: “poetry is merely life in words.
The vernacular, then, has a large place in antipoetry” (Lerzundi 153). In
this sense, the poet-as-communicator is preoccupied with finding ways to
express what he or she sees and experiences in everyday life by employing
vernacular language to communicate with readers. Since antipoetry pre-
supposes that poetry has privileged difficult metaphors, ornate language,
and musicality without a discernible connection to real-life concerns,
antipoetry turns to the vernacular as a way to counteract “high” poetry.
As such, the use of the vernacular becomes a counter-poetics that stands
in opposition to and differentiates itself from high poetry, or what I re-
fer to above as hermeticism in poetry. Antipoetry is anti-apolaustic in its
conscious creation of poetry that moves away from enjoyment and pure
pleasure devoid of social references or political inflections, thus seeking to
undo a certain coloniality of poetic language, or what César Vallejo once
termed “el proceso hispano-americanizante de nuestro pensamiento” [the
Hispanic-Americanizing process of our thinking] (Vallejo, “Una gran re-
unión latino-americana” 31).
In the following sections, I will explore the ways in which the afore-
mentioned poets employed vernacular language to communicate directly
with readers, but also to present a distinct way of writing and doing an-
tipoetry. Given antipoetry’s preference for quotidian language, and how
the antipoet’s socio-poetic awareness must be in the service of social
42 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

justice, I do not see antipoetry as an exclusively “Parranian” invention or

way of writing poetry, though Parra is certainly the foremost and perhaps
best-known proponent of antipoetry. It would be a mistake to link anti-
poetry with Parra in such an overt and exclusive way, since antipoetry is
against the practice of turning a poet into an idolatrized public figure. As I
will argue and illustrate in the following sections, the choice of quotidian
language showcases four distinct-but-related modalities of embracing and
expanding upon the poetic possibilities that antipoetry proffers. For the
antipoet or poet-as-communicator, poetry does not simply remain at the
level of the written word, but must be pushed to its boundaries to come
back to life. In doing so, the very literary and aesthetic category of poetry
is brought closer to serving a social and political function, and not only a
literary one. In essence, the poet-as-communicator draws his inspiration
from everyday life and seeks to return to it an aesthetic product stripped
of ostentatiousness, unnecessary ornateness, irrelevant imagery, and her-
metic language.
But what might one gain from reading antipoetry or quotidian po-
etry writ large from the 1960s through a decolonial lens? How might
this type of poetry already articulate some of the concerns appearing in
contemporary theory (in this case coloniality/modernity/decolonial-
ity)? And, in existing discourses around decolonial aesthetics, why does
this decolonial stance often concern itself primordially with recent art
practices?1 These are questions that will be more fully addressed in the
course of this chapter, but I will provide some preliminary answers here.
One of the precepts of a decolonial critique of aesthetics is that aesthet-
ics has concerned itself with establishing parameters within which one
may both produce and evaluate artworks and thus distinguish between
those works deemed worthy of exhibition, reading, viewing, and enjoy-
ment and those that simply did not conform to the artistic parameters.
In the case of poetry, one could extend this type of argument to thinking
about the historical prevalence of specific poetic forms (the sonnet or the
décima), strict preference for meter and rhyme (both as internal rhyme
and rhyme schemes), or the preference for high versification, as with oc-
tosyllabic or hendecasyllabic verses, traditionally part of the versos de arte
mayor (usually of nine, ten, or eleven syllables in Spanish). A turn toward
quotidian language in Latin American poetry becomes more prominent
with the likes of César Vallejo, Luis Palés Matos, or Nicolás Guillén. This
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 43

emphasis on transforming traditional poetic forms, embracing quotidian

and popular linguistic expressions (what I refer to here as conversational
poetry), and a sometimes-veiled, sometimes-overt engagement with radi-
cal politics (usually anti-imperial and anticolonial) becomes more wide-
scale during the 1960s with the prominence of Juan Gelman, Gonzalo Ro-
jas, Enrique Linh, Roque Dalton, Ernesto Cardenal, José Emilio Pacheco,
Idea Vilariño, and Jorge Enrique Adoum, among many others.
As simple as it might seem to us today, these heterogeneous attempts
at transforming poetry into a popular art form or, to echo Nicanor Parra,
at bringing poetry down from Mount Olympus, are indeed not only foun-
dational to a type of poetry seeking transparency and directness in com-
munication, but also remind us that poetry can and should be directly en-
gaged with the world from which it draws its inspiration. Thus, rather than
merely being a distant observer of reality, social conditions, political and
social unrest, forms of racial injustice, sexism, and other forms of oppres-
sion (a shorthand for the pillars constituting coloniality), the committed
poet records in verse, reflects, and responds to such forms of coloniality
with poetry, while seeking to expose and critique them in plain language.
As I will argue through close readings of select poems by Nicanor Parra,
Mario Benedetti, Roque Dalton, and Ernesto Cardenal, reading poetry
through a critique of coloniality (a decolonial lens) does not mean that
every aspect of these writers’ poems, or even their poetic propositions,
align neatly with decolonial perspectives. In fact, what we see quite often
are uneven approximations of and contributions to the spirit and energy
behind the contemporary critical concepts of coloniality/decoloniality. I
underscore the pluralization and diversity of positionalities related to co-
loniality/decoloniality to emphasize the need to think of these theoreti-
cal concepts not exclusively in relation to Quijano or Mignolo, but also
in terms of the many scholars and non-scholars who have embraced and
contributed to an expansion and re-elaboration of these ideas. This, I ar-
gue, is part of what needs to happen in a rethinking of the genealogy of
decolonial critiques through archival and archaeological work that looks
at artists and social actors who have produced various and even incon-
gruous critiques of coloniality through a host of artistic modalities. Sim-
ply put, arriving at decoloniality through an exposure of coloniality does
not need to take the form of a straight line, nor does it exclusively need
to occur through existing discourses from recovered thinkers (Fanon,
44 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

O’Gorman, Fals-Borda, Kusch, etc.). Exposures of coloniality can and

should appear from heterogeneous optics and positionalities. As I have
consistently underscored, my perspective seeks to present art, at the level
of philosophy, sociology, or political thought, as a viable and equally im-
portant contributor to a decolonization of knowledges, leveling the hier-
archy of knowledges. An aversion to engaging with the arts (in this case
literary forms), particularly from a decolonial perspective, or even sim-
ply giving primacy to certain modes of knowledge (favoring only some
disciplines), seems only to instantiate further the very coloniality that a
decolonial perspective seeks to expose and denounce. In a recent study,
Horacio Legrás takes on this particular issue by focusing on decolonial
theory’s lack of engagement with literature, and states that “This absence
of a literary register is all the more remarkable since literature has been
central to the establishment of a postcolonial canon that decolonial au-
thors see as a twin, although differently grounded branch, of the general
crisis of colonial reason in the periphery” (19). Echoing Legrás’s position,
what follows is just such an examination of the poetry of Parra, Benedetti,
Dalton, and Cardenal as contributing to “a genealogy of a decolonial
ethos” (Legrás 20). Constructing such a genealogy is an ongoing process,
and any effort can only be a partial attempt at piecing together the various
(and necessarily incomplete) fragments that are constitutive of a decolo-
nial ethos that is not recent, but rather has an extended trajectory.

Antipoetry’s Different Modalities

Engaging with a term such as antipoetry presents us with a number of

questions. At first glance, with the prefix “anti,” the term antipoetry might
seem to imply an opposition to or rejection of poetry. Moreover, there
would appear to be a conscious attempt on the antipoet’s part to distance
him- or herself from poetry or to position him- or herself against it. To
have a better understanding of how antipoetry differentiates itself from
poetry, we need briefly to identify the type of poetry that the antipoet
rejects.
In relation to Latin American poetics, the concept of antipoetry has
been exclusively associated with Nicanor Parra. In essence, we are deal-
ing with a poetic proposition that has its origins in Chile. Much of the
scholarship around antipoetry has almost univocally identified antipoetry
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 45

with Nicanor Parra, and therefore as a Chilean poetic model.2 If we take

this position as a point of departure, Parra’s antipoetry seeks to distance
itself from his immediate poetic precursors, namely Pablo Neruda, Pablo
de Rokha, Gabriela Mistral, and Vicente Huidobro. Antipoetry, then,
stands in opposition to a specific lineage of celebrity-poets in Chile’s liter-
ary scene and highly lauded poets on an international level. As Alexander
Coleman reminds us: “Parra’s campaign against the idea of ‘poetry’ makes
him into a literary poujadist; a needler too, a trasher of idols who glee-
fully spoofs Mallarmé’s hermeticism, who deflates Eliot’s Christian pos-
tures, who jokes with Neruda’s bardic rumblings. This onslaught includes
attacks against the idea of ‘masterpieces’ and the attendant sacralization
of poetry” (xiv). Coleman’s succinct assessment of Parra’s antipoetic
proposition is accurate, particularly when one thinks of the ways in which
antipoetry seeks to distance itself from Neruda’s lyric poetry or even the
reference to Mallarmé’s symbolist poetry, which had been so influential
among some modernista poets in Latin America. Of equal importance is
one of the precepts of antipoetry, by which the idea of poetic or literary
masterpieces—the sacralization or aggrandizement of poetry, and by ex-
tension of poets—is unjustified and unnecessary practice.
It can be argued that the publication of Parra’s Poemas y antipoemas
(Poems and Antipoems) in 1954 marks a before-and-after not only in
Chilean poetry, but also in relation to Latin American poetics in general
(Fernández Retamar, “Antipoesía y poesía conversacional en Hispanoa-
mérica” 162). In a sense, with this publication, Parra shaped the genera-
tion of younger and contemporary poets who became prominent in the
1960s, including Mario Benedetti, Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, En-
rique Linh, Juan Gelman, and César Young Núñez, among others. Addi-
tionally, with the conceptualization of antipoetry, Parra reclaimed the col-
lective right of poets to turn to popular poetry, quotidian inspiration, and
employ colloquial expressions. After all, as one critic noted: “antipoetry
is unadorned, is unlyrical, is nonsymbolist; in antipoetry what you see is
what you see” (M. Williams vii).
For Parra, it is important to go back in time to draw inspiration from
poets of the quotidian and the vernacular as a way to move forward
with his antipoetic proposition, while also demystifying poetry’s highly
aestheticized, academicized, ornate, lyrical, hermetic, and overly meta-
phorical tendencies. By looking back to his poetic precursors, Parra also
46 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

distinguishes between poetic models he wishes to embrace and those

from which he seeks to distance himself. For instance, when Benedetti
asks Parra in an interview to mention some of the influences that have
shaped his elusive and undefined usage of antipoetry, Parra lists the likes
of Aristophanes, Lucius Afranius, and Chaucer, all three of whom em-
braced comedic devices to speak about the follies of their respective soci-
eties (Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o el artefacto con laureles” 44). Among
the poetic sources that shaped Parra’s proposition, the poet adds Juan
Ruiz, el Romancero, El Poema del Cid, Quevedo, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer,
Martín Fierro, and nineteenth-century Chilean popular poetry, among
others (Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o el artefacto con laureles” 44–45; Le-
rzundi 151–155). Even if antipoetry draws from these traditions, however,
there is at the same time a conscious attempt to move away from them.
In the same vein, Parra admits to some vague influences from Huidobro,
Mistral, and Neruda in his poetry. Parra provides a clue about his vision
of antipoetry in the following statement:

De modo que si ésta es una poesía anti-Neruda, también es una

poesía anti-Vallejo, es una poesía anti-Mistral, es una poesía anti-
todo, pero también es una poesía en la que resuenan todos estos
ecos. (Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o el artefacto con laureles” 52)

[And so, if this poetry is anti-Neruda, it is also an anti-Vallejo po-

etry, an anti-Mistral poetry; it is an anti-everything poetry, but it is
also a poetry in which there are resonances of all of those echoes.]

Here we find another dimension of antipoetry. On the one hand, Parra

acknowledges the influence or echoes of canonical poets such as Vallejo,
Neruda, or Mistral, while also reaffirming how antipoetry goes against
these poets’ legacies. Parra’s antipoetic praxis is at once attuned to these
poets’ work, but only as a way to reject it with the intention of proposing
a desacralization of canonized poets.
Since there are echoes of Vallejo’s poetics in Parra’s antipoetry, it be-
comes important to trace this point of relation. In fact, Vallejo is a pivotal
poetic reference for all four poets in this chapter, precisely because of his
legacy in seeking to activate poetry for a political purpose, while peel-
ing back the embedded and overbearing legacy of Spanish language and
poetic forms. In an essay that surveys the most salient Latin American
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 47

poetic figures, Stephen M. Hart suggests that César Vallejo is one of the
quintessential poets seeking to join art and politics, particularly in the
collection Poemas humanos (1939), which “include some of the finest po-
litical poems written in the Spanish language” (433). According to Hart,
what makes Vallejo’s political poetry “retain aesthetic value” is that Valle-
jo’s poetry does not “descend into the ranting of a pamphleteer . . .” (433).
While I agree with Hart’s assessment, despite the fact that he still oper-
ates under a certain Eurocentric aesthetic judgment that is simply at odds
with the perspective of this study, it is important to note a simple obser-
vation: Vallejo’s success and agility in joining poetry and politics rests pre-
cisely on his subtlety and his ability to reflect upon everyday events and
turn them into political observations worthy of being poeticized. Thus,
as much as Parra wants to distance himself from Vallejo by claiming an
“anti-Vallejo” stance in his antipoetic praxis, I would argue that Parra ends
up emulating Vallejo’s subtle engagement with politics through poetry.
Another commonality between these two poets, particularly when one
thinks about Vallejo’s Poemas humanos in relation to Parra’s Poemas y anti-
poemas, is a turn toward the versification of prose or the mirroring of quo-
tidian speech through complete sentences, dialogues, and monologues, as
in the case of Vallejo’s poems “El momento más grave de la vida,” “Voy a
hablar de esperanza,” or “Epístola a los transeúntes.” In both Vallejo’s and
Parra’s poetry, there is a clear emphasis on an intended audience, a reader,
and an interlocutor with whom the poet seeks to communicate. As Hart
notes, however, “Vallejo is able to make his political point much more ef-
fectively by coining striking poetic images rather than writing straightfor-
ward poetry which attacks capitalism directly” (433). This is perhaps one
of the most striking differences among the poets in this chapter. Despite a
certain family resemblance, to adapt Wittgenstein’s concept, there are dis-
tinct differences among the four poets’ engagement with the directness
of language, with how straightforward poetry should be, and with how
veiled or direct the “attacks” ought to appear in verse. These distinctions
will become clearer in the subsequent sections dedicated to each poet.
Since antipoetry is also anti-everything, and one could extend this
claim to examples of conversational poetry, there is a common concern
among these poets with a return to simplicity in poetic language, which
does not mean simplistic poetry or verses devoid of deep and pressing
existential, political, or social questions. For instance, in his attempt to
48 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

distinguish antipoetry from some of his poetic (hermetic) precursors,

Parra attributes the crisis of hermetic or high poetry to the Renaissance:
“it occurred to me that that was the source of all the vices of this elegant
poetry, of this stuffed shirt poetry that was being written in Chile. . . . I
saw that the thing had got off to a bad start in the Renaissance, when po-
etry was written for the salon, an aristocratic poetry for the upper classes,
a poetry eminently conventional; but luckily I went back even further and
came upon the Middle Ages” (Lerzundi 152). In his attempt to rehabilitate
poetry, not only does Parra go farther back in time for poetic inspiration,
he finds kindred voices in classical poets such as Callimachus, Nikarchus,
and Archilochus (Lerzundi 152). Furthermore, as one critic has noted, in
Parra’s antipoetry there is also use of rational discursivity that takes on a
tone of explanation in its dialogic or conversational emphasis, and one
might even say that antipoetry contains a pedagogic emphasis that brings
antipoetry closer to socialist realist poetry, though also questioning the
ends and means of an emphasis on historical perspective (Pérez 290).
In this recovery of past poetic forms and a return to a simplicity of lan-
guage, we find again a connection to Vallejo’s own thinking about his po-
etic milieu when he writes:

La poesía nueva a base de palabras o de metáforas nuevas, se dis-

tingue por su pedantería de novedad y, en consecuencia, por su
complicación y su barroquismo. La poesía nueva a base de sensibi-
lidad nueva es, al contrario, simple y humana y a primera vista se la
tomaría por antigua o no atrae la atención sobre si es o no moderna.
(Vallejo, “Poesía nueva” 12–13)

[The new poetry based upon new words and metaphors distin-
guishes itself by the pedantry of its novelty, and, in turn, by its com-
plicatedness and baroque nature. The new poetry based upon a new
sensibility is, on the contrary, plain and human and, at first glance,
one might take it for old or for not drawing attention to itself about
whether or not it is modern.]

While Vallejo was describing a type of poetry written in the context of

the 1920s, in the aftermath of World War I, in an era of great turmoil and
change both in Latin America and in Europe, there are a few keywords
stemming from the second description of the new poetry that definitely
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 49

resonate with the type of antipoetry or conversational poetics of Parra,

Benedetti, Cardenal, and Dalton. Vallejo’s emphasis on a new sensibility
and a return to a simplicity of language to showcase the depths of the hu-
man experience, including its horrors, suffering, and multiple modes of
oppression, are the seeds from Vallejo’s poetics that blossom into a con-
versational poetics invested in confronting life with quotidian language.
In the case of Parra, he displays a distaste for highly ornate, lyrical and
metaphorical poetry or poetry that abuses metaphors as a poetic device.
Parra wants to strip antipoetry of muddled and highly ornate metaphors
and what he perceives as poets’ misuse and overuse of them. For Parra,
the association of the lyrical with high poetry generated a hermetic prod-
uct that became highly valorized among certain elite circles but failed to
connect with popular audiences. Instead, Parra opts for simple, concrete,
and direct language intended to be read and understood by the common
reader and audiences. In this sense, antipoetry becomes an effort to cre-
ate direct communication with audiences without the need for media-
tors and interpreters (critics) or the deciphering of complex imagery and
language.
Furthermore, Parra shows a rejection of the type of poetry that had
dominated Latin American poetics well into the first half of the twentieth
century. Parra’s objection to a certain kind of lyrical poetry is the degree
to which it has become delinked and detached from its origins and its re-
lation to the lyre and troubadours, while it has also alienated audiences
and negated lyrical poetry’s original purpose, which was to communicate
directly with and entertain audiences. For Parra, lyrical poetry is linked to
perception and the senses and thus is associated with aesthetics, but not
the kind of aestheticization that privileges beauty and the ornate. Quite
the contrary—in Parra’s proposition, he wishes to retain from the legacy
of classical and medieval lyrical poetry what he perceives to be a connec-
tion with quotidian elements and expressions that denote a conversa-
tional approach to bring about communication with readers: “ésta es una
poesía que siempre está dirigida a un interlocutor, no a un interlocutor
equis sino a un sector . . . de modo que si no se produce la comunicación,
yo me siento profundamente deprimido, me parece que he fallado” [This
is a poetry that is always aimed at an interlocutor, not at any interlocutor,
but at a sector . . . and so, if communication fails, I feel deeply depressed;
it seems that I’ve failed] (Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o el artefacto con
50 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

laureles” 50). Clarity and directness in expression, coupled with desacral-

izing and scrutinizing every possible subject, are perhaps the central te-
nets of antipoetry as poetic praxis, and what I perceive to be a decolonial
gesture of reclaiming and reactivating poetry as a means of directly engag-
ing with audiences.
In short, antipoetry does not stand against the idea of poetry, but only
against of a certain conceptualization, execution, and tradition of poetry
that has come to dominate poetic output and consumption. As Fernán-
dez Retamar notes, “Pero por el mero hecho de ser, ninguna poesía es an-
tipoesía: la única verdadera antipoesía no se escribe” [By the mere fact
of being, no poetry is antipoetry: the only true antipoetry is that which
is not written at all] (“Antipoesía y poesía conversacional en Hispanoa-
mérica” 163). Far from essentializing popular or folk poetry, antipoetry’s
claim to revalorize popular poetic forms and expressions appears as a
conscious move to take a stand against elitist poetic and aesthetic sensi-
bilities regarding what counted as valid, worthwhile, or beautiful poetry.
While antipoetry resists a clear-cut definition, even in interviews Parra
has consciously avoided providing a definitive stance or writing a proper
manifesto. Nonetheless, Edith Grossman has offered some general goals:
1) to free poetry from the yoke of the metaphor; 2) to use common lan-
guage as a way to reflect daily life; 3) to localize or use colloquialisms to
accomplish the first two goals (Grossman 8–9).
Another important characteristic in Parra’s antipoetry is his incorpora-
tion of playfulness and comedic devices, which are meant to produce a
different sort of aesthetic experience or way to sense poetry: to laugh at
the ornate and highly aestheticized, the poetic demi-gods, and the canon-
ized collections of poetry. For the antipoet, nothing is sacred, including
antipoetry. Even an antipoem can be self-reflexive and self-critical and
poke fun at itself. A good example of this can be found in his collection
Versos de salón (1962), in the poem “La montaña rusa” [“Roller Coaster”]:

Durante medio siglo

Lo poesía fue
El paraíso del tonto solemne.
Hasta que vine yo
Y me instalé con mi montaña rusa.
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 51

Suban, si les parece.

Claro que yo no respondo si bajan
Echando sangre por boca y narices.
(Parra, Obra gruesa 84)

For half a Century

Poetry was the paradise
Of the solemn fool.
Until I came
And built my roller coaster.

Go up, if you feel like it.

I’m not responsible if you come down
With your mouth and nose bleeding.
(Parra, Poems and Antipoems 67) 3

As Parra explains in his interview with Benedetti, when he employs “I,”

it should not be confused with a poetic voice or with Parra as poet. In-
stead, it is meant to denote a sense of collectivity and belonging (Bene-
detti, “Nicanor Parra o el artefacto con laureles” 49). As becomes appar-
ent in “La montaña rusa,” Parra is interested in taking readers on a roller
coaster ride of extreme emotions and modes of sensing poetry, though he
rids himself of any responsibility for what the reader may get out of his
poetry. At the same time, with the invocation of a bleeding mouth and
nose, we see an example of how Parra draws our attention to the quotid-
ian, to the earthly, and avoids any sense of “beauty” in the conventional
aesthetic and poetic sense. Instead, Parra presents us with a very graphic
and visceral image we cannot escape or confuse with anything else. It
does not necessitate extrapolations and does not hide deeper meanings.
Antipoetry thus grounds itself in relation to a different aesthetic sensibil-
ity, which draws its inspiration from the popular, the quotidian, or simply
what the antipoet thinks (deified) poets would deride as unworthy of po-
etic inspiration. As Parra notes, “What the antipoet looks for is not, fun-
damentally, beauty, but life, life in flesh and bone; he will settle for noth-
ing less” (Lerzundi 153).
Antipoetry resists the temptation of taking itself too seriously, though
at times the thematic preoccupation of antipoets can be somber and
52 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

serious, particularly with topics such as death and other dark emotions.
If any topic can become a source of inspiration for the antipoet, it can
also be subverted and turned into a source of lightness. Parra’s treatment
of certain topics can be associated with a particular view on how poetry
needs to have a certain degree of levity if it is going to communicate ef-
fectively with its readers. This stance, of course, is very different from the
sense of urgency we find in Dalton, Benedetti, and Cardenal. Yet, a com-
mon characteristic among the four poets is their embrace of the comedic
in relation to poetry. Laughing or poking fun at pain, suffering, authority,
oppression, and other forms of power is a key facet of antipoetry’s deco-
lonial gesture. In other words, antipoetry demands that we rethink domi-
nant conceptions of what constitutes valid culture from the vantage point
of what is perceived as valid, worthwhile, beautiful, or aesthetic poetry.
To establish a connection between decolonial aesthetics and antipo-
etry, we must remember that Parra’s poetic (or antipoetic) perspective
lies precisely in the attempt to bring down poetry and poets from Mount
Olympus, as he astutely announces in his poem “Manifiesto”: “Los poetas
bajaron del Olimpo” [The poets have descended from Olympus] (Parra,
Obra gruesa 211). Parra’s references to the poets who have descended
and become part of the world are to none other than antipoets, poets-
as-communicators, or poets of the vernacular. Moreover, in its decolonial
aesthetic proposition, antipoetry embraces everyday language, situations,
colloquialisms, irony, parody, satire, and other forms of humor as sources
of poetic inspiration for the antipoet or poet-as-communicator. Follow-
ing Enrique Dussel’s call for us to think of aesthetics not exclusively in
terms of beauty, the sublime, or other positive aesthetic categories, but in
relation to the ugly or the popular, antipoetry becomes an aesthetic and
poetic proposition that constantly renews and redefines itself as a way to
keep up-to-date with the exigencies of social demands and changes in
language (Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation). This position is in line with
certain aspects of Benedetto Croce’s argument about the aesthetic as a
science of expression, but also with determining its terms of relation with
history and linguistics. In arguing about the relation between aesthetic
judgment and questions of uniformity in language, Croce writes that
“Language is perpetual creation; what is expressed at one time in words is
not repeated save in the reproduction of what has already been produced;
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 53

ever new impressions give rise to a continually changing set of sounds and
meanings, that is, to ever new expressions” (Croce, The Aesthetic 163). An-
tipoetry or poetry of communication constantly seeks to renovate itself
without becoming static or stagnant given its emphasis on the perpetual
revitalization of poetic language and its ongoing connection with lived
experiences. Rather than standing in opposition to poetic language or
creation through verse, as it has been commonly understood, antipoetry
seeks to bring poetics back into tune with the rhythms, sounds, words,
and sensibilities of the quotidian.
The connection between decolonial aesthetics and antipoetry is an in-
herent challenge to what has traditionally been favored as valid poetry in
Latin America and to conceptualizations of poetic language, as well as to
valid perspectives or approaches to appreciating poetry. Since aesthetics
are related to perception and the senses, antipoetry opens up the possi-
bility of engaging the senses in relation to poetry. While antipoetry can
be aural and visual, it leaves the musicalization of poetry to troubadours,
singer-songwriters, or interpreters seeking to adapt a poem into song for-
mat. An instance of the correlation between antipoetry and music can be
seen with Daniel Viglietti’s and Joan Manuel Serrat’s respective attempts
at setting Benedetti’s poetry to music. In the following chapter, for in-
stance, I will explore one example of the connection between poetry and
music with a poem Nicanor Parra wrote for his sister, Violeta Parra, to
set to music. In terms of antipoetry’s visual dimension, we see clear in-
stances of this with Nicanor Parra’s turn toward visual artifacts, drawings,
and artistic installations, which still retain the written word, but are more
concerned with the interplay between the word and image.4
In the following sections, I will pay closer attention to the ways in
which each of the four poets engages with poetry-as-communication,
vernacular poetics, or antipoetry in different modalities. Whereas Parra
takes on an anti-everything stance, Benedetti engages with the working
class and the struggles of everyday life in urban settings. Cardenal, on the
other hand, infuses poetry with liberation theology to grapple with social
injustices, particularly with the underprivileged and indigenous peoples.
Finally, Dalton takes a militant stance when it comes to writing poetry
as a way to underscore the connection between poetic craft and political
commitment as a means to work toward social justice.
54 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Nicanor Parra and Antipoetry

Whereas some of the parameters of decolonial aesthetics I demarcated in

the introduction and first chapter demand an artist’s conscious effort to
politicize art, in the case of antipoetry, particularly with Parra, one is able
to see the gradations and different approaches by which art can be politi-
cized without the artist overtly doing so. Parra’s playful and conscious ef-
fort in avoiding disclosure of his political ideologies and stripping his po-
etry of self-evident political language is another way in which he sought
to distance and differentiate himself from Neruda.
If Neruda became associated with Marxist ideology and the Chilean
Communist Party, while also actively participating in various capacities in
Chile’s political life, Parra opted for the exact opposite: no clear commit-
ment to either right-wing or leftist politics. In fact, as one critic noted, “En
la poesía de Parra, vemos, no hay una posición política o cultural única,
cada posición es capaz de incluir su contrapartida. El autor no se iden-
tifica con un solo sujeto, puede alternativamente adoptar todas las más-
caras, las ‘personas’” [In Parra’s antipoetry we see that there is not a single
political or cultural position, because each position is capable of contain-
ing its counterpart. The author does not identify with a single subject, but
can adopt and alternate all masks, all people] (Pérez 291). We can gather,
however, from Parra’s poetry and interviews where he stands on the polit-
ical spectrum. This is to say that Parra the man aligns himself with the left,
but Parra the poet sees no room for overt politics and ideological tints in
his poetry. Of course, there are times at which Parra betrays this apolitical
and anti-ideological stance.
For instance, Parra argues that he considers himself a political poet,
but not a poet who actively seeks to engage in politics or political life
(Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o el artefacto con laureles” 61). Nonetheless,
Parra also suggests how he can be considered a revolutionary poet in the
sense that antipoetry seeks to challenge cultural and aesthetic values,
which have been passed down. “Un antipoema en este sentido no es más
que la punta de un alfiler que toca un globo que está a punto de reventar”
[In this sense, an antipoem is nothing else than the tip of a pin touching a
balloon that is about to explode] (Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o el artefacto
con laureles” 61). With this statement, for instance, one notices a clear at-
tempt to push the boundaries and challenge cultural notions and values.
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 55

The antipoet becomes a political poet by becoming aware of what needs

to be exploded in order to open up the way for new values, and antipo-
etry becomes a response in verse to tumultuous times in which there is no
room for being apolitical, or for being abstract when the world around the
antipoet is open to questioning, a series of problems requiring questions
even if the answers are unsatisfactory or contradictory (Ibáñez Langlois
263–265). To this vision of antipoetry, Parra also adds that artifacts com-
prise the antipoem. Put differently, an antipoem can be broken down into
smaller units that are none other than artifacts (Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra
o el artefacto con laureles” 50). Once the antipoem explodes, what we are
left with are the remnants, fragments, or verses of the poem.
An instance of such radical changes can be seen in “Cambio de nom-
bre” [“Changes of Name”], particularly as the poetic voice addresses both
a reading audience and also fellow poets. For instance, in the first stanza,
Parra addresses aesthetes or those interested in what constitutes high
art: “A los amantes de las bellas letras / Hago llegar mis mejores deseos
/ Voy a cambiar de nombre algunas cosas” (Parra, Obra gruesa 83). [“To
the lovers of belles-lettres / I offer my best wishes / I am going to change
the names of things”] (Parra, Poems and Antipoems 65).5 As with this first
verse, the second verse evinces Parra’s use of irony, and his “best wishes”
are not to be taken at face value. Although Parra forewarns the “lovers
of belles-lettres” about the changes that will take place, it can be argued
that his true and best wishes are summed up in the necessity of changing
language. Since language has been exhausted, and is redundant, devoid
of any surprises, the antipoet seeks induce a radical transformation in the
way we read, write, and interpret poetry, which is to say how we sense
verses.
Parra continues in the second stanza by presenting a more straightfor-
ward stance on his vision of what constitutes the antipoet’s poetic duty:
“Mi posición es ésta: / El poeta no cumple su palabra / Si no cambia los
nombres de las cosas” (Parra, Obra gruesa 83). [“My position is this: / The
poet is not true to his word / If he doesn’t change the names of things”]
(Parra, Poems and Antipoems 65). For Parra, the poet’s ethical and poetic
duty is to transform language, to activate and resuscitate it, to let it speak
for itself, but also to ensure that every word carries with it a different
connotation. More importantly, it is up to every poet and, in turn, every
reader to have a personal dictionary in which words found in poems can
56 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

be looked up. This implies, of course, that no two readers will come to the
same definition or the same understanding of what a poem suggests or
implies.
In the remaining parts of the poem, Parra questions why it is necessary
to call the sun “sun” or cats “cats.” Parra implicitly asks the question: Why
should we not change what things are called? To the litany of seemingly
random and quotidian objects in dire need of a name change, Parra adds
that shoes ought to be called “coffins” [“ataúdes”], since the word shoe
seems rather arbitrary and does not seem to describe accurately what he
sees on his feet. If anything, shoes resemble the shape of coffins, and thus
ought to be called what the poet and reader see.
Through antipoetic praxis, Parra presents us with a thought-provoking
challenge. It is not enough to radicalize the words we use in poetry so that
signifier and signified correlate with one another. Instead, and perhaps
more importantly, it is up to each poet and each reader to establish that
connection subjectively. Parra seeks to underscore the coloniality perva-
sive in the acts of writing and reading poetry. When this is done, there is
no longer a vertical relationship between poet and reader in which the
poet infuses meaning into his verses and the reader desperately seeks to
get to what the poet intended. Put differently, the poet and reader be-
come equal partners (a horizontal relationship); the poet acknowledges
the reader and demands that the reader take responsibility for drawing
meaning from words. Otherwise, the act of establishing a dialogue be-
tween poet and reader is incomplete.
Parra concludes his page-long poem by inscribing and openly de-
claring that individuals (both poets and readers) must design their own
dictionary, which implies an ongoing process of renaming objects and
thus expanding the vocabulary and possibilities of what can be included
in a poem. Parra writes: “Todo sujeto que se estime a sí mismo / Debe
tener su propio diccionario” (Parra, Obra gruesa 83). [“Every fool who
respects himself / Has to have his own dictionary”] (Parra, Poems and
Antipoems 65). In this instance, having one’s own dictionary becomes an
act of self-respect and inscribes an urgency to reclaim the reader’s subjec-
tivity. Parra reminds us how the acts of reading and interpreting poems
are deeply subjective experiences and that, if each individual has her/his
own dictionary, an antipoem’s artifacts (devices, components, fragments)
can be sites of multiple and enriching experiences. In Miller Williams’s
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 57

translation, however, it is problematic to accept “fool” for the original “su-

jeto.” In Parra’s original verse, the word “sujeto” denotes subjectivity, and
this becomes a key word in his antipoetic proposition of radicalizing and
changing the names of things. The word “fool” would seem to weaken the
effect of the original verse. Finally, as is characteristic of much of Parra’s
poetry, he takes a jab at the idea of God and also urges readers to change
His name, though “Ese es un problema personal” (Obra gruesa 83). [“That
is a personal problem”] (Poems and Antipoems 65). The conclusion of the
poem reiterates the proposition of reinscribing subjectivity into the act of
reading. If we contrast the last image of the “personal problem” with the
first addressees in the poem, “the lovers of belles-lettres,” one can recog-
nize how Parra tossed aside conventions, traditional aesthetic and poetic
values, in the first stanza and never looked back. Instead, Parra turned
his attention to readers and antipoets, who are arguably Parra’s intended
audience.
Parra wants his poetry to engage the reader and for his direct language
to deliver a message that the reader can gather on his or her own. In this
sense, Parra avoids the pitfalls of turning poetry into a tool of political
or ideological indoctrination, which thus renders Parra’s politics separate
from his antipoetic output. This is one of the characteristics of Parra’s
work: his conscious effort to dissociate or delink antipoetry from politics.
As we will see later, however, this is one dimension of antipoetry, but not
a definitive one. In the work of Benedetti, Cardenal, or Dalton we find
that poetry is more overtly political and ideological as it engages with so-
cial issues.
For contemporary critic and poet Martín Espada, Neruda is one of the
quintessential poets of the political imagination. For Espada, “Any pro-
gressive social change must be imagined first, and that vision must find its
most eloquent possible expression to move from vision to reality” (100).
One can argue that Parra would reject such association, even if some of
his poetry is indeed political or engages with topics related to politics.
Parra, like Vallejo, rejects any association with “eloquence” as a means to
bring about a vision of social change. Quite the contrary: vernacular lan-
guage replaces “eloquence” in Parra’s conceptualization of antipoetry.
Parra draws from Whitman to rid himself of Neruda, Huidobro, and
Lorca as poetic influences. In so doing, Parra finds in Whitman’s poetry a
model by which to free himself from what he perceives as dominant and
58 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

suffocating poetry. Parra explains how Whitman allowed him to mark a

point of transition between his earlier poetry (before Poemas y antipoe-
mas) and what would come after. Parra finds in Whitman a way toward a
more horizontal language and poetry oriented toward the everyday reader
(Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o el artefacto con laureles” 43). In Parra’s con-
ceptualization, antipoetry can be equated with a type of poetry that takes
its cue from life in words. As such, since poetry departs from everyday
life, the language it employs needs to connect with it, mirror it, and return
to it. If one accepts this a point of departure, Parra explains that poetry
can embrace and incorporate a multiplicity of sometimes seemingly ir-
reconcilable positions: “no tan sólo las voces impostadas, sino también
las voces naturales; no tan sólo los sentimientos nobles, sino también los
otros; no tan sólo el llanto, sino también la risa; no tan sólo la belleza, sino
también la fealdad” [Not only feigned voices, but also natural voices; not
only noble feelings, but also the others; not only tears, but also laughter;
not only beauty, but also ugliness] (Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o el arte-
facto con laureles” 51). Antipoetry allows for the inclusion of divergent
positions, particularly in relation to aesthetic categories such as beauty or
ugliness, but also seeks to bridge the gap between popular voices and so-
phisticated ones.
In “El pequeño burgués” [“Litany of the Little Bourgeois”], Parra en-
gages precisely with the question of art for art’s sake when he writes: “El
que quiera llegar al paraíso / Del pequeño burgués tiene que andar / El
camino del arte por el arte / Y tragar cantidades de saliva: / El noviciado
es casi interminable” (Obra gruesa 114). [“If you want to get to the heaven
/ Of the petit bourgeois, you must go / By the road of Art for Art’s sake /
And swallow a lot of saliva: / The apprenticeship is almost interminable”
(Parra, Poems and Antipoems 93).6 Parra uses irony to poke fun at what has
been socially construed as acceptable behavior denoting refinement and
good taste. In the remainder of the poem, Parra adds images related to
learning to tie a necktie, shave properly, have polished shoes, distinguish
between a viola and a violin, and admire works of art in museums, among
other conventions. To escape from the vicious cycles of social conven-
tions, Parra concludes his poem by suggesting precisely the opposite of
what is deemed proper behavior, thus defying logic. As a possible way
of out of the humdrum of modern life, Parra suggests that one ought to
“Aparecer y desaparecer / Caminar en estado cataléptico / Bailar un vals
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 59

en un montón de escombros . . . / Presentarse en frac en los incendios”

(Parra, Obra gruesa 115). [“Appear and disappear / Walk in a cataleptic
trance / Waltz on a pile of debris . . . / Go to fires in a morning coat”]
(Parra, Poems and Antipoems 95). At the end of the poem, Parra produces
a brief list of behaviors, actions, or measures one can take to ensure one
will be deemed persona non grata in petit bourgeois circles. After all, who
in their right mind would dance a waltz among debris or wear a tuxedo to
a fire? This is precisely one of the missions of the poem, namely, to chal-
lenge social conventions, perceptions, and behaviors, and underscore
how certain idiosyncrasies can be subject to mockery.
Parra is also interested in engaging those readers and critics who need
absolute and concrete definitions of the type of poetry he writes or what
he considers himself. In a poem entitled “Test,” Parra presents his readers
with two large questions. In the first stanza, Parra lures the reader into
trying to define precisely what an antipoet is. To do so, Parra writes out
sixteen questions and asks the reader to underline the most fitting de-
scriptions for an antipoet. Some of the questions in this first part of the
test that seek to “define” the antipoet are: “Un comerciante de urnas y
ataúdes? . . . / Un bromista sangriento / Deliberadamente miserable? /
Un poeta que duerme en una silla? / Un alquimista de los tiempos mod-
ernos? / Un revolucionario de bolsillo? / Un pequeño burgués?” (Obra
gruesa 184). [“A dealer in urns and coffins? . . . / A bloody joker / willfully
wretched? / A poet who sleeps in a chair? / An up-to-date alchemist? /
A revolutionary of the living room? / A petit-bourgeois?”] (Parra, Poems
and Antipoems 145).7 All of the descriptions offered are suitable and yet
incomplete answers to the question. In a way, Parra’s exercise forces the
reader to accept that the antipoet cannot be neatly defined or reduced to a
simple phrase. In short, all of the questions Parra presents in the first half
of the test are simultaneously fitting and not fitting, complete and incom-
plete, when it comes to defining what constitutes an antipoet.
In the second part of the poem, Parra embarks on an even bigger feat,
which is to test the reader on what she or he understands as antipoetry. In
this part, there are only ten questions, and Parra asks the reader to put an
“x” next to the correct answer. In this section, we face a similar problem
to the earlier one. All of the proposed descriptions are potentially valid
answers, but always remain partial ones. Some of the questions in this
section are: “Un temporal de una taza de té? . . . / Un espejo que dice la
60 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

verdad? . . . / Una advertencia a los poetas jóvenes?” (Obra gruesa 184–

185). [“A tempest in a teacup? . . . / A mirror that tells the truth? / A warn-
ing to the young poets?”] (Poems and Antipoems 145). When Benedetti
asks Parra to explain what the he intended by the poem, Parra astutely
retorts: “Mira, hay tantas cruces como versos. Y quedan algunas cruces
pendientes” [Look, there are as many Xs as there are verses. And there are
some pending Xs.] (Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o el artefacto con laureles”
50). In short, Parra playfully reminds us that poetry is not an exact science
that can be reduced to a test, a right or wrong answer, or clearly crafted
definitions. Antipoetry is a constantly evolving way of writing poetry that
steers away from being neatly put into a box. Instead, as Parra suggests in
this poem requiring the active participation of its readers, antipoems and
antipoetry allow the reader and young poets to form their own opinions,
to come up with their own answers, to make the poem and antipoetry
their own.
Despite Parra’s intention to avoid succumbing to definitions, Parra has
also argued that the “antipoet gets involved with everything, even things
that have nothing to do with him. . . . Antipoetry is a poetry of commit-
ment” (Lerzundi 154). Such a commitment is clearly expressed in one
Parra’s best-known poems, “Manifiesto.” The poem can be read as an at-
tempt at writing an antipoetic manifesto seeking to distinguish the dif-
ference between previous generations of poets and Parra’s generation.
Parra suggests that his inspiration for this poem came after a trip to China
and that it was his attempt at blurring the line between poetry and essay
(Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o el artefacto con laureles” 62). For instance,
Parra describes differences in perception of what poetry can do when he
writes: “Para nuestros mayores / La poesía fue un objeto de lujo / Pero
para nosotros / Es un artículo de primera necesidad: / No podemos vivir
sin poesía” [For our elders / Poetry was a luxury item / But for us / It
is a basic necessity: / We cannot live without poetry] (Obra gruesa 211).
Throughout the poem, Parra creates an opposition between high and or-
nate poetry, as well as urgent or committed poetry. In Parra’s view, older
poets, even if they claimed to be of the left or socially committed, almost
always failed to connect and communicate with audiences. As such, Parra
stands for poetry in touch with nature, with the streets, in tune with re-
ality, and not an ethereal or sublime experience or poetry of social pro-
test that merely stays at the rhetorical level. While Parra has been careful
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 61

not to align himself with a clearly defined political ideology, in this poem
one can see how his vision of antipoetry can be employed to effect social
change by seeking to reach wider audiences, to make poetry more acces-
sible, and to situate the antipoet as part of society at large and not merely
an observer.
Most of the scholarship seeking to trace decolonial gestures empha-
sizes overt acts of denunciation and undoing of coloniality either through
theoretical critique or action. By overt I mean that the decolonial subject’s
ideological or political stance is easily discernible and leaves little room
for doubt or interpretation. A prime example of this would be the writ-
ings of Fanon in either Black Skin, White Masks (1952) or The Wretched
of the Earth (1961). When placed alongside Fanon’s work, for instance,
Parra’s poetry lacks Fanon’s overt anticolonial, anti-imperial, and politi-
cized engagement with a variety of forms of racialization and infrahuman-
ization. And yet, such an overt absence of politicization and decolonial
critique stems precisely from a distinction in locus and means of enuncia-
tion. It is not the same for Fanon (as a black Martinican engaged with lib-
eration struggles in the Caribbean and North Africa) to write prose that is
fueled by his experiences and observations as someone immersed in such
a turbulent period as it is for Parra (as a seemingly white Chilean profes-
sor of physics) to write poetry. And yet, not reducing Fanon or Parra to
racialized subjects (black Martinican vs. white Chilean) is precisely what
I detect as coloniality/decoloniality’s true potential in helping us move
beyond the embedded legacies of framing how we see and treat artists ac-
cording to their racialized or gendered subjectivities. More importantly,
we should keep in mind that both Fanon and Parra were men of science,
though they used it toward different productive and artistic ends. Fanon’s
career as a psychiatrist became an intrinsic part of his philosophical writ-
ings and his revolutionary politics. Parra’s training as a physicist and his
career as a university professor of physics propelled him to seek poetry as
complement and inverse of scientific rationality and to transform poetry
in a radical way. Antipoetry and the other forms of conversational poetry
discussed in this chapter are indeed political, despite their different grada-
tions of conjugating ideology and poetics. What makes antipoetry politi-
cal and possessed of decolonial gestures, albeit in an understated way, is
precisely its desacralization of everything and everyone central to a nor-
mative understanding of society and its institutions of order and reason.
62 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

This is why, perhaps, Parra “mocked his readers, he used vulgarity, sar-
casm, irony, black humor, comedy, carnivalesque elements, and he made
fun of God, religion, and societal institutions” (González and Dotremon
63). Reading such mockery, uses of sarcasm, irony, parody, and displaying
critiques through antipoetic verses as political gestures are precisely what
make Parra’s poetics a challenge to and an undoing of a Western rational-
ity and aesthetics.8
Part of the difficulty that most prominent decolonial thought and
scholarship presents us with is precisely its emphasis on tracing genealo-
gies of thought that come either from specific genres (such as the essay or
other non-fiction prose forms), as in the case of Mignolo’s work, or from
popular articulations, as in the case of Albán Achinte’s or Pedro Pablo
Gómez’s recent work on decolonial aesthetics. This is perhaps where co-
loniality of knowledge comes into play, particularly in terms of thinking
about which forms of writing are “authorized” to produce “knowledge.”
In this privileging or authorization of specific genres over others (such as
non-fiction over fiction/poetry), a hierarchy of sites and modes of knowl-
edge further instantiates the very coloniality of knowledge that colonial-
ity seeks to critique. The current crisis of the humanities in higher educa-
tion is a pressing reminder of this tension that coloniality of knowledge
underscores. It is rather difficult to find instances of applying such ways
of thinking about coloniality or the decolonial to literature, particularly
literature not produced by or about indigenous or Afro-descendant sub-
jects. Precisely because of what I perceive to be a reductive equivalence of
decolonial thinking in Latin America with identity politics, some scholars
of literature and detractors of coloniality/decoloniality swiftly dismiss or
prefer to ignore decolonial thinking or critiques of coloniality without a
sustained dialogue with decolonial perspectives that may or may not rest
solely upon questions related to indigeneity or Afro-descendant politics
in a Latin American context. Without entering into a sustained dialogue
to build either upon decolonial thinking or critiques of coloniality in
order to advance or disprove their theoretical premises, such dismissals
are founded upon a somewhat simplistic and reductive understanding
of decolonial scholarship, simply because of its identification almost ex-
clusively with Mignolo. As such, and in an effort to trace a “decolonial
ethos,” to follow Legrás’s term, I seek to think about critiques of colonial-
ity and decoloniality in a broader sense by incorporating voices coming
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 63

from poetry (and other arts) into an archive that is indeed foundational
to a more nuanced understanding of discussions around coloniality/de-
coloniality and its potential uses for Latin American literary and cultural
studies.

Mario Benedetti and Poetry as Communication

In many ways, while literary criticism has focused on many aspects of

Benedetti’s literary production, which includes novels, essays, and the-
ater, his poetry has received limited attention. When placed alongside
“full-time” poets such as Parra, Dalton, and Cardenal, among others, the
critical reception of Benedetti’s poetry has been overshadowed. How-
ever, as I will argue in this section, Benedetti was a pivotal figure in the
development of a new poetics during the 1960s at the level of criticism
and praxis. Benedetti’s roles as a critic in his capacity as editor of Uru-
guayan magazine Marcha, and in the formation of Casa de las Américas
during his exile in Cuba in the mid-1960s, make him a central figure in
foregrounding poetry-as-communication or conversational poetry as an
organizational way of grouping together a number of poets with similar
affinities and sensibilities (Parra, Cardenal, Dalton, Adoum, Fernández
Retamar, Gelman, etc.)
In his prologue to the collection of interviews conducted for Marcha,
which were later collected in a volume aimed at giving shape to the poetas
comunicantes (poets-as-communicators), Benedetti argues that the type
of poetry produced in the 1960s built upon a tradition of earlier poetry.
Benedetti does not see antipoetry, conversational poetry, or poetry of
communication as a rupture with previous poetic traditions, but more
as a natural continuity or progression (Benedetti, “Prólogo”). One can
agree with Benedetti on one level, particularly since poets cannot exist
in isolation or with their backs turned away from their precursors. As was
mentioned in the previous section, even Parra acknowledged his love-
hate relationship with Neruda; as much as Parra is anti-Neruda, there
are glimpses of Neruda in Parra. The same could be said about Neruda’s
poetry in collections such as Extravagario or Odas elementales, in which
Neruda also shifts his attention to antipoetry and conversational poetry.
Nonetheless, in Benedetti’s assertion about the continuity of poetic tradi-
tions, it is important to note that he seems to overlook one of the prime
64 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

characteristics of poetry and the arts in the 1960s, which is precisely its
desire to distinguish itself from artistic precursors and previous artistic
movements, and its conscious effort to make a mark by introducing new
artistic and aesthetic propositions.
Fernández Retamar makes a similar observation when he argues that
the idea of antipoetry and conversational poetry have been around since
the nineteenth century. In the case of nineteenth-century Spanish poetry,
for instance, Fernández Retamar argues that Ramón de Campoamor was
a sort of antipoet who sought to distinguish himself from José Zorrilla
(Fernández Retamar, “Antipoesía y poesía conversacional en Hispanoa-
mérica”). Yet, Fernández Retamar is also careful to clarify that antipoetry,
as it has been articulated in twentieth-century Latin American poetics,
is different in that Parra builds an entire poetic corpus around a poetic
proposition that resists definitions.
In thinking about conversational poetry as a type of antipoetry, and
particularly its attempts at underscoring the coloniality of poetic lan-
guage, it should be noted that Benedetti’s poetry is deeply concerned with
turning every aspect of daily life into a topic of poetic critique. While the
concepts of conversational poetry and antipoetry are thought to be ex-
clusively Latin American, we are reminded that the appeal of antipoet-
ics is far-reaching since it becomes a means of questioning the assertion
that there is only one way of sensing and doing poetry. To this end, for
instance, Glissant reminds us that “The poetics pierces the depths . . . ,
demands denial where it affirms itself; from a poetics of the poetics of the
world emerges an anti-poetics (a negation of the One in the field of the
Diverse)” (Poetic Relation 200). Like Parra or Benedetti, Glissant argues
for a diversification of our understanding of what poetry stands for and
for allowing a heterogeneity of voices to contest the idea of a singular po-
etic voice. In other words, Glissant challenges and seeks to undo the em-
bedded legacy of thinking that poetry must be written, read, consumed,
and sensed in a particular (elitist) way. Instead, Glissant argues for a poet-
ics of the world that must arise from piercing and critiquing the embed-
ded legacies of coloniality, which give way to that affirmation of a par-
ticular sense of what constitutes poetry—what at times we can call high
poetry or simply canonized poetry. For a francophone poet and intellec-
tual such as Glissant, knowing Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, or Hölder-
lin is necessary in order to undo the uniqueness of a certain Eurocentric
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 65

poetics that prevents an antipoetics as critique from emerging. Put dif-

ferently, the only way to critique through poetry, and for antipoetry to
emerge, is to know the poetic forms, voices, and techniques in order to
then be able to turn them upside down and create a new poetics that em-
braces a multiplicity of voices and experiences silenced by the coloniality
of language and aesthetics. This line of thinking can be extended to the
Latin American case precisely because the only way to turn toward po-
etry-as-communication, whether it be as antipoetry or conversational po-
etry, is to know and turn upside-down the poetic canon as well as the his-
pano-Americanizing gesture, to echo Vallejo, so prevalent in the history
of Latin American poetics. By this, Vallejo meant that, by and large, Latin
American poetry has been imitative of the literary trends, forms, and
topics coming to the Americas from Spain. One can add to this hispano-
Americanizing gesture franco-Americanizing and anglo-Americanizing
gestures, which collectively comprise a coloniality of poetic language. In
light of this, and echoing Glissant’s line of thinking, Vallejo reminded us
that we should not forget the ways in which a certain indigenous spirit, an
aesthetic of rebelliousness to use Benedetti’s words, runs through a cer-
tain sector of Latin America, and this was the key to a future poetics of
liberation, which I am calling here a decolonial poetics.9
Even though I do not completely agree with Benedetti’s assertion that
there is an unproblematic continuity among the poets-as-communicators
and their precursors, I find the concept of poetry-as-communication an
effective way to understand why it is that Parra develops antipoetry in
Chile, Cardenal turns to exteriorist poetry in Nicaragua, Dalton turns to
revolutionary poetry, and Benedetti turns to conversational poetry, all
in apparent isolation from one another. As Alemany Bay has argued, it
would appear that all of these poetic propositions, which she places un-
der the umbrella of colloquial poetics, developed in seeming isolation and
would later come into contact with one another through encounters in
Casa de las Américas or through Benedetti as a common poetic interlocu-
tor (Alemany Bay, Poética coloquial hispanoamericana). In essence, the
four poets central to the present chapter had similar approaches to writ-
ing poetry, though with different names for their respective poetic proj-
ects. Nonetheless, I argue that all four approaches make use of the vernac-
ular, turn to everyday forms of communication, take on social concerns,
and aim to communicate directly with readers. As such, all four poets are
66 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

responding to previous poetic traditions and position themselves as anti-

poets in opposition to elitist, ornate, flowery, hermetic, and high poetry.
At the same time, however, they also embrace quotidian language and
colloquialisms because the ultimate goal is to establish open and clean
lines of communication with audiences. In this sense, the antipoet is a
poet-as-communicator, but can also be dubbed a conversationalist poet
or a colloquial poet. What is important in their poetic outlook and praxis
is what they do with their craft and their thematic preoccupations, which
distinguish these four poets from one another.
From Benedetti, as a key critic and organizing figure who brings these
four poets together, we can turn briefly to examine and illustrate Bene-
detti’s poetic praxis. In his collection Poemas del hoyporhoy (1961), Bene-
detti turns his attention to truly quotidian concerns. We find poems such
as “La crisis,” which deal with economic crises and the effects of infla-
tion on the poor and working classes. There are also poems dealing with
existential crises of the middle class. However, as with Parra, we find in
Benedetti a keen sense of humor, and that he takes his poetic craft with a
certain degree of lightness. In the poem “Interview,” we find what can be
assumed to be a dialogue between the poet and his interviewer, though
we never get to read the interviewer’s questions. They can be gleaned,
however, from the responses of the poet. The first question deals with the
poet’s thoughts on infinity. The poet responds to the question with what
appears to be a poetic response, but concludes by affirming that he does
not believe in infinity. There is a clear mockery of metaphysical and exis-
tential poets and how this poetic voice seeks to distinguish himself from
that tradition. This goes back to my earlier point about poetry’s function
as critique of the sense of uniqueness that surrounds Eurocentric poetics
and its ripple effect into a coloniality of poetic language.
The second question of the interview is encompassed by the poem’s
second stanza. As this question deals with the poet’s thoughts on poli-
tics, once again, the poet’s move is to begin to express what his thoughts
are about politics, only to conclude his answer with a negation of poli-
tics. The speaker affirms that he is a poet and that poets live with their
backs turned to the world. As such, then, poets are apolitical and remove
themselves from social and political lives. In the second stanza, Bene-
detti addresses a different type of poetic tradition, that of a certain kind
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 67

of political poetry. Benedetti pokes fun at these political poets, who are
only seemingly apolitical and only seem to write poetry with their backs
turned to the world, social reality, changes of language, and the exigencies
of the poetic craft in order to communicate with the everyday reader. The
point of this answer is to emphasize the need for poetry and politics to in-
tersect, and also to assert that a depoliticized poetry does not have a place
in the context of the early 1960s in Latin America.
The third part of the interview engages with the question of poetic
style. As with the previous two questions, the poetic voice also begins
by affirming how the speaker draws inspiration from random moments,
writes his poetry in bed or on trains, but is always thinking about the fu-
ture. The answer to this question about poetic style ends with the poet’s
rejection of style, or rather a statement that he does not believe in style.
The fourth and final question of the interview deals with the matter of
love and its role in poetry. Here the poetic voice begins to answer in a
more honest way and thoroughly accepts how love plays a central role in
his quotidian life. His affirmation at the end is that love is a serious mat-
ter. The final stanza of the poem is the speaker’s request not to publish the
interview.
In sum, one can argue that Benedetti’s poem “Interview” mocks the
elevated and metaphysical tone of poets, as depicted in the first stanza of
the interview. With the second stanza, Benedetti pokes fun at those poets
who write depoliticized poetry. For Benedetti, socially committed poetry
is central to the act of communication. This question of communication
is directly connected to the question of style, since conversational style
or poetry-as-communication necessitates concrete, direct, quotidian lan-
guage. Finally, the question of love is also central to the poet-as-commu-
nicator, particularly in the poetry of Benedetti, Cardenal, and Dalton. In
Benedetti’s poetry we find different dimensions of love, ranging from love
between lovers, to love and compassion for one’s neighbor, to love as a
real-life emotion to which readers can relate. Part of the strategy we find
in “Interview” is an affirmation that a poet-as-communicator must have
firm beliefs about his or her craft, style, and the centrality of politics in
his or her work, but also how more earthly and universal questions play a
role. Ultimately, for Benedetti the poet-as-communicator must have a de-
fined sense and purpose about the means and ends of poetry. There is no
68 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

middle ground for Benedetti and no possibility of lacking an opinion on

pressing social and political questions and thus a poet-as-communicator
must have firm beliefs and stand by them.
In terms of thinking about Benedetti’s poems, it becomes useful to
consider the purpose of a poem and its sites of enunciation. In light of
these topics related to poetic language, for instance, Martin Heidegger
wrote:
Everyone knows that a poem is an invention. It is imaginative even
when it seems to be descriptive. . . . The poem, as composed, images
what is thus fashioned for our own act of imagining. In the poem’s
speaking the poetic imagination gives itself utterance. What is thus
spoken out, speaks by enunciating its content. The language of the
poem is manifold enunciating. (Heidegger, “Language” 195)
Because Benedetti embraces a conversational style of poetic language,
his poems might appear as merely descriptive, as social realist to some
degree. Yet, as Heidegger suggests, there is a certain inventiveness in a
poem, even if it describes the world around us. Part of the poetic gesture
is to invent images, to conjure up affective responses through language,
and in this way poetry induces an aesthetic effect in its readers. Of par-
ticular interest, however, is the emphasis on the act of enunciating poetic
content, or rather, that a multiplicity (manifold) of voices emerges from
within a poem. By this, I take it that Heidegger is drawing our attention
to the multiple resonances that a particular word may have, or its implied
meanings. This emphasis on enunciation is different from the one that
Mignolo gives to the geopolitical site of enunciation, by which he means
that enunciation differs depending upon the location within the house of
modernity/coloniality (The Darker Side of Western Modernity 94–95). To
challenge the embedded legacies of the coloniality of aesthetics, particu-
larly as it plays out in poetry, is already an attempt to make oneself heard,
even if those being challenged do not always want to hear or understand
such challenges.
A clear instance of this tension appears in a different poem from Bene-
detti’s same collection. A poem that is a bit more personal in tone and
somewhat autobiographical, “Cumpleaños en Manhattan” [“Birthday
in Manhattan”] was written during Benedetti’s only visit to the United
States. Given his political stance and his overt denunciation of U.S.
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 69

imperialism, after the 1960s Benedetti was repeatedly denied entry to the
country. It is no coincidence that among the four poets discussed here,
Benedetti’s poetry has been the least translated into English, precisely be-
cause of his explicit critique of the United States’ imperialist attitude and
its structural attempts at instituting coloniality in perpetuity.
In the poem, the speaker takes the reader through a walk in Manhattan.
The speaker describes a feeling of utter isolation, alienation, and anonym-
ity on his birthday by underscoring how in his 39 years the speaker has
never felt simultaneously so alone and yet surrounded by so many people.
The cityscape is described in the poem as we walk past skyscrapers and,
on the streets, pass others by. The speaker constantly reminds himself
that this day cannot be his true birthday. Instead, he will postpone it until
February or March, once he returns home to celebrate it alongside family
and friends. A recurring image in the poem is how New Yorkers walk for
hours without stopping. All of a sudden, the speaker is happy that other
Latin Americans (Colombians, Brazilians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Chil-
eans) in New York recognize in him a certain air of familiarity. However,
his happiness is rapidly reduced to despair as that moment of being sur-
rounded by familiar faces dissipates all too quickly. This level of affective
connection and recognition transcending national borders is one that
harkens back to a utopian dream of unifying Latin America that goes back
to Simón Bolívar. Yet, in this instance, this recognition of commonality
is also one that accentuates Latin Americans’ alienation as migrants in a
new, foreign, and somewhat inhospitable land that perpetuates the social,
cultural, and political unevenness that these migrants experienced back
home and from which they were seeking to escape.
In other words, this particular section of the poem reinscribes what
José David Saldívar, following Immanuel Wallerstein and Aníbal Qui-
jano, calls Trans-Americanity. As Saldívar notes, Trans-Americanity ar-
ticulates “that the geo-social and temporal space of Americanity and the
coloniality of power involve us in a number of different conceptual axes”
(xvii–xviii). As migrants recognize their coloniality within each other and
appeal to their shared lived experiences of subjugation, a type of Trans-
Americanity comes to the fore to articulate their experiential otherness.
“Cumpleaños en Manhattan” concludes with a bleak message in which
the poetic speaker feels forgotten, yet calm and inconspicuous—like, he
says, a leading zero (in mathematics). This poem prefigures the themes
70 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

of exile he would take up throughout his life, during his multiple periods
outside of Uruguay. Ultimately, in confronting and inhabiting the heart of
U.S. imperialism while taking notice of quotidian experiences provides
readers with the critical perspective of a visitor who does not romanticize
the American dream or its lived experience.
In his collection Noción de patria (1962–1963), Benedetti presents us
with an epigraph from Parra’s poem “Advertencia,” in which Parra an-
nounces that he is not afraid to get into trouble by writing poetry. This
authorial gesture of invoking Parra further corroborates the poetic affin-
ity between Benedetti’s and Parra’s respective poetic projects, particularly
in terms of redefining the uses of poetic language as a means of overt or
veiled social and political critique. In the opening poem, which gives the
collection its name, the poetic speaker clearly articulates a redefinition of
what country or nation has come to mean by invoking a sense of collec-
tive yearning for a lost home and the imperative to feel like one belongs to
a community. It is that sense of urgency that gives way to a renewed con-
notation to what nation means, while simultaneously adding a degree of
uncertainty about its attainability. While Benedetti has traveled and wan-
dered the world, we get a glimpse of what it is like to yearn for an imagi-
nary home—a place left behind and lodged in one’s memory. For Bene-
detti, the desire to return to his native Uruguay pervades wherever he may
be. As such, the sense of alienation, of foreignness, of being an outsider
makes him feel like cities and images are just a mirage, artificial, unreal,
and transitory. As denoted in Benedetti’s concluding verses to “Noción
de Patria,” the speaker wants to return home to have that sense of collec-
tivity, of belonging to a place and feeling at one with those around him.
However, Benedetti also acknowledges that such a return is an impossi-
bility and the precise path toward that return is mere uncertainty. After
all, it does not matter how much Benedetti yearns for his homeland; the
conditions of return prevail and establish an uncertainty he cannot over-
come. The overwhelming feeling of uncertainty and his inability to return
are the last images of this opening poem that sets the tone for the rest of
the collection, a tone of ongoing desire for homecoming and a never-end-
ing quest to look for that moment when a return home can be completed.
Aside from his engagement with the theme of exile, Benedetti also en-
gages with a mixture of political and religious themes. A prime example
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 71

of this can be found in “Un Padrenuestro Latinoamericano” [“A Latin

American Our Father”] from his collection Poemas del hoyporhoy. In this
poem, the language of the prayer is infused with a sense that the Lord
has forgotten about and neglected everything south of the Rio Grande.
The poetic voice beseeches the Lord to turn his attention once again to
those who need Him the most, particularly those suffering, the poor,
and those living in absolute misery. The poem is both a prayer and also a
denunciation of the lopsided divine distribution of wealth and everyday
goods necessary for survival. The sense of urgency and the pangs of hun-
ger in the stomachs of those with little food are clearly expressed in his
confrontation with God’s will simultaneously to give and take away the
poor’s daily bread. As the poetic speaker clearly suggests, the question-
ing of God’s will is expressed with irreverence and gratitude. The bread,
in this case, stands both as a symbol of God himself and also of the ma-
terial and essential food the poor need to satisfy their hunger and basic
necessities. Part of the dissatisfaction the speaker expresses is that God
has also deprived the poor of the ability to provide bread for themselves.
This poem is thus irreverent in terms of how the speaker confronts God
and His will, but also because this confrontation opens up the possibility
that the poor might not need to rely upon God’s will anymore if they are
given the opportunity to secure their own daily bread. In the poem, the
collective pronoun “nuestro” (our) is used to denote a sense of commu-
nity and discontent, as well as the changing times, in which social unrest
and protests are leading to a questioning of deeply embedded religious
beliefs—that is, of one of the ways in which the coloniality of power has
rooted itself, particularly among the disenfranchised or the wretched of
the earth, to echo Fanon’s words.
The poetic voice takes on a demanding tone with a mixture of irrever-
ence and gratitude, which soon will become indistinguishable from one
another. There can be no gratitude for someone who takes food away
from hungry mouths. As Benedetti reminds us, daily bread was taken
from Latin Americans in the past, but perhaps today it can be given to
them once again. If real bread is not possible, a symbolic or religious one
will no longer suffice to suppress hunger. The idea of obtaining food be-
comes an organizational principle and a fixed idea that marks each pass-
ing day and every part of a hungry day. Above all, we are presented with
72 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

the idea that Latin Americans will no longer wait for food to come to
them and instead are willing to work even harder to procure it, if only
such a possibility presents itself.
In thinking through the social implications of this poem, and its invo-
cation of religious motifs for a poetic critique, we may find it helpful to
connect this to Glissant’s words regarding the adequacy and power of po-
etic language: “The poetics no longer requires the adequacy of language,
but the precise fire of language. In other words: I speak to you in your
language, and it is in my language that I understand you” (Glissant, Po-
etic Intention 46). As I take it, Glissant foregrounds that in times of social
unrest, political upheaval, and pressing hardships, lingering on the orna-
mental function of poetry will not suffice. Instead, finding the adequate
words requires that the poet turn to “the fire of language,” which is to say,
the language that emerges from extreme feelings and that will spark the
most sentiments in readers. It is through this common language, and by
resorting to quotidian means of expression, that poet and reader can un-
derstand each other. In the case of this particular poem by Benedetti, us-
ing the form a widely known Catholic prayer and turning it upside down
serves to communicate directly with readers in a language that is already
familiar (the prayer), though modified for a particular social and political
commentary.
Other aspects of the poem engage with U.S. militarization in Central
America, the colonial legacy of landowners, peasants, and land distribu-
tion, foreign debt, and inflation in Latin American economies, among
other topics. As the poor, the indigenous, and the oppressed have suc-
cumbed to a long-standing history of social inequities, images of growing
non-conformity and social uprisings are also present when the speaker
confronts God with the suggestion that His will is present when a citi-
zen turns her or his hand into a fist. The fist, then, becomes a symbol
of unrest and protest, as well as of the need to fight against conformity
with the status quo. The image of working hands turning into fists ready
to fight marks a clear transition in the poem from a sense of collective
Latin American passivity to one of a collective shift toward uprisings and
struggles, an evocative image of anti-imperial and anticolonial struggles
taking place on a global scale in the 1960s. The ultimate decolonial ges-
ture is to invoke the Lord’s Prayer and employ it in a more overt political
gesture, though in a way distinct from the theology of liberation poetics
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 73

associated with Ernesto Cardenal. In this particular poem, an implicit

suggestion and critique is the role that religion has played in producing
and accentuating multi-modal coloniality on its different axes and in dif-
ferent articulations of power (race, knowledge, religion, gender, aesthet-
ics, ontology, etc.). As we will see in the following section, this way of
writing poetry that engages with social concerns and religious undertones
is one that is best exemplified in Cardenal’s poetry, though in a different
way and with a less-confrontational tone.

Ernesto Cardenal and Exteriorist Poetry

In Cardenal’s work we find a link between liberation theology and poetry,

particularly around a depiction of God and Christian beliefs capable of
putting an end to suffering and social injustices (DeHay 48–59). By in-
corporating precepts from liberation theology into his poetry, Cardenal
seeks to portray how the average person struggles against oppression, ag-
gression, and unequal distribution of wealth and other forms of capital.
Above all, Cardenal is interested in synthesizing the idea of love, which
is at once a devotion to his calling as a priest and also a love of mankind,
his neighbors, and those who need him the most. In Cardenal’s concep-
tualization of his duty as priest and poet, he cannot just be a preacher,
but must also find a way to reinterpret Christian doctrines to bring about
social justice for the poor and thus give them a sense of hope (Benedetti,
“Ernesto Cardenal: Evangelio y revolución”).
As I argued earlier in this chapter, one of the functions of decolonial
aesthetics is to inscribe a broader sense of the relationship among the art-
ist, the artwork, and its level of engagement with broader audiences. To
this end, for instance, Cardenal opted to teach basic literacy to the people
in his colony in Solentiname. For Cardenal, if people do not have a basic
sense of literacy, the message of the Gospels and other Biblical scriptures
cannot be conveyed. In this sense, we see a connection with Cardenal’s
Marxist ideology and how the Cuban Revolution also set out early on to
remedy illiteracy. Otherwise, the message of a social and cultural revolu-
tion would be meaningless and flawed. In a similar way, before even at-
tempting to teach catechism to children, Cardenal took on the challenge
of ensuring that children could overcome illnesses and thus premature
death, which is linked to the concept of care that will be discussed more
74 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

fully at the end of this section. In both cases, Cardenal identified basic
problems that needed to be addressed before any Christian message
could be delivered. The experiences in Solentiname, along with his previ-
ous experiences in monasteries in Kentucky, Cuernavaca, and Colombia,
gave Cardenal a profound sense of how he could turn his religious calling
and poetic work toward a higher and collective purpose (Fernández Reta-
mar, “Prologue to Ernesto Cardenal”; DeHay 48–59).
In an attempt to argue for an aesthetics of Americanity (estética de lo
americano), Rodolfo Kusch advances the following position: “En general
cuando el arte no confiesa, miente, y, por lo tanto, entra en el plano de
la diversión. Y la confesión ha de ser de las cosas que vienen desde muy
adentro, más allá de la conciencia, de aquel mundo que se halla cerca del
germen vital o de que arranca la vida misma” [In general terms, when art
does not confess, it lies, and thus it moves toward the terrain of entertain-
ment. Such a confession must be one of those things that emerges from
within the depths, beyond conscience, from that world close to the seeds
of life or from which life itself begins] (Kusch, Planteo 775–776). For
Kusch, life, as both the source and inspiration of art, must play a pivotal
role in its creation. Works of art must be attuned to the depths of Latin
America’s neglected realities and truths. It is in this spirit that Cardenal’s
poetry is invested in creating art that is honest, even at the cost of rel-
egating aesthetics to a secondary role. For it is with honesty, integrity, and
social commitment that a politicized undoing of the coloniality of poetic
language (a decolonial aesthetics) affects the reader’s senses.
In his collection titled Salmos (1969) [Psalms], Cardenal’s poetic voice
is one that beseeches God to attend to the immediate and urgent needs
of people who have been historically alienated, oppressed, and forgot-
ten. For instance, in his fourth psalm, Cardenal writes: “Óyeme porque
te invoco Dios de mi inocencia / Tú me liberarás del campo de concen-
tración” (Salmos 11). [“Hear me O God because I call upon you in my
innocence / You will free me from the concentration camp”] (Psalms 13).
Cardenal’s tone is not so much a request as a demand. It is meant to re-
flect how certain groups in society are tired of praying without any re-
sponse. The underprivileged and oppressed are also tired of the instru-
mentalization of politics to continue asserting power over the poor. In
the same poem we read: “¿Hasta cuándo los líderes seréis insensatos? /
¿Hasta cuándo dejaréis de hablar con slogans / y decir pura proganda?”
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 75

(Salmos 11). [“How long will leaders be without reason? / How long will
you let them speak in slogans / and utter pure propaganda?”] (Psalms 13).
In this part of the poem, it is not God who is called upon, but rather ques-
tions of discontent and frustration are directed at God for allowing politi-
cians to speak in empty political rhetoric, meaningless slogans, and vacu-
ous promises that never materialize. Toward the end of the poem, as a
way to appease God and to reassure Him that He is still respected, we get
a radical shift in tone: “Apenas me acuesto estoy dormindo / y no tengo
pesadillas ni insomnio . . . / No necesito Nembutales / porque tú Señor
me das seguridad” (Salmos 11). [“I hardly lie down before I am asleep /
and I have no pills nor insomnia . . . I do not need barbiturates / because
you Lord give me security”] (Psalms 14). The psalm concludes with the
image of a soothing and comforting God who is capable of clearing one’s
head of nightmares and preventing insomnia. The speaker finds solace
and comfort in knowing that God will attend to his calling and will act
upon his just requests to put an end to political repression and the perse-
cution of the innocent under Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship in Nicara-
gua (1937–1956), Cardenal’s home country.
In thinking about Cardenal’s exteriorist poetics, particularly in rela-
tion to liberation theology in the service of a critique of capitalism and
the techniques of politics that enable poverty and suffering, it becomes
necessary to pause over one of the possible meanings of liberation the-
ology. In a recent study, Mexican scholar Luis Martinez Andrade has
noted the following: “Liberation theology, as a critical and emancipatory
discourse, has been instrumental in the process of hegemonic narrative
de-fetishisation. Through a prophetic and subversive look at the various
aspects of modern society—the sanctification of the market, messianic
technology, the myth of progress, the ideology of developmentalism,
among others—this liberation theology has revealed the sacrificial char-
acter of the hegemonic system” (104). Despite Cardenal’s conflation of
religious and Marxist themes, his poetry has been associated with the line
of conversational poetry. Cardenal draws inspiration from Ezra Pound to
use poetry as an all-encompassing medium of expression and communi-
cation capable of accomplishing just as much as narrative and essays can
do. For Cardenal, a poem can engage with topics related to economics,
politics, culture, indigenous themes, pre-Columbian history of the Amer-
icas, religious topics, etc. As Cardenal argues: “Para mí es muy importante
76 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

la comunicación con el lector, y siempre he tratado de hacer una poesía

clara, ya que siempre estoy interesado en que el lector entienda mi men-
saje, e incluso que lo entienda el lector que no está muy acostumbrado
a entender la poesía” [For me it is very important to communicate with
the reader; I have always tried creating a clear poetry, since I’m always in-
terested in having the reader understand my message, and even in having
that reader unaccustomed to reading poetry also understand my message]
(Benedetti, “Ernesto Cardenal: Evangelio y revolución” 113). This is per-
haps one of the clearest articulations of how his exteriorist poetry, which
borrows from Pound’s modernist poetics, is repurposed for a particular
project of direct engagement with everyday readers and turns poetry into
an instrument of social and political critique.
Moreover, in Cardenal’s poetry, there is an embedded commitment
to trying to write poetry that is at once conversational and yet rigorous
in its poetic vision. In this respect, Cardenal differs from Parra’s poetic
proposition, since Cardenal labels his type of poetry “exteriorist.” By em-
ploying the concept of exteriorism, Cardenal stands in opposition to the
lyrical-oneiric poetry that had dominated Latin American poetics up to
his time.10 In sum, the poetic proposition is one that takes external images
as a means by which to express internal feelings, attitudes, and perspec-
tives on the quotidian. Given this approach, anecdotes, proper names,
real names, numbers, and dates, among other facts, can be incorporated
into the poetic production as an act of communication. In this sense, a
poet like Cardenal takes external, verifiable facts as a way to verbalize and
ground his own ideas. In essence, exteriorism, as a way of writing con-
versational poetry or poetry of communication, seeks to bridge a gap
between poetic subjectivity and material/external objectivity. Cardenal
suggests that his poetry follows the tradition of the Bible, Homer, and
Dante, but also of Inuit and indigenous poetics. More importantly, how-
ever, Cardenal affirms the following: “toda buena poesía social y política
y económica, y toda poesía revolucionaria tiene necesariamente que ser
exteriorista” [All good social, political, and economic poetry, and all revo-
lutionary poetry, has necessarily to be exteriorist] (Benedetti, “Ernesto
Cardenal: Evangelio y revolución” 121). In Cardenal’s conceptualization of
exteriorist poetry, he also introduces the idea of the poet as a revolution-
ary, which is meant to be a way of articulating what he perceives to be the
poet’s duties. First, the poet must revolutionize language. This alone can
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 77

be construed as a political act. One does not have to take up arms to be

revolutionary. In this sense, for instance, Parra and Benedetti are revolu-
tionary poets of the word and conversational poetic language. Cardenal
is a revolutionary poet of the word, but also takes action leading to social
justice, whereas Dalton is a revolutionary poet who also engages in guer-
rilla warfare and armed struggles.
An instance of Cardenal’s engagement with revolutionary poetry can
be seen in “Psalm 34,” in which, once again, he addresses God in a direct
way and reminds Him to be on the side of the poor: “Declara Señor tu
guerra a los que nos declaran la guerra / porque tú eres aliado nuestro
/ Grandes potencias están contra nosotros / pero las armas del Señor
son más terribles” (Salmos 37). [“Lord declare your war on those who
declare war on us / Because you are our ally / Great Powers are against
us / but the weapons of the Lord are more terrible”] (Psalms 41). Carde-
nal presents us with an image of a God who is ready to fight and struggle
alongside those who are persecuted, imprisoned, abused, tortured, and
humiliated by those in power. In other words, Cardenal beseeches God to
make an ethical decision and side with those who need him most. There
is a clear distinction in the poem between two groups that cannot see
eye to eye, and God must take a stand, but cannot side with both. Carde-
nal includes himself among the “us,” those who struggle, suffer, and are
most underprivileged. Cardenal concludes the poem by enticing God
into helping those in need by praising Him through poetry for the rest of
the poet’s life. As Cardenal notes in a recent collection of essays on this
question of God, which seems pertinent to my reading of this particular
psalm, “Y cuando Dios nos ama a cada uno de nosotros está amando a
todo el universo del que somos parte, aunque sólo los seres conscien-
tes pueden corresponder a este amor” [And when God loves each of us,
He is loving the entire universe of which we are part, even though only
conscious beings can return this love] (Cardenal, Este mundo y otros 58).
Ultimately, liberation theology and poetry in the service of social justice
emerge as reminders that we are all part of something greater than we are.
To believe in God’s love is to also believe that His love is directed at every
aspect of our world and the pluriverse. It is only in recognizing that sense
of love that we can engage in an ethical duty of undoing injustices and
calling into question various modalities of subjection. As with most of the
poems in this collection, the poetic plea or supplication to a God who
78 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

has forgotten about the poor is meant to generate a sense of collectivity

through a conflation of spirituality, desperation, alienation, and being fed
up with current living conditions.
Understanding Cardenal’s poetry in terms of liberation theology, par-
ticularly in terms of Cardenal’s own emphasis on love, is necessary to
understanding that our work as readers is not merely to take in words,
metaphors, and beautiful images. Instead, this emphasis on love, on a col-
lective, societal, pluriversal love, is linked to what Leonardo Boff has re-
cently highlighted as care. Care is a broader way of experiencing or nam-
ing what Cardenal understood as love for one another, in terms of both
human and non-human entities, and also our particular love for God,
which is also expressed through loving the poor and dispossessed. As Boff
noted,
The fable-myth of Gaius Junius Hyginus transmits to us an ancient
wisdom; that is, it is care that binds everything, it is care that brings
the heavens into the Earth and that puts the Earth into the heavens,
it is care that provides the links from transcendence to immanence,
from immanence to transcendence and from history to Utopia. It
is care that grants strength to search for peace among the various
levels of conflict. Without care that recovers the dignity of humanity
condemned to exclusion, the new paradigm of living together will
not be established. (143)
In his foregrounding of care as a principle and action that compels us to
recognize the historical injustices and deeply rooted mechanisms of op-
pression that have turned “the wretched of the earth” (Fanon) into the
“dispossessed of the earth” (Boff), care, according to Boff, will allow us to
strive for the recovery of the dignity of the dispossessed, and the dignity
of all humanity. The ultimate goal of foregrounding care is to acknowl-
edge its centrality in what makes us human, an ethos within ourselves that
privileges well-being, the sumak kawsay (el buen vivir), something some of
us seem to have forgotten or, at the very least, neglected. Ultimately, Boff
calls for humans to recognize within themselves not only the ethical duty
to care for the dispossessed, but also how care can be activated as a princi-
ple to counteract “ecological degradation” and “the exaltation of violence”
on a localized and global scale (144). While some concepts circulated as
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 79

decolonial theories disengage from theology, as much as they disengage

from a Marxist approach to understanding social inequities and the cen-
trality of capitalism in a critique of coloniality, Cardenal’s work intersects
with liberation theology and he becomes a poet who is foundational to a
decolonial ethos, particularly given his preoccupation with the poor, the
dispossessed, the racialized, the historically silenced, and the marginal-
ized beings who have been denied a right to exist.

Roque Dalton and Revolutionary Poetry

The late Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton provides insight into his way of
conceptualizing poetry, particularly into how La taberna y otros lugares
(1967) came to be. Since La taberna was composed during a time of exile
that took Dalton through Cuba, the German Democratic Republic, and
Czechoslovakia, Dalton found that, in composing his poetry, he was in
fact taking sociological notes based on conversations he overheard from
Czech youth and on other observations, particularly in relation to the
third part of the collection. As such, Dalton considered his poetry a socio-
logical exercise in which he documented the effects of socialist ideology
on the ground (Benedetti, “Una hora con Roque Dalton” 21–22). More
importantly, however, in Dalton’s poetry we see a form of poetry of com-
munication or antipoetry as a committed and revolutionary act. In Dal-
ton’s poetic praxis, he argues that poetry needs to be committed to social
change, as well as active and armed struggle against oppression and im-
perialism (Benedetti, “Una hora con Roque Dalton”; Dalton, Poetry and
Militancy in Latin America).
Unlike Parra’s clear attempt not to disclose his political alignment, Dal-
ton makes no effort to hide his ideological inclinations. For Dalton, po-
etry is a medium that lends itself to engage with the urgency of undoing
or challenging social inequities. In this sense, the poet-as-communicator
is also a militant-poet and thus must create art with the intention of de-
nouncing social injustice, but must also be actively engaged with every-
day social struggles and the social reality of the people.
In interpreting Dalton’s poetics, Hugo Achugar argues that Dalton’s
poetry “struggles against a system of values that limits poetry to a lin-
guistic adventure with no historical function beyond the development
80 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

of imagination” (658). This is not to say, however, that Dalton renounces

writing aesthetically pleasing or “good” poetry. What changes, however,
are the terms, conditions, and categories with which one evaluates poetic
works that are at once revolutionary in their political ideology, engaged
with larger social struggles, and effecting of profound changes at the level
of language and poetics. As Margaret Randall notes about Dalton’s in-
fluence on writers of his generation: “He taught us, among many other
things, that a simplistic sense of ‘social realism,’ in terms of creative ex-
pression, was nothing more nor less than a lack of respect for the work we
were doing” (iv). In Dalton’s poetic proposition, art was life itself, which
is to say that life was the foundation for any type of art. To this end, a po-
et’s commitment had to be to life and not merely a political commitment.
Numerous examples of Dalton’s poetic praxis can be found among
his poetry collections, including his 1967 publication of Taberna y otros
lugares, which was awarded the Premio Casa de las Américas in 1969. The
organization of the collection is aimed at displaying multiple facets and
observations of the poet-as-revolutionary. The first part of book is dedi-
cated to an articulation of Dalton’s imagined nation. In his poem “El gran
despecho” [“The Great Resentment”], Dalton writes: “País mío no ex-
istes / sólo eres una mala silueta mía / una palabra que le creí al enemigo”
[Country of mine, you don’t exist / you are only a poor silhouette of me
/ an enemy’s word, which I believed] (Taberna y otros lugares 10). Since
the idea of country and home Dalton had in mind is nothing but a fig-
ment of his imagination and a construction based on an idea instilled by
the enemy, El Salvador is defined in a negative way. While Dalton wants
to claim El Salvador as his own, he soon realizes that it is an invention or a
byproduct of imperialism. In the short poem, Dalton continues to realize
that if once he considered El Salvador a small country, with the passing of
time, he has realized how insignificant it has becomes as he writes: “pero
ahora sé que no existes / y que además parece que nadie te necesita / no
se oye hablar a ninguna madre de ti” [But now I know that you don’t ex-
ist / and more so since no one seems to need you / one doesn’t hear any
mother speaking about you] (Taberna y otros lugares 10). Dalton defines
El Salvador as unnecessary, since it is not essential to anyone. Moreover,
with the invocation of a maternal figure, we are reminded of El Salvador’s
history of colonialism and imperialism, with no one to claim or care for
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 81

this imagined and then forgotten nation. The poem concludes with full
acceptance that his idea of El Salvador was nothing but an invention of his
own mind, and that he should be put away in a mental institution for such
delirium. In this sense, Dalton realizes that he is himself an expatriate, but
also that his country is an ex-patria, or a former country, that is no longer
recognizable or one he can call his own.
The rest of the collection presents us with engaging and thought-pro-
voking articulations of exile. Dalton dedicates almost two-thirds of the
collection to the idea of country, but from different perspectives. If the
first section seeks to engage with a personal quest to come to terms with
his own exile and “expatriation,” the second section produces fictional
characters of English descent who are meant to stand for the neo-imperi-
alist forces that replaced Spanish colonialism in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Put differently, the construction of the collection can
be read as an attempt to zoom-in on El Salvador’s and Latin America’s
history of colonialism and its pervasive coloniality. Dalton’s third section,
about the idea of country, is described from the perspective of imprison-
ment, which is another of Dalton’s facets as a revolutionary. In this sec-
tion, the idea of country becomes more elusive, since El Salvador seems
to turn its back on those in prison by treating them as enemies of the state,
as subhuman. The two final sections of the book engage with sociological
poetry or poetry written in prose and dialogue form, but also as a reflec-
tion on world historical themes and ideological articulations of Marxism
among the youth of socialist Europe. Much of the collection was written
during Dalton’s period of exile, which took him on a journey through so-
cialist countries, including Cuba, the German Democratic Republic, and
Czechoslovakia.11
As a way to get a better perspective on Dalton’s development as a revo-
lutionary poet, we can turn to a posthumous publication comprised of
the last set of poems he wrote, under five pseudonyms. Poemas clandes-
tinos appears as an attempt to write, publish, and circulate his poetry by
passing it off as having been written by one woman and four men of dif-
ferent professions. In her introduction to this bilingual publication, Mar-
garet Randall has suggested that Dalton chose to write in the voice of a
woman as a way to come to terms with his own sexism (Randall i–xii).
One could argue, however, that the inclusion of a female voice, or his
82 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

attempt to write from the perspective of a woman, is Dalton’s attempt to

call attention to how revolutionary struggles have often silenced women’s
voices.
It is interesting to note that each of Dalton’s pseudonyms is presented
with a corresponding brief biography, and each has a poetic collection of
its own. Vilma Flores, Dalton’s feminine pseudonym, suggests in “Sobre
Nuestra Moral Poética” [“On Our Poetic Moral”] that she and her fel-
low “poets” in the volume should not be confused with detached poets
who openly attack the enemy; they must rely on anonymity and clan-
destinity to avoid repercussions. Instead, Flores writes: “Y al sistema y a
los hombres / que atacamos desde nuestra poesía / con nuestra vida les
damos la oportunidad de que se cobren, / día tras día” (Dalton, Poemas
Clandestinos / Clandestine Poems 6). [“And we give the system and the
men / we attack—with our poetry / with our lives—the opportunity to
get back at us day after day”] (Dalton, Poemas Clandestinos / Clandestine
Poems 7).12 In Dalton’s feminine pseudonym we can discern a clear at-
tempt to call attention to the disparity in gendered power distribution
among revolutionary and guerrilla forces. Flores emphasizes how revo-
lutionary women struggle on two fronts: against a common enemy, and
against men. Flores evinces a desire for women to be treated equally and
for men to fight alongside them in everyday struggle. Other themes found
in the poems presented under this feminine pseudonym are questions of
love between revolutionary men and women, but also how to spread the
message of love and equality among all Salvadorians. If read beyond the
context of revolutionary struggle, this particular poem draws attention to
the coloniality of gender, as articulated by María Lugones and Rita Se-
gato.13 Coloniality of gender names a complex and historically embedded
mechanism by which gender has been created and rendered normative as
a modality of exclusionary practices within a patriarchal, Europeanized
society. Lugones, in particular, draws attention to the potential for exam-
ining the grid of coloniality not only in terms of race and capitalism, but
also in terms of gender, through intersectionality—that is, how modes
of racialization and gendering are inextricably linked practices through
which power is displayed and by which coloniality is instantiated. If read
as a decolonial gesture from Dalton, the poem displays the very tensions
of power that have created a hierarchy of power among men and women,
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 83

despite the seemingly horizontal and socialist goals of revolutionary

struggles. More importantly, as the poem suggests, poetry is a means to
attack the system, which could be capitalism, imperialism, or patriarchy,
all of which converge in what has been termed the coloniality of power.
The remaining four pseudonyms in the collection are men who, in
their pre-revolutionary lives, studied law, sociology, and architecture, and
one student who demonstrated an interest in liberation theology. Given
its brevity and succinctness, one poem, written under the pseudonym of
Timoteo Lue, seems to encapsulate Dalton’s conceptualization of how to
mend the apparent schism that separates poetics and revolutionary work.
In “Arte Poética 1974” [“Poetic Art 1974”], the entire poem reads as fol-
lows: “Poesía / Perdóname por haberte ayudado a comprender / que no
estás hecha sólo de palabras” (Dalton, Poemas Clandestinos / Clandestine
Poems 34). [“Poetry / Forgive me for having helped you understand /
you’re not made of words alone”] (Dalton, Poemas Clandestinos / Clandes-
tine Poems 35).14 In short, poetry needs to be in the service of revolution-
ary action for the greater well-being of others. Poetry cannot stand with
its back turned to reality. As such, Dalton, under the pseudonym of Lue,
reminds us that poetry is comprised of a number of elements transcend-
ing mere words, images, or rhetorical devices. In this brief poem, Dalton
also helps us realize how he has forced poetry into submission in order
to communicate and understand once and for all what its true essence is
all about. To put things differently, and to return briefly to antipoetry’s
stance as being anti-Neruda, when Benedetti asks Dalton whether he sees
himself as being part of César Vallejo’s or Neruda’s family, Dalton replies:
“Mira, yo quisiera ser uno de los nietos de Vallejo. Con la familia Ner-
uda no tengo nada que ver. Hemos roto nuestras relaciones hace tiempo”
[Look, I would like to be one of Vallejo’s grandchildren. I want nothing to
do with Neruda’s family. We severed ties long ago] (Benedetti, “Una hora
con Roque Dalton” 33).

Poetics of Sensing, or Sensing Poetic Fragments

In her study of César Vallejo’s profound contribution to lyric modernity,

Michelle Clayton argues for a reading of Vallejo’s poetry that privileges
“an ethics of the fragment,” by which she seeks to distinguish Vallejo’s
84 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

notion of the fragmentary from avant-garde’s versions of the term. In-

stead, Clayton seeks to underscore the fragment in terms of its “central-
ity to modes of modern subjectivity and collectivism. Poetry in pieces,
in other words, as the most responsible mode of lyric modernity” (3).
Borrowing this notion of the fragment in Vallejo’s poetry, I would like to
extend the fragmentary as a critical concept that enables a discussion of
seemingly dissimilar poetic modes during the 1960s, a period in which
“poetry is afforded very little place, which suggests that in the 1960s—just
as today—the aesthetics of lyric poetry was thought to have little to say
about or contribute to political discourse” (Clayton 5). In confronting the
seemingly disparate and yet conjoined poetics of Parra, Benedetti, Carde-
nal, or Dalton, we notice a genealogy of the fragmentary that appears in
Vallejo.15 As a genealogy, then, we can understand their claiming a certain
ancestry or familial relation that turns these diverse poets into kindred
interlocutors constantly seeking to activate an ethics of the fragment in
order to foreground the social and political dimensions of their respec-
tive poetic projects. Ultimately, such an ethics of the fragmentary seeks to
create a resonance of poetry with pressing political questions in a national
context, but always with an eye toward bringing together individual Latin
American nations (as fragments) in a dialogue with each other through
poetry and the arts at large, perhaps in an attempt to correct and advance
Bolívar and Martí’s dreams of a united Latin America.
The idea of the fragmentary in relation to the arts is one that particu-
larly resonates with the project at hand, especially if we think about frag-
ments in the broadest possible sense. For instance, how do we under-
stand individual song lyrics or a poetic verse, particularly those deemed
memorable? In part, reading a verse detached from its whole requires a
double extirpation, first of the verse from its poem and then of the poem
from its collection. A similar gesture of fragmenting occurs when we lis-
ten to a song that belongs to and was intended to be part of an album.
Analyzing a scene from a film also requires this type of formal and inten-
tional fragmentation. But this is only one type of fragmentation, interpre-
tive or analytical, among others, including the act of dividing artworks
among genres and subgenres. So, how can we make sense of two explic-
itly fragmentary acts—namely, reducing the scope of study to a few years
(the 1960s) and choosing an array of case studies in poetry traditionally
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 85

deemed incompatible with each other (Parra, Benedetti, Cardenal, and

Dalton)?
To provide a preliminary answer, one can turn to Alain Badiou’s con-
cept of inaesthetics, particularly as it relates to poetry, and Rancière’s re-
sponse to such an enticing concept. The precise meaning of “inaesthetics”
in Badiou’s The Handbook of Inaesthetics is elusive. It rests on two lines
that appear as an epigraph, as well as on a series of readings seeking to
show what inaesthetics looks like when we encounter the works of Fer-
nando Pessoa, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Labîd ben Rabi’a, dance,
theater, film, music, and other art forms. Of interest is Badiou’s asser-
tion that “The poem is neither a description nor an expression. Nor is it
an affected painting of the world’s extension. The poem is an operation.
The poem teaches us that the world does not present itself as a collec-
tion of objects” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 29). In seemingly rejecting the
Aristotelian model of mimesis, Badiou argues for the poem as an artifact
that stands on its own terms and that neither contains nor seeks to repli-
cate the world in a handful of images in verse. Instead, we enter a poem,
Badiou argues, “not in order to know what it means, but rather to think
about what happens in it” (29). As I take it, Badiou is encouraging a radi-
cal shift in our reading practices and methodologies by moving away from
privileging interpretation and treating a poem instead as a laboratory in
which to think about the “Ideas” suggested in it. Furthermore, Badiou
seems to privilege the pedagogical function of the artwork, in this case
a poem, “not so much in order to preserve a realm that is proper to po-
etry or to art, but to preserve the educational value of the Idea” (Rancière,
“Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics” 224). In so doing, then, phi-
losophy turns to poetry as a site from which to think, and thus suggests
that literary interpretation is incompatible with aesthetics as a means of
arriving at ideas and knowledge of the world. Rancière, for instance, calls
Badiou’s project ultra-Platonist, given Badiou’s aversion to “the notion
that the specificity of the arts resides in their respective languages. It re-
sides, he affirms, in their Ideas” (Rancière, “Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-
Aesthetics” 222, original emphasis). Differently put, in Rancière’s reading,
inaesthetics becomes a set of reading and interpretative operations that
place the arts at the service of philosophical thought. As such, the arts
are mere instruments of philosophical thinking, since they symbolize or
86 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

point to specific problems germane to philosophical inquiry. The specific-

ity of poetic language or music, then, is almost secondary to what poems
or songs can offer as events or sites from which to think or test out ideas.
If Clayton is right in her claim that poetry in the 1960s in Latin Amer-
ica was deemed as having little to offer political thinking, we should keep
in mind the activation of poetry in Badiou’s work not only for pedagogical
or philosophical purposes, but also as a way to engage ethics and poli-
tics. In Rancière’s reading of Badiou’s inaesthetics as ultra-Platonism is the
claim that “to be a Platonist is to maintain that the question of the poem
is ultimately an ethical and political one, that the poem or art is educa-
tional” (Rancière, “Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics” 224). Think-
ing about poetry’s contribution to aesthetic and political thought during
the 1960s in Latin America, then, has more to do with claiming the cen-
trality of poetry as poetry for political thinking and with being an integral
part of a genealogy of decolonial thinking (a decolonial ethos) than with
undermining its aesthetic and affective qualities. Nicanor Parra argued
that poetry was nothing but life in words, which is to say that poetry must
draw from life, but must also be in dialogue with it. Poetry as quotidian,
conversational, and political poetry, then, becomes a direct engagement
with, not retreat from, life itself. As Parra put it, “la clave de todo el pro-
blema estaba en la palabra vida, y la antipoesía no es otra cosa que vida en
palabras” [the key to the entire problem rested upon the word life, and an-
tipoetry was nothing else than life in words] (Benedetti, “Nicanor Parra o
el artefacto con laureles” 51).
In choosing a corpus of poets embracing conversational poetry or anti-
poetry writ large, I do so with the aim of precisely emphasizing the poetic
intention of establishing a clear line of communication, rather than the
hermeticism that Badiou so admires in Mallarmé’s poetry. This is, in fact,
a decolonial critique that could be deployed when facing Badiou’s Euro-
centric examples of poetry. I would argue that conversational poetry can
be theorized or philosophized, but its main purpose is to sense and inter-
pret what it means and not dwell on unraveling excessively complicated
metaphors or convoluted language. This is perhaps poetry’s clearest con-
tribution to a decolonial ethos, particularly as the four poets discussed
here attempt to render the communication between poet and audience as
something that operates on a horizontal, rather than a hierarchical, level.
Furthermore, in the works of Parra, Benedetti, Cardenal, and Dalton,
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 87

I trace specific attempts to place Latin American poetics in dialogue with

the transformational and ebullient epoch that was the 1960s by illustrat-
ing diverse and fragmentary anticolonial and political positions, which
indeed add to a growing decolonial archive.
In Mignolo’s recovery of important figures contributing to what he
calls “genealogies of thought,” he draws upon the work of Algerian Malik
Bennabi, the Argentine Rodolfo Kusch, and the Afro-Caribbean Sylvia
Winter as constituting such a genealogy of thought in the context of the
1960s. In Mignolo’s retracing of a network of “non-national genealogies”
of decolonial thinking, he is interested in connecting diverse experiential
thinking “through the common experience of the colonial wound—of
sensing that, in one way or another, one belongs to the world of the an-
thropos” (The Darker Side of Western Modernity 93). In Mignolo’s critical
apparatus, anthropos is a term he uses to discuss groups of people who
have been historically deemed inferior, and who have been marginalized,
racialized, sexualized, and experienced other forms of colonial/imperial
domination either in their direct experience or simply by virtue of hav-
ing descended from traditionally marginalized groups. In contrast to the
anthropos, Mignolo deploys the term humanitas to frame a complex set
of formal and often subtle operations that create a hierarchy of domina-
tion, and thus enact the very structures foundational to the coloniality
of power. Humanitas becomes a term used to understand those who are
Eurocentric in their thinking, being, and “dwelling,” by which he means
one’s positionality or location “in the house of modernity/coloniality.” In
this context, one’s positionality is not always reduced to physical location,
but rather relates to one’s understanding of who is capable of knowledge/
reason and what the accepted and normative way of rational thinking is.
Humanitas and the anthropos, then, become another way to understand
the long-standing division of “civilización y barbarie” emerging from
Sarmiento’s thinking (The Darker Side of Western Modernity 94–95). In
the preceding sections, I was interested in exploring how an emphasis on
conversational poetry as a return to everyday language is connected to
this long-standing project of undoing the sedimented division between
“civilización y barbarie,” humanitas and anthropos, those who deploy colo-
niality and those who endure it. The four poets and other critical voices in
this chapter are part of a fragmented and uneven corpus of critical and ev-
eryday language seeking to denounce and undo what we now understand
88 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

as coloniality and, in so doing, compel us to sense poetry otherwise and

detect decolonial gestures in verse. Sensing poetic fragments is, of neces-
sity, a set of operations that can work on multiple levels ranging from a
purely affective and aesthetic engagement with poetry as poetry (figur-
ing out what a poem means), to enabling poetry’s quotidian language to
help us think about both historical and contemporary issues in light of
coloniality/modernity/decoloniality.
To return to Fernández Retamar’s words at the beginning of this chap-
ter, one could argue that conversational poetry (broadly construed) is at-
tuned with its time and literary context and thus engages with the most
effective means to redress them. In outlining his understanding of what
constituted the difference between art criticism and the history of art,
Benedetto Croce distinguished between the critic’s proximity to contem-
porary literature and art, in which case what prevails is “the judging or
polemical tone, for which the name ‘criticism’ seems more fitting; and in
that of more remote literature and art, prevails the narrative tone, which
is more readily called ‘history’” (Croce, Breviary 72). For Croce, then,
a temporal distance from the literary text or artwork moves the scholar
to the side of historical context, rather than criticism, if the latter term
is understood as synonymous with polemics. In the preceding sections,
however, such distinctions between criticism and historicism have often
been blurred in order to arrive at a critique that is attuned to the historical
context of the poetry to be discussed, which seeks to reassert its relevance
in the shifting poetic language of the 1960s in Latin America. By engag-
ing in close readings to establish points of connection among four diverse
poetic propositions, I have sought to shed light on each poet’s distinct
approach, while moving toward sensing or connecting their seemingly
fragmentary positions. If read separately, these poetic positions appear as
poetic or lyric fragments, to echo Clayton’s idea, that indeed contribute to
both poetic and political discourses by politicizing and decolonizing the
aesthetic dimension of poetry and aestheticizing politics. Yet, the gesture
in this chapter is to read these poetic propositions in their own right, but
also relationally, as contributing to a decolonial ethos emerging from po-
etic verses.
In reference to the radical rupture in poetic production occurring dur-
ing the sixties when compared to earlier decades in Latin America, Hugo
Achugar reminds us how in that decade “an alternative to the hegemonic
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 89

system emerged” (657). Achugar adds that the rise of a new poetics came
about toward the end of the 1950s, particularly with the rise of the Cu-
ban Revolution. During this time, for instance, some of the prominent
names were “the Pan Duro group in Argentina (including Juan Gelman),
the antipoesía of Nicanor Parra, the exteriorismo of Coronel Urtecho and
Ernesto Cardenal, and the poetry of Fernández Retamar, Benedetti, and
A. Cisneros” (657).
While critics such as Fernández Retamar have been pivotal in estab-
lishing a clear division between antipoetry and conversational poetry,
and subsequent studies have followed suit, I have sought to go beyond
this binarism.16 Instead, it can be argued that labels or poetic propositions
have particular significance insofar as each of the poets discussed here
attempted to differentiate his work from others,’ while also presenting a
poetic proposition of his own against previous poetic traditions. None-
theless, a quick look at the history of the period allows us to see that there
are many efforts during the 1960s to establish poetic connections across
Latin America. With publications such as Argentina’s Eco Contemporá-
neo and Airón, the Venezuelan El techo de la Ballena, the Chilean Orfeo,
and Mexico’s Pájaro de Cascabel and bilingual El Corno Emplumado/The
Plumed Horn, poets of the 1960s sought to come into contact with one
another’s work and ideas in an attempt to move toward a poetry devoted
to colloquial language (Rostagno 59–87).
Another pivotal figure in his dual role as poet and critic was Benedetti,
particularly in his effort to coalesce different poetic approaches (antipo-
etry, conversational, exteriorist, or revolutionary) under the umbrella of
poetry-as-communication. A common denominator that united these
four approaches was, in fact, a distinct interest in communicating directly
with readers without alienating them through what the poets deemed to
be the artificiality and hermeticism of pre-1960s poetic language. Each
poetic proposition builds upon another and thus coexists in relation to
the others. Once they identified a common poetic “enemy,” the paths to
counteract said enemy varied, though the final objective of an antipoetic
stance did not change.
Parra seeks to disrupt a logocentric understanding of poetic language.
In Parra’s antipoetry, a disruption of poetic language is primarily con-
cerned with privileging multiple and simultaneous forms of sensing as
a form of communication. This becomes even more prevalent in Parra’s
90 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

work when he moves from poetry to artefactos, art installations, all of

which are antipoetic and seek to engage multiple forms of sensing. In
the recent critical assessment of Parra’s work, particularly his antipoetic
experimentation, Jill S. Kuhnheim has noted Parra’s repeated question-
ing of the nature and limits of poetry. To this end, Kuhnheim writes that
“As in his antipoesía, he [Parra] attempted to demystify poetry as he cre-
ated it” (110). Both in Benedetti as well as in Parra we see an emphasis
on returning poetic language to the level of orality and horizontal com-
munication. The image of the gods descending from Mount Olympus in
Parra and the figure who walks through Manhattan in Benedetti present
us with a renewed sense of each poet’s claim to undo and delink the logic
that has bound poetry to specific registers governing the modes of sens-
ing, reading, hearing, understanding, feeling, and communicating with
and through poetry. In Alejandro A. Vallega’s recent work on decolonial
aesthetics, he recognizes the necessity of transcending reason and logic
in discussions around aesthetics when he remarks that “my suspicion is
that at a certain level we are still holding on to the primacy of reason over
aesthetic experience as we develop our liberatory and decolonial narra-
tives” (199–200). In Cardenal’s poetry, there is an emphasis on establish-
ing new connections between conversational poetry and an ethical sense
of social justice infused in the service of those who have been histori-
cally excluded from the coloniality of narrative histories central to Latin
America. Dalton’s poetry reaches new dimensions of decolonial poetics
in which there is an emphasis on questioning the very tension that has
historically attempted to keep separate aesthetics, poetic creation, and po-
litical engagement.
A poetics of sensing operates in all of the aforementioned cases as a
way to disrupt, delink, and question the role that poetry came to em-
body in a world of neglect and marginalization inherent in the creation
of poetry as art for specific intended audiences and with defined poetic
registers that rendered it only liminally accessible. A poetics of sensing
does not have recourse to narrow definitions of the senses, sensing, or the
sensuous. In fact, as I have articulated in the sections above, what binds
these four poets’ approaches to a decolonial poetics of sensing is a radical
redefinition of modes in which poetic language can be understood, read,
distributed, appreciated, felt, and sensed beyond the contours of written
language, established poetic forms, or poetic projects. Put differently, a
 The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses · 91

poetics of sensing necessitates a transcendence of aesthetics as a West-

ern/Eurocentric philosophical project invested in aesthetic categories.
Once this happens, and following Enrique Dussel’s words, “El arte deja
de expresar una belleza equívoca para ocuparse ahora de una de las tar-
eas más urgentes y eminentes que posee el hombre, una tarea inigualable
e insustituible: expresar ante la historia, ante sus propios cogestores de
la cultura el sentido radical de todo aquello que habita el mundo de los
hombres” [Art ceases to express an erroneous beauty in order to concern
itself with one of the most urgent and prominent tasks that mankind has,
an unparalleled and irreplaceable task: to express before history, before its
own cultural bearers, a radical sense of all that inhabits the world] (Dus-
sel, “Estética y ser” 295). Inherent in the poetics of sensing is the poet’s
attempt to engage and communicate more directly with a broader audi-
ence by employing colloquial language, giving the quotidian an antipo-
etic treatment, which ultimately means bringing poetry back to its origi-
nal function of communication and its impact on the senses.
 3
x
Decolonial Sounds
Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción

Time and again the yearning for time has been figured in the topic of music,
the art of time.
Marshall Brown, The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul 128

The poetic figures of Nicanor Parra and Mario Benedetti appear as two
connecting threads between the type of poetic production discussed in
the previous chapter and a specific type of popular music that appeared
during the same period. In the case of Nicanor, his indirect contribution
to the development of nueva canción has to do with encouraging his sister,
Violeta, to conduct research in remote areas of Chile as a way for her to
compile folk music and traditions that were rapidly disappearing and had
been long neglected. These experiences had a significant impact in shap-
ing Violeta Parra’s own musical style, lyric compositions, and her incur-
sions into visual and textile arts. Needless to say, Violeta Parra has long
been hailed as the founding figure of what would later be termed nueva
canción beyond the confines of Chile.
In his role as cultural critic, Mario Benedetti makes a critical distinc-
tion between the two types of “popular” music. On the one hand, there
are popular songs that are merely a product for consumption and enjoy-
ment and easily fit into the category of commercial music. By extension,
this type of music produces high sales and acquires its status as popular
through high-grossing concerts, large record sales, radio play, and other
forms of media exposure. The second type of popular music, instead,
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 93

shies away from engaging in such mechanisms of commercialization

(Benedetti, “La canción como instrumento” 32–34). This type of popu-
lar music aims to appeal to a sector of the population that may very well
also consume the commercialized type of popular music, though may
not quite identify with the escapist or Manichean lyrical constructions
of 1960s and 1970s songs in Latin America that often dealt with the topic
of love, but failed to engage with social realities. I am thinking here of
immensely popular artists such as Angélica María, Enrique Guzmán, or
Armando Manzanero. Benedetti also warns against the well-intentioned
and overtly political songs that give primacy to ideological content over
the craft of lyrical and musical composition. Instead, Benedetti suggests
that music must operate within its own set of laws and norms, which si-
multaneously constitute it as music and art. In other words, music with
political content must first stay true to its art and not to politics. When an
artist uses overtly political lyrics set to music, Benedetti argues that there
is an impending danger of turning art into a mere ideological pamphlet or
propaganda presented under the guise of art (Benedetti, “La canción” 33).
Benedetti continues his argument by asserting that with popular-political
songs, artistic value and merit need to take precedence over ideological
indoctrination.
With nueva canción, the division between popular songs as art form
and lyrics with political content is collapsed. The separation between
popular music and lyrics as poetry is blurred in the service of fusing el-
ements from folklore with popular musical styles (i.e., tastes emerging
from peasant and working-class sensibilities), as was the case with many
of the song styles and lyrics Violeta Parra produced, as well as many of
the songs sung by Mercedes Sosa, Víctor Jara, and Silvio Rodríguez. At
the same time, the fusion of folklore and popular musical traditions ar-
ticulated an attempt to bring these musical traditions up-to-date to meet
the demands of social and political realities and changing tastes. Put dif-
ferently, nueva canción artists retrieved folk traditions and popular musi-
cal styles from the stagnation of form and repetition in performance over
successive generations, while exhibiting and maintaining a respect and
understanding of the implications that popular arts have for peasants and
other sectors of populations across Latin America.
One could go as far as to argue that, in part, nueva canción appears
as a response to the musical trends coming from the United States and
94 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

England as part of a globalized form of counterculture. These forms of

musical importation as a neocolonial strategy were seen as a way to mold
musical sensibilities, taste, and markets. In the context of the 1960s, nueva
canción artists created music as an alternative to British and U.S. rock &
roll, as it flooded the airwaves, rapidly impacted the tastes and fashions of
youth, and spawned a series of groups that took an imitative approach by
adapting and translating rock music into a Latin American context. In the
Chilean case, for instance, a young artist whose name was Patricio Hen-
ríquez took on the stage name of Pat Henry. A similar case happened with
the Carrasco brothers who adopted The Carr Twins as their stage name
(Rodríguez Musso 60). In the Mexican case, for instance, there were nu-
merous bands such as Los Crazy Boys, Los Teen Tops, Los Camisas Ne-
gras, or Los Hooligans doing covers of U.S. and British songs.
In light of this widespread neocolonization through musical sensibili-
ties, and in an attempt to go against the commercial aspirations of record
labels and radio industries, nueva canción artists, in my view, individually
and collectively contributed to an undoing of coloniality of aesthetics
through sound. In recovering traditional and so-called folkloric musical
styles and instruments such as the quena (an Andean flute), zampoñas
(Pan flute), or the charango (an Andean stringed instrument), musicians
such as Alí Primera, Soledad Bravo, Amparo Ochoa, Daniel Viglietti, Los
Olimareños, Quilapayún, and Inti Illimani, among many others across
Latin America, began to create an archive of sounds and lyrics that sought
to undo the embedded history of subjugation and domination of indige-
nous, Afro-descendant, and disenfranchised peoples such as peasants and
the poor. In other words, it was through an uncovering of musical tradi-
tions that had been historically marginalized (or confined to spaces such
as the countryside or popular bars) that nueva canción musicians began to
respond to the coloniality of power as it operated on levels of knowledge
and aesthetics. Popular forms of knowledge transmitted through music
were often categorized and hierarchized as folklore or popular in counter-
distinction to music of good taste. A clear indication of how dangerous
and powerful nueva canción became among vast sectors of the non-elite
population in Chile is the fact that as soon as Augusto Pinochet rose to
power, his dictatorship banned instruments such as the quena or the cha-
rango, simply because “Traditional musical instruments had become so
thoroughly associated with the politics of the deposed government that
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 95

playing them was considered tantamount to subversion” (Morris 123).

Not only might playing these instruments have been deemed a sign of
ideological subversion, but the instruments themselves served as remind-
ers of their indigenous provenance and that of their musical styles, as well
as an allegiance with those who had been historically disenfranchised and
had begun to hope for change before the rise of Pinochet’s dictatorship in
1973.
While rock music appealed to a certain sector of the youth across Latin
America, there were artists who shied away from musical importations
and turned their efforts toward recovering autochthonous, folkloric, or
popular songs that shared the ethos of revolution, utopian sensibilities,
cultural decolonization, a quest for nationalist forms of artistic expres-
sions, and ideologically charged art forms, all of which I read as decolo-
nial gestures. In turn, nueva canción became increasingly popular among
students and workers, while also emerging as a means with which to raise
class-consciousness, validating popular thought and popular art forms,
but without neglecting artistic merit or elevating songwriting to new and
rarified poetic heights.

Nueva Canción and (Decolonial) Aesthetics

For Edward Lippman, music in the twentieth century moved away from
conceptions of aesthetics and turned toward deriving meaning from
music. “The question of meaning, then, has superseded the traditional
problem of emotional content (which had derived in turn conceptions of
emotional expression and emotional effects)” (Lippman 352). Implicit in
Lippman’s analysis is the scission between aesthetics and meaning as two
separate and irreconcilable approaches to thinking about music. Some of
Lippman’s reservations come precisely from his assumption that music
“rarely possesses meaning in the most obvious sense—that of referring
to or representing extramusical objects or occurrences” (Lippman 353).
Of course, Lippman is primarily concerned with a specific tradition of
music (high music) and a particular historiography of musical thought
(i.e., Western and, more specifically, European). Left out of Lippman’s ex-
tensive analysis are musical traditions that are part of a musical corpus
that exists at the margins of Western musical aesthetics and is often left
unacknowledged within its musical historiography.
96 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

This is a point that Carolina Santamaría Delgado has raised to show

musicology’s insufficiencies to grasp the embedded dimensions of popu-
lar knowledge and collective affective memories arising from a musical
style such as bambuco in Colombia. Santamaría Delgado goes as far as to
argue that the field of musicology is grounded in a certain coloniality of
knowledge that demarcates aesthetic domains and does not sufficiently
account for non-canonical (popular or folkloric) musical traditions that
emerge from indigenous, Afro-descendant, and colonial encounters (San-
tamaría Delgado 4–7). In a broader Latin American context, for instance,
we see a strong current around the middle of the twentieth century that
shies away from such conceptions that delink musical aesthetics from
meaning, as Lippman suggests. In fact, as we will see throughout this
chapter, there is a conscious effort to rehabilitate aesthetics by giving it a
political and social dimension, but also by grounding meaning in specific
“extramusical” social concerns, historical situations, and political condi-
tions. Moreover, when placing music and lyrics alongside one another, a
symbiotic, codependent relationship is revealed in which lyrical composi-
tion acquires a specific register of meaning when set to specific musical
styles. The same could be argued about specific musical styles (for exam-
ple, the cueca), given that without lyrics embedded in social, political, and
historical realities, all we would have would be further folk songs. There
would not be anything novel or different about nueva canción. Folkloric
or “primitive” music has often been categorized as functional in the sense
that it is often associated with rituals, ceremonies, or celebrations. In con-
trast, “high” or cultured music does not necessarily serve a specific func-
tion and, instead, it can be placed within the domain of pure art (Nettl
21). For its part, nueva canción retained elements of the functional nature
of music stemming from folkloric or so-called primitive traditions, but
it also aimed to serve as entertainment, though politicized and socially
committed, for a specific sector of the population, primarily workers,
peasants, indigenous peoples, and students, among other underprivileged
and oft-silenced citizens.
It was just this blend of folk musical traditions, instrumentations,
dance styles, clothing, and lyrics set to traditional meters that resonated
with artistic efforts across Latin America. Musicians within this move-
ment also made a conscious effort to modernize “folk” traditions without
falling into the trap of commercialism. This was the case in the later 1960s
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 97

in Chile, where a number of musical groups jumped onto the commer-

cial bandwagon and often were at the service of the right-wing govern-
ment instead of critiquing it.1 As such, it can be argued that there were
two movements that aimed to rekindle an interest in folk traditions.
The first has been attributed to the direct influence of Argentine musi-
cian Atahualpa Yupanqui as a precursor to the new song movements in
Latin America and Chilean musician Violeta Parra. The general impulse
that gave rise to this movement took on new dimensions and was reart-
iculated as it spread from its origins in the Southern Cone to other lo-
cations across Latin America. The second movement, however, particu-
larly in the Chilean context, merely created music as part of a capitalist
enterprise with no particular social agenda and, by extension, few social
repercussions. Whereas the first movement sought to connect with dis-
enfranchised sectors of the population while politicizing audiences, the
second of these folk movements merely sought to entertain and achieve
commercial success. This chapter will be devoted to the first movement,
which hereafter will be referred to as nueva canción.
In mapping out the Latin American musical landscape, Guillermo
Barzuna argues for the conflation and cross-fertilization of musical tradi-
tions from Spain, pre-Columbian traditions, African elements, and creole
instruments and rhythms (Barzuna 8). While this assessment is partially
correct, one of the problems with this sweeping analysis is that it places
popular music under the guise of syncretism or acculturation. If one were
to interpret nueva canción merely as a product of acculturation, we would
be negating the centrality of coloniality. In fact, I read nueva canción as a
way to contest the discourse of acculturation. It is because nueva canción
seeks to employ musical forms, poetic traditions, and various modalities
of oppression carried over from colonial times into the new Latin Ameri-
can republics that the conjoining spirit among nueva canción musicians
is one of undoing coloniality or the legacies of colonial experience. It is
this “undoing” of coloniality via songs that I am linking to the concept
of decolonial aesthetics and, specifically, decolonial sounds. Nueva can-
ción is invested in reclaiming the idea of the nation by way of reactivat-
ing an interest in local and national artistic expressions. At the same time,
an interest in articulating art forms at the national level reveals points
of commonality with other parts of Latin America, particularly where
similar projects vindicating popular culture are taking place. While the
98 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

discourses of the nation and nationalism would appear as ones of excep-

tion (in the sense of working in isolation and for the sole benefit of the
national imaginary), those discourses serve to establish artistic dialogues
among similar aesthetic-ideological projects across Latin America that
share an affinity in politicized creation. In other words, there is a dual
sense of belonging: first to a nation, and, later, to a region as a whole:

La nueva música folclórica en Latinoamérica se ha convertido en un

gran movimiento de unidad continental que simboliza la actititud
(relativamente amplia y que intenta ser general) de los jóvenes ante
las situaciones de sus países. Aunque las canciones son contextual-
izadas (dentro de cada país en particular), son adaptables a los ele-
mentos comunes y constantes de la situación general. (Barzuna 27)

[The new Latin American folkloric music has become a great move-
ment of continental unity, which represents the attitude of the
youth (relatively wide and attempting to be general) in relation to
the situations in their countries. While the songs are contextualized
(within each particular country), they can be adapted to constant
and common elements of the general situation.]

It is in this sense that we can speak of a Latin American nueva canción

movement as opposed to nueva canción chilena or nuevo cancionero argen-
tino or nueva trova cubana, which identify a particular modality of making
music with an aesthetic project of national dimensions. However, a na-
tional musical movement does not negate the possibility of communicat-
ing with and establishing points of contact among different movements
at the regional level. Quite the contrary—by having a dual perspective
on the musical movements of the period (i.e., movements at the national
and Latin American levels), we can shift from looking at context-specific
articulations of the movements and how they engage with and respond
to a broader regional articulation of the new song movement in Latin
America.
Before engaging with the specific movements taking place at the na-
tional or regional levels, however, we must turn our attention to the cen-
trality of the singer-songwriter as a figure who is constantly redefining the
relationship among folk instruments, contemporary musical sensibilities,
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 99

and sociopolitical realities. To become a nueva canción artist, the singer-

songwriter enters into dialogue with a particular musical history that has
often been neglected by “cultured” or elite circles. The nueva canción art-
ist carves out a space for that derided musical history with conviction
regarding its inherent merit and aesthetic value, and how it needs to be
reevaluated in the face of the social and political change taking place in
most Latin American nations. On a different level, the nueva canción artist
becomes an aesthete, but not one who is interested in embracing elitist
or Eurocentric ideals. On the contrary, for the nueva canción artist beauty
can be found in the sounds of the guitarrón or the charango as much as in
a violin. As one critic has noted:

El cantante nuevo resulta, pues, un elemento que hace posible la

difusión en grande de la poesía de una cultura musical, y con ellas,
de una conciencia de la circunstancia actual de nuestros países; in-
tenta ser, así, un modo de conocimiento y, a la vez, una invitación a
desenajenarse y participar en la rebeldía para construir una nueva
realidad. (Barzuna 30)

[The new musician becomes, then, an element that makes possible

the wide dissemination of a given musical culture’s poetry and, with
it, consciousness of the current circumstances of our countries. It
seeks to become a form of knowledge and, at the same time, an invi-
tation to unalienate oneself and take part in rebelliousness to build
a new reality.]

The nueva canción artist becomes instrumental in communicating to the

general public the social and political dimension that music can have, as
well as the meaning conveyed by means of resorting to particular musi-
cal styles or poetic forms for composition. Moreover, the nueva canción
artist is an agent of social change at both the local and national levels,
though she/he shares the labor of change (questioning and attempting
to undo coloniality) with other artists across Latin America. Networks
of exchange, communication, and creative affinities are created to accen-
tuate the fact that nueva canción artists are not working in isolation, but
are part of a larger movement with differences in creative approaches and
aesthetic propositions, though sharing a broad common goal, which is
100 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

to turn music into an instrument of communication and entertainment,

social activism and denunciation, to evoke emotions and help audiences
identify with pressing sociopolitical struggles.
As Fernando Reyes Matta has suggested, when talking about nueva
canción, one should keep in mind that “This music and poetry are in-
serted into the popular culture at precisely those points where we find the
forms and language of a folklore excluded from the ‘culture industry’ con-
trolled by the transnational capitalist system” (Reyes Matta 447). In other
words, nueva canción, as a dual bearer of musical and poetic traditions,
seeks to challenge its exclusion from a “culture industry” by challenging
the dominant modes of production, consumption, marketing, and domi-
nant tastes. While European and U.S. musical styles were in vogue among
youth in Latin America, nueva canción appeared as a response to such
transnational cultural forces. In this sense, then, nueva canción can also be
called a “countersong” in that it makes it a point to resist commercial mu-
sic and other types of cultural importation.2
Reyes Matta has also argued that the dissemination and circulation of
tapes, the creation of festivals, and the mass appeal of the leading singers
of the new song movement helped make the movement one of transna-
tional impact. In the process, however, singers such as Violeta Parra and
Víctor Jara have become “renationalized” in the sense that they are not
only part of the Chilean nueva canción movement, but have also become
symbols of political and social struggle throughout Latin America (Reyes
Matta 448–49). In Violeta Parra’s case, some of her songs have been re-
interpreted by the likes of Mercedes Sosa, Soledad Bravo, Joan Baez, and
contemporary singer Francisca Valenzuela. Víctor Jara, for his part, has
become a Latin American symbol of resistance throughout the arts. In
this light, in the following sections of the chapter, the role and impact
of select nueva canción singers at the national and regional levels will be
examined.

Violeta Parra and the Conception of Nueva Canción

When thinking about Violeta Parra’s artistic endeavors, one is not lim-
ited to her musical compositions or poetic output. One must also keep
in mind her incursions into folkloristics, painting, and tapestry work (ar-
pilleras), as well as her role in showcasing folk songs through her radio
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 101

shows in Chile.3 After Nicanor Parra brought his sisters Violeta and Hilda
to Santiago from San Carlos, their hometown in southern Chile, Violeta
began her career as a singer by performing in fondas. From colonial times,
and well into the twentieth century, fondas were sites where workers went
to drink, a space to escape momentarily from their tedious lives, but also
as a place where they sought entertainment. In this context, Violeta and
her sister Hilda began performing popular tunes and genres of the time,
which included Mexican corridos, boleros, polkas, and pasodobles, as well as
theme songs from popular films and radio programs (Rodríguez Musso
48; Viola chilensis). Most of these genres were of foreign origin and ap-
pealed to popular audiences based on the commercialization of these
genres, which were replacing traditional Chilean musical styles. After a
couple of years, however, at Nicanor’s suggestion, Violeta turned her at-
tention to other cultural enterprises.
Violeta went around Chile from north to south, particularly in the
most remote areas, interviewing peasants and folk singers in order to
compile a collection of songs that had been passed down orally since co-
lonial times.4 Violeta’s work was part of ensuring that a facet of Chile’s
cultural patrimony would not die out. At the same time, though she had
no formal training in ethnomusicology or folkloristics, her contact with
peasants and folk musicians had a crucial impact on shaping her musical
aesthetics. As Rodrigo Torres Alvarado has noted, during this particularly
creative period of her life in which she developed a “three-way role of re-
searcher, performer, and creator,” Violeta developed her own method for
collecting popular lyrics and melodies throughout the Chilean country-
side (262).
In between trips to remote areas of Chile, Violeta also began a radio
show on which she played folk and popular songs using traditional Chil-
ean rhythms (Viola chilensis). Furthermore, during this period in which
Violeta began finding her true vocation of unearthing silenced voices and
traditions and bringing them to a wider public as a mode of resisting the
coloniality of knowledge and aesthetics, “she would develop a vast plan of
promoting traditional music through radio programs, recording records
conceived as didactic, and monographic works, perform in different set-
tings, and initiate her prolific personal creative work” (Torres Alvarado
262). Given her contact with workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, and
students during her travels, her radio show had an immediate appeal, and
102 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

connected at once with these sectors of Chile’s population, which imme-

diately identified with the type of music Violeta was airing. One should
keep in mind that, at this time, Chilean airwaves were invested in playing
foreign music (a form of neocolonialism or coloniality of sound), and it
would have been unthinkable to dedicate a radio show to music that elite
circles thought belonged to small town festivals or fondas. Violeta’s use of
the radio as a way to disseminate her project of recovering and valoriz-
ing folkloric and popular songs became instrumental to bridging the gap
between the use of mass media and often-disenfranchised sectors of the
population, which included peasants and indigenous populations living
in remote areas of Chile, but her work also interested workers and left-
ist students (Rodríguez Musso 39; Viola chilensis).5 Violeta intended to
use the radio as a means of connecting more readily to, and broadening
her reach within, her intended audience. In short, by compiling folksongs
and employing radio and print media as means of dissemination, Violeta
repurposed these popular and neglected traditions as a way to resist the
denigration of the sounds and aesthetic pleasures one can derive from
such musical traditions.
Keeping in mind how Violeta’s artistic project is shaping up at this
early point in her career, one could turn to a succinct assessment of her
art, which has been defined as having a combination of neofolklore and
urban sensibilities (Lindstrom 324). One could extend this assessment to
include Violeta’s various endeavors in the arts and her work as an “ethno-
musicologist” as a way better to understand musical and popular poetic
traditions, as she compiled documents from first-hand accounts as a way
to preserve them from the passing of time, oblivion, neglect, or complete
disappearance.
To situate the origins of popular music in both the Chilean context and
across Latin America, Chilean musicologist Osvaldo Rodríguez Musso
has argued for the need to think about the origins of popular poetry in re-
lation to the poetic genres that Spanish soldiers brought with them, which
include villancicos, villanelas, coplas, and romances (9). These poetic forms
appear as a product of the Spanish colonial enterprise and as foundational
to the development of both music and poetry, whether in its stylized or
popular versions. According to another musicologist, those who took part
in the global counterculture of the 1960s and the nueva canción movement
in Chile later spearheaded an interest in turning to ethnomusicology as
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 103

a way to understand the development of popular music (González 249).

In other words, with the passing of time, those who had participated in
the Chilean nueva canción movement became invested in having a more
in-depth understanding of the origins of specific musical traditions, the
development of musical trends, and tastes.
To return to the context of Violeta Parra’s interest in Chilean musi-
cal traditions, there were a few reasons for importing foreign musical
styles and models into Chile. Because of Chile’s presumed lack of mes-
tizo or Afro-descendant musical traditions—indeed, a legacy of Chile’s
long-standing whitening discourses and practices linked to a coloniality
of race—it was easier to import musical styles from other parts of Latin
America than to embrace local Afro-descendant, indigenous, or peasant
musical styles. As traditional Chilean music relied heavily on stringed
instruments, it became easy to adapt instrumentation to foreign musi-
cal styles (such as guaracha or corridos) (González 257). Whereas record
companies found it almost impossible to market and catalogue Chilean
music via its local genres such as the cueca and the tonada before the
1960s, in the following decades these genres would be recognized and
later valorized as constitutive of a national imaginary by their identifica-
tion with the construction of Chilean national identity (González 260).6
To begin addressing one of the central questions in this chapter re-
garding the role of women in the development of this music movement,
one should note that in Chilean salon culture, female duets or trios were
privileged. Furthermore, women were allowed to learn the piano and per-
form in salons, which became a symbolic space where both genders could
meet and interact (González 261). This may seem a minor practice of en-
tertainment and performativity designed for the male gaze and pleasure,
but, in fact, one could argue that the presence of women in such tradition-
ally male-dominated spaces corresponds to the growing global presence
of feminist ideals and, in this context, an attempt at undoing a colonial-
ity of gender. Furthermore, the salon was also a site where cuecas were
removed from their rural context and transposed into a space of urban
performance. In the twentieth century, the salon also became a semi-pro-
fessional space where artists first performed before they became famous.
After the mid-1930s, men also began making careers in urban spaces by
singing cuecas (González 261). Cuecas and tonadas helped revive internal
migrants’ cultural memories as they shifted from the countryside to urban
104 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

spaces. According to Gérard Béhague, the cueca comes from a colonial

dance known as the zamacueca or zambacueca, though today it goes by
the name of marinera. With the passing of time, two distinct dances were
derived from the zambacueca, namely the zamba and the cueca. The lyri-
cal composition of the cueca follows the form of the seguidilla, which uses
verses composed of seven and five syllables (Béhague 212). This ongoing
process of the colonial imposition of instruments and musical styles is
part of an extended and complex repurposing and transformation aimed
at bringing to the fore popular knowledges and aesthetic sensibilities that
have traditionally been denied space in certain elite, institutional, and aca-
demic discourses. Clear proof of this is that a study of such genres would
be categorized as ethnomusicology, whereas more respectable and ac-
cepted musical composition forms (operas, cantatas, classical music) fall
under the purview of musicology. This distinction is one that serves to
underscore the hierarchy of knowledges and aesthetic sensibilities consti-
tutive of the modernity/coloniality dynamic.
An example of Violeta Parra’s engagement with the cueca, as both
a dance style and in terms of lyrical composition, would be her song
“Cueca de los poetas,” which Nicanor Parra wrote for her, though Violeta
set it to music. In the first stanza of the song, Violeta praises the beauty of
pheasants and peacocks, though she says their beauty is inferior to that
found in Gabriela Mistral’s poetry. In this case, we are presented with a
contrast between the type of beauty found in nature and the beauty re-
flected in and represented by poetry. In the second stanza, we move from
Mistral as founding figure of Chilean twentieth-century poetry to other
major poets, namely Pablo de Rokha and Vicente Huidobro. The song
questions which of the two poets is worth more. While Pablo de Rokha
is a “good” poet, Vicente Huidobro is worth double or triple de Rokha’s
value. The third stanza is shorter and is dedicated to Pablo Neruda. The
stanza begins by recounting Neruda’s popularity among Chileans and
how he has long been hailed as a poet of the people. Given Neruda’s sta-
tus as the biggest poet in Chile’s poetic tradition, the song compares him
to the figure of a rooster. The song then comes to an abrupt conclusion in
which the rooster (Neruda) is urged to run, as Nicanor Parra will soon
come and snatch him away. In other words, Nicanor Parra is presented as
a new poetic force who will soon be part of a noteworthy list of poets, but
will also supersede Neruda. Given that it was Nicanor Parra who wrote
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 105

the lyrics to this cueca, and Violeta who set it to music and sang it, the
song serves as a prime example of the connection between poetic tradi-
tions (antipoetry) and musical styles (cueca within nueva canción). This is
a particularly interesting song and collaboration, because it speaks to the
subversive and contestatory nature of decolonial gestures in both poetry
and music. As we will see, the lyrics call into question the canonization of
poets who have been hailed as foundational to twentieth-century Chilean
poetics. By turning this song into a modern cueca, the principal decolonial
gesture is to call into question how attuned to popular sensibilities poets
such as Gabriela Mistral or Pablo Neruda have been. At the very least, and
in the spirit of both antipoetry and the cueca, humor becomes a means by
which to critique and resist the silencing of popular musical traditions,
which in this song are leveled by bringing poetic/musical lyrics and the
musical form of the cueca on even ground.
We should keep in mind that in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s,
Violeta Parra traveled throughout Europe, and her stays in France and
Switzerland were of particular importance in shifting the nature of her
music from traditional folk songs to music with a more overtly political
and social content and tone. It was also during this period that Violeta
began recording traditional folk songs, and this type of music was well-
received in the aforementioned countries. Given her success in Europe,
upon her return to Chile, Violeta began to be recognized as a singer-
songwriter in her own right. During her travels in Europe, Violeta also de-
veloped other facets of her art, which included a one-person show at the
Louvre in which she displayed her tapestries (arpilleras) and traditional
instruments from Chile, multiple performances in the Quartier Latin, and
making connections with expatriate musicians in France and Switzerland
(Viola chilensis).7
Given the context of her travels and how these shaped the direction
her music would take, we are confronted with an “aesthetization of the
political” in the sense that Violeta’s poetic voice and her music resonate
with a committed collectivity invested in effecting social change (Osorio
Fernández 38–39). An example of this aesthetization can be seen in Vio-
leta’s song “Cantores que reflexionan” [“Singers Who Reflect”], in which
she presents the figure of a singer at two different stages of her/his de-
velopment. In the first part of the song, the artist is merely interested in
commercial success and fame and lacks political and social commitment,
106 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

and, in turn, does not produce authentic and honest art. After experienc-
ing a crisis, the artist finds his own voice and the true meaning of his art in
making socially committed music. In this sense, Violeta Parra is present-
ing an argument that links aesthetics to the realm of the political and goes
as far as suggesting that the two domains are inseparable. This perspective
echoes with the connections between aesthetics and politics present in
Jacques Rancière’s work, as discussed in my first chapter.
Throughout the first two stanzas of the song, the singer is invested in
seeking fame and earning money, while not being at all interested in sing-
ing in the name of truth. In reference to this singer, Violeta sings:
Va prisionero del placer
y siervo de la vanidad;
busca la luz de la verdad
más la mentira está a sus pies.
Gloria le tiende terca red
y le apresiona el corazón
en los silencios de su voz
que se va ahogando sin querer.
La candileja artificial
te ha encandilado la razón
dale tu mano, amigo sol,
en su tremenda oscuridad.
(Violeta Parra, Gracias a la vida 18–19)

[Imprisioned by pleasure
and vanity’s serf,
he looks for the light of truth,
yet untruth is at his feet.
Glory casts a rigid web
and imprisons his heart,
in the silences of your voice
that is quelling without want.
The artificial bougie
has alighted his reason,
extend your hand, my friend the sun,
to his immense darkness.]8
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 107

Violeta presents us with an indictment of commercial artists who become

prisoners to pleasure and the vanity of fame. Instead, the weight of fame
and glory becomes a heavy burden for these artists to withstand and it
takes a toll on their craft. The artificial spark and joy of performing slowly
dissipate and leave these singers in absolute darkness and without a clear
sense of where they ought to take their art.
After this moment of crisis, later in the song, the artist has an epiphany
in which he finds his own class consciousness and this, in turn, shapes his
creative process and redefines the purpose of his craft. Violeta Parra sings
the following final stanza:
Y su conciencia dijo al fin:
cántele al hombre en su dolor,
en su miseria y su sudor
y en su motivo de existir.
Cuando del fondo de su ser
entendimiento así le habló
un vino nuevo le endulzó
las amargura de su hiel.
Hoy es su canto un azadón
que le abre surcos al vivir,
a la justicia en su raíz
y a los raudales de su voz.
En su divina comprensión
luces brotaban del cantor.
(Violeta Parra, Gracias a la vida 19–20)

[And his conscience said at the end:

sing to man about his pain,
about his misery and his sweat
and about his reason for being.
When from the depth of his being,
understanding told him so,
a new wine sweetened
the bitterness of his spleen.
Today his song is the hoe
that troughs life,
108 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

to the justice of its roots

and to the torrents of his voice.
In his divine comprehension
beams emanated from the singer.]

At the end of the song, the singer’s own consciousness is personified and
becomes a voice of reason that beckons the singer to address his new-
found audience, which is none other than the everyday man. Whereas
before the singer had an elite audience in mind, his songs will now reflect
the everyday person’s pain, suffering, struggles, and toils, and underscore
his purpose in society. It is with this newfound understanding that the
singer finds solace from his previous internal conflicts vis-à-vis his own
craft. In this new facet of his art, the singer’s voice becomes an instrument
(a hoe) that actively becomes involved with concerns in life, while ques-
tioning the very roots of justice and injustice in society. The metaphor
of the hoe places an emphasis on the singer’s craft as one that is of equal
importance or runs parallel to any type of manual labor. By having rede-
fined the purpose of his art, the singer now has a deeper understanding
that music must connect with real-life concerns. The lyrics of this song
stand as a reminder of Violeta’s own preference for “an emic style of per-
formance. ‘Emic’ in the sense of a deep and emphatic record of the ver-
nacular world and its representation in the heart of the city and its artistic
circuit” (Torres Alvarado 265).
Socially and politically committed popular songs defy the political
and cultural centralism and bourgeois sensibilities arising from Santiago,
Chile’s capital (Rodríguez Musso 11). Popular songs, in fact, often de-
scribe the experiences of workers, miners, peasants, and those working in
saltpeter deposits, as these laborers often live an entirely different reality
from that of city-dwellers. While those who had been left out of the city’s
purview inspired Violeta’s musical aesthetics, the experience of oppres-
sion and exploitation that Chilean workers in saltpeter deposits experi-
enced also inspired artists during this period, namely Luis Advis’s musi-
cal composition Cantata de Santa María de Iquique (1969) and Humberto
Solás’s film Cantata de Chile (1975).
During 1965, while Chile was undergoing a social and economic crisis
during Eduardo Frei’s government, there was a musical dispute between
Ricardo Alarcón—a musician linked to the nueva canción movement—
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 109

and a Chilean military officer. According to Osvaldo Rodríguez Musso,

the dispute began when Alarcón wrote a refalosa (a dance and music style
related to the cueca) in which he made a reference to the military. In turn,
the officer wrote a refalosa in which the military’s patriotism was under-
scored. The dispute continued with a number of refalosas on each side of
the argument. While this dispute came to be known as the “guerra de las
refalosas” (war of the refalosas), Violeta Parra wrote “Mazúrquica modér-
nica” [“Modern Mazurka”] as a response to the ludicrous amount of me-
dia attention the dispute received during a time of economic and social
unrest (Rodríguez Musso 58).
While Violeta chose to write a modernized “mazurka,” as the title of
the song implies, it is important to provide a brief account of this mu-
sic’s history and the mechanisms by which she modernized this musical
style. According to one musical historian, the mazurka, along with the
polka, crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Buenos Aires around the mid-
nineteenth century in connection to musicals in which both dance styles
were incorporated (Santana de Kiguel). These dance styles soon became
popular among the elites during the nineteenth century in Latin America,
but also among other social classes, as had also been the case in the Eu-
ropean context. Moreover, the mazurka and the polka soon spread and
became fashionable throughout Latin America. A crucial aspect of Vio-
leta’s modernization of the mazurka is her use of a poetic device known as
the jerigonza in which additional syllables are inserted into words to treat
a serious topic in a lighter tone. In this case, however, Violeta uses it as a
way to poke fun at the ridiculousness of what has captured the public’s at-
tention during the musical dispute of the refalosas, when there are serious
social concerns more deserving of public attention.
The text of the song begins with Violeta’s indictment of those people
who are concerned with whether or not “canciónicas agitadóricas” (songs
with social and political content) can agitate and create unrest among cer-
tain sections of Chile’s population. Violeta scoffs at the ludicrousness of
the inquiry by stating that only a child would ask such questions. In the
second stanza, Violeta continues:

Y he contestádico yo al preguntónico:
cuando la guática pide comídica,
pone al cristiano firme y guerrérico
110 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

por sus poróticos y sus cebóllicas;

no hay regimiéntico que los deténguica
si tienen hambre los populáricos.
(Violeta Parra, Las últimas composiciones de . . . )

[And I answered the questioner:

When the belly demands food,
it makes a Christian stand his ground and fight
for his beans and onions;
there’s no regiment capable of
containing the people if they are hungry.]

Violeta provides a direct answer to the question presented in the first

stanza. Her response is grounded in the daily struggles of the people,
namely how to survive and obtain their next meal. As Violeta suggests, if
people are hungry, they will soon go on strike and there will not be any
military or police force that can contain the will of the people to show
their discontent and have their voices heard. The singer underscores the
agency of the poor as actors in social change. The first two stanzas go
hand-in-hand, as the first stanza presents the question, and the second
stanza provides an answer that appears self-evident. The seemingly child-
ish question presented in the first stanza as to whether or not political
songs can incite people to rebel against the government is grounded in
the disjuncture between those asking the question and the objects of the
question. Put differently, only those who are out of tune with the needs
and realities of workers, peasants, and the poor could conceive of such a
question when there are more pressing issues at hand.
In the third stanza, Parra shifts her attention to the role of politicians in
keeping people hungry and unhappy. Whereas in the first stanza she was
asked about the role of politically charged songs, in the third stanza she
asks politicians to ask themselves whether their actions and decisions are
more dangerous than verses. After all, they make decisions for an entire
population, but if something goes wrong, they place the blame on others
and wash their hands like Pontius Pilate. In the fourth stanza, Parra con-
tinues putting the spotlight on people of power, namely “caballerísticos
almidonádicos” [heavily starched gentlemen], as they are the ones who
control the mines and have absolute control over the labor conditions
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 111

and the types of jobs available to the everyday citizen. This is a direct ref-
erence that can be linked to coloniality of power, as discussed by Quijano,
in relation to the mechanisms of racialization and capitalism that subju-
gate certain sectors of the population, even beyond formal political inde-
pendence. From the comfort of their chairs, Violeta suggests, they keep a
tally of those who die in coal mines, with absolute disdain for human life.
By the fifth stanza, Violeta turns her attention to the many massacres
recorded in Chilean history. She sings the following:

Varias matáncicas tiene la histórica

en sus pagínicas bien imprentádicas:
para montárlicas no hicieron fáltica
las refalósicas revoluciónicas.
El juraméntico jamás cumplídico
es el causántico del desconténtico:
ni los obréricos ni los paquíticos
tiene la cúlpica señor fiscálico.
(Violeta Parra, Las últimas composiciones de . . . )

[History has many massacres

well-printed in its pages:
to carry them out
no revolutionary refalosas were necessary.
The always-unfulfilled promises
were the cause for discontent:
neither the workers nor the police
were at fault, Mr. district attorney.]

In this stanza, Violeta returns to the questions asked in the first stanza. If,
in the first stanza, it was suggested that political songs might incite people
to revolt, in the fifth stanza Violeta suggests that revolutionary refalosas
(related to the cueca) were not necessary in the past as excuse for govern-
ments to kill their citizens. Differently put, Violeta suggests that some cul-
tural critics and politicians have used popular interest in nueva canción as
an excuse to take action against any possibility of revolt. As history shows,
however, people have revolted in the past without the aid of revolution-
ary or political songs. What drove people to revolt has been a litany of
unfulfilled promises and a history of discontent, which continue growing
112 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

with the passing of time and new governments. By the end of the stanza,
as though she were respectfully addressing a district attorney, Violeta ab-
solves workers and the police from the weight of history and its numerous
massacres.
The final stanza of “Mazúrquica modérnica” places an emphasis on
Violeta’s own position related to the aforementioned issues raised in the
song. Violeta concludes her song in the following way:

Lo que yo cántico es una respuéstica

a una pregúntica de unos graciócicos,
y más no cántico porque no quiérico:
tengo flojérica en los zapáticos,
en los cabéllicos, en el vestídico,
en los riñónicos y en el corpíñico.
(Violeta Parra, Las últimas composiciones de . . . )

[That which I sing about is an answer

to a question asked by a few jokesters,
and I won’t sing anymore because I don’t feel like it:
laziness runs deep in my shoes,
in my hair, on my dress,
in my kidneys and my ponytail.]

Violeta suggests that she has answered the question about whether politi-
cal songs can affect and mobilize unsatisfied workers in this way primarily
because the inquiry was ludicrous to begin with. While the question is
apparently not taken seriously, Violeta, in addressing it, in fact provides a
very direct and strong statement against social injustice in Chilean soci-
ety, while highlighting a number of other issues that people should keep
in mind instead of being preoccupied with the effects that songs can have
on people.
While Violeta’s response has seemingly been a humorous one given
her use of jerigonza, she defiantly and abruptly ends her song by stating
that she refuses to continue answering such a ridiculous question and she
does not feel like devoting more time to something that does not merit
it. Of course, this response is yet another device employed to underscore
the seriousness of the issues she has presented throughout the song. The
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 113

final verses of the song position Violeta on the side of the workers as she
reclaims her will to answer a question (i.e., what is the purpose of socially
committed songs?) and when to end her response. When Violeta states
that she does not feel like continuing to answer the initial question that
sparked this song, she attributes her lack of willingness to her own lazi-
ness, which runs in her being. In fact, Violeta’s laziness is ingrained in her
shoes, her hair, her dress, and all the way from her kidneys to her ponytail.
One might wonder why Violeta would end such a powerful song on
such a note. I would argue that she is redefining and embracing laziness
as a characteristic that politicians and men in power have often attributed
to workers and the underprivileged. If workers go on strike, the men in
power reason that it must be because they are lazy. A version of this re-
lationship between men in power and workers and how the aforemen-
tioned see laborers as lazy can be seen in my discussion of Humberto
Solás’s Cantata de Chile (1975) in the next chapter. In fact, Violeta self-
identifies with workers and their rights. She is one of them: “lazy” from
head to toe. Once again, she uses irony to mean the exact opposite. While
workers have often been labeled as lazy, Violeta rehabilitates such a cat-
egorization. After all, and particularly given her humble origins, Violeta
often sided with and sang for the underprivileged and the oppressed. In
fact, her music has been described as “canto a lo humano y a lo divino”
[singing to the humane and the divine], particularly because these are
characteristics that describe two constant preoccupations in her music
(Rodríguez Musso 39; Viola chilensis). While religious imagery appears
in many of her songs (as in the reference to Pontius Pilate in “Mazúrquica
modérnica”), Violeta is also concerned with very earthly and human is-
sues, particularly those linked to social injustices.
Violeta Parra’s art is extensive and cannot be reduced to a discussion
of three of her songs, as her legacy and impact are far-reaching. Following
her brother Nicanor Parra’s advice to turn to the décima (a poem with ten
verses) as a poetic form to help her express and record her experiences
and frustrations, she wrote her autobiography in that form, using it to re-
flect on her childhood and many of her concerns throughout the years. A
few years after Violeta’s tragic death in 1967, Luis Advis adapted Violeta’s
autobiography in Canto para una semilla (1972), as the autobiography was
linked to Advis’s own interest in rethinking whether or not popular music
114 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

fit into established models of beauty and aestheticized classical music

compositions (Osorio Fernández 36–37). If Violeta found inspiration in
popular and folkloric forms of poetry and music in her own work, her au-
tobiography inspired Advis to resolve some of his own reservations about
popular music’s aesthetic values and whether they could be transferred to
the form of the cantata.
In thinking about Violeta Parra’s contributions to nueva canción be-
yond writing her own lyrics, composing her own music, and compiling
popular songs from the countryside of Chile, it becomes important to
think of how she has been credited with the role of introducing the pe-
ñas, as a space for performance and site of more direct engagement with
the community. As Torres Alvarado has noted in reference to the central-
ity of the peñas, “At these performance events, a new ritual in which the
singer communed with the audience crystallized, negating the distance
that had separated them in the nightclub format” (266). In connecting in
more personal and affective ways with a community of the dispossessed,
Violeta’s gesture was important as she moved away from the nightclubs
that consumed folklore as a mere commodity that sedimented class-
based and racialized difference. In so doing, Violeta sought to engage in
an active and ongoing challenge to the relationship between music and
performance as objects of commercialization, enjoyment, identification,
and liberation. Differently put, these gestures of rethinking the role of the
musician and performer in nueva canción in bringing her performance to
audiences in spaces those audiences already inhabited (popular and dis-
enfranchised areas of an urban space), along with a politicization of music
lyrics in unison with a recovery of traditional and popular musical styles,
are what I perceive to be the lasting legacies of this movement toward an
undoing of the coloniality of sound, or what I have suggested in this chap-
ter as an archive of decolonial sounds.
Particularly for the discussion of the remaining singers in this chapter,
Violeta Parra becomes a frame of reference for how to make socially and
politically committed songs. Violeta’s impact has been widely acknowl-
edged in the formation of a more cohesive movement of the nueva can-
ción chilena, particularly among a younger generation of artists, which
included her own children Ángel Parra and Isabel Parra, as well as Víc-
tor Jara, Inti-Illimani, Quilapayún, and Patricio Manns, among others.
In the following sections, Violeta Parra will continue to be referenced,
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 115

particularly as we move toward a discussion of nueva canción’s articulation

as a movement of Latin American dimensions.

Víctor Jara: Lyrics as a Political Weapon

If Violeta Parra is often hailed as the founding figure of the Chilean nueva
canción movement, Víctor Jara is remembered as a figure who marks
a moment of transformation in that movement. His tragic death at the
hands of the Pinochet dictatorship only three days after the coup d’état
on September 11th, 1973, and the growing repression and violence of Pi-
nochet’s regime, compelled many of the leading figures of the movement
to seek political asylum in other Latin American countries and in Europe.
For instance, Isabel Parra, Ángel Parra, Quilapayún, and Patricio Manns,
among others, settled in Paris and continued making music there, while
staying closely in tune with political developments in Chile and other
Latin American nations (Party 671–684). Víctor Jara’s torture and killing
in a concentration camp—a soccer stadium that had been adapted to de-
tain and torture potentially “dangerous citizens” in Pinochet’s regime—
made him one of the first victims of the dictatorship, but also elevated
him to the status of a popular idol and a symbol of political resistance.
Given the tragic deaths of Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara, as well as their
respective contributions to the development of nueva canción, both of
these singer-songwriters became the most salient voices of a generation
of nueva canción artists.
It is no wonder, then, that to commemorate another anniversary of
Chile’s dictatorship, Chilean hip-hop artist Ana Tijoux recently remade
one of Víctor Jara’s songs, called “Luchín,” and released an accompany-
ing YouTube video. My point is that such songs, precisely because of their
social and political messages of inequality and disenfranchisement, con-
tinue to be as important today as they were in the late 1960s and early
1970s. More importantly, in a contemporary hip-hop artist re-releasing
one of Jara’s songs there is an implicit gesture of drawing a parallel be-
tween the contemporary social, political, indigenous, and student-led
struggles going on today in Chile and across Latin America and those that
were taking place four or five decades ago. This is why I keep drawing at-
tention in both implicit and explicit ways to coloniality’s usefulness as a
framework within which to understand these long-standing issues and
116 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

read decolonial gestures that challenge them. As Madina Tlostanova and

Walter Mignolo have argued, thinking decolonially is just as valid and
indeed pressing as already-common expressions such as “thinking philo-
sophically, thinking economically, or thinking politically” (17). Further-
more, to think and feel from a decolonial perspective means “formulating
the epistemic, political, and ethical basis for global decolonial options in
the existing world order, which we all witness or take part of today” (17,
original emphasis). This is why songs such as “Luchín,” whether they are
performed by Víctor Jara or adapted in contemporary fashion by Ana Ti-
joux, are deeply rooted in an ethical and political project of thinking and
feeling from the perspective of those Fanon called the “wretched of the
earth.” This is to say that decolonial thinking and feeling, as gestures of
decolonial aesthetics, are deeply connected to those who have been “hu-
miliated, devalued, disregarded, disavowed” for centuries and continue to
experience on a daily basis “the trauma of the ‘colonial wound’” through
entangled mechanisms that render certain people disenfranchised and
disempowered due to a complex interweaving of racism, gender, class,
and hierarchies of knowledges (cultured vs. popular/indigenous), etc.
(Tlostanova and Mignolo 19).
Given this context, and the pivotal roles artists such as Violeta Parra
and Víctor Jara played in the formation of the Chilean nueva canción
movement, a brief comparison of the two cannot be avoided. In fact, one
critic has provided a nuanced interpretation of both singer-songwriters,
including their marked differences in political ideology and how this
shaped their respective works. Whereas Violeta Parra often shied away
from closely aligning herself with a given political party or a specific ide-
ology (in a similar way to Nicanor Parra), Víctor Jara made very clear in
his writings, songs, and interviews his alignment with Marxist thought
(Nandorfy 172–209). Moreover, Jara became an ardent supporter of Sal-
vador Allende’s campaign, and continued collaborating with Allende’s
government (Nandorfy 172–209; Joan Jara). Nonetheless, Jara avoided
dogmatism, while still creating songs that dealt with the conditions of
workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, and the poor.
As both Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara came from humble origins and
were born in the same region of Chile (Chillán), both were equally in-
vested in recording and recovering folk music and lyrical traditions
throughout their careers. In fact, it is this common interest that led Víctor
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 117

Jara to seek a meeting with Violeta Parra so that the two could exchange
points of view on the role and function of folk music in the type of music
that became known as nueva canción (Isabel Parra 47–50).
Víctor Jara started his career as an actor and later became a theater di-
rector and taught acting at the university level. It was during this period
that Jara also became part of the musical group Cucumén. Around 1966,
Jara began devoting more of his time to creating and performing music,
particularly as he came into contact with other artists in a small venue
known as the Peña de los Parra, which was spearheaded by Violeta Parra’s
children Isabel Parra and Ángel Parra. The Peña de los Parra served as a
space where nueva canción artists convened to perform and develop long-
lasting friendships and collaborative relationships (Mara and Zito Lema;
Isabel Parra). His participation in the peña put him in touch with other
artists, including members of the musical group Quilapayún, whose artis-
tic director he soon became (Carrasco 53–55).
Víctor Jara became fully immersed in the world of music to the point
where he recorded and released one album per year, starting in 1969 with
Pongo en tus manos abiertas, on which some of the members of Quilapa-
yún collaborated. On that album, Jara released “Plegaria a un labrador,”
which was a song he had written and performed during the First Festival
of Nueva Canción, and for which he received the festival’s first prize. Other
albums followed, such as Canto Libre (1970) and El derecho de vivir (1971).
In the latter, there were several songs that indicated Jara’s turn to political
songwriting, including songs dedicated to Cuba, Father Camilo Torres
(a prominent figure of liberation theology), and “Che” Guevara. On the
album La población (1972), Jara collaborated with theater director Alejan-
dro Siéveking in writing the lyrics, which dealt with the struggles of peas-
ants and shantytown dwellers. For Canto por travesura (1973), Jara turned
his attention to Chilean folklore; he had compiled many of the songs over
the previous several years.
At the time of his death, however, Víctor Jara had been working
on an album that would later be released under the title of Manifiesto
(1973/1974). On this posthumous album, there are several noteworthy
songs that encapsulate many of Jara’s lifelong concerns. For instance,
“Aquí me quedo” [“Here I Stay”] is based on Pablo Neruda’s poem of
the same name, which appeared on Incitación al Nixoncidio y alabanza de
la revolución chilena (1973). Víctor Jara and Patricio Castillo, one of the
118 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

members of Quilapayún, adapted the poem and set it to music (Castillo

56–58). The song begins with a plea for unity, given the growing divide
between those who ardently opposed Allende’s government and the ma-
jority of the population, which supported it.

Yo no quiero la patria dividida

ni por siete cuchillos desangrada
quiero la luz de Chile enarbolada
sobre la nueva casa construida.
Yo no quiero la patria dividida
ni por siete cuchillos desangrada.
(Víctor Jara, Manifiesto)

[I don’t want a country divided

or bled by seven knives.
I want Chile’s light hoisted
Above the newly built home.
I don’t want a country divided
or bled by seven knives.]

The song’s opening verses provide a dual image of a split in Chilean so-
ciety. The first stanza suggests a country divided along ideological lines:
one part that supports Allende, and the right-wing opposition labeled by
the left as the momios. The second verse, however, shifts our attention to
a forceful divide in Chile in which struggles are turning into acts of vio-
lence mostly directed toward workers.9 Instead of a divided Chilean soci-
ety, the song advocates for a united Chile as represented by the metaphor
of the newly built home.
Despite these political differences in the country, Jara stresses how ev-
eryone can coexist: “cabemos todos en la tierra mía / y que los que se
creen prisioneros / se vayan lejos con su melodía” [All of us fit in this land
of mine / and those who think they’re imprisoned / can go far away with
their melody] (Víctor Jara, Manifiesto). By stating that Chile is his land,
the singer reaffirms his sense of patriotism and that his position is in line
with entertaining the possibility of dialogue and collaboration. None-
theless, the singer is also aware that there are those who will claim that
Allende’s government has “imprisoned” them (the momios) in its bid for
social justice. If that is the case, those people can simply leave with their
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 119

repetitive complaints, which are equated with the melody of a song. In

the same stanza, the song continues: “Siempre los ricos fueron extranje-
ros; / que se vayan a Miami con sus tías” [The rich were always foreign-
ers; they can go to Miami with their aunts] (Víctor Jara, Manifiesto). The
implication in these verses is that the elite have always favored foreign
products and culture over Chile’s, which is why they ought to join their
relatives abroad. Continuously complaining about Chile’s social transfor-
mations is not productive and can only stagnate any possibility of a truly
new society.
In the last stanza, several of the verses are repeated, though the singer
clearly sides with the working class. Whereas in the second stanza the
voice is conciliatory, here we are told: “Yo me quedo a cantar con los
obreros / en esta nueva historia y geografía” [I will stay to sing with the
workers / in this new history and geography] (Víctor Jara, Manifiesto). If
those in opposition to Allende cannot stand the changes in Chilean so-
ciety, they are welcome to leave. The singer of the song, however, would
rather stay and sing alongside the workers, while witnessing the changes
in the course of history. The changes in geography can be interpreted as
a potential transformation in the redistribution of land and power, which
may move the workers and the impoverished from a marginal to a central
position in relation to urban planning, power dynamics, and shifts in a
participatory democracy.
“Vientos del pueblo” [“The People’s Winds”] is another song from this
posthumous album that describes Chile’s long history of oppression of
workers. The first verse in the song illustrates a constant dynamic in Chile,
but can also be applied to another Latin American context—that of land-
owners and people in power abusing workers’ rights: “De nuevo quieren
manchar / mi tierra con sangre obrera / los que hablan de libertad / y
tienen las manos negras” [Once again they want to stain / my land with
worker’s blood / those who speak of liberty / and have filthy hands] (Víc-
tor Jara, Manifiesto). The opening stanza is reminiscent of Violeta Parra’s
“Marzúrquica modérnica,” particularly with the recurring image of those
people in power who have “dirty hands” and seek to rid themselves of any
responsibility for their decisions and actions. In this song, however, the
people in power want to suppress workers by overworking them and even
killing them if they protest against their working conditions. The image of
the workers’ blood staining the very land on which they labor is poignant
120 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

in establishing a cyclical relationship from which workers cannot escape.

Moreover, those in power have a double discourse in which they profess
to love freedom, but only for a select few, while they continue to oppress
workers. At the end of the stanza, we are left with the image that the
hands of the landowners are dually stained, by the blood of the workers
and also by constant decisions that sustain a relationship between the op-
pressor and the oppressed.
Much like the overarching message in “Aquí me quedo,” in the second
stanza of “Vientos del pueblo,” the trope of a divided Chile is highlighted
in the following lines: “Los que quieren dividir / a la madre de sus hijos
/ y quieren reconstruir / la cruz que arrastrara Cristo” [Those who want
to separate / a mother from her children / and want to rebuild / the cross
that Christ carried] (Víctor Jara, Manifiesto). Once again, this stanza pres-
ents a clear division between those in power and the poor. The powerful
want to divide the poor and continue ensuring that they have a cross to
bear. It is in this vein that those in power want to continue endorsing a
particular version of history. The song continues: “Quieren ocultar la in-
famia / que legaron desde siglos / pero el color de asesinos / no borrarán
de su cara” [They want to cover up their infamy / left as legacy of centu-
ries, / but the color of murderers / will not be wiped off your face] (Víc-
tor Jara, Manifiesto). As with the previous two stanzas, the song contrasts
the powerful versus those who have been silenced, punished, marginal-
ized, and abused for centuries. While the actors may have changed, the
lopsided relationships of power have not. The ones who murdered and
oppressed centuries ago are the ancestors of those who continue the same
mechanisms of infamy and oppression today. In this sense, we see a clear
example of the coloniality of power, particularly in relation to the conti-
nuity of the methods of oppression that sustain uneven distribution of
and access to power.
The fourth stanza of the song continues with the same invective against
those who have kept the people in poverty while slowly killing them. The
stanza also suggests a feeling of being fed up with the course of history
and wanting to change it: “Ya fueron miles y miles / los que entregaron su
sangre / y en caudales generosos / multiplicaron los panes” [Thousands
and thousands were those / who gave up their blood / and in generous
streams / multiplied bread] (Víctor Jara, Manifiesto). While there have
been countless victims of oppression and abuses of power, this stanza
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 121

exhibits a sense of hope and frustration. On the one hand, the count-
less deaths of people and their blood have served to continue feeding the
rich. On other hand, it is precisely the number of deaths and amount of
bloodshed that provide hope and enable those who are fed up to multiply
their efforts to put an end to oppression. The imagery of the blood and
the multiplying of bread have obvious correlations with religious motifs,
but they are present here to support the case of the workers.
The tone of the song shifts in the fifth stanza when the singer professes
his desire to live and struggle alongside his brethren. Jara sings the fol-
lowing verses: “Ahora quiero vivir / junto a mi hijo y mi hermano / la pri-
mavera que todos / vamos construyendo a diario” [Now I want to live /
alongside my son and my brother / the springtime that we are / building
daily] (Víctor Jara, Manifiesto). Whereas the singer is conscious of how
things used to be, his lyrics affirm that there is a new era in bloom. The
metaphor of springtime suggests the birth of a new social order, though it
is workers and the poor who are working on bringing about a new future.
By stressing that the singer wants to live and share a collectively built time
of prosperity and change with his family, there is a sense of pride in the
effort of building a space and time of transformation on a daily basis. It
is not as if the work of changing the social order is ever finished. Quite
the contrary—the singer is quite aware that changing people’s mindset
while challenging the mechanisms of oppression will not take place over-
night. Moreover, the labor of transformation and building a new society is
equated with any type of manual labor, which requires that workers put in
the time and effort to complete an ongoing job.
From wanting to be an active participant in the new future of Chile,
the singer becomes defiant in the sixth stanza, when he sings: “No me
asusta la amenaza, / patrones de la miseria, / la estrella de la esperanza /
continuará siendo nuestra” [I’m not afraid of the threat, / chiefs of misery,
/ the star of hope / will continue being ours] (Víctor Jara, Manifiesto).
The singer is aware that not everyone will support these changes in so-
ciety. The people in power, who are labeled chiefs of misery, will pose a
constant threat to the “star of hope” or the “springtime” the people are
building. Nonetheless, the possibility of a new future and the hope of be-
ing able to enjoy it cannot be taken away from workers.
In the seventh stanza, we arrive at the title of the song, which also acts
as a type of chorus. Víctor Jara sings: “Vientos del pueblo me llaman, /
122 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

vientos del pueblo me llevan, / me esparcen el corazón / y me aventan la

garganta” [The winds of the people beckon me, / the winds of the people
carry me off, / these scatter my heart / and fill up my throat] (Víctor Jara,
Manifiesto). The singer uses the metaphor of the winds to indicate a type
of energy that is unstable and cannot be contained. In this way, because
the winds are associated with workers, peasants, and citizens working to-
ward social change, they also serve to inspire the singer. It should also be
noted that the singer positions himself as an agent who obeys the exter-
nal forces, which are symbolized by the winds. Since the “winds” operate
as the wishes and desires of the people, they also call upon him to be-
come a voice that sings on behalf of the people. In a similar way, the song
concludes with an affirmation of the role that the singer-songwriter must
play. “Así cantará el poeta / mientras el alma me suene / por los caminos
del pueblo / desde ahora y para siempre” [This is how the poet will sing /
while a soul may echo me / through the paths of the people / from now
until forever] (Víctor Jara, Manifiesto). The singer acknowledges his role
as a poet of the people and that his craft will live on as long as it is true to
the needs of the people. By concluding the song in this way, Jara presents
other singers with a challenge by setting an example of the creative and
ethical duty that the singer-songwriter must fulfill henceforth. It is in this
challenge of denouncing disenfranchisement and a wide set of mecha-
nisms articulated under the concept of coloniality that I detect decolonial
gestures in Jara’s work, as he draws attention to the need to question and
undo long-standing forms of social and economic oppression.
The song that gives the name to Víctor Jara’s posthumous collection
indeed serves as a manifesto on political songwriting, but also encapsu-
lates many of Jara’s own political principles, which carried over into his
craft. The song in itself is one long stanza. It does not have a chorus and,
as such, it does not conform to a traditional song format. Jara sings the
following in the opening verses of “Manifiesto”: “Yo no canto por cantar /
ni por tener buena voz. / Canto porque la guitarra / tiene sentido y razón”
[I don’t sing just to sing / or because I have a good voice. / I sing because
the guitar / makes sense and has reason] (Víctor Jara, Manifiesto). For
Jara, it is not necessary for the singer to have a good voice or merely to
sing for the sake of singing. In other words, the singer must have a more
profound ethical reason to turn to singing. In the case of Jara, however, it
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 123

is not his voice or a desire to sing that drive him to seek this medium of
communication. Instead, it is the guitar, which has become personified,
that drives Jara to sing. The guitar becomes an instrument that is foun-
dational to the singer-songwriter’s craft, as it is what gives meaning and
common sense to any lyrical composition or musical creation.
As the song progresses, the image of the guitar continues to be likened
to images of the earth and the freedom of a dove, and it even replaces the
function of images of religious items such as holy water. It is in this con-
text that Jara situates his own artwork within a musical movement that
Violeta Parra began.
Aquí se encajó mi canto,
como dijera Violeta.
Guitarra trabajadora
con olor a primavera.
Que no es guitarra de ricos
ni cosa que se parezca. . . .
Que el canto tiene sentido
cuando palpita en las venas
del que morirá cantando
las verdades verdaderas
no las lisonjas fugaces
ni las famas extranjeras.
(Víctor Jara, Manifiesto)

[My singing fits here,

like Violeta once said.
Laboring guitar
with a smell of spring.
It’s not a guitar for the rich
or anything of the sort. . . .
Singing makes sense
when it beats in the veins
of him who will die singing
the truthful truths
and not ephemeral praises
or about foreign fame.]
124 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

By invoking the figure of Violeta Parra, Jara asserts how his music fits
within a specific tradition, namely nueva canción, and within a national
genealogy of socially committed musicians aiming to make music about
social justice by introducing critiques of what we now call the coloniality
of power. Much like in “Vientos del pueblo,” in this song, Jara associates
singing and the guitar with the labor of workers. It can also be interpreted
as an association with the working class in Chile, especially if we take into
account Jara’s claim that the guitar is not an instrument that the rich use.
In fact, these verses serve as a commentary on how radio stations con-
trolled the type of music that received airplay in Chile, but also on how
there were a number of singers who wrote “neo-folk” songs whose lyrics
were devoid of any political or social commentary, or of a concrete re-
lationship with pressing issues impoverished communities faced. While
apolitical neo-folk music served the interests of the elite, in “Manifiesto,”
Jara makes evident that the singer must be fully committed to his craft
and the content of his lyrics, regardless of the consequences. In retro-
spect, Jara’s words were almost prophetic in the sense that he died defend-
ing his ideals, and his imprisonment and torture came about because of
his repeated investment in critiquing political power, instead of remaining
silent and not denouncing coloniality.
Jara’s work toward fostering social justice in Chile through his music is
illustrated in most of his songs, though it is most succinctly presented in
“Manifiesto.” The final verses of the song reaffirm Jara’s firm belief in the
importance of the type of music he was creating:

Ahí donde llega todo

y donde todo comienza:
canto que ha sido valiente
siempre será canción nueva.
Siempre será canción nueva.
Siempre sera canción nueva.
(Víctor Jara, Manifiesto)

[It all goes there

and there it all begins:
singing that has been brave
will always be a new song.
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 125

Will always be a new song.

Will always be a new song.]
The beginning and end of nueva canción, as a song-making practice and
a style of social commentary through music, are rooted in the singer’s
ability to be brave, to be honest with himself and his intended audience,
and in the content of his lyrics. This is quite important for an undoing of
the coloniality of sounds, because lyric content needs to be honest and
believable to the ears of the intended audiences, namely those who have
been disenfranchised—the wretched, to use Fanon’s words. Furthermore,
and to borrow Edgar Ricardo Lambuley Alférez’s term, what we end up
hearing are other sonorities (sonoridades otras) as a mode of resistance,
of speaking back to power through lyrics and sounds aimed at empower-
ing the historically disempowered (263–278). Through the simplicity of
guitar accompaniment, resistance emerges from within lyrics that employ
colloquial speech, solely because of an awareness of the intended audi-
ence and that the message of what I refer to here as decoloniality must
carry through in a clear and direct manner. In relation to the concluding
verses of “Manifiesto,” as long as the singer firmly believes in and defends
his compositions, a new song will come about. By repeating the last verse
three times, Jara suggests that nueva canción is not merely a movement
that will disappear or that will be censored by those in power. Quite the
contrary, as long as there are brave and honest singers, there will be new
songs, constantly redefining themselves according to their social and po-
litical contexts. The singer and the song-making practices will adapt to the
situation, as was the case with many of the nueva canción artists who had
to go into exile and needed to expand upon their repertoire by incorpo-
rating different instruments and musical traditions from Latin America.
More importantly, Jara’s last verses in “Manifiesto” are hopeful about
nueva canción’s future by ascribing to the artist the possibility of exploring
new means of lyrical and musical expression.

Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of the Silent Majority

If Violeta Parra is considered a foundational figure in the Chilean nueva

canción movement, Mercedes Sosa can be placed in the same category as
Parra, particularly given Sosa’s continuous dissemination of Argentine
126 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

folk music. Sosa’s role in what also became known as the nuevo cancionero
was pivotal in bringing together cultural and musical traditions from vari-
ous places in Latin America, while she also did covers of other artists in
the Latin American movement such Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, and Daniel
Viglietti. Particularly on her early albums, Sosa followed in the footsteps
of Violeta Parra by seeking to recover Argentine folk traditions and bring-
ing them up-to-date for audiences in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dur-
ing the early period of her musical career, Sosa was also building upon the
groundwork that Atahualpa Yupanqui had laid in bringing folk music to
the forefront during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Among the numerous productions in Mercedes Sosa’s early career, and
keeping in mind the period studied here, the following albums illustrate
Sosa’s prolific presence within the nueva canción movement: Canciones
con fundamento (1965), Romance de la muerte de Juan Lavalle (1965), Yo no
canto por cantar (1966), Hermano (1966), Para cantarle a mi gente (1967),
Zamba para no morir (1968), Sabor a Mercedes Sosa (1968), Mujeres argen-
tinas (1969), El grito de la tierra (1970), and Navidad con Mercedes Sosa
(1970). In 1971, Sosa recorded eleven of Violeta Parra’s songs in Homenaje
a Violeta Parra. Some of the songs included on this album are “Volver
a los 17,” “Los pueblos americanos,” “La carta” (with Quilipayún), and
“Gracias a la vida.” In fact, for many listeners, it is Mercedes Sosa’s version
of “Gracias a la vida” that has made the song into an anthem across Latin
America that celebrates peace and life. It should be noted, however, that
Sosa had already recorded a version of this song for her album Zamba
para no morir (1968). In Hasta la Victoria (1972), Mercedes Sosa also did a
cover of Víctor Jara’s “Plegaria de un labrador.” Following this production,
Sosa recorded Cantata sudamericana (1972), Mercedes Sosa (1973), Traigo
un pueblo en mi voz (1973), and A que florezca mi pueblo (1975).10 Mercedes
Sosa continued performing and recording on a yearly basis almost right
up until her death in 2009.
One of the main differences between Mercedes Sosa and the other art-
ists in this chapter is that Sosa was not a singer-songwriter. Instead, she
performed songs coming from a variety of folk traditions, which ranged
from the Argentine zamba and the chacarera to the Peruvian vals. Other
songs were composed for her or were compositions by other members of
the nueva canción movement.
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 127

When attempting to describe what Mercedes Sosa means to Latin

Americans, one commentator has characterized her as a motherly figure
who was able to mediate between Anglo-European cultural influences
and indigenous traditions in Argentina, while also advocating for social
justice (Bernstein 176). Mercedes Sosa has also been called the voice of
Latin America, though she often shied away from such epithets. When
asked how she felt about such a label, she once responded:
It’s impossible to be the voice of a continent. . . . Just think about
it: from Argentina to Venezuela is six hours by plane. It is an easy
thing for reporters to say, but I know perfectly well it is not a real-
ity. I have a great deal of feeling for my continent, great respect and
sadness that some things still have not improved. I have sung for Ni-
caragua, for El Salvador; I sing in Costa Rica for the students and
for the people, and they know that I am an artist who feels for every
place in Latin America. But to be the representative of the continent
is too difficult. (Wald 101)
While this response came at a later point in her career, it still enables an
understanding of the magnitude of her presence well beyond her native
Argentina. In fact, in Sosa’s early music, we begin to see clear examples of
how she positions herself as a cultural figure who transcends borders and
cultural divides.
As a concept album, Cantata sudamericana (1972) is comprised of
songs that pay homage to several regions of South America. The opening
song, “Es sudamérica mi voz” [“South America Is My Voice”], makes use
of a variety of instruments, which include the cuatro, requinto, charango,
maracas, and guitars, among other instruments reminiscent of Bolivia,
Venezuela, and Paraguay. In the opening stanza, Sosa affirms her pride in
being born a woman in the Americas, though she also underscores her
indigenous and Spanish roots when she sings: “Americana soy/ y en esta
tierra yo crecí. / Vibran en mí / milenios indios / y centurias de español”
[I’m an American woman / and I was born in this land. / Indigenous mil-
lennia / and Spanish centuries / vibrate within me] (Sosa, Cantata su-
damericana). One can read these lyrics as biographical, particularly given
Sosa’s indigenous roots. In the opening verses, a hierarchy is created in
which the presence of indigenous cultures is more profound and deeply
128 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

rooted than the Spanish. The contrast is made evident when the weight of
indigenous culture is quantified in millennia, whereas as the presence of
Spain has only been felt in the Americas for a few centuries. In the same
opening stanza, Sosa continues: “Mestizo corazón / que late en su exten-
sión / hambriento de justicia, paz y libertad” [A mestizo heart / beats
to its fullest, / hungry for justice, peace, and liberty] (Sosa, Cantata su-
damericana). These verses are a continuation of the imagery that presents
the singer as having mixed ancestry. In this case, however, the mestizo
heart can also be read as a metonym that stands for South America as a re-
gion. The word “extensión” in the Spanish lyrics evokes an image of South
America’s geography. Whether the mestizo heart is a reference to Sosa or
to South America at large, said symbol stands for the justice, peace, and
liberty that the singer is seeking.
The title of the song appears in the chorus, where the singer’s voice
is not personal, nor speaks on behalf of another. Instead, the chorus ad-
vances the idea that South America in its entirety is what informs and in-
spires Sosa’s singing. Moreover, Sosa describes South America as a “foun-
dational country” in its full geographical extent, from north to south and
from coast to coast. In the concluding verses and the chorus, the song
personifies South America as an aching entity whose pain has seeped
into the very core of the singer. It is in this context that, by the last stanza,
the singer beckons her listeners to struggle for another emancipation, a
more complete undoing of the vestiges of coloniality. This time, however,
said emancipation must be a lasting one that will truly free and enable all
South Americans (and Latin Americans) to rejoice in their newfound and
definitive freedom.
As Sosa sings for the need to strive toward a definite and profound
emancipation from South America’s long history of suffering, injustices,
social inequalities, and armed conflicts within and among its nations,
this song is inevitably linked to decolonial aesthetics, particularly as the
song acknowledges a legacy of colonial practices that have continued
beyond formal political independence. In this song, music and singing
become tools to envision an undoing of coloniality by way of decolonial
sounds. Put differently, the song employs traditional instruments and
musical styles that are linked to lyrics calling for a new beginning, one
that must be imagined as a possibility for South Americans to see them-
selves as brothers rather than enemies. It is for this reason that Cantata
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 129

sudamericana has songs that employ elements of bossa nova, as well as

Caribbean and Andean rhythms. The album pays homage to South Amer-
ica’s and Latin America’s rich cultural traditions, while seeking to employ
musical rhythms one would associate with specific parts of Latin America
as a way to break down cultural barriers.
In this vein, the last song of Cantata sudamericana highlights the ur-
gency of the decolonial project on a regional scale. “Alcen la bandera” be-
gins with the following verses: “Que tu tiempo se acerca, / Sudamérica
mía, / con fronteras de flores / y fusiles de mentira” [Your time is near, /
South America of mine, / with borders made of flowers / and your make-
believe rifles] (Sosa, Cantata sudamericana). The singer envisions that
South America’s time for undoing coloniality—in this case, by rework-
ing and undoing the coloniality of music—is fast approaching. For that to
happen, however, borders must be replaced with flowers and guns ought
to become mere figments of the imagination. In other words, political and
geographical borders and armies will become obsolete in what the singer
envisions will be a unified South America. This utopian project, of course,
is one that can be traced back to Simón Bolívar’s early project of unifying
Latin America. A renewed interest in seeking to coalesce Latin American
nations is one that must be understood in relation to 1972, when the al-
bum appeared, and how the impetus of the Cuban Revolution was wan-
ing and dictatorships were budding across the region. Thus, in what I
am calling decolonial sounds, the idea is that a challenge to politics can
emerge from within an undoing of Western musical aesthetics by affirm-
ing the need to reclaim musical traditions and underscoring the urgency
of retrieving a common identity rather than emphasizing differences. In
light of the song, divisions according to identity politics based on nation-
alism have been traditionally been used to keep Latin Americans at war
with each other and under the control of the political regime in power at
any given time. The song seeks to make evident this history of manipula-
tion and oppression through politics.
The song continues presenting images that one can associate with a
new beginning. For instance, South America is personified as though it
is awakening from slumber and nightmares. For the nightmares to dis-
appear, the chant of the people, a collective voice, must become South
America’s new reality. South America continues to be likened to a dam-
sel who has been terrorized, whose beauty and innate happiness have
130 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

been stripped away beyond recognition. At this point in the song, Sosa
turns her attention to the following: “Si la muerte me lleva, / no ha de
ser para siempre. / Yo revivo en mis coplas / para ustedes, para ustedes”
[If death takes me, / it won’t be forever. / I come alive in my coplas / for
all of you, for all of you] (Sosa, Cantata Sudamericana). Sosa recognizes
the danger in singing about freedom and inciting South Americans to
dream of emancipation by accepting the possibility that singing may lead
to the singer’s own demise. In the event of death, however, Sosa will con-
tinue living through her lyrics and her singing for the benefit of all South
Americans.
The final message of the song is that liberation is within reach and that
it is time to wave the flag of freedom. Moreover, the song places an em-
phasis on the role that the “guitarras militantes” [militant guitars] have
played in creating an atmosphere of hope in which justice, freedom, and
happiness can be fully realized. By invoking the image of the guitars,
Sosa recognizes the importance of nueva canción artists in voicing social
inequalities and as agents of social change. As most nueva canción artists
made use of the guitar to sing about the injustices they witnessed, the gui-
tar became a symbol of political resistance and activism. In the case of
Sosa, however, when she performed on stage, she used a drum instead,
unlike most of her contemporaries. Despite this difference, one can argue
that in Sosa’s case, it was her voice and her way of singing political lyrics
that served as her principal instrument of militancy. It was through her
voice, her primary and most essential denunciatory instrument, that she
became known as the “voice of the silent majority” (Schnabel 132).

Silvio Rodríguez and Nueva Trova

Whereas Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, and Mercedes Sosa were indebted
to folk music traditions and instruments native to various parts of Latin
America, Silvio Rodríguez was indebted to a style of music known as old
trova, whose origins lay in the turn of the twentieth century and which
was foundational for later Cuban styles such as the bolero and guaracha.
Another major difference between Silvio Rodríguez and the other artists
studied in this chapter was their appearance, particularly their choices in
clothing and what they came to symbolize. For Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara,
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 131

and Mercedes Sosa, dressing like the audience to which they were sing-
ing, and paying homage to the folk elements from which they drew their
musical inspirations, became of prime importance. Thus, often, these art-
ists performed wearing ponchos and other signature peasant garments as
a way to create a direct association with popular audiences. Conversely,
Silvio Rodríguez presented himself in the fashions of the 1960s and 1970s.
Rodríguez was influenced musically by figures as diverse as Bob Dylan
and The Beatles, as well as Violeta Parra and Atahualpa Yupanqui. These
foreign influences placed Silvio Rodríguez at odds with the ideological
line of Castro’s government, in which rock music was deemed subversive
and too closely aligned with the perceived decadence and opulence of im-
perialist and capitalist countries such as the United States and England
(Moore 150–151; Díaz Pérez 105).
Attempting to situate Silvio Rodríguez within nueva trova and nueva
canción might also prove to be tricky. Robin D. Moore has characterized
nueva trova as oppositional and contestatory in its aesthetic scope (Moore
135). One critic has suggested, however, that in choosing the name nueva
trova, young Cuban musicians sought to distinguish themselves from the
nueva canción movement taking place in the rest of Latin America, pre-
cisely because the latter movement was seen as one of opposition and
political resistance (Benmayor 11–44). In the case of Cuba, because a cul-
tural and political revolution was well under way, no such oppositional
and denunciatory stance from artists was needed (or allowed). This is
not to say that nueva trova artists did not see points of connection with
the song-making practices of their contemporaries in the rest of Latin
America; indeed, there was a convention in Havana in 1967, the First
Latin American Protest Song convention, devoted to the genre, which
was meant as a common point between nueva canción and nueva trova.
It should be noted, however, that many of the artists who participated in
that meeting and who were part of both movements openly shied away
from embracing the term “protest song” to describe the type of art they
were making. Nonetheless, the 1967 convention was essential in establish-
ing a point of dialogue among the various artists and proponents within
both movements.
In addition, nueva trova is self-reflexive about its desire for continuity
in relation to two distinct sources of inspiration, namely nueva canción
132 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

as a Pan-Latin American artistic movement, and old Cuban trova. These

two influences converge into a musical style that relies primarily on voice,
with guitar as accompaniment. It is the simplicity of its performance and
the poetic and suggestive complexity of its lyrics that make nueva trova
distinct from the larger nueva canción movement. In its early form, this
style of music became known as protest music, and only in the early
1970s did nueva trova gain currency as a term that defined Cuba’s particu-
lar stance on socially and politically oriented music. It should be noted,
however, that as with other nueva canción artists, Silvio Rodríguez and his
contemporaries also wrote about everyday topics and concerns, particu-
larly love songs with a blend of political or social messages (Benmayor
11–44; Delgado Linares).
For the development of the Cuban nueva trova, the support of official
state institutions was essential. In fact, it was the Casa de las Américas
that served as the first meeting space for many of the nueva trova artists.
Silvio Rodríguez became a central figure within the nascent movement,
to the point where he was one of three singers chosen to represent Cuba
at the 1967 Havana event dedicated to the protest song genre. The other
two chosen singers, Pablo Milanés and Noel Nicola, became, along with
Rodríguez, part of the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora, a group of
twelve musicians, under the direction of Leo Brouwer, whose purpose
was to create scores for the productions of the Instituto Cubano del Arte
e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC, the Cuban Institute of Cinemat-
ographic Art and Industry) (Benmayor 11–44; Delgado Linares; Díaz
Pérez).
A point at which artistic movements and governments coincided was
when Castro became closer to Allende’s government in Chile. As a re-
sult of this, nueva trova artists gained recognition in Chile, where politi-
cally charged and socially committed songs had gained wide acceptance
(Moore 154). This might help explain why there was a truly hemispheric
spirit of solidarity against Pinochet when he rose to power. Immediate
responses to this dictatorship from the arts came from Humberto Solás
in his film Cantata de Chile and Silvio Rodríguez himself with his song
“Santiago de Chile.” Turning our attention to Rodríguez’s Días y flores
(1975), which was the first major nueva trova album, one can see a range
of themes.11 Aside from the ideological connection between Castro and
Allende, one can see Silvio’s homage to Chile for its cultural contribution
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 133

and for the possibility of social change it represented during Allende’s

government.
The song “Santiago de Chile” is an anthem that is at once melancholic
while also describing the singer’s unwillingness to succumb to despair de-
spite the pervasive sense of loss and rapid transformation of how life used
to be. The first stanza opens with the singer’s strong emotional response
to a woman: “Allí amé una mujer terrible / llorando por el humo siempre
eterno / de aquella ciudad acorralada/ por símbolos de invierno” [There
I loved a terrible woman / crying from the eternal fumes / of that city
cornered by winter’s symbols] (Rodríguez, Días y Flores). Here we get a
description of the landscape surrounding Chile as it stands at the foot-
hills of the Andes, but also the scene in the context of the winter season.
This accentuates the extreme emotions present in the song. The beloved
woman is described as “terrible” and as crying for a symbol of loss that
will not dissipate (eternal fumes). The second stanza continues with the
imagery and sensorial experiences of winter as the singer describes its
coldness, the fog, and rain found everywhere in the “calles del enigma”
(streets of enigma). A clue to figuring out why the streets of Santiago
may be enigmatic appears in the chorus: “Eso no está muerto / no me lo
mataron / ni con la distancia / ni con el gris soldado” [That is not dead /
they did not kill it from me / neither with distance / nor with the somber
soldier] (Rodríguez, Días y Flores). The chorus refers to those memories
described in the first two stanzas of the song. The memories of heartache,
loss, and winter in Santiago have not died in the singer’s voice. Quite the
opposite; they are still alive within him, which is why there is an emphasis
on making the action of killing those memories impossible. Those experi-
ences are so internalized in the singer that neither the distance of exile
nor the militarization that ensued with Pinochet’s rise to power can di-
minish their weight.
The song continues in a similar vein by reminiscing about the friends
left behind and simple things that once made the singer happy. By the
fourth stanza, we find a reference to the power of nueva canción: “Allí
nuestra canción se hizo pequeña / entre la multitud desesperada, / un
poderoso canto de la tierra / era quien más cantaba” [There our song be-
came small / in the middle of the desperate crowd, / the powerful sing-
ing of the land / was what sang the most] (Rodríguez, Días y Flores).
134 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

As the nueva canción movement belongs to the people, it is the collective

response (“multitud”) to a tragedy and social instability (desperation)
that dwarfs the significance of the song (“allí nuestra canción se hizo
pequeña”). The weight of nueva canción does not rest upon the individual,
but rather on a collectivity, which is what assigns the song its strength as it
refers to the symbol of the land as a source of labor, but also as a reference
to Chile and its population.
The song continues to reference themes of death, shadows, and ha-
tred, while underscoring the speaker’s inability to foresee the profound
changes that were to come. One might ask at this point why Silvio Ro-
dríguez would write a song as though he were a Chilean in exile. Part of
what makes the song so powerful is that the voice captures the conflictive
experiences and emotions of a person forced into political exile, while
having to come to terms with the ideas of a home and a country that are
still alive. Here we see a clear example of how a singer-songwriter is able
to transcend the social and political realities of his native country and ad-
dress international concerns affecting a “familial” population. This song
shares the spirit and message of unity and of the transcendence of politi-
cal borders, as described in Mercedes Sosa’s songs.
Another key song from Días y flores is one that Rodríguez wrote while
living on a fishing boat for several months. The song “Playa Girón” pays
homage to the ship on which the song was written, while also serving as
a reference to the site where the Bay of Pigs conflict took place. The com-
position of the song is of particular significance to the project at hand,
since Rodríguez seeks to engage in dialogue with fellow poets, musicians,
and historians in a collective reconfiguration of aesthetic categories and
affective responses to politicized artworks. The song is divided into three
distinct parts. In the first part, Rodríguez asks fellow poets for advice
on adjectives, which is to say, the precise wording with which to write a
poem about the boat in which the song is being written. He is concerned
that the poem not come off as sentimental, as avant-garde, or as political
propaganda. Moreover, the song must be in tune with the latest develop-
ments in poetry, which is to say it must turn to colloquial and conversa-
tional expressions, as I have argued in chapter 2. Ultimately, Rodríguez
is unsure of whether or not he ought to use direct and simple language
in his song. Needless to say, the concerns expressed in the first part of
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 135

the song are in tune with the poetic projects of the poets studied in the
second chapter, as these poets also sought to steer away from the entrap-
ment of sentimentalism, overtly political poetry devoid of artistic merit,
or hermetic avant-garde poetry. It should be emphasized here that “Playa
Girón” is one of Silvio Rodríguez’s most accessible and direct songs.
There are no ornate words or metaphors open to multiple interpretations.
The second part of “Playa Girón” turns to musicians. Here Rodríguez
asks for their advice on the type of harmonies and polytonalities that
he should use to make a song about the men on board the ship. It is as
though he is seeking the precise musical language to do justice to the sail-
ors on board the ship and tell their life stories. By the third stanza, Rodrí-
guez turns his attention to the role of historians. As an artist, he shares the
commitment of historians to be impartial and be at the service of truth.
Ultimately, the singer comes to the realization that it is up to the sailors
themselves to write their own stories. Some important characteristics
in all three parts of the song are that Rodríguez invokes the assistance
of his comrade poets, musicians, and historians. In doing so, the singer
positions himself in all three fields. As a poet, Rodríguez must do justice
to what he tries to describe through his word choices. As a musician, he
must find the right music to complement his poetic craft. Moreover, in
each song, he writes a piece of history in honor of truth and social justice.
It is because of these three functions of his craft that in all three parts of
the song, Silvio Rodríguez says “me urge” [it’s urgent]. These three as-
pects of his art as a singer-musician-historian carry a sense of urgency and
a profound sense of ethical duty to craft the best song possible.
In “Pequeña serenata diurna” [“Little Diurnal Serenade”], Rodríguez
makes a statement against repeated international allegations that the Cu-
ban Revolution has infringed upon the rights of its citizens. The open-
ing verses of the song thus are: “Vivo en un país libre / cual solamente
puede ser libre / en esta tierra, en este instante / y soy feliz porque soy
gigante” [I live in a free country, / which can only be free / on this land, at
this moment, / and I am happy because I am colossal] (Rodríguez, Días y
Flores). When Silvio asserts that he lives in a free country, he implies that
democratic values are still intact in Cuba. At that moment, because free-
dom and revolution are in place, he is the happiest he has been. It is that
immense feeling of happiness that makes him feel “colossal.” Silvio adds
136 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

that he has a woman he loves and who loves him back without asking for
much in return. As the song continues, and as if freedom and love were
not enough, Rodríguez sings:

Y si esto fuera poco,

tengo mis cantos
que poco a poco
muelo y rehago
habitando el tiempo,
como le cuadra
a un hombre despierto.
soy feliz,
soy un hombre feliz,
y quiero que me perdonen
por este día
los muertos de mi felicidad.
(Silvio Rodríguez, Días y Flores)

[And if this weren’t enough,

I have my singing,
which I gradually
mill and restore,
inhabiting time,
such as it fits a lively man.
And I would like to be forgiven,
in this day,
by the dead of my happiness.]

Asking for more than happiness and love is inconceivable, though Rodrí-
guez has plenty more for which to be thankful. His voice and his sing-
ing are yet other gifts that transcend the passing of time. With Rodrí-
guez’s singing, he has control over his voice, which is something he can
adapt (“mill and restore”) according to the circumstances. His absolute
joy, however, is not something he takes for granted, as he can only enjoy
it now because of those who died in the early days of the revolution to
transform Cuban society. While “Pequeña serenata diurna” is a celebra-
tory song, it is also a song of mourning and remembrance of those Cu-
bans who cannot enjoy the freedom for which they fought. The last verse
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 137

suggests a sense of eternal indebtedness to the martyrs of the revolution.

In reference to this song, Chilean nueva canción artist and critic Patricio
Manns notes, “When Silvio Rodríguez makes millions of people tremble
with one line (note: one single line) in which he makes the beautiful dec-
laration: ‘I live in a free country . . . ’ in three seconds he washes away
thirty years of infamy and calumnies leveled against his country by thou-
sands of mercenaries of the pen, at a cost of millions of dollars” (Manns
194).
In the same way that Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, and Mercedes Sosa
were proud of their roots and were committed to effecting social changes
in their respective contexts, Silvio Rodríguez is proud of forming part of
revolutionary Cuba, to the point where today he is a member of Cuba’s
national assembly. Rodríguez’s connections to nueva canción are also still
prevalent. In his recent CD, entitled Segunda cita (2010), he has a song
entitled “Carta a Violeta Parra” (“Letter to Violeta Parra”) in which he up-
dates her on what has taken place in Latin America since her death. As the
only one of the four singers discussed here who is still alive today, Silvio
Rodríguez remains a salient voice of a movement that continues to have
an impact among younger contemporary listeners in Latin America.
In light of this brief discussion of lyrics and music, it is important to
talk about their connection to how we sense sound and its decolonial
potential. In her book Sensing Sound, Nina Sun Eidsheim contends that
sound and music are not only about aurality, but also about a “tactile,
spatial, physical, material, and vibrational” set of sensations or multisen-
sorial phenomena that are “at the core of all music” (8). Put differently,
Eidsheim argues that when thinking about music and how to discuss it,
we tend to privilege one of the senses (hearing), while neglecting a dis-
cussion of how we might have a multisensorial experience relative to mu-
sic. I agree with this claim, since immersive experience shapes the field of
musicology and sound studies. For me, what is important is to come up
with a way of understanding how we sense the past in the present through
music that can be categorized as popular as opposed to classical or oper-
atic, or as folkloric as opposed to other popular genres prevalent in the
1960s across Latin America. Sensing nueva canción, and the archives of de-
colonial sounds, including lyrics, a recovery of popular and indigenous in-
struments, melodies, and musical styles emerging from popular and rural
spaces represents a set of challenges, because when listening to an extant
138 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

LP or a CD, we often experience aurality of both the musical components,

or what Eidsheim calls “figures of sound” (pitch, timbre, tonality, etc.),
and lyrical composition. In this chapter, I have privileged a discussion of
lyrical composition given its centrality as politicized (decolonial) lyrics
during the 1960s within the longue durée of musical styles in the Ameri-
cas. Of particular interest are the ways in which the politicized lyricism of
nueva canción intersects with a recovery of traditional and folkloric musi-
cal forms such as the cueca or the zamba. In the decades preceding the rise
of nueva canción, there was not such a widespread and overt politicization
of lyrics in genres such as the bolores, rancheras, or the cha cha cha. The
overt politicization of lyrics in nueva canción is what helps it coincide with
the radical shift in poetry and film during the 1960s. If we are lucky today,
we may sense and experience archival footage of performances through
online platforms such as YouTube or as part of documentaries or biopics.
What remains in the archives of decolonial sounds, either in their original
form or in terms of song covers, are primarily lyrics.

Decolonial Sounds

Throughout this chapter, I have stressed the importance of music lyrics

to help reframe the importance of nueva canción within the specificity
of the political and historical contexts in which specific songs and art-
ists emerged. Likewise, at various points, I also argued about the efforts
these artists made in recovering specific musical traditions, reworking
them for modern sensibilities, and imbuing them with the political and
social urgency of reclaiming musical legacies that had been historically ex-
cluded from discussions of musical aesthetics. It is in this sense that Vio-
leta Parra’s continuous efforts in working with the cueca, the refalosa, the
mazurka, and other genres can be read and discussed as a way to engage
with a delinking of Western musical aesthetics from the Latin American
projects that emerged during the 1960s. In reclaiming musical traditions,
and putting them at the service of social commitment, artists such as Víc-
tor Jara, Mercedes Sosa, and Silvio Rodríguez sought to engage more
concretely in exploring the political dimensions of music-making at the
national and transnational levels. In this way, when I discuss song lyr-
ics, these must be understood as sounds in themselves and not strictly as
written language. Nueva canción, then, as a register of historically inflected
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 139

decolonial sounds, necessitates a renewed framework for the listener to

move beyond the instantiation of its lyrics or the seeming datedness of
its instrumentation. Instead, as decolonial sounds, the music of nueva
canción is both inscribed within its time and exceeds it through memory,
representation, and adaptations.12 In short, the lyrics set to music must be
imagined as active speech emerging from a particular moment of Latin
America’s cultural history that continues to have a deep resonance in our
times.
So, how might we understand the emergence of music from the per-
spective of musicology, rather than cultural theory? For literary and mu-
sic critic Lawrence Kramer, musicology serves the following function.
Musicology . . . simply picks up where music leaves off. It turns on
music the same kinds of attention that arise, at times, spontane-
ously, in making music. It does not add a process of interpretation
to the presence of music but joins a process of interpretation that
the music has made present. In doing so it acknowledges and aug-
ments the power of music to be not only something understood
but also a medium of understanding no less effective than the texts
that traditionally constitute “literature in the European and modern
sense” and the images that form the texts’ doubles and opposites.
(Kramer 288–89)
In making this claim about the relationship between musicology and
music, Kramer would seem to have in mind a specific approach to inter-
preting music and, by extension, a very concrete definition of what con-
stitutes music, from which there can be very little deviation. By invoking
terms such as “tradition,” “European,” and “modern,” Kramer seemingly
obviates other types of tradition that are also modern, even if they may
not be entirely European, though they are of European influence. One
need only mention the plethora of instruments, particularly the guitar as
a foundational tool for nueva canción, that are European by design. Yet,
what distinguishes the pan-Latin American movement described in this
chapter from the type of approach Kramer advocates is the conscious ef-
forts of Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, Mercedes Sosa, and Silvio Rodríguez to
serve as cultural and temporal bridges between folk traditions and mod-
ern musical sensibilities. If music is what enables the interpretive process,
as Kramer suggests, one cannot help but wonder if the same “power” he
140 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

ascribes to music would be applicable to popular music and songs with

political content. As Kramer makes a claim for music as something not
merely to be “understood,” but also as an object that leads to understand-
ing, it would also appear that he has a very specific register of the type of
texts (musical or literary) that might open up to interpretations and cre-
ate a repertoire of suggestive images.
Part of what is embedded in this approach to understanding and inter-
preting music is linked to the “loss of radical sensibility” with the intro-
duction of the ego cogito, which has traditionally privileged reason “over
the irrational body, sensibilities, affects, intuitions, and memories” (Val-
lega 199). Interpreting and sensing music from a decolonial perspective,
including lyrics and instrumentation, requires a radical shift in our under-
standing of what constitutes aesthetics or what aesthetics is for, and in
whose service it works. So doing, and thinking about the genealogy of
decolonial sounds discussed in this chapter, requires that we think about
the generation of nueva canción musicians not merely as responding to the
spirits and ideologies of the time, but as having made redolent contribu-
tions to a rethinking of how to sense and experience music that is collo-
quial, rooted in popular traditions, and critical of power, and that reclaims
the centrality of popular forms of knowledge, while positioning collective
sensibilities emerging from below at the center of aesthetic discussions.
To sense sounds from a decolonial perspectives requires a “learning to
unlearn and relearn,” which is to say that we must be willing to forego
long-standing categorizations of nueva canción as just nueva canción, and
begin thinking and sensing these musicians’ collective contributions to a
genealogy of decolonial sounds in their exposure and contestation of vari-
ous modalities of coloniality (Tlostanova and Mignolo 15).
As I have argued throughout this chapter, nueva canción was part of
a broader countercultural movement that took place in individual Latin
American countries, but expanded onto the region at large. As a counter-
cultural movement, it stood at odds with foreign influences and national
cultural elitism, while actively seeking to validate folk traditions, popu-
lar registers of lyricism, quotidian concerns, and engaging directly with
workers and peasants as an intended audience. After all, nueva canción was
fueled by a nationalist sentiment in which a rediscovery and revaloriza-
tion of indigenous and folk traditions were employed in response to im-
perialist and commercial influences coming from the United States and
 Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción · 141

Europe (Vila 1–17). Nueva canción has also been characterized as songs
having “an impact on the pueblo, who identified both with the message,
which portrayed them sympathetically, and the music, with its catchy
dance rhythms and simple melodies” (Bernstein 170). It is with an inten-
tional shift in the music-making practices that valorize the national over
the foreign, the traditional and folk over the modern, political and social
content over apolitical and commercial demands, and the crucial role of
the singer-songwriter as an agent of social change that decolonial aesthet-
ics becomes a useful interpretive tool. It is the artist who has to be in tune
with the tastes and fashions of his or her time. The artist has a choice ei-
ther to conform or challenge them. As Marshall Brown has put it, “Aes-
thetic value abolishes time; to be the latest and best is to stake a claim
that none hereafter may escape from your sway” (Brown 101). In the case
of nueva canción musicians, however, they did not seek to become merely
popular or just a fad. Instead, they sought to make a profound and lasting
impact by marking a before and after in the historiography of music in
Latin America and thus abolishing time, as Brown would suggest. More
importantly, the artists studied in this chapter actively sought to break the
artificial boundaries that separated high and popular music or values that
gave preference to the former over the latter.
 4
x
Decolonial Visuality and
New Latin American Cinema
As a continent, we had begun to recognize our own voice, our own image, and
though our response to this discovery was somewhat extreme, it was also a
necessary stage of our development.
Humberto Solás, in Burton and Alvear, “Interview with Humberto Solás” 32

In the concluding words to his coedited volume Empires of Vision (2014),

Martin Jay reminds us that integral to the multilayered forms of imperial-
ism are the uses of vision, visuality, and “the visual to achieve its ends. The
spectacle of imperialism is always a screen behind which a far less attrac-
tive process unfolds. Although resistance to that process also can draw on
visual practices, it too is never predominantly an affair of the eye or the
gaze” ( Jay 618). In making these remarks, Jay is aware that the visual was
only one of the ways in which European empires sought to control their
colonies and that any partial attempts at resisting “the spectacle of impe-
rialism” certainly subverted, reinvented, and contested the very aesthetics
of the visual that empires employed and introduced to control and sub-
ject the colonized. Any discussion of decolonial visual aesthetics, particu-
larly in relation to the language of cinema, must begin with an acknowl-
edgement that cinema and its various aesthetics emerged from the United
States and Europe and rapidly made their way to other parts of the globe,
including Latin America. Much of the early cinema in Latin America en-
gaged and closely mirrored both European and Hollywood sensibilities
and film aesthetics.1 It is in this sense that the epigraph to this chapter
emerges as Humberto Solás’s reflection on New Latin America Cinema
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 143

filmmakers’ efforts to shift and resist the “spectacle of imperialism,” to

borrow Martin Jay’s words. If the work these filmmakers produced was
“somewhat extreme,” and yet necessary for the undoing and challenging
of Western film aesthetics, as Solás admits in this 1978 interview with Juli-
anne Burton, it was because of the pressing necessity for new, if imperfect,
cinematic practices to contest the coloniality of vision and visuality.2 By
this I mean the Western/Eurocentric framing of visual practices and aes-
thetics, which had widespread repercussions elsewhere in the world. As
Nicholas Mirzoeff has succinctly put it, “The authority of coloniality has
consistently required visuality to supplement its deployment of force. Vi-
suality sutures authority to power and renders this association ‘natural’”
(Mirzoeff 6). It is precisely this “natural” association that links author-
ity and power by using visuality (or the right to see) that the New Latin
American Cinema filmmakers sought to undo, contest, and reconfigure
through a decolonial gesture characteristic of their aesthetic propositions
and films.
As a response to the co-opting of visuality to justify the use and abuse
of power through imperial designs, one may consider countervisuality as
a way to engage in a decolonial delinking and undoing of the historical
embedded and naturalized nexus connecting power to visuality. In this
sense, Mirzoeff argues that “Countervisuality is the assertion of the right
to look, challenging the law that sustains visuality’s authority in order to
justify its own sense of ‘right.’ The right to look refuses to allow authority
to suture its interpretation of the sensible to power, first as law and then
as the aesthetic” (Mirzoeff 25). To reframe countervisuality as the right
to look necessitates a reexamination of the articulations that subsume
sensing, the sensible, and the sensuous into structures of power, which
have been normativized and embedded in scientific, legal, and artistic dis-
courses. Inherent in Mirzoeff ’s argument is the need to redefine and re-
think the aesthetic from a decolonial perspective leading to countervisu-
ality. It is in this way that the aesthetic propositions emerging from New
Latin American Cinema can be considered an archive of countervisuality,
which needs to be reconsidered as such.
To revisit the work of this generation of filmmakers with a particular
eye to their respective visual aesthetic propositions, it becomes important
to turn to Michael Chanan’s seminal assessment of their work. In his in-
troduction to Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (1983),
144 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Chanan argues that the various cinematic articulations taking place in

Latin America during the period he studies comprised a heterogeneous
movement bearing the name of New Latin American Cinema. This move-
ment starts with Fernando Birri’s documentary film school in Santa Fe,
Argentina, in the late 1950s and continues to redefine its aesthetics with
Glauber Rocha and Brazilian cinema novo, as well as the emergence of
a prominent Cuban film industry. In places such as Chile and Bolivia,
among other countries, what we find are isolated cases of filmmakers
seeking to take on some of the creative challenges posited by the afore-
mentioned filmmakers and their cinematic manifestos (Chanan 2–8).
While the label for this movement certainly underscores the novelty of
aesthetic film propositions and shares with other art forms the emphasis
on a radical break with previous models and ways of making films, this
label also simultaneously downplays the transformative effects of the
various types of filmmaking of this period. The groundbreaking influence
of this period’s films is not merely their distinction as “new” cinematic
alternatives to previous efforts. Whereas the term New Latin Ameri-
can Cinema certainly encompasses a number of the alternative and po-
liticized approaches to and modes of filmmaking that began in the late
1950s and continued into the 1980s, this label is also useful in finding the
connections among the explicit cinematic visions, political projects, and
aesthetic propositions that Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Tomás
Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás, Glauber Rocha, Miguel Littín, Jorge
Sanjinés, and Raymundo Gleyzer, among others, articulated in their own
films and in their writings in relation to a reading of their projects as pro-
ducing decolonial visual aesthetics.
The conjoining moment that gave a certain degree of coherence to this
film movement was the 1967 film festival in Viña del Mar, Chile, in which
many of the aforementioned filmmakers came together to showcase their
work, start a collective dialogue, and share perspectives on their respec-
tive national film industries. As a result, a document was produced that
would lay the foundation for the formation in 1974 of the Committee of
Latin American Filmmakers. From this founding document, the use of
the term New Latin American Cinema became common among scholars
and filmmakers, who adopted the term as an umbrella under which vari-
ous modalities of filmmaking could come together. From a statement in
that document, one can discern the common agenda among filmmakers:
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 145

El auténtico nuevo cine latinoamericano solo ha sido, es y será el

que contribuya al desarrollo y fortalecimiento de nuestras culturas
nacionales, como instrumento de resistencia y lucha . . . y el que
aborda los problemas sociales y humanos del hombre latinoameri-
cano, situándolos en el contexto de la realidad económica y política
que lo condiciona, promoviendo la concientización para la transfor-
mación de nuestra historia. (Anonymous 545–546)

[The authentic New Latin American Cinema has been, is, and will
be that which contributes to the development and strengthening
of our national cultures, as instruments of resistance and strug-
gle . . . and one that engages with the social and human problems of
Latin Americans, situating them in the context of an economic and
political reality that conditions them, and promotes consciousness
toward the transformation of our history.]3

The founding document for the Committee of Latin American Filmmak-

ers makes a profound and explicit case for the use of the term “New Latin
American Cinema” in relation to political cinema linked to the grounding
of national cultures. Infused in the language of this document is a cer-
tain Fanonian spirit in which national culture serves as a mode and tool
of resistance against colonial enterprises, but must also be critical of its
own colonial legacies, which in today’s critical language we now call co-
loniality. In fact, Fanon’s thinking is present as early as the opening in-
tertitles of Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces, particularly in
the film’s first part dealing with “Neocolonialismo y violencia” [Neocolo-
nialism and Violence]. Within the first six minutes of images of violence,
we read quotations from the likes of Aimé Césaire, Fidel Castro, and
Che Guevara, among others. The film quotes Fanon: “El hombre coloni-
zado se libera en y por la violencia” [The colonized being becomes liber-
ated in and through violence] (05:38). The ideas quoted in this film, the
Fanonian spirit present in Solás’s interview serving as the epigraph to this
chapter, and the foundational document “Constitución del Comité de
Cineastas de América Latina: 1967–1985” all draw from Fanon’s Wretched
of the Earth.4
Given New Latin American Cinema’s original intended role as an in-
strument of resistance and struggle, I am also arguing for its interchange-
146 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

ability with the term third cinema, which comes from Fernando Solanas
and Octavio Getino’s manifesto, “Toward a Third Cinema.” In that mani-
festo, they argued for a third alternative or a third way of making films,
delinked from Hollywood models or European aesthetic influences. As
Solanas and Getino succinctly put it, “[t]hird cinema is, in our opinion,
the cinema that recognizes in that struggle the most gigantic, cultural, scien-
tific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of construct-
ing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point—in a
word, the decolonization of culture” (“Toward a Third Cinema” 18, original
emphasis). For Solanas and Getino, third cinema became a means to chal-
lenge and question the way art, history, politics, and national culture had
been articulated. The project of third cinema is one that acknowledges a
profound schism between two versions of culture: a “dominant” one and
an “inferior” one. As Chanan has argued, “The need for a third cinema
was a consequence of the conditions of neo-colonialism which had ruled
the evolution of cinema in Latin America” (3).5 For Solanas and Getino,
film served as an effective tool with which to contest and subvert previ-
ous hierarchical models of culture. In the following section, I will draw
an explicit connection between the New Latin American Cinema as a de-
colonizing cinematic endeavor and decolonial visual aesthetics as a theo-
retical tool to examine the ways in which filmmakers sought to challenge
dominant film aesthetics.

Decolonial Visual Aesthetics and Third Cinema

In The Future of the Image (2009), Jacques Rancière posits a differentia-

tion between the concepts of the image and the visual (2–3). For Ran-
cière, the image stands for or refers to external referents. As such, one
could argue that the image always lends itself to interpretation. The im-
age is suggestive and always concerned with the reality it seeks to repre-
sent or encapsulate within a frame. In contrast, for Rancière the visual is
self-referential. While the visual could also lend itself to interpretation, its
self-referentiality renders it apolitical and concerned with the field of aes-
thetics, particularly an aesthetics invested in the idea of pure pleasure and
entertainment derived from art. Moreover, Rancière complicates this ini-
tial distinction when he argues that “The image is never a simple reality.
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 147

Cinematic images are primarily operations, relations between the sayable

and the visible, ways of playing with the before and after, cause and effect”
(The Future of the Image 6). In other words, while the image may stand for
reality, it never represents it in a simplistic or one-dimensional manner. In
being represented through an image, particularly a cinematic image, real-
ity fragments itself into what remains outside the film and what is cap-
tured inside a frame. In this way, the cinematic image creates an ulterior
reality based on a set of codes and registers that communicate to the audi-
ence that the images they are seeing are neither purely real nor entirely
fictional.
While Rancière’s argument is helpful to a degree, his dismissiveness
of the term “visual” needs to be complicated. Whereas Rancière focuses
on isolated images, which is to say fragments of a whole work of art such
as a film (a discussion that appears toward the end of chapter 2 of this
book), the visual refers to our ability as audiences to grasp and look at a
work of art in its entirety. That is to say, as viewers of a film we can make
sense of a series of images and how they connect to one another because
we are engaging several of our senses. In a different work, Rancière ar-
gued that aesthetics is connected to the domain of the perceptible and to
politics (“The Rationality of Disagreement” 43–60). As such, by engag-
ing our senses, especially our sight and hearing, aesthetics is reinserted
into the equation. By arguing for the importance of the visual, however, I
am following Rancière’s articulation of aesthetics as a political activity by
design. Put differently, I am arguing for the need to articulate the “visual,”
which is to say the viewer’s ability to make sense of images, as a political
praxis.
In a different though related sense, I am making a claim for the need to
distinguish among different types of aesthetic practices. For one, in using
the term visual aesthetics, I am differentiating artworks seeking primar-
ily to affect and engage our sight from those artworks that engage sight
along with other senses and other modes of sensing needed to come close
to a decolonial aesthetic experience. The project at hand is not interested
in advancing the long-standing articulations of “aesthetic experience” as
a passive act or as one that delinks entertainment from political engage-
ment. It is at this juncture that decolonial visual aesthetics comes into play
as a category that specifically addresses and engages with artists whose
148 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

works have purposely challenged Eurocentric/Western articulations of

aesthetics. More importantly, decolonial visual aesthetics acknowledges
the existence of visual aesthetics embedded in the coloniality of power,
while challenging it by shifting cinematic techniques, cinematic codes, in-
tended audiences, and modes of representation.
At this point, it becomes necessary to specify how decolonial visual
aesthetics is related to or enables a reading of third cinema and New Latin
American Cinema. We should keep in mind that the concept of third cin-
ema came about during a time of anticolonial struggles for independence
in Latin America following World War II. It is in within that context and
anticolonial/Fanonian “spirit” that Solanas and Getino saw Latin Amer-
ica as existing in a neocolonial stage of its history. Despite seeming to have
formal political autonomy, the political control in Latin American nation-
states was in the hands of a select few, while national economies were
heavily dependent upon foreign capital. This also helps to explain why the
dominant discourse in films such as The Hour of the Furnaces is closely in
line with dependency theory and its articulation of the center-periphery
dyad. Although Solanas and Getino did not use these terms, what they
called a neocolonial phase in Latin America was none other than colo-
niality, which is to say a continuum of colonial modalities of oppression
and control that validate those who can be in power and define those can-
not have access to power. As argued throughout this book and developed
more fully in the next chapter, it is under coloniality that knowledge is
also codified. Only a specific line of knowledge (Eurocentric/Western)
has been assumed as universal and valid, while negating the possibility
of other forms of knowledge that deviate from this model.6 Making an
argument for the need to rethink aesthetics, Solanas and Getino write:
“Ideas such as ‘Beauty in itself is revolutionary’ and ‘All new cinema is
revolutionary’ are idealistic aspirations that do not touch the neocolonial
condition, since they continue to conceive of cinema, art, and beauty as
universal abstractions and not as an integral part of the national process
of decolonization” (“Toward a Third Cinema” 19). Whereas in today’s
critical language the concept of the nation is less-favored, particularly in
relation to categories that look at the transnational or the global, Solanas
and Getino’s remarks are still relevant in an effort to look at aesthetics and
the arts anew from a decolonial perspective. This perspective will, in turn,
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 149

have an impact at the individual, communal, national, and global levels.

Rather than falling into “idealistic aspirations” or “universal abstractions,”
I am arguing here instead for a reexamination of instantiated and specific
attempts to shift, delink, challenge, and decolonize modes of sensing, par-
ticularly under the rubric of New Latin American Cinema.
It is at this juncture that third cinema and decolonial visual aesthet-
ics intersect. Third cinema appeared as a critical intervention in theory
and praxis that acknowledged the need to reframe aesthetics, as well as
what constituted valid art and cinema. As one critic has put it, “The praxis
of Third Cinema, i.e., the call for action of these films, within the con-
text of production, leads us to view the aesthetic of Third Cinema as a
form of ideology; that is, the films point toward a confrontational cinema
and an aesthetics of liberation” (Gabriel 6). Just as third cinema did not
merely accept the established ways of making film coming from Holly-
wood or Europe, it also did not complacently accept ideas of “beauty” or
what could be considered “beautiful” in film. Decolonial visual aesthetics
names artistic interventions that reframe, challenge, question, and reart-
iculate established conceptions of what constitutes cinema or what can
be labeled aesthetically pleasing, beautiful, or entertaining. More impor-
tantly, decolonial visual aesthetics does not concern itself with presenting
entertaining, visually pleasing, or beautifully constructed images. Quite
on the contrary—as a way to undo neocolonial ways of conceiving film
aesthetics, films espousing the principles of third cinema aim to engage
audiences in dialogue rather than complacency and mere spectatorship,
and thus move toward what Rancière has called “the emancipated specta-
tor.”7 The images and themes treated in third cinema seek to draw upon
the sensibilities of workers, peasants, and students. Instead of being es-
sentialized or romanticized, workers and peasants are depicted in a “real-
istic” manner in which the everyday issues affecting them are treated in a
more profound way, rather than superficial or Manichean constructs fit-
ting into pre-established cinematic models or formulas. In the following
sections, I will explore some of the ways in which the films discussed in
this chapter presented different models of making documentaries and fic-
tional films, while moving toward aesthetics that challenged established
models.
150 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino: La hora de los hornos

and Third Cinema

La hora de los hornos (1966–1968) [The Hour of the Furnaces] serves as the
Grupo Cine Liberación’s prime example of how films can serve as a labo-
ratory for defining the language to be used in the making of an alterna-
tive to Hollywood or European cinema. As the film was being created,
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino organized small screenings in clan-
destine locations to obtain feedback from and engage in dialogue with
workers and students. One could argue that these small screenings and
dialogues with viewers were foundational to the final construction of the
film and are, in themselves, a decolonial gesture challenging the hierar-
chical relationship and critical distance between filmmaker and audience.
In fact, at various points in the three parts of the documentary, which
runs over four hours, there are intertitles or black screens at which point
the film was meant to be stopped so that the person screening the film
could update the audience about specific political situations or open up
the floor to discussion. As such, the film was conceived to be an organic
and horizontal film-viewing experience seeking to undo modes of instan-
tiating the coloniality of knowledge. In this exchange and dialogue, ideas
coming from workers, students, and peasants in the audience were just
as valid as (and perhaps more valid than) those presented in the film. In
1968, upon completion of the film, The Hour of the Furnaces was screened
internationally and received an outstanding critical reception at film festi-
vals, including an award at the Pesaro Film Festival.
The documentary informed the critical language and theoretical prop-
osition of a new kind of filmmaking that would shape the region, as well
as subsequent politically committed African and Asian cinema. As such,
the documentary and the manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema,” which ap-
peared in 1969, were instrumental in the development of critiques of colo-
nialism (coloniality) throughout the world. In fact, the manifesto makes
explicit the language and approach to filmmaking that Solanas and Ge-
tino set out to embrace, particularly when using terms such as “films of
decolonization” or “cinema of subversion” (“Toward a Third Cinema”).
It would be impossible to talk about third cinema in Latin America
without studying The Hour of the Furnaces by itself and then looking more
closely at the critical language it creates, as well as its aesthetic-ideological
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 151

proposition. As mentioned earlier, the film is divided into three parts,

which are simultaneously independent of and complementary to each
other. If we interpret the documentary as an extended visual essay, the
first part serves to introduce the historical, social, political, cultural, and
economic background of Argentina and Latin America. The opening of
the documentary, “Neocolonialism and Violence” is divided into thirteen
subsections, which include a discussion of history, Argentina as a nation-
state, forms of quotidian violence, Buenos Aires as a port and symbol of
centralization, the oligarchy, systems of power, political violence, neora-
cism, dependency, cultural violence, Eurocentric and universal cultural
models and forms of knowledge, ideological wars, and possible solu-
tions and options to the aforementioned problems. In recent critical dis-
course, all of these areas have become central to discussions around the
coloniality of power, being, knowledge, gender, race, and aesthetics. As
such, reading this film from a decolonial perspective means viewing this
documentary as part of an archive of images seeking to challenge the co-
loniality of representation, or what Alejandro Vallega has called “the co-
loniality of images.” In so doing, Vallega articulates a position similar to
that of Mirzoeff ’s concept of visuality in which what is explored is who
represents whom and through which visual registers and means. Follow-
ing Quijano, Vallega argues that the coloniality of images points to an is-
sue in which “the colonized see themselves through a Eurocentric image”
(201, original emphasis). A way of undoing this Eurocentric construction
of images is to find modes of self-representation, or seeing oneself, that
come from the visual register of the European cinematic gaze, but use vi-
sual modalities that are inherently oppositional, critical, and subversive
of Eurocentric optics and visuality. This is why, for instance, there is an
emphasis on distinction in the adjectives used in third cinema or imper-
fect cinema, which seeks to distinguish itself from hegemonic visualities
coming from Europe or Hollywood.
In the opening intertitles, it is made evident that the film addresses
how neocolonialism and everyday violence take place in Argentina, and
by extension, in the rest of Latin America. However, Cuba is purposely
left out of the discussion, as the filmmakers acknowledged its status as
the first liberated Latin American nation-state. The film also makes use
of a black screen and interspersed images of violence and social unrest,
accompanied by texts that complement the images. In so doing, Solanas
152 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

and Getino ensure that the images will not be misinterpreted, and they
are also correlated with concrete examples from history.
In the opening subsection of part one, a discussion of Latin American
history and the history of colonialism is of prime importance to setting
the stage for the rest of the documentary. The discussion of history in
this section centers on a discussion of Spain’s colonial presence (colonial-
ism) and how England has taken over from Spain and become a neoco-
lonial power in Latin America through investments and banking. While
Latin America exported raw materials in the nineteenth century, England
sent the finished products back to the Americas. The discussion of his-
tory then shifts to the relationship that Latin America has had with the
United States, particularly in reference to the Monroe Doctrine and the
Big Stick, which led to multiple U.S. military interventions in the region.
At the time the film was made, the narrator was able to count forty-one
U.S. military interventions across Latin America in the twentieth century.
The film also asserts that the Organization of American States conceals
and perpetuates this history of neocolonialism and U.S. intervention. For
the narrators, while in the nineteenth century Latin American states were
divided and pitted against one another, in the twentieth century the idea
of Pan-Americanism continued serving the practices and discourse of
neocolonialism.
The second subsection of part one focuses on Argentina’s history as a
nation state. This section gives an account of Argentina’s population, its
natural resources, its centralization and overpopulation around Buenos
Aires, etc. The third subsection focuses on forms of quotidian violence.
Images of factory workers, coal miners, and farmers are used to illustrate
or put a face to everyday violence. This section also addresses the prob-
lem of uneven distribution of land—who owns it versus who works for it
and who profits from it. The discussion of the distribution of land has par-
allels with Raymundo Gleyzer’s México, la revolución congelada [Mexico,
the Frozen Revolution] (1971), which will be discussed toward the end of
this chapter. Finally, the section presents an argument in favor of the dis-
enfranchised or the wretched of the earth, to echo Fanon’s term, particu-
larly when they lack basic utilities: running water, sewers, electricity, etc.
For Solanas and Getino, these are problems that are experienced on an
everyday basis and are forms of violence and oppression in very tangible
and experiential terms.
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 153

The fourth section focuses on Buenos Aires as a predominantly white,

Eurocentric city. The section makes the argument that Buenos Aires is Ar-
gentina’s center of neocolonialism or coloniality. The fifth section turns
its attention to the role that the Argentine oligarchy plays in perpetuat-
ing neocolonialism. For Solanas and Getino, the oligarchy is comprised
of cattle ranchers, as well as the rural landowning families who are the
“owners” of the country. In the sixth section of the film, the military is
presented as the enemy and as a constitutive component of the system of
oppression. This section also makes the case for various forms of internal
colonialism, particularly in relation to the agricultural, cattle-raising, and
industrial oligarchies.
The seventh and eight sections deal with instances of political violence
and neoracism as other modalities of neocolonialism. The ninth section
is about the history of economic, political, and cultural dependency on
Spain, England, and the United States. The tenth section emphasizes
how illiteracy and pedagogical/educational colonization are two ways in
which cultural violence is perpetuated. The eleventh section makes a case
for Latin America’s fascination with European and seemingly universal
forms of culture and models of knowledge. This section illustrates how
Latin America has yet to produce culture and knowledge that steer away
from or questions widely accepted Eurocentric models. A discussion of
ideological wars is the main topic of the twelfth section. The images pre-
sented in this section show how Buenos Aires was fully immersed in the
global counterculture of the 1960s. As the film makes evident, these for-
eign influences had very little to do with Argentina’s reality beyond the
dominant spheres of culture.
The final subsection of part one argues for the need to engage in a
transformative revolution that engages with all the problems presented in
the preceding twelve subsections. As the narrator in this section states,
“En su rebelión el latinoamericano recupera su existencia” [In its rebel-
lion, the Latin American being recovers its existence] (La hora de los hor-
nos). These are the concluding words of the first part of the film. They also
encapsulate several of the concerns presented throughout this section,
particularly in advocating for the need to seek liberation as a way to vali-
date the everyday person’s existence in the eyes of his or her oppressor. In
other words, the final statement in the section presents us with the critical
challenge of rethinking the everyday person’s ontological position within
154 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

a spectrum of coloniality that seeks to continue colonial forms of oppres-

sion into neocolonial times. These words are also invoked and strategi-
cally placed in relation to a last image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s death.
The film zooms in on Che’s face with its open eyes and advocates for the
need to struggle even to the point of death. The need to engage in a pro-
found liberation movement is equated with taking the risk of losing one’s
own life for the collective well-being, as was the case with “Che” Guevara.
The second part of the film, “Acto para la liberación” [“Liberation
Act”], focuses on the ten-year period from 1945 to 1955 in Argentina,
during Juan Perón’s first government. For Solanas and Getino, this gov-
ernment became a symbol of what sets the stage for actual liberation.
If Perón’s government changed the political system from a position of
power, its inclusion in the film is meant to make recent history a refer-
ent of the type of revolution that Solanas and Getino are advocating. The
third part of the film, entitled “Violencia y liberación” [“Violence and
Liberation”], is concerned with what took place after Perón’s government.
Some of the topics discussed in this section include how theory can be
transformed into praxis and lead to a revolution. The third part of the film
also questions whether or not pacifism and non-violence are viable op-
tions with which to lead a revolution. This part of the film also links strug-
gles in Argentina with struggles in Africa and Asia. The concluding part
remarks how violence is the only way to combat oppression and power,
and be liberated.
If we interpret the three parts of the film as three sections of an ex-
tended visual essay exposing various modalities of coloniality, we could
conclude that Solanas and Getino started with a discussion of Latin
America as a whole and its history, and how Argentina can be situated
within that history of colonialism and neocolonialism. The first part of
the film is essential to discussing what gave rise to Peron’s government
and how this government sought to remedy some of the existing prob-
lems in Argentine society. The third part of the film also focuses on Ar-
gentina’s situation during the 1960s, and seeks to draw parallels between
the types of struggle and forms of neocolonialism present in Argentina
and liberation struggles in the rest of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Accompanying the release of The Hour of the Furnaces, Solanas and Ge-
tino wrote a brief statement in May of 1968 that served as the founding
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 155

document for the Grupo Cine Liberación (Liberation Cinema Group).

The concluding words of the document are:
La hora de los hornos, antes que un film, es un acto. Un acto para la
liberación. Una obra inconclusa, abierta para incorporar el diálogo
y para el encuentro de voluntades revolucionarias. Obra marcada
por las limitaciones propias de nuestra sociedad y de nosotros, pero
llena también de las posibilidades de nuestra realidad y de nosotros
mismos. (Solanas and Getino, “Primera declaración,” 10)

[The Hour of the Furnaces is an act rather than a film. It is an act to-
ward liberation. It is an incomplete work, open to incorporating dia-
logue and to the meeting of revolutionary wills. It is a work marked
by our society’s limitations and our own, but it is also full of the pos-
sibilities of our reality and of ourselves.]

By stating that The Hour of the Furnaces is an act rather than merely a film,
Solanas and Getino are arguing for the need to change the way we ex-
perience and view films. The Hour of the Furnaces is not a film for view-
ing pleasure or complacency. Quite the contrary; the active participation
of small audiences, and the opportunity for dialogue, are essential to the
screening of the film and inherent in what I have been tracing as deco-
lonial gestures of denouncing modalities of oppression, but also in shift-
ing the dynamic between filmmaker and audiences. Solanas and Getino
crafted this film as a text that could be stopped and opened to discussion
much in the same way that one might do with a difficult passage in a writ-
ten text. The directors do not assume that the film is self-evident, with a
fixed meaning, or that it provides answers. Instead, as they suggest in the
quotation above, the film remains an open text in which the viewer and
audiences can inscribe their own readings that lead to further questioning
of what they call neocolonialism, or what in today’s critical language we
understand as a stage of coloniality’s longue durée.
Turning our attention to “Toward a Third Cinema,” which appeared in
1969, this particular manifesto is one that is invested in questioning the
history and nature of art, science, culture, and thought in “neocolonized”
nation-states. In other words, the manifesto is not merely a film manifesto
that argues for the need to conceptualize and put into practice a third way
156 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

of making films that is different from the Hollywood norm—“first cin-

ema,” so to speak—and Western culture’s attempts to offer an alternative
to Hollywood, or “second cinema.” It also argues for the need to trans-
form culture, art, science, the history of knowledge, and cinema. Third
cinema, then, is an intervention in all those fields, a way of critiquing nor-
mative and Eurocentric ways of perpetuating the coloniality of knowledge
and aesthetics. If Hollywood set the standards for filmmaking in terms
of techniques, aesthetics, technology, and distribution, and established a
star system, then auteur cinema, French New Wave, and even Brazilian
cinema novo sought different directions in those areas, but were limited
by the particular set of cultural models. Second cinema emerges as an at-
tempt at cultural decolonization, while still operating within the concep-
tions of Western/Eurocentric aesthetics and adhering to cinematic lan-
guage, modes of production, and distribution employed by first cinema.
For Solanas and Getino, without second cinema as an initial attempt
at cinematic decolonization, third cinema would not have been possible.
Thus, in their self-definition as a third option to making cinema, Solanas
and Getino are likewise acknowledging their indebtedness to second cin-
ema, while being critical of its limitations and shortcomings. When think-
ing of the direction of third cinema, two basic requirements must be met:
“making films that the System cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its
needs, or making films that directly and explicitly set out to fight the System”
(21, emphasis in original). The Hour of the Furnaces certainly meets both
requirements, as it is a film that was not readily assimilated by the global/
Western cinematic system of images, cinematic techniques, and mecha-
nisms of film distribution, while also openly challenging in a decolonial
gesture this very system of visuality. In fact, one could argue that all the
films studied in the present chapter meet both of these basic require-
ments of third cinema.
At this point, one needs also to question whether or not there are
marked differences in making documentary and fiction films under the
concept of third cinema. For Solanas and Getino, films have the “capac-
ity for synthesis and the penetration of the film image, the possibilities
offered by the living document, and naked reality, and the power of enlight-
enment of audiovisual means [which] make the film far more effective
than any other tool of communication” (“Toward a Third Cinema” 21).
In making The Hour of the Furnaces, the directors certainly make use of
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 157

the “living document” by going to the streets, fields, and private spaces
to capture what was happening at that moment of Argentina’s history in
the mid-1960s. They also made use of the living document, or “naked real-
ity,” by including images from mass media, archival footage, and scenes
from other films. For instance, throughout the first part of the film, Sola-
nas and Getino employed images from Fernando Birri’s Tire Dié (1958),
León Hirzman’s Maioria absoluta (1964), and Joris Ivens’s Le ciel-La terre
(1967). By including images from these films, Solanas and Getino seek to
establish a relationship with films that have served as a cinematic founda-
tion for what would become third cinema. Other film referents in Solanas
and Getino’s filmmaking style as they were making The Hour of the Fur-
naces were Glauber Rocha, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Tomás Gutiérrez
Alea, Santiago Alvarez, and Jorge Sanjinés (Caetano 60).
It should be underscored that “Toward a Third Cinema” is concerned
with the role of cinema as a component of a larger transformative process
that needs to take place at the aesthetic-political level. It is not merely a
film manifesto, but an essay on how culture needs to be rearticulated from
the vantage point of “the people.” For Solanas and Getino, the elite circles
of society are merely filters for foreign modes of thinking (coloniality of
knowledge). The elite think and operate within a dominant culture—as
a system of oppression, or coloniality of power—and do not see a need
to change it. They are fully satisfied with the status quo and the system
that has kept them in power for so long. It is the elite’s inability to see
beyond its social circles and interests that has caused Latin America’s cul-
tural development to stagnate and has positioned it as a receptor and imi-
tator of culture. In the role of receptor, it is impossible to produce works
of art that steer away from pre-established models. Reception of culture
without producing and exporting a culture of one’s own maintains what
Mignolo has termed the colonial difference, which is an imbalance in
power by means that perpetuate Eurocentrism as the core of a global sys-
tem, while relegating the rest of the world to a peripheral status (Mignolo,
Global Histories/Local Designs).
When Solanas and Getino showed parts of The Hour of the Furnaces to
students, workers, and activists, they realized third cinema’s new poten-
tial: “the participation of people who, until then, were considered specta-
tors” (“Toward a Third Cinema” 26, original emphasis). The film-viewing
experience depended on those who organized it and those who attended.
158 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

This is to say that third cinema, particularly with a film like The Hour of
the Furnaces, demands the active participation of its audience engaging
in dialogues during and after a screening. This film and its accompanying
cinematic manifesto changed the way political films were made, particu-
larly during a time when discourses of liberation and decolonization were
circulating in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The film and the manifesto
proved that political action could coincide with artistic merit and that
aesthetics could be placed in the service of undoing coloniality. More im-
portantly, The Hour of the Furnaces sought to transform the relationship
between a film and its viewers. If before film had been used as on object
of entertainment, now it became a medium through which to question
and contest history and the present. A concern with history and the pres-
ent as ways to imagine the future became a common interest beyond the
documentary form and beyond Latin America’s southern cone. In the fol-
lowing sections, we will turn our attention to examples that take the chal-
lenge of third cinema to new registers, in other Latin American contexts,
and in both fiction films and other genres.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: Memories of Underdevelopment

and Revolutionary Cinema

Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968) [Memories of Under-

development] is based on Edmundo Desnoes’s homonymous novel, pub-
lished in 1966. Aside from being a criticism of the Cuban bourgeoisie that
left the island after the 1959 revolution, the film posits the problems of
coexistence between bourgeois life (remnants of capitalism) and a socio-
cultural revolution that is solidly in place. Ultimately, the film seeks to un-
derscore the insurmountable disconnect between these opposing states
of mind (coloniality and an attempt at decolonization) and social reali-
ties. In many ways, the main character in the film, Sergio, embodies these
tensions. Sergio decides to stay in Cuba despite most of his family and
friends migrating to the United States. But Sergio’s lifestyle and frame of
mind are out tune with socialist Cuba and its newly implemented social
policies.
Memories of Underdevelopment’s opening sequence is devoted to Afro-
Cubans dancing, and as part of the diegetic soundtrack we hear Afro-Cu-
ban drums. This sequence suddenly comes to a halt and things shift to
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 159

the film’s narrative, particularly the exodus of Cubans leaving the island
in 1961. In fact, we have a sequence of images of the airport in Havana
and affluent families emigrating, mostly to the U.S. One could interpret
the inclusion of dancing, celebration, and visual referents to Afro-Cuban
culture as signs of the positive and triumphalist atmosphere that had per-
vaded Cuba since 1959. By contrasting these images of celebration with
Cubans seeking to emigrate, the film portrays the ideological tendencies
between those who supported Castro’s government and those who op-
posed it. Those who left the island were the ones who would benefit the
least from the revolution, because of the loss of their private property or
companies in the redistribution under socialism. In contrast, the Afro-de-
scendant and formerly disenfranchised Cubans benefited the most from
Castro’s new government.
From this opening, the film narrative turns our attention to Sergio,
the film’s protagonist, whose voiceover guides the film. Images of Sergio
on the balcony of his apartment serve as our first introduction to him.
From that vantage point, Sergio looks at the city through a telescope and
admires the changes in the cityscape. At this point, Sergio states: “Todo
parece tan distinto. ¿He cambiado yo o ha cambiado la ciudad?” [Every-
thing seems so different. Have I changed or has the city changed?] (Me-
morias del subderrallo). From this moment onward, Sergio tries to answer
these questions as he constantly tries to figure out what is becoming of
Havana and who he has become in this revolutionary process, now that
all the people he once knew are gone.
Gutiérrez Alea makes conscious use of Hollywood conventions such
as over-the-shoulder shots to introduce characters, tracking shots to es-
tablish the type of rooms and apartment Sergio lives in, or details such as
Sergio’s wardrobe. By employing these film conventions, Gutiérrez Alea
ensures that audiences will situate Sergio as a petit bourgeois who is out
of place in Cuba’s new social and political milieu. In fact, by having Sergio
look at the city and its inhabitants, and resorting to inner dialogue, the
film shows Sergio’s alienation from everything and everyone around him.
Furthermore, our central character is not interested in what the future
may hold for Cuba. Instead, Sergio is invested in the past as he looks over
objects that remind him of his wife—lipstick, furs, a monocle—while lis-
tening to a recording of a conversation between them. As these objects
evoke memories for Sergio, they can also be interpreted as symbols of
160 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

decadence of Fulgencio Batista’s pre-revolutionary regime. These objects

are remnants of Sergio’s previous life, but they also stand as symbols of
the uneven social hierarchy before the revolution.
Early in the film, however, Sergio begins to discover answers to the
question of whether it is the city or he who has changed. Through Sergio’s
perspective as a mere bystander and observer of the social changes tak-
ing place, the camera follows the quotidian experiences of women—how
they walk, how they dress, and what they eat. It is as though Sergio is try-
ing to make sense of his fellow citizens. Sergio’s alienation is such that he
yearns for the times when Cuba was called the Paris of the Caribbean.
For him, under Castro’s regime, Havana now looks like a Tegucigalpa of
the Caribbean, a possible reference to the longstanding history of U.S. in-
tervention in Honduras and how the country’s economy and governance
had been weakened during the first half of the twentieth century. Com-
paring Tegucigalpa to Havana brings into the fold a subtle critique of U.S
interventions across the Americas. By contrasting medium shots depict-
ing scenes of everyday citizens in Havana with Baroque non-diegetic mu-
sic, the film suggests that it is other people who have changed, not Sergio.
In fact, Sergio wonders what the meaning of life must be for them, but his
concern is empty, detached, particularly since he sees himself as different
from the rest.
The film also presents what those Cubans emigrating or wanting to
leave the island are thinking. In a conversation that Sergio and one of
his friends, Pablo, have prior to the latter’s departure, Pablo lauds people
from the United States for knowing how to do things. Pablo is trying to fix
his car, so that he can turn it over to the Cuban government. Only upon
handing it over will Pablo be allowed to leave Cuba. From this conversa-
tion, the film suddenly shifts to Sergio’s inner thoughts about the hunger
that Cubans withstood under Spanish colonialism and how hunger affects
children everywhere in Latin America and is one of the leading causes of
death. It is interesting to point out that this scene echoes a similar point
made in The Hour of the Furnaces regarding Latin America’s problems with
malnourishment and how extreme poverty has claimed more victims in
the region than the entire casualty count of World War II. This scene is a
prime example of inherent coloniality in Sergio’s thinking in his supposi-
tion that hunger and social inequities belonged to the nineteenth century
under Spanish rule and that U.S. intervention at the turn of the nineteenth
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 161

century led to social progress and economic growth. Sergio’s failure to see
how such uneven distribution of wealth affects and disenfranchises vast
sectors of Cuba’s population positions him within the modernity/colo-
niality/decoloniality spectrum. In other words, Sergio assumes a linear
historicity of modernity as progress (colonialism, independence, post-
independence), without being capable of acknowledging what this linear
discourse veils (coloniality or the perpetuation of modes of oppression
beyond formal independence). Decoloniality, then, becomes a non-op-
tion, for it first needs the acknowledgment that coloniality exists in order
to move beyond it, critique it, and seek to undo it.
Memories of Underdevelopment has several scenes interspersed through-
out the film’s narrative, which at first glance would seem to disrupt the
narrative flow, but end up enhancing the narrative by contrasting Sergio’s
careless and bourgeois attitude with his observations on Cuba’s under-
development. One could mention here three different scenes related to
Sergio’s love interests to illustrate this point. In one sequence, Sergio fan-
tasizes about his maid, Noemi. As Sergio and the maid are having a cup
of coffee, there is a voiceover describing Noemi’s baptism. The scenes of
the baptism are idyllic and Sergio imagines himself embracing her; Viv-
aldi’s Spring is used as background music. This dream-like sequence shifts
to Sergio gazing on Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. With these references
to Renaissance art and Baroque music, the film suggests Sergio’s detach-
ment from what is going on outside his apartment and his refusal to let go
of his bourgeois sensibilities and his preference for Western aesthetics or
high art, which negate the possibility of sensing popular forms of visual or
aural art forms.
In the next sequence, Sergio bumps into a young girl. This teenager,
Elena, wants to become an actress, and Sergio introduces her to people
he knows at the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industrias Cinematográfi-
cas (ICAIC). While they are having dinner, Sergio asks Elena why she
wants to be an actress, to which she responds that she is tired of being
herself. Sergio replies that actresses repeat the same gestures, the same
words over and over. The film shifts to images of five (Hollywood and
European) films in which images of women are repeated. Most of the im-
ages are sexual, particularly of women showing their breasts, and of men
and women about to have sex. In hearing Sergio’s statement that films
are made up of repetitive dialogue and scenes and observing repetitive
162 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Hollywood imagery, one can argue that this sequence serves as a direct
commentary on Hollywood cinema, its formulaic approach to filmmak-
ing, and even a coloniality of visual registers and visuality as a form of
controlling and subjugating women by reinforcing gender roles—what is
now called coloniality of gender. In other words, this is Gutiérrez Alea’s
commentary and stance on what it means to make imperfect films under
the Cuban Revolution, which is to depart from cinematic formulas and
change the approach to filmmaking by turning a film into a set of visual
cues aimed at interrogating modes of domination or coloniality.
In a different set of scenes also centered on Sergio’s relationship with
Elena, Sergio becomes bored with her and realizes the following: “Siem-
pre trato de vivir como un europeo y Elena me hace sentir el peso del
subdesarrollo en cada paso” [I have always tried living like a European
and Elena makes me feel the weight of underdevelopment with each step]
(Memorias del subdesarrollo). Sergio wants to make Elena more like his
wife, Laura, and for Elena to suit and share his own tastes. Particularly in
view of Sergio’s statement about underdevelopment, one can argue that
Gutiérrez Alea wants to make the case that underdevelopment has to do
with Sergio’s state of mind, in which he assumes a position of inferiority
in relation to European culture. This position is illustrative of coloniality
and thus the need to move toward the decolonial as an option to the co-
loniality of knowledge, aesthetics, and being. In other words, to be a Cu-
ban or a Latin American is insufficient and incomplete, since one needs
always to strive to be like Europeans in their accumulation of knowledge
and refined taste, which from Sergio’s perspective creates an ontological
hierarchy (Europeans as superior to Latin Americans) involving the vir-
tue of intersectionality of race (white) and knowledge (European).
The film shifts its narrative to a flashback of Sergio’s affair with a young
German woman, Hanna, prior to his marriage. In fact, throughout this
sequence, Sergio admits to falling in love with Hanna, who he thought
was more mature than the underdeveloped Cuban women around him.
Hanna and her family decide to move to New York, but Sergio cannot
go as he is in charge of the family business, a furniture store, which is
to say he is bound by his capitalist and familial ties to the island. Sergio
argues that he does not want to go New York empty-handed, but in the
process of his obsession with work, he is forced to let go of Hanna. This
flashback is introduced in the film to illustrate how this relationship has
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 163

transformed his attitude toward work and toward women, two of the
main themes in the film. Now that the revolution is in place, Sergio does
not work, and survives on what he receives from renting out properties
he owns—a reminder of the familiar capitalist ties that bind him to the
island and why he chose not to leave with Hanna. Memories of Hanna
haunt Sergio and become a reference point to which other Cuban women
can never compare, given her beauty, maturity, and overall development.
Implicit in this discourse are threads that can be connected to an embed-
ded coloniality, but also a Darwinian and even positivist perspective on
the alleged superiority of the blonde German woman over any mixed-
race or black, and thus impure, Cuban woman. Sergio’s idealization of
and fascination with all that Hanna represents as a symbol of European/
Western beauty, intelligence, sophistication, self-assurance, and maturity
cannot be matched by any woman coming from the Americas. Read from
this perspective, what we see in this film is Sergio’s own entrapment and
stagnation on the island due to his inability to recognize his own colonial-
ity of mind as something that ought to adapt to the changing times under
the Cuban Revolution. Gutiérrez Alea’s inclusion of this sequence is also
reminiscent of Latin America’s fascination (starting as early as the foun-
dation of the Latin American Republics in the nineteenth century and
continuing today) with that which is foreign, particularly European, at
the expense of what is local, indigenous, Afro-descendant, or popular, and
thus assumed to be inferior or flawed. This xenophilic gesture is one that
is constitutive of coloniality and one that the decolonial seeks to unveil.
The film’s exploration of Sergio’s character eventually leads to a conclu-
sion in which he finds himself alone. With the revolution, there has been
a rupture in society that Sergio cannot bear. For Sergio, everything about
the past falls prey to the seemingly successful aura of the Cuban Revo-
lution, allowing Cuba’s prerevolutionary past to be forgotten in the cur-
rent state of underdevelopment. In this existential crisis, Sergio assumes
his nothingness, his own symbolic death, and sees himself as too old and
as having little to contribute to society. While dwelling in his existential
crisis, Sergio looks at pictures of his youth and likens his life to that of
a monstrous vegetable. If this monstrous vegetable can be likened to a
visual representation of coloniality, is it even possible to uproot it, given
its deep sedimentation in the collective mindset? Because the revolution-
ary discourse in Cuba is all about “the people,” Sergio finds himself in
164 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

complete isolation, as he thinks he is the only one who speaks coherently.

Prior to the revolution, Sergio was considered “respectable,” and now he
is forced into a position where he is one of “the people,” though he rejects
this new role without being able to identify himself as the problem, let
alone connect in any significant way with vast sectors of the population.
The film’s finale suggests that Sergio does not know how to act and
cannot adapt to the changes around him. Instead, he becomes static and
petrified in his sense of his superiority in relation to what he perceives to
be the widespread underdevelopment that plagues Cuba and its citizens.
While the film is primarily concerned about Cuba’s situation in the revo-
lution and its people, it also served as a model in its day for how to make
ideologically charged fiction cinema to critique long-standing modes of
domination, or what can be called coloniality of power. Gutiérrez Alea
presents us with a new set of aesthetic choices to make fiction films in a
region that is trying to define its own cinematic language as a tool of so-
cial and political critique.8

Humberto Solás: Lucía, Historical Reevaluations, and Melodrama

Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1968) takes its viewers through three distinct
moments of revolutionary history in Cuba, namely 1895, 1932, and an un-
specified year in the 1960s. Humberto Solás, Julio García Espinosa, and
Nelson Rodríguez cowrote the script; García Espinosa’s participation is
of particular interest given his theorization of an imperfect cinema. Dis-
tinctive of Solás’s film style is the careful mixture of melodrama, social
critique, and surrealist imagery. As in many of the early ICAIC films, Leo
Brouwer was responsible for the musical compositions here, particularly
in creating music that accentuated the film’s melodramatic tone.
As one of the three films that redefined third cinema in 1968, Lucía
confronts us with the role of women in Cuban society at three distinct
moments of social unrest, and serves as a way to reflect on the absence
of women’s voices during this period of transformation. Focusing on
three distinct moments of revolution in Cuba (1895 against Spain and the
U.S., 1933 against Machado’s regime, and a year in the 1960s in the midst
of the Cuban Revolution), and using conventions of the melodrama, the
film takes a keen interest in using the medium as a tool for understanding
the role of history in the composition of contemporary society. Lauded
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 165

as one of the masterpieces of the period, it also remains one of the most
enigmatic in its treatment of female characters and their participation in
political struggles and societal transformations.9 This film provides a stark
contrast to Memories of Underdevelopment.
The character of Lucía in 1895 is submissive, conforms to the norms
expected of unmarried women, follows what her mother expects, and
yet, when she is surrounded by her female friends, is playful and girlish.
In conforming to these gender roles and attributes that are constitutive
of the coloniality of gender, the film inserts a question: Is it possible for
this Lucía to challenge the coloniality of gender and engage in political
action? The first encounter between Lucía and Rafael accentuates their
playful flirtation with each other, which marks their initial relationship.
The women support and help the revolutionary cause by sewing cloth-
ing and hammocks for the Cubans fighting against the Spaniards. In this
first part of the film, there is a heavy emphasis on prioritizing women’s
work and labor. In the first scene, in which the women are sewing, one of
the female characters wishes to take a break from work and chat instead,
while Lucía makes a case for talking less and working more. In fact, she
argues that if anyone is going to win the battle between the Spaniards and
the Cubans, it will be the “mambises,” a reference to the Cuban guerrilla
fighters fighting for independence. This alludes to anti-Spanish and anti-
colonialist sentiment reminiscent of Latin American nineteenth-century
texts. In this subtle attempt to take a leadership role within a domestic
and feminine space, Lucía begins to show signs of wanting to insert her-
self in political struggle, albeit from a distance.
The relationship between Lucía and Rafael is marked by the latter’s de-
ception as he seeks a relationship with Lucía as a way to find out more
information about the rebels’ plans and location. Rafael serves the inter-
ests of the Spaniards and Lucía symbolizes the spirit of a thwarted pro-
independence and nationalist sentiment that fails to materialize. Among
the rebels is Lucía’s brother, Felipe, who is killed by the Spanish forces.
As a response to this betrayal, the passivity, submissiveness, and naïveté
that were emblematic of Lucía’s character are exchanged for madness
and a desire for revenge as she stabs Rafael to death. One can read this
violent gesture as a moment in which Lucía radically challenges gender
roles aimed at keeping her in a domestic space (coloniality of gender) and
takes it upon herself to become involved in political struggle by killing
166 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Rafael, a symbol of colonial allegiance and the persistent coloniality of

power—Cubans wanting to perpetuate Spanish modes of domination.
In contrast, the second part of the film focuses on 1933 Lucía and her
affair with Aldo, a revolutionary fighting to overthrow Cuban President
Gerardo Machado’s regime. In this section of the film, the role of women
shifts. Here we no longer have a seemingly submissive and naïve female
character. Indeed, this Lucía decides to leave the comforts that her well-
off family can provide and take up work in a tobacco factory. Aldo, as the
male figure, is still the symbol of revolutionary struggle and resistance,
but Lucía also becomes politically engaged as she participates in strikes
and actively supports Aldo. In relation to Lucía from 1895, this period’s
Lucía shows the progress made by women in Cuban society, which is to
say progress toward challenging and undoing the coloniality of gender.
Nonetheless, the elements of melodrama and personal tragedy, both of
which are distinctive of Solás’s style, are inescapable. Aldo is killed during
one of the attempts to overthrow Machado and Lucía is left to suffer in
silence and with the added weight and responsibility of carrying Aldo’s
child. The relationship has not only awakened but deeply affected Lucía’s
consciousness, thus enabling the possibility of a change in her condition
in a patriarchal society constitutive of coloniality of gender.
In the third section of the film, the 1960s Lucía has characteristics of
the initial submissiveness of Lucía from 1895 and the progressiveness of
Lucía from 1933. It is clear that this period of the story, which is left open-
ended, takes place in post-revolutionary Cuba. Lucía has just married
Tomás, and they are still in a honeymoon phase. However, we soon find
out that Tomás still thinks and behaves like men did before the revolu-
tion, as he is resistant to change and wants to keep Lucía in confinement,
not allowing her to leave the house or see friends and relatives unless he
is present. Tomás’s jealousy is such that when the illiterate Lucía has the
opportunity to learn how to read and write, her husband nixes the idea.
For the lifestyle Tomás wishes for his wife, and in the agricultural rural
context they inhabit, Tomás cannot and does not want to understand
why women would want to learn how to read, have access to education,
or work outside the home. In other words, Tomás is perfectly content to
uphold the modes of domination that have been put in place to oppress
women, and thus to uphold a coloniality of gender by denying Lucía ac-
cess to knowledge, which may lead to her emancipation. Tomás thinks
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 167

that laboring at home ought to be sufficient for Lucía. Yet, in the spirit of
revolution, she escapes from Tomás’s obsessive and archaic control with
the help of a literacy volunteer sent from Havana to teach everyone in
town how to read. In her desire to rebel or to escape her husband’s con-
trol, all Lucía wants to do is to work and be able to move freely without
having to ask her husband’s permission. At the end, Tomás chases Lucía
around the salt dunes where she has gone to work, while she resists his
repeated attempts to take her back home to their previous living arrange-
ment and modes of domestic, emotional, and psychological control and
domination so key to the pervasiveness of the coloniality of gender. Al-
though the style of this third part of the film is comic, this last section
resolves some of the tensions present in the two previous representations
of women during revolutionary times in Cuba. Lucía of the 1960s exhibits
a rebellious persona that echoes the liberation of women taking place in
other parts of the globe through second-wave feminism. Moreover, the
third section makes the case that under Castro’s government, the role of
women is central to the advancement of a profound revolutionary pro-
cess, as it challenges the embedded structures of patriarchy that have
sustained gendered modes of domination leading to the coloniality of
gender.
Even if the film is heavily invested in entering into dialogue with the
past, such an exercise is meant to be a critical reflection on the present.
For Solás, the past helps us arrive at a better understanding of a nation’s
cultural, social, and psychological articulations, which shape everyday
life and social mores (Caballero 165). In a broader sense, for Solás, Lucía
also serves as a critical reflection on the relationship among Latin Ameri-
can nations, which Solás identifies as one of isolation rather than inter-
action. As Solás writes, “El problema más importante de los incentivos
que me planteó el filme fue buscar un modo de expresión nacional que,
de genuino, trascendiera el ámbito isleño y se insertara como aspecto de
un modo de expresión latinoamericano” [Among the most important in-
centives with which the film confronted me was to search for a mode of
national expression, which, if genuine, would transcend the scope of the
island and become an aspect of a mode of Latin American expression]
(Caballero 165). Even though the film was attempting to engage in a his-
torical study of the trajectory in the liberation struggles in Cuba and the
place of women in them, in fact, the film could also be read as a reflection
168 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

on the future direction and struggles that need to take place elsewhere in
Latin America to avoid repeating the failed emancipatory experiences of
the likes of Lucía from 1895 or the Lucía from 1933. The film’s progression
from subtle to overt modes of overturning and challenging patriarchy is
the most prominent way in which I see Solás’s work as one that displays
decolonial gestures toward undoing or, at the very least, questioning the
sedimentations of patriarchy that give way to the coloniality of gender. In
other words, the film can be interpreted as an exercise in underscoring
the need to decolonize gender in Latin America’s patriarchal societies at
the discursive and experiential levels (Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gen-
der”). One could argue that Solás’s use of melodrama serves as a way to
engage the film with a historical reflection on the progressive liberation
of women, but also as a reminder of what remains to be done to avoid
the pitfalls of revolutions spearheaded solely by men. Moreover, the film
advocates for the centrality of women in revolutionary causes. This is a
concern present in subsequent films by Solás, including Cantata de Chile,
though to a different degree.

Humberto Solás: Cantata de Chile, Neo-Baroque Sensibilities,

and Melodrama/Tragedy as Critique

In contrast to Lucía, Cantata de Chile (1975) is not concerned with Cuba

or the role of women per se, but rather with workers in the north of Chile.
This is not to say, however, that women are not depicted positively in
the film. On the contrary, the role of women is of prime importance in
enabling the saltpeter miners’ revolt against their oppressors. In this sec-
tion, I am interested in reconsidering the ways in which Solás crafted his
film Cantata de Chile (1975) as a means of engaging with politics and his-
tory beyond the borders of Cuba. In this film, Solás establishes temporal
shifts that move from nineteenth-century Chile to pre-Columbian times
and then to 1970s Chilean society. The bulk of the action of the film takes
place in 1907, though there are temporal shifts to correlate the struggles
taking place in the early part of the twentieth century with the colonial
and independence periods. Toward the end of the film, there is also a
correlation between the 1907 revolt and the popular revolts of the mid-
1970s. Through a nuanced examination of Chile’s history of oppression,
Solás is able to focus on questions of labor and foreign capital in Chile,
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 169

particularly in relation to miners and exploited laborers in Iquique, which

led to the massacre of Chilean miners in 1907. By engaging with history,
particularly the tragic massacre in Iquique, Solás creates a highly ambi-
tious film in which he blends his signature emphasis on visual and aural
tropes linked to melodrama with a highly politicized film aesthetic that
incorporates sculptures, paintings, techniques from theater, and the con-
stant use of a choral piece composed specifically for this film. This amal-
gamation of artistic media in its political vein is what I call decolonial film
aesthetics. To ground my analysis and theorization, in this section I will
draw on Walter D. Mignolo’s and Madina Tlostanova’s work, as well as
other critical texts that enable an examination of Solás’s slippery conjunc-
tion of the tragic with melodrama.
Recently the work of Walter D. Mignolo and of Madina Tlostanova has
focused on articulating how decolonial aesthetics might work. For Mi-
gnolo, what lies ahead is precisely the challenge of uncoupling aesthesis
(in its original meaning of sensorial experiences) from aesthetics which,
after Kant, became synonymous with discourses around beauty, the sub-
lime, aesthetic pleasure, and evaluative categories (Mignolo, “Aisthesis
decolonial” 10–25). While more contemporary works on aesthetics do
not necessarily rely on these categories, they still rely on the same logic
of positing a normative aesthetics that originates from Europe and now
the U.S. In a similar vein, Madina Tlostanova is attempting to liberate
aesthesis from this normative aesthetics that still persists today (Tlo-
stanova 10–31). While their works focus primarily on pictorial art, as well
as modes or places of exhibition, in my own work I have extended deco-
lonial aesthetics to other art forms, in this case film, precisely as a way to
return to language that enables us to think about how we can sense the
arts anew, while also allowing space for voices and works of art that are
not created to satisfy or meet normative aesthetic expectations.
In this sense, then, Solás’s interest in the correlation between film and
history continues in Cantata de Chile, particularly because the film serves
as a tool with which to look at the history of British investment in Chile
and the legacy of economic imperialism. In fact, the film presents pointed
critiques of nineteenth-century British imperialism, as Britain controlled
Chile’s saltpeter mines, and the country became a neocolony under Brit-
ish economic investment. Aside from looking at the mechanisms by
which workers were oppressed by the bourgeoisie (Chilean and foreign
170 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

investors), the film is meant to elicit a reflection on the rapid transforma-

tions in Chilean politics and social repression after Pinochet’s coup d’état.
This film, then, can be read as an example of Solás’s interest in historical
analysis and social critique beyond Cuba.
As part of Solás’s aesthetic style and choices, for instance, during the
battle scenes from the War of the Pacific (1879–1893), he makes heavy use
of blue and red when focusing on the common citizen engaged in battle.
The film suggests that it was foreign investors and the elite who came out
as victors in this struggle. To accentuate this perspective, the foreign in-
vestors are depicted as though they are watching the battles from a bal-
cony. The color used to envelop their shadowy presence is gold, which
is symbolic of the money they continued making at the expense of a ter-
ritorial dispute among neighboring countries—Chile, Bolivia, and Peru.
When dealing with the 1907 massacre, in order to draw parallels between
that revolt and Chile’s history of struggles since colonial times, the direc-
tor invokes the figure of Lautaro, who led the Araucanos’ victorious re-
volt against the Spaniards in the 1550s. As the miners share stories around
a bonfire in the 1907 scenes, they invoke Lautaro as a mythical figure of
popular resistance, which leads the miners to identify with Lautaro and
what he symbolizes: a continuous struggle in their country from colonial
times into the early twentieth century. To mark the temporal shift and to
differentiate 1907 from the colonial period, Solás makes use of dark colors
and dim lighting in the former.
Another way in which the film seeks to establish a parallel between
time periods involves the same actors playing roles in 1907 and in colo-
nial times, changing costumes and embodying those fighting for indepen-
dence in each era. To denote this shift, aside from the changes in costume,
Solás uses reds and brighter light in the colonial era. In this part, the film
presents a discourse on how independence was available only to a select
few, while there was continuity in the unevenness and oppression of the
poor and workers. When asked about how much improvisation has gone
into his filmmaking style, Solás responds that in the case of Cantata de
Chile, scenes were rehearsed about an hour before shooting. Solás adds
that up to ninety percent of the actors were, in fact, Chileans living in
exile and were thus non-professional actors. These actors worked on the
film “as a political activity for the liberation of their country” (Burton and
Alvear 32).
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 171

The film’s main narrative takes place in 1907. As the saltpeter miners are
convening to march toward Iquique, where they will meet other miners,
they begin to dance the cueca. Bolivian miners soon join them. As music
forms an important part of the aesthetics of this film, the traditional cueca
instrumentation incorporates Bolivian wind instruments. This can be
seen as a sign of transnational workers’ solidarity and as an effort to put
behind them the events of the War of the Pacific. At this point, the scene
transitions to a panoramic image of workers marching with Chilean, Bo-
livian, Argentine, and Peruvian flags waving. At various points in the film,
Solás defies cinematic convention by having workers march toward the
camera, while at other times they march from left to right or right to left.
After meeting with the owners of the mines in which they work, de-
manding better salaries, and having their demands dismissed, the salt-
peter miners decide they must fight for a popular democracy and a gov-
ernment ruled by and in favor of the workers. As this is perceived as a
revolt against the government, the military gets involved, and soon begins
shooting at the miners. While the miners are defending themselves with
rudimentary weapons such as picks and knives, the film transitions to the
scene of a protest in the 1970s. The film concludes with a repeated chant
of “el pueblo unido jamás será vencido” [a united people will never be de-
feated]. Even as the images fade out, the repeated chant continues to be
heard.
Colonial indigenous insurgencies, nineteenth-century armed struggle
for independence, miners’ revolts at the turn of the twentieth century,
and political demonstrations in Chile during the 1970s are seldom the first
scenarios we imagine when confronted with the task of thinking about
why tragedy matters today and what it means to contemporary audiences.
In Humberto Solás’s Cantata de Chile (1975), these moments of Chile’s
history are woven together to explore why tragedy, in the second half of
the twentieth century, should neither focus exclusively on a traditional
tragic protagonist nor on single tragic event. The film focuses instead on
articulating different dimensions of collective tragedy, whether in the
guise of an entire country or concerning groups that have fought against
different agents of subjugation. It is this history of resistance that enables
the staging of historical tragedy, or rather a series of historical events that
have a tragic aspect. To examine what Solás does with his film that might
enable a discussion of tragedy, I will focus on four different aspects: the
172 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

film’s engagement with the tradition of the cantata; a shift from a single to
a collective protagonist; moving from a single event as the source of his-
tory to drawing connections among several historical events to delineate
the contours of historical tragedy; and the formal components taken from
theater and painting that are present in the film. By looking at Cantata de
Chile from these perspectives, I argue that Solás produces a choral film,
one that highlights specific events from Chile’s history to emphasize the
impact of tragedy upon its citizens as a collectivity, and that the filmic rep-
resentation of these tragic events necessitates the use, variations, and con-
jugation of techniques/language stemming from music, theater, history,
and film.
In an interview conducted over a decade after Cantata de Chile was re-
leased, when asked if it was one of his most ambitious and provocative
films, Solás replied that from an aesthetic perspective, the film could be
qualified as such. For Solás, the problem the film presents in terms of
communicating with an audience is that it is a “choral film,” which means
that Solás incorporated elements of choral music, theater, and painting
into the medium of film. It also means that the action does not focus on a
single protagonist, but rather on a group of miners. In terms of the musi-
cal composition for the Cantata de Chile, the film relies heavily on music
for melodramatic effect, and Patricio Manns wrote lyrics for the opening
cantata. Manns was among the many Chileans who went into exile after
the rise of Pinochet, and was also a pivotal figure in the Chilean nueva
canción movement. At various points in the film, characters recite poems
by Pablo Neruda and Violeta Parra, which are used to draw a connection
between the historical struggles of the turn of the twentieth century and
Chile’s social and political repression in the mid-1970s.10 The Cuban Na-
tional Symphony also provided music, particularly to accompany the can-
tata. For moments of high tension, as with many ICAIC films, Leo Brou-
wer provided the musical arrangements. In terms of the incorporation of
art, the film employed sculptures made by the students at the Escuela de
Bellas Artes San Alejandro, which is Cuba’s most prestigious and oldest
fine arts school.
As one can see, the film aimed to make use of several art media to con-
vey a political and historical message regarding workers’ rights. More im-
portantly, the film served as Cuba’s homage to the atrocities that Chile
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 173

had just endured a couple of years prior to the release of the film. Perhaps
because of the incorporation of certain film techniques along with other
art forms as a way to discuss Chile’s historical struggles and its relation-
ship to its society’s situation in the mid-1970s, Julianne Burton and Marta
Alvear have dubbed Cantata de Chile an “interpretive documentary” (32).
By this, Burton and Alvear suggest that the film aims to interpret social
reality by employing suggestive art media, which may not be readily as-
sociated with Chile’s situation under Pinochet, though they certainly de-
note it. In a different interview, Solás added that when he was making this
film, Paolo Ucello’s The Battle of San Romano (c. 1435–1460) had heavily
influenced him, which may explain the marked Renaissance and Baroque
visual undertones present in the film (Caballero 184). Altogether, Cantata
de Chile is a highly ambitious film that embraces these various art forms to
accentuate the melodrama of social oppression in Chile’s history.
As Darlene J. Sadlier reminds us in her recent assessment of the use
of melodrama in Latin American cinema, the prefix of the term comes
from the Greek word for music (melos), and became associated in the
first half of the nineteenth century with theater that employed musical ar-
rangement to “heighten emotional climaxes” (2). In the latter part of the
nineteenth century, the usage of the term morphed to include “plots fea-
turing spectacular actions, improbable twists of fate, intense expressions
of emotion, last-minute rescues, and vivid conflicts between bad and vir-
tuous characters” (2). Furthermore, Sadlier notes that in Latin America,
melodrama as a term linked to film has wider implications in that it may
refer to “domestic dramas” but also to “historical epics in which family
life is viewed in relation to larger national issues” (3). In Cantata de Chile,
however, Solás makes use of non-diegetic music, in fact a choral piece
composed by Patricio Manns, which gives its name to the film. The title
of the film, which is to say the cantata, is linked to a specific tradition of
music that has its origins in the late seventeenth century and eighteenth
century in countries such as Italy, France, England, and Germany ( Joncus
513–540). Thus, as we can begin to see, Solás is referencing a well-estab-
lished film and theater tradition in melodrama, but also makes an allusion
to Baroque music, which was initially used in religious domains and later
became part of secular music. Through this referencing, appropriation,
and subversion of genres, we see glimpses of what I am referring to here
174 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

as decolonial aesthetics. In addition, however, the tragic, historical, and

collective events treated in Cantata lead us to engage in an evaluation of
the film’s engagement with the tragic.
Distinguishing between tragedy and melodrama in theater, Helen
Foley writes that “In contrast to tragedy, stylized acting, gestures, and fa-
cial expressions could serve in the plays to counter linguistic ambiguity.
Tableaux and freezing of the action distilled and underlined specific emo-
tional moments; music helped to define character and heighten tension
and pathos” (5). One could argue that Solás resorts to these conventions
in Cantata. While critics may view Solás’s use of these conventions exclu-
sively in light of melodrama, in fact, I see the use of these conventions as
a way to collapse the distance between tragedy and melodrama. It is well-
known that Solás resorts to melodramatic components and neo-baroque
aesthetics in his films (as critics have charged, and he has admitted sev-
eral times). Yet, tensions, suffering, and other characteristics of traditional
tragedy are not readily resolved in his films. In this sense, then, Solás em-
ploys specific conventions of melodrama in relation to tragedy as a way
to give it some contemporaneity, to complicate the critical division of the
two genres.
In most conventional tragedies, a particular event is taken as the basis
for the action. Such an event is developed, as well as the tragic protago-
nist. In Cantata, instead, the only event that is even partially developed is
the massacre at Iquique, while the other historical events are succinctly
presented as a way to provide background for the massacre, to draw par-
allels between the past and present, and to encourage reflection on the
connections between past and present tragedies. The difference between
conventional tragedy and the type of tragedy we have in Cantata is that
usually the source of tragedy is an isolated event, whereas in the film we
have several events that serve as background for a larger tragedy—a trag-
edy that then reflects a continuity of tragedies, of woven histories told
from the perspective of below, often forgotten and treated in isolation.
The tragedy, then, is a way to discuss how the tragic works in relation to a
country or nation-state. In essence, the nation becomes the tragic protag-
onist. The workers are also the tragic protagonist. The weight of tragedy in
the film is not carried by a single, isolated figure.
For instance, in Euripides’s The Bacchae, the real tragic protagonist is
not really any individual actor or figure, but instead, the city (in this case
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 175

Athens). In reference to the timelessness of Greek tragedies and their im-

pact on our contemporary world, Helen Foley argues the following:
Tragic individuals are fundamentally inseparable from their social
world; domestic tensions among its elite characters are observed
by choruses that preserve a public dimension to the action. Char-
acter is illuminated through public speech, difficult choices, and
action; protagonists struggling to live a moral life take responsibil-
ity for outcomes that can be imposed on them for a range of rea-
sons from within and without. The plays are not didactic; there is
no clear triumph of good over evil; many plays arguably lack a firm
sense of closure. The questions they pose are not resolvable, but
confronting the past and cultural memory is critical to moving for-
ward. (Foley 2)
If we take into consideration this critical invitation, then, in a sense, what
Solás is doing is transforming Chile into the tragic protagonist in a long-
standing tradition of tragedies. In other words, while the actors in the
tragedies may change, the site of the tragedies remains the same. These
tragedies are often not connected in our contemporary and ahistorical
minds. Or rather, they are often understood and treated as isolated and
unconnected events or moments in history. The traditional focus on the
tragic has involved paying attention to particular figures, names, and ac-
tors. Instead, what Solás is doing is to shift the attention and really place
the emphasis on what these events have done to Chile. In so doing, So-
lás moves from that general and abstract level of focusing on the idea of
Chile to treating the nation-state as the tragic protagonist and focusing
attention on the parallels that we can draw, the connections that can be
made among colonial times, the late eighteenth century, the early nine-
teenth century, the early twentieth century saltpeter mining tragedy, and
the early 1970s, with the aftermath of Pinochet’s dictatorship as Chile’s
most recent tragedy. In a sense, then, the film explores the archives of
tragedies in order to explore how each tragedy in isolation, but also all
collectively, comprise a multilayered aspect of a country’s history. The
film is also exploring how a country’s collective memory can be a source
of these traditions and registers of historical information, while drawing
attention to what might be left out, what is communicated or forgotten
in the process of remembrance. The film thus forces its viewers to look
176 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

at tragedy from a variety of perspectives, not just from a single/isolated

perspective grounded in history.
Whereas in classical tragedies the source of the action and the drama
is usually a story that is built around mythology or mythological figures,
in Cantata what we have is a conglomeration of traditional history, events
left out of history, oral traditions, and the mythical foundations of the na-
tion-state itself. These are perspectives that are usually left out of official
historical discourses and official history. What Solás does is use all these
different levels of historical discourse to build a fragmented narrative
about the tragic protagonist, which is the country itself. The fragmenta-
tion that appears in the film is intended to allow viewers to draw parallels
between the tragedy of Iquique in 1907 and the colonial resistance of Lau-
taro and the Araucanos, and see the connections between the struggles
for independence and what took place in colonial times. These events
should be seen as a continuum among independence, labor rights, and
labor struggles in Chile, or rather as a continuum of modalities and his-
tories of resistance to coloniality. This, in a sense, also allows one to draw
parallels between what happened in those three particular historical times
and the history of resistance in Chile, which reached its most profound
form in the aftermath of Pinochet’s rise to power from 1973 to 1975. While
the story is fragmented, Solás is trying to break away from the traditional
model that looks at history as a linear narrative. The film portrays history
as a source of non-linear tragedy, a tragedy with multiple layers, parallels,
and points of correlation, which the viewer must then connect to make
sense of them.
When asked about whether or not he has a specific audience in mind
when making films, Solás has alluded to the difficulty of gauging one’s
audience and how they might respond to political films. To illustrate his
case, Solás discusses the reception of Cantata de Chile, which the crew
and collaborators hoped would have been more successful and received a
stronger critical reception in Cuba. Instead, due to the Cuban audiences’
politicized film-viewing experience, the political issues raised in Cantata
de Chile were not particular enlightening, as they did not advance or clar-
ify the debates around Chile’s political situation under Pinochet. Solás
adds that the film “turned out to be more appropriate for other sectors of
Latin America where the issues raised by the Chilean experience are still
confused and distorted” (Burton and Alvear 32).
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 177

In discussing what he tried to achieve in making Cantata de Chile, So-

lás categorizes his own film as an experimental work in the sense that he
aimed to “achieve a convergence between form and ideological compo-
nents” (Burton and Alvear 32). He notes that the film included elements
from popular theater and iconography, and played with the temporal dis-
play of images, which was meant to encourage an allegorical interpreta-
tion of Chile’s political climate, though this was also applicable to other
countries that had “passed through the stages of colonialist and neoco-
lonialist domination” (Burton and Alvear 32). Of the films studied in the
present chapter, Cantata de Chile is the least-available and least-known in
the United States, which is one of the reasons why I have discussed it here
at some length. In fact, only a couple of universities have it as part of their
collections. While the film’s reception may not have been favorable, its
ambitious interplay of theater, sculpture, painting, music, and cinematic
techniques produced a film that deserves reevaluation on its aesthetic
merits and for what it aimed to achieve at the time of its release, given Pi-
nochet’s regime in Chile and the rise of dictatorships across Latin Amer-
ica. While Cantata de Chile has often been overshadowed by more “au-
thentic” or critically acclaimed films made by Solás, such as Lucía (1968),
Cecilia (1983), or Amanda (1985), its use of various types of art media and
Solás’s trademark over-the-top and melodramatic representations are key
to understanding his interest in employing film as a medium with which
to explore history’s connection with the present and the overlap between
decolonial visual aesthetics and social critique.

Raymundo Gleyzer: Mexico, the Frozen Revolution, Cinema

of the Base, and Clandestine Documentary Making

Compared to the other filmmakers studied in this chapter, Raymundo

Gleyzer has only recently gained some critical attention.11 Gleyzer was a
Jewish Argentine documentary filmmaker whose masterpiece is México,
la revolución congelada (1971) [Mexico, the Frozen Revolution]. Gleyzer’s
entire body of work engages with social issues in very concrete ways.
When compared to other famous documentarians of the period, such as
Solanas or Fernando Birri, Gleyzer seems different indeed because of his
interest in making documentaries commenting on Argentina’s social real-
ity, as well as those of other countries. For instance, in 1964, Gleyzer made
178 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

La tierra quema, which deals with impoverished Brazilians living in the

northeast of their country (in the sertãos), where a small number of elites
control the fertile land and the rest of the population is forced to live in
barren, drought-stricken areas.
In terms of his film style, Gleyzer was interested in allowing images to
speak for themselves and allowing filmed subjects to speak their minds,
even if the scenes included in his documentary were lengthy as a result.
One could argue that Gleyzer was interested in a more organic and real-
istic way of filmmaking in which the director’s hand and editing job were
less prevalent and obvious in the final product. Unlike the other filmmak-
ers studied in this chapter, who had formal film training in film institutes
in Rome or elsewhere, Gleyzer studied film in La Plata in the province
of Buenos Aires, though he had begun working as a photographer ear-
lier, in 1956. By 1965, however, Gleyzer had left film school and decided
to replace it with his own fieldwork and observations. As a product of his
early attempts at defining his own style, Gleyzer produced Pottery Makers
Behind the Mountain (1965), which had been commissioned by the Uni-
versity of Córdoba. During this period, Gleyzer and Jorge Preloran made
It Happened in Hualfin (1965), though Gleyzer finished the documentary
on his own as Preloran did not want to explore fully the root ideological
and social causes of poverty in Hualfín, Catamarca, a small village in the
northwestern province of Catamarca, Argentina. At this point in Gley-
zer’s career, his filmmaking style and the topics he chose to document be-
came suspect to the Argentinian government, and were heavily censored
by Juan Carlos Onganía’s military dictatorship from 1966 to 1970. During
Onganía’s dictatorship, civil rights were trampled and there was a marked
clash among social classes. It should be stressed that it was in this con-
text that The Hour of the Furnaces (1966–1968) appeared. In fact, Gleyzer
worked as a cameraman on the first part of The Hour of the Furnaces. This
film would have a profound impact on Gleyzer’s filmmaking style, though
later there would be ideological differences between Solanas and Gleyzer,
which in turn affected their film aesthetics and how they viewed film as a
form with which to engage with Peronism (Ardito, Raymundo).
Despite the military regime, Gleyzer went on to do a series of inter-
views for television in the Falkland Islands. Gleyzer asked the English
government for a special permit to do so, and was granted it. This was the
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 179

first time that an Argentine had filmed there. Gleyzer went inside people’s
homes to see how they lived, which became a signature of his approach to
making documentaries, a way to engage people in a more horizontal level
of communication. In this sense, this particular type of film aesthetic can
be connected to the conversational poetry or the recovery of collective
voices of everyday people, including workers, discussed in previous chap-
ters. In 1969, Gleyzer went to Cuba to do a series of interviews. While in
Cuba, Gleyzer became very familiar with Santiago Álvarez’s documenta-
ries, and these also shaped his film aesthetics (Ardito, Raymundo). I draw
attention to these developments in Gleyzer’s filmography to underscore
how his interest in documentaries went beyond Argentina and took on
a hemispheric interest in unveiling systemic forms of social inequality. It
is in this spirit of engaging documentary filmmaking as an instrument of
visual critique that I see Gleyzer’s work as contributing to a type of visual
archive that resonates with more recent treatment of decolonial film aes-
thetics in relation to indigenous social movements and to inserting indig-
enous subjectivities as producers of modes of self-representation.12
Read as part of an extended archive of gestures toward decoloniz-
ing media representations of indigenous populations, as well as provid-
ing a nuanced critique of the Mexican political and social history of the
first seven decades of the twentieth century, Gleyzer’s México, la revo-
lución congelada (1971) is a documentary that takes a historical look at
the reasons why the Mexican Revolution failed to materialize and how
it neglected workers, indigenous peoples, and other oppressed groups.
Through the use of archival images and interviews with survivors of the
revolution, Gleyzer offers a critique of the Mexican political system, of
the historical domination of one political party (the PRI, Partido Revolu-
cionario Institucional), and of how such factors contributed to the stasis
of what could have been an emancipatory project. My interest in this film
is related to Gleyzer’s personal investment in examining the historical and
social foundations of coloniality in other parts of Latin America. In do-
ing so, Gleyzer enables a historical critique of various revolutions’ past
mistakes, but also seeks to find ways to avoid future failures. It is in this
gesture of critiquing coloniality and its embedded history of racializa-
tion and the instrumentalization of politics to subjugate the indigenous,
the impoverished, and other vast sectors of a disenfranchised Mexican
180 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

society that decoloniality is enacted. As a tragic figure who suffered the

effects of the abuse of power depicted in many of his own documentaries,
Gleyzer becomes a pivotal figure in understanding how cinema can be-
come a subversive tool to decolonize viewers’ minds and ways of looking
at documentary films.
Gleyzer intended Mexico, the Frozen Revolution to be screened at uni-
versities and workers’ unions, and by any group interested in its recep-
tion. It was supposedly a Mexican peasant who suggested the title of the
film (Gleyzer, Raymundo Gleyzer 49). The central argument in Mexico, the
Frozen Revolution is that land distribution throughout most of Mexico’s
twentieth century was markedly uneven, particularly when it came to
issues related to the long-standing politics of racialization as they inter-
sected with class-based issues. The film makes an explicit critique of the
PRI, the political party that had been in power for over five decades at
the time the film was made. Although fifty percent of Mexico’s people,
many of whom were indigenous peoples or peasants, had no land even
after the presumed success of the revolution, the PRI neglected to give
peasants technical assistance, adequate machinery, or irrigation systems,
or to establish agricultural cooperatives to assist the very people who
had supported and fought for a redistribution of land alongside Emil-
iano Zapata and Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution in the early
decades of the twentieth century. Instead, the documentary shows that
many of those who fought believed that their dreams of land distribution
and the end of serfdom had actually ended after 1910. Many of these farm-
ers were forced to continue employing primitive and inefficient farming
methods, while continuing to live in dire poverty. In light of this ground-
ing, Quijano’s words on the entanglement of race and labor are a useful
aid to understanding the dynamics against which the Mexican Revolution
sought to rebel, but that remained largely undisturbed: “The racist distri-
bution of new social identities was combined . . . with a racist distribution
of labor and the forms of exploitation of colonial capitalism. . . . Conse-
quently, the control of a specific form of labor could be, at the same time,
the control of a specific group of dominated people. A new technology of
domination/exploitation, in this case race/labor, was articulated in such
a way that the two elements appeared naturally associated” (Quijano,
“Coloniality of Power” 537). In essence, the film makes the argument that
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 181

the revolution failed those who supported it by leaving unperturbed the

mechanisms that imbricated and had rendered normative a racialization
of certain sectors of the population in order to justify the type of work
they did and thus their standing in the social hierarchy. For instance, and
as the film makes it clear, elderly indigenous people even now have to
continue working to survive, as there are no mechanisms to ensure their
well-being and protection. Such instances in the film, whether viewed on
their own or in relation to the long-standing registers of social and politi-
cal critique that I have been underscoring in this chapter, are reminders
that the Fanonian concept of the “wretched of the earth” and Leonardo
Boff ’s more recent articulation of the “dispossessed of the earth” are still
very much in place. It is against this naturalization of disenfranchisement
that I read Gleyzer’s film as a gesture toward decolonizing film aesthetics
and turning to the medium of film to critique the coloniality of race and
being.
The Frozen Revolution also makes the case that it was the PRI that was
responsible for the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968, in which more than 400
people were massacred in one afternoon.13 Since the film had been able to
use archival footage of the revolution of 1910, Gleyzer had hoped also to
make use of footage from the Tlatelolco massacre. Instead, Gleyzer was
only able to get pictures of the massacre, since all film and most images
documenting it had been confiscated by the Mexican government. Need-
less to say, Gleyzer and his small crew were able to enter Mexico and film
only clandestinely, as they did not receive the proper permits from the
Mexican government.
The film was screened in Chile within a year of Salvador Allende’s rise
to power. Chilean audiences were shocked, and in both Argentina and
Mexico the film was banned (Ardito, Raymundo). In making Mexico, the
Frozen Revolution, Gleyzer wanted to translate what he had experienced
during his visit to Cuba and find ways to materialize a socialist revolution
in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America:

Uno no puede ser extranjero en América Latina. Hay muchas co-

sas que unifican nuestra realidad, mas que nada nuestro enemigo
común. . . . Llegué a México por la necesidad de mostrar a la Revo-
lución Mexicana de 1911 a 1917 como un ejemplo vinculado con
182 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

algunos movimientos populares frustrados. Cuando un movimiento

popular carece de una precisa definición socialista, la burguesía se
apropia de las banderas de la revolución. (Ardito, Raymundo)

[One cannot be a foreigner in Latin America. There are many things

uniting our realities, particularly a common enemy. . . . I went to
Mexico to show the Mexican Revolution from 1911 to 1917 as an
example connected to failed popular movements. When a popular
movement lacks a precise socialist definition, the bourgeoisie ap-
propriates the revolution’s flags.]

In 1971 the film was screened at film festivals in Caracas, Berlin, Cannes,
Locarno, Venice, Manheim, and Adelaide. It received awards and critical
acclaim in Locarno, Manheim, and Adelaide (Gleyzer, Raymundo Gleyzer
16).
In 1973, cine de la base (cinema of the base) became a social and film
movement in Argentina whose founding idea was for people not to go
to movies, but for filmmakers to take movies to the people. In this sense,
cinema of the base already hinted at a decolonial gesture of making film
available to all people by bringing it to them. It also sought to make citi-
zens active participants in witnessing and discussing aspects of social and
political reality that deserved a more central place in local communal
spaces, rather than film theaters supporting social inequities by censoring
what got screened. The intent of the cine de la base group was to screen
films and have debates and conversations with workers, and this also be-
came an attempt to overcome the problem of distribution. In many ways,
cinema of the base shares the initial impulse of Solanas and Getino’s third
cinema, but takes on a more radical dimension and becomes interested
in engaging with societal problems on a smaller scale. For Gleyzer and
the cinema of the base, the relationship between the filmmaker and his
audience must be more horizontal. Cinema of the base would provide
copies of the films and projectors, and find spaces in which to screen the
films. By this time, it had become increasingly difficult and dangerous for
cinema of the base to show its films in Argentina. Right-wing supporters
of Juan Perón’s party persecuted Gleyzer and the other members of the
group, while all filmmakers making political films were deemed a threat.
For instance, in late 1975, the Argentine Anticommunist Association
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 183

closed down Fernando Birri’s Santa Fe Film School. Only three months
later, the military coup began, giving rise to a period known as the “dirty
war.” By late May of 1976, Gleyzer had been kidnapped, tortured, and
killed by a paramilitary group.
Gleyzer’s tragic life and the circumstances of his death in connection
to the rise of a military government bear a resemblance to Víctor Jara’s
death, which had taken place only three years earlier. After Gleyzer’s dis-
appearance, the military dictatorship sought to destroy all the negatives of
his films. Nonetheless, some of Gleyzer’s friends smuggled his films out
of Argentina by cutting them into pieces and piecing them back together
once they were safe in exile. Since Gleyzer’s death, most of his films have
been neglected and have received little critical attention. As one may see
from Gleyzer’s approach to documentary filmmaking, attention to Gleyz-
er’s works is essential if one seeks to have a better understanding of how
film engages with politics and with a critique of the longue durée of the
various modalities of coloniality, and of how Gleyzer’s politically oriented
film aesthetics sought to engage in more direct and concrete terms with
popular audiences with the ultimate intention of shifting from a colonized
film-viewing experience to what today we can call a decolonial option.

Conclusion

Upon reflecting on the filmmaking legacy of the 1960s and 1970s, one in-
evitably must emphasize the correlation between the spirit that the Cuban
Revolution imprinted across Latin America and the ways in which leftist
ideologies influenced the development of innovative and combative film
aesthetics. Filmmakers such as Solanas, Getino, Gutiérrez Alea, Solás, and
Gleyzer aimed to employ film as a medium through which to explore em-
bedded problems as instantiations of coloniality in their respective societ-
ies, while also presenting critiques of long-standing histories of oppres-
sion. As I have argued, it is in these critiques of social injustice, even if the
individual approaches are markedly different, that I have sought to trace
decolonial gestures toward an undoing, challenging, and contesting of the
coloniality of visual aesthetics, or visuality writ large. In relation to the
cinematic experimentations and innovative film approaches arising from
this period, Joanna Page has noted, “Interestingly, recourse to documen-
tary modes of filmmaking, or the incursion of ‘documentary’ techniques
184 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

into fiction, has accompanied both the rise and the demise of socialism in
Latin America” (5). While Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces
paved the way for a new type of politically and socially committed docu-
mentary filmmaking praxis, the film also lent itself to subsequent theori-
zation about the new direction that Latin American cinema ought to take
in response to Hollywood and European cinema. It was with Solanas and
Getino’s film manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema” that political cinema
in Latin America sought to redefine itself as different from foreign con-
ventions as forms of the coloniality of visuality, while seeking new means
of expression and producing new film aesthetics to contest such forms of
coloniality.
During the same period, similar film approaches, using fiction films,
were being explored in Cuba. Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelop-
ment fictionalized the internal tensions of its protagonist. To emphasize
Sergio’s disconnect with the changes under Castro’s regime and the po-
litical tensions of the Cold War, the film incorporated footage from news
broadcasts to resemble the assumed veracity of a documentary. Likewise,
the film also made use of still shots to underscore the protagonist’s grow-
ing alienation from his society. In this attempt to underscore the tensions
within a coloniality of knowledge, gender, and race, Gutiérrez Alea intro-
duced subtle decolonial gestures to challenge these modes of coloniality
through film aesthetics.
Whereas Solanas and Getino’s film was heavily invested in situating
what they perceived to be the ripeness of a growing revolutionary spirit
in Argentina and Latin America within a historical narrative, Gutiérrez
Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment employed fiction as a way to mark a
contrast between bourgeois sensibilities under Fulgencio Batista’s regime
and the way in which the elite had no place in revolutionary Cuba. In
other words, both films wanted to engage with history, although through
different approaches. In the case of Humberto Solás, his filmmaking style
reveals a complex relationship among fiction, melodrama, and analysis of
historical events as tragedy. In the case of Lucía, Solás explores the role
and situation of women at three revolutionary moments in Cuba’s his-
tory. The film conveys a progression in women’s consciousness and how
women have fought to emancipate themselves from the control of a pa-
triarchal society. As discussed above, I read Lucía as a film that very di-
rectly engages with the question of coloniality of gender, and through this
 Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema · 185

engagement with melodrama and history produces decolonial gestures

to show instances in which patriarchy can be contested. In contrast, Can-
tata de Chile is a more ambitious film project that incorporates sculpture,
painting, music, poetry, theater, and deliberate film techniques to present
a historical reflection on four moments in Chile’s history: colonial times,
independence, 1907, and the 1970s. As the bulk of the film’s narrative takes
place in 1907, Solás employs temporal shifts, and changes in costumes,
lighting, and colors to denote the continuity of liberation struggles in
Chile. As discussed in the section dedicated to this film, I read Cantata
de Chile as a film that engages with a multilayered way of producing a cri-
tique of various modes of coloniality by tracing a transhistorical arc that
connects instances of collective resistance in Chile.
In comparison to Solanas and Getino, Gutiérrez Alea, and Solás, Ray-
mundo Gleyzer’s documentary films have until recently been largely ne-
glected as part of an analysis of third cinema or the development of New
Latin American Cinema. Given Gleyzer’s interest in documenting social
realities and historical problems on a smaller scale, rather than creating
broad historical narratives as many of his contemporaries have done, it
is important to resituate his work within a period of socially committed
and politically charged filmmaking that had a profound impact across
Latin America, as well as in Africa and Asia. During Gleyzer’s time, his
work was well-received by popular sectors and by critics, though after his
disappearance, and perhaps due to the limited availability of his films,
his legacy fell into oblivion. As discussed in the last part of this chapter,
Gleyzer’s interest in exploring social and historical conditions in Argen-
tina, Brazil, and Mexico is something that also sets him apart from the
other three filmmakers discussed here. Whereas Solanas and Getino
produced The Hour of the Furnaces in Argentina, and Gutiérrez Alea and
Solás produced their respective films in Cuba, Gleyzer went to the differ-
ent locations where he wanted to shoot, regardless of how remote they
were or what the political situation was. It is in this context, for instance,
that Mexico, the Frozen Revolution appears as a documentary and histori-
cal document that explores where the Mexican Revolution fell short of
materializing redistribution of land and ending social inequities as a way
of undoing coloniality, while the film also presents a strong critique of the
PRI’s control over Mexican politics for most of the twentieth century and
discusses the massacre of Tlatelolco at a time when Mexican authorities
186 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

wanted to avoid further discussions of that event. Screening of the film in

various places across Latin America was met with popular support and
censorship from the governments of Argentina and Mexico. Furthermore,
Gleyzer’s approach to filmmaking and exhibiting his works under the
principles of cinema of the base—making films for audiences, presenting
films in small locations, and engaging viewers in an active discussion—
marks a continuity with and an aesthetic-ideological departure from third
cinema and New Latin American Cinema.
The four filmmakers discussed in this chapter serve to illustrate some
of the major and perhaps most distinct approaches to engaging with the
critical and social challenges present in the articulation of New Latin
American Cinema in its attempt to distinguish itself from Hollywood and
European films (first and second cinemas) and to contest dominant films
emulating foreign film language. More importantly, all five filmmakers
had divergent aesthetic agendas when producing the films for which they
are best-known. Despite their marked differences in film styles, aesthetic
innovations, and engagement with historical analysis and critique, they
also share common ground in seeking to effect social change and con-
nect in more concrete and direct ways with audiences. In short, Solanas
and Getino, Gutiérrez Alea, Solás, and Gleyzer advanced alternative cin-
ematic models to distinguish the social realities and technological means
available to Latin America from Hollywood and European conventions,
which could no longer be adequately replicated or adapted to suit the
needs and aesthetic innovations of New Latin American Cinema film-
makers. It is these modes of contesting the coloniality of visuality that I
have traced as decolonial gestures in their respective proposals and ap-
proaches to filmmaking.
 5
x
Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America

Throughout this book, my theorization of decolonial aesthetics has been

grounded upon a need to revisit seemingly dissimilar and disjointed so-
called “populist” artistic expressions, some of which failed to receive
much critical recognition in their time, while others have become part
of the canon of cultural texts that get taught and written about in aca-
demic circles. Precisely due to their alleged “populist” agenda and pre-
sumed alignment with Marxist, communist, or socialist ideologies, the
poets, musicians, and filmmakers studied here were often dismissed on
the grounds that their works belonged to a low type of art that lacked
formal qualities and aesthetic value. Returning to issues related to high
and low art is necessary to engage in alternative modes of thinking that
dismantle disciplinary boundaries, while questioning what is worth ex-
ploring or knowing. In this vein, decolonial aesthetics becomes a type of
“low theory” that can be at once “a mode of accessibility, but we might also
think about it as a kind of theoretical model that flies below the radar,
that is assembled from eccentric texts and examples and that refuses to
confirm the hierarchies of knowing that maintain the high in high theory”
(Halberstam 16, emphasis in original). According to a certain sector of
the academic establishment, cultural critics, right-wing governments, and
apolitical audiences of the time, art forms defined as low did not display
artistic merit worthy of critical attention.1 On the other hand, these art-
works also produced a fear among elite sectors and governments across
Latin America that if the general public were to consume such popular or
ideologically based artworks, communist or socialist values coming from
Cuba and the U.S.S.R. would spread like wildfire and ignite cultural and
188 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

social revolutions. As a result, often, artists such as Roque Dalton, Víc-

tor Jara, Raymundo Gleyzer, Jorge Sanjinés, Mario Benedetti, and oth-
ers faced political persecution or obstacles that made it difficult for them
to produce such art in their respective countries. In extreme instances, as
was the case with Jara and Gleyzer, rising political dictatorships (in Chile
and Argentina, in their cases) made it a point to “eliminate” contentious
voices emerging from the arts. In other instances, artists faced self-exile
and often gravitated toward Cuba or other countries with less-repressive
governments than those of the mid-1970s in the Southern Cone and Cen-
tral America.
Given the debates about the nature of culture in Latin America, from
the Manichean binaries of civilization vs. barbarism or Ariel vs. Caliban,
as succinctly illustrated toward the end of chapter 1, “Sensing Otherwise,”
I see antipoetry, nueva canción, and New Latin American cinema as artic-
ulations of the arts seeking to challenge such binaries. While the focus of
this book falls upon antipoetry, nueva canción, and New Latin American
Cinema as particular expressions of art that sought to contest established
and accepted notions of what constituted poetry, music, and cinema, I
also seek to draw attention to some of the heterogeneous positions and
artistic/aesthetic propositions within these movements. Many of their
poets, musicians, and filmmakers shared common points in their aes-
thetic propositions, but there were also divergent approaches to challenge
the hegemony of a specific definition of what constituted culture in Latin
America, particularly around a canonical or elite perception of culture.
What binds these three articulations of art is the desire to decolonize a
perception of what constitutes valid art/culture by presenting radical de-
partures from established aesthetic models, inserting a political dimen-
sion into artistic production, and seeking to reach and communicate with
audiences in more effective and horizontal ways in order to collapse the
traditional hierarchical relation of intellectual/artist and audience.
In the case of musicians of nueva canción, for instance, it is true that
most, if not all, incorporated folk elements into their music. As an exam-
ple, Violeta Parra renewed an interest in autochthonous Chilean rhythms
and incorporated them into a movement that aimed to revive and con-
serve such traditions, while also making it available to a wider public.
While many people identified with such musical innovations, as a musical
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 189

movement, nueva canción became emblematic of connecting working

classes from urban centers to the countryside.
While poetry had been dominated by poets of polished poetic lan-
guage and form (e.g., Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, José
Lezama Lima), many of whom were part of the avant-garde poetic move-
ments of the decades preceding World War II and thereafter, one can ar-
gue that, notwithstanding their ideological affiliations or poetic innova-
tions, their poetic output remained hermetic and at the vanguard. As the
poetic giants of Latin American poetry in the twentieth century, these
poets of language and form were the point of reference for younger poets,
who sought either to emulate or contest them. Critics and elite circles ap-
preciated, consumed, and found pleasure and aesthetic value in the mean-
ing behind their verses. Instead, and following here Benedetti’s suggested
concept of an ethics of rebelliousness, some Latin American antipoets
(Nicanor Parra, Mario Benedetti, Roque Dalton, Ernesto Cardenal, and
others) sought to rebel against these giants by breaking away from poetic
forms, while transgressing the genre in the most extreme way by making
poetic language readable, colloquial, conversational, and accessible to the
everyday reader.
The established poets believed in and became part of the myth of what
Angel Rama dubbed the lettered city, while remaining unresponsive to its
underside: the unlettered city. The unlettered city, which is to say those
who stand at the margins of the power of the letter and who have little use
for metaphors or innovations in poetic form, became the antipoets’ target
audience. The antipoets recognized the need to debunk the conception
that poetry was exclusively for a distinct readership able to deal with its
impenetrability. As such, the antipoets stood at the gates of the lettered
city with a double gaze toward the poetic giants, canonized writers, and
star authors, while also looking toward what remained outside. The letter
became the wall that separated those within the city from those outside of
it.
If the lettered city became a trope useful to understanding the liter-
ary culture of Latin America, artists in other cultural forms and genres
also understood the mythical implications of such claims. In an effort
to appeal to larger audiences often excluded by the power of the letter,
filmmakers and musicians turned to popular culture as a way to invite all
190 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

people to partake of their work, though the primary interest was placed
in those often shut out by high art. By aiming to appeal to workers, stu-
dents, leftist intellectuals, and non-readers (those who are illiterate or
who simply choose not to read), popular culture became the most effec-
tive medium through which to critique the two dimensions of dominant
culture: U.S. and European on the one hand, and elitist and vanguard-
ist creole (criollo—culturally, linguistically, and racially mixed with often
xenophilic and Eurocentric sensibilities) on the other.
In the case of New Latin American Cinema, its main goal was to gen-
erate an alternative way of filmmaking to address the problems of social
inequality, political oppression, and the possibility of a new social order.
Gutiérrez Alea, Solanas, Solás, and Gleyzer are the focus in this study of
the cinematic expression of third cinema, though other filmmakers could
also be included in this category (e.g., Patricio Guzmán, Miguel Littín,
Glauber Rocha, Jorge Sanjinés, etc.). While each of these filmmakers had
proposed his respective cinematic project, they all had also produced
modes of artistic execution and theoretical propositions that stood on
common ground with each other. Collectively, these filmmakers sought
to create national cinemas that contributed to a regional cinema with dis-
tinct aesthetics from dominant Hollywood or European models.
The conjoining factor that links antipoets, nueva canción musicians,
and third cinema filmmakers—although they might seem disparate artis-
tic forms and cultural products—is the way in which the artists have ne-
gotiated ideological commitment, aesthetic innovation, and transgression
of their respective genres in the service of a wider audience. As Rama sug-
gests, political, social, and artistic movements draw from their own “na-
tional traditions” and obey “the historical momentum” that gives rise to
such movements (Rama 99). The regional purview of the present study
seeks to evince the ways in which a historical momentum manifests itself
in countercultural artworks and their place within a national and regional
cultural tradition.
In this sense, I see decolonial aesthetics as an approach to understand-
ing different artistic genres, aesthetic propositions, and artistic projects
within antipoetry, nueva canción, and third cinema. Put differently, I
am proposing the concept of decolonial aesthetics as a way to examine
and understand these artistic movements both for its ways of question-
ing established artistic models and for its interest in reinserting into the
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 191

arts a political dimension and commitment to effecting social change

across Latin America. A problem present in the study is the seemingly
irreconcilable juxtaposition of “decolonial,” suggestive of an undoing of
experiential subjugation, and aesthetics, which has been linked to theo-
ries about how we come to appreciate art and the value we assign to it.
As an initial response to this seeming conundrum, decolonial aesthetics
becomes a prism through which we can revisit, reinterpret, and reevalu-
ate a period that gave birth to distinct art forms in poetry, music, film,
and other spheres of Latin American popular culture. Rather than treat-
ing the multiple aesthetic propositions in poetry, music, and film as irrec-
oncilable and isolated from each other, this project seeks to trace points
of convergence and divergence to place them in dialogue. By resituating
these art forms in their historical, cultural, and ideological contexts, I seek
to unravel the connecting threads that make up these works’ aesthetic-
political projects with their manifold schisms and linkages.
Before proceeding with a theorization of decolonial aesthetics, I will
provide some examples that examine the usage of the decolonial in its
practical sense. From examples of decolonial practices, I shift to some
of the interventions about aesthetics that inform my theorization. In the
fourth section, we come to a more elaborate exposition of what decolo-
nial aesthetics entails, and its implications for the artworks studied here.

Philosophy of Liberation and Decolonial Aesthetics

My conceptualization of decolonial aesthetics is indebted to Enrique

Dussel’s philosophy of liberation, particularly his aesthetics of liberation.
Dussel argues that the project of liberation enables the expression and the
exposition of semiotic, poietic, and poetic beauty (Dussel, Philosophy of
Liberation 124). The expression of such aesthetics is concerned with the
past, present, and future of oppression and what a process of liberation
can achieve. For Dussel, the value of such liberatory expressions lies in
the possibility of what is to come. That is, Dussel is concerned with the
potentiality of the aesthetics of liberation. On a different level, however,
there is acknowledgment in Dussel’s thought of how an appreciation and
evaluation of the aesthetics of liberation necessitates a different mindset
and a different perspective on aesthetic categories. In reference to the aes-
thetics of liberation, Dussel notes:
192 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Its exposition is ugly according to the rules and canons of beauty

currently in force; but it is an innovation of the formal coherence of
signs and is therefore procreation of the beauty of a new order.
The apparent ugliness of the countenance of the oppressed, the
withered face of the farmer, the hardened hand of the laborer, the
rough skin of the impoverished woman (who cannot buy cosmet-
ics), is the point of departure of the aesthetics of liberation. It is the
entreaty that reveals popular beauty, the non-dominating beauty,
the liberator of future beauty. Aestheticism is the dominant ideo-
logical imposition of the beauty admired by cultures of the center
and of the oligarchical classes (imposed by the mass media). It is the
ideology of beauty. (Philosophy of Liberation 124–125)

In other words, Dussel suggests quotidian sources from which the aes-
thetics of liberation draws its expression and points to how these will not
always be deemed beautiful according to existing precepts of aesthetics.
Instead, the artworks akin to aesthetics of liberation seek to represent
and express what would conventionally not be considered beautiful or
even worthy of being represented in art. The aesthetics of liberation is
concerned with subjects construed as unworthy of representation due to
their lack of conformity to what we come to expect when exposed to art.
In this sense, the aesthetics of liberation challenges the very concept of
what constitutes beauty, how we define, experience, view, and interpret
it. Moreover, the aesthetics of liberation challenges the ideological foun-
dations behind existing aesthetic frameworks and offers an alternative to
them.
Despite some overlaps between Dussel’s conceptualization of the aes-
thetics of liberation and decolonial aesthetics, there are also some fine dif-
ferences between them. Among these are terminology, how theory trans-
lates into praxis, and the identifiable characteristics that align artworks
with either model of aesthetics. In principle, Dussel’s aesthetics privileges
the final result of liberatory art, in the sense that the emphasis is placed
on achieving liberation, with little attention paid to the means of or me-
dium for obtaining it. The potentiality of what liberatory art can achieve
becomes the ultimate goal on the horizon of possibilities. The means and
precise processes of liberation through aesthetics are merely suggested.
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 193

Likewise, in Dussel’s philosophical proposition, the shift from theory to

praxis is not sufficiently delineated.
Decolonial aesthetics, however, takes a step back from the insistence
on liberation as the ultimate goal and assumes that decolonization is only
the first step on an arduous road toward a seemingly more distant libera-
tion. The link between decolonization and aesthetics is embedded in the
connection between theory (in the form of manifestos and critical writ-
ing) and praxis (in the form of artworks). It should be noted here, how-
ever, that for artworks to be understood in terms of decolonial aesthetics,
an aesthetic manifesto is not always a prerequisite. As we have seen in the
preceding chapters, some decolonial artists drafted aesthetic manifestoes
and put them into practice in their own art, as in the case of Solanas and
Getino. Other decolonial artists, however, refrained from putting into a
formal manifesto their aesthetic propositions, though these can be gath-
ered based on modes of artistic production and the art itself. With this in
mind, decolonial aesthetics embraces as its primary purpose the need to
communicate directly in concrete and discernible language with the op-
pressed, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised.
Another central difference between the aesthetics of liberation and
decolonial aesthetics is how the two models define the role of the intel-
lectual (as a philosopher, public intellectual, or artist), as well as how the
intellectual relates to her or his audiences. Dussel makes the assumption
that “the most oppressed classes do not always have the most acute criti-
cal awareness” (Philosophy of Liberation 125). According to Dussel, it is up
to another class (that is, intellectuals) to take on the role of materializ-
ing or bringing about such an awareness of oppression. This position, of
course, reveals Dussel’s indebtedness to a Marxist understanding of the
role of the intellectual in social struggles. For Dussel, then, the philoso-
pher “as an organic intellectual, as militant, can express the criticism of a
people with the maximum of precision even if, by birth, culture, or work,
the philosopher does not, from the beginning, belong to the oppressed
classes” (Philosophy of Liberation 125). Extending Dussel’s intervention
about the role of the philosopher as organic intellectual to other types of
intellectuals, we can observe that the artists who are the focus of Sensing
Decolonial Aesthetics made it a point to create the “right” medium in which
to express the marginalization and subjugation of the oppressed.
194 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

I concur with Dussel’s assertion that there are inherent contradic-

tions that intellectuals experience in the clash of competing ideological
and class-based allegiances. In many cases, the intellectuals in the present
study belonged to the middle or upper middle classes, and yet they chose
to engage with social problems pertaining to working and impoverished
sectors of the population in their respective countries. I differ, however,
from Dussel in his understanding of the role of the intellectual. Dussel
sees the intellectual as one who speaks for the oppressed, as someone
who has the critical tools to express and articulate the various modalities
of oppression. In this sense, the role of the intellectual is paternalistic and
hierarchical. Dussel suggests that the relationship of the intellectual and
the oppressed class for which the former speaks is that of a “teacher-pupil,
thinker-people” (Philosophy of Liberation 178). This formulation privileges
a specific kind of knowledge and thinking, and a specific mode of articu-
lating oppression and subjugation. Following Gramsci, Dussel introduces
a pedagogical relationship between the intellectual and the oppressed.
Nonetheless, if such a pedagogical relationship remains vertical, the in-
tellectual remains an outsider-insider: an outsider due to his or her own
ideological, educational, and class background, but also an insider based
on his or her concerns for social justice as issues affecting a social class
different from his or her own.
Decolonial aesthetics differs from this hierarchical model by asserting
that the intellectual, despite his or her own tensions and outsider status,
ought to engage in horizontal and symbiotic pedagogical relationships
with the oppressed. As much as the intellectual has the critical tools to ar-
ticulate social inequities, without the experiential and popular knowledge
of the oppressed, the intellectual has little foundation on which to base a
critique of oppression. In other words, the relationship between the intel-
lectual and the oppressed is that of mutual learning and mutual need (that
is, of mutuality and interdependence). The intellectual learns as much
from popular thinking as the oppressed learn from the intellectual. In
the case of decolonial aesthetics, the ultimate relationship of pedagogical
mutuality is that in which the intellectual as artist does not merely voice
or critique oppression, but provides the tools that allow the oppressed
to participate actively in the process of critique (as in the works of Ray-
mundo Gleyzer). Of course, not every decolonial artist is able to engage
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 195

in this level of mutual pedagogical critique, but those who did so in the
1960s became clear symbols with whom the oppressed found it easier to
identify and whom they were able to call their own (e.g., Violeta Parra,
Víctor Jara, Roque Dalton, Ernesto Cardenal, Raymundo Gleyzer, etc.).
The importance of mutuality and interdependence between the in-
tellectual and the oppressed echoes the positions found in the works of
Paolo Freire and Rodolfo Kusch. For instance, in Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed (1970), he insists that such pedagogy must be created with,
and not for, the oppressed. Moreover, the oppressed “must perceive the
reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit,
but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (34). The artist as
intellectual and teacher has an obligation to express his ideas clearly to
his intended audience. Only in this way can decolonial art be effective in
raising consciousness among audiences about their oppression and how
to challenge it.
In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Alain Badiou introduces three sche-
mata, which he terms didacticism, romanticism, and classicism. Didacti-
cism is related to Plato’s views on the arts in relation to society and poli-
tics. The romantic schema argues that “art alone is capable of truth” (3).
Classicism, which Badiou equates with an Aristotelian view of aesthetics,
mediates between these two extremes, didacticism and romanticism. En-
gaging with the intricacies and subtleties of these three schemata is be-
yond my concerns here. Yet, given the emphasis on aesthetics and edu-
cation in both Dussel and Freire, it becomes important to reflect briefly
on this notion of the didactic dimension of aesthetics. According to Ba-
diou, one of the knots that ties art, philosophy, and education together
is the power given to art as a form of control or a didactics of the senses
(2–3). By this I understand that art becomes a means by which to instruct
a population on how to sense art in specific ways that sustain and uphold
values and categories that follow a Eurocentric conception of art and the
truths derived from them. It is not that education (or the didactic schema
of the arts) in itself necessarily has negative effects. Instead, I am drawing
attention to the particular dangers of holding up a given poet (say Mal-
larmé) or a director (say Truffaut) as a parameter according to which we
value and evaluate poetry and films from non-European locations. Simply
put, Latin American arts respond to and produce their own sets of truths,
196 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

which mirror the historically embedded realities and particularities of

Latin American social contexts to engage with audiences in a didactic re-
lation in which the arts indeed have something to teach and offer. This
didactic relation transfixes or shifts the relationship between art and dom-
inant conceptions of aesthetics. As such, art produced from this didactic
perspective (closer to Freire’s understanding of didactics and pedagogy
than Badiou’s) is capable of enacting its own aesthetic categories (anti-
poetry, third cinema, nueva canción, etc.). The aim of this didacticism is
limited to seeking to engage audiences in a sensorial confrontation with
artworks aimed at producing indignation and to showing Latin America’s
history of oppression, which in today’s categories we call coloniality.
Rodolfo Kusch presents us with similar critical challenges to the im-
portance we give to popular thought. For instance, in his Indigenous and
Popular Thinking in América, Kusch insists that when we are confronted
with the task of distinguishing between European and Latin American
thinking, it is not simply a matter of dismissing Western philosophy. In-
stead, Kusch argues for the need to “look for a formulation closer to our
own lives” (1). By this Kusch means that it is not to enough adapt Western
philosophy to a Latin American context or merely to emphasize and re-
valorize indigenous and popular thought. Instead, “it is necessary to think
at the margins of the categories of economics, of civilization, or of cul-
ture” (Kusch, Indigenous and Popular Thinking 7). In this sense, as a way
to bring about an awareness of oppression, as Freire argued, Kusch pro-
poses that intellectuals must go beyond established parameters of West-
ern thought, and always work in tandem with those we have been calling
throughout this book the oppressed, the wretched, the dispossessed, and
the disenfranchised.
Returning to Enrique Dussel’s articulation of the aesthetics of libera-
tion, in a more recent text, Dussel rethinks the role of the philosopher of
liberation to assert that such a person should neither engage in ventrilo-
quism (speaking for the other) nor “undertake a concrete task in order to
overcome or negate some petit-bourgeois sense of guilt” (“Philosophy of
Liberation, the Postmodern Debate” 342). The critique I posited before
still stands in Dussel’s reformulation, particularly as the philosopher of
liberation is still constructed as the subject who struggles and critiques
oppression for the other. Within the same reformulation, Dussel asserts
that the philosophy of liberation
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 197

assumes the responsibility of fighting for the other, the victim,

the woman oppressed by patriarchy, and for the future generation
which will inherit a ravaged Earth, and so on—that is, it assumes
responsibility for all possible sorts of alterity. And it does so with
an ethical, “situated” consciousness, that of any human being with
an ethical “sensibility” and the capacity to become outraged when
recognizing the injustice imposed on the other. (“Philosophy of
Liberation, the Postmodern Debate” 342)

There are inherent logical contradictions in Dussel’s argument. First, he

asserts that the philosopher of liberation does not speak or act on behalf
of the other, and then, immediately following this statement, claims that
the philosophy itself assumes and accepts the “responsibility” of fighting
for the other, the oppressed. My objection to this formulation is the em-
phasis on the way the relationship between the philosopher and the op-
pressed is constructed. For Dussel, the philosopher does things for the
oppressed. In contrast, the decolonial intellectual as artist recognizes her
or his ethical duty to critique what is unethical, unjust, that which is em-
bedded in inequity, oppression, and subjugation, and becomes outraged
when witnessing injustice, but always with or alongside the oppressed, the
dispossessed. The decolonial artist also has an ethical “sensibility” and a
“situated” consciousness, as Dussel suggests. If the decolonial intellectual
as artist recognizes and assumes an ethical duty, it is to employ his or her
artistic medium to critique injustice, and to inform and educate the op-
pressed, but also to learn from them, to engage in dialogue with them in
a horizontal relationship of mutuality as a decolonial strategy. A comple-
mentary part of the artist’s duty is the acknowledgment that decolonial
artists are also learning from the oppressed, from popular thought, and
that the source of inspiration for their decolonial art is the oppression
they witness on an everyday basis, as are popular thinking and means of
expression, which have been negated and relegated for so long. In sum,
the decolonial artist seeks to articulate injustice and oppression with and
not only for the oppressed. Achieving such a balance in the relationship
between decolonial artist and the oppressed becomes a critical challenge
and an ongoing aesthetic-political-ethical project.
198 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Coloniality and Decolonial Aesthetics

Contrary to long-existing perceptions that correlate aesthetics with the

idea of beauty or sublime experiences, decolonial aesthetics cannot en-
gage with such concepts, as many of the artists studied here deemed both
categories bourgeois and devoid of social concerns. An alternative, how-
ever, would be to follow Dussel’s and Kusch’s critical invitation to view
what is popular—the quotidian, a hardened face, portrayals of dire pov-
erty—as beautiful or worthy of artistic representation. However, this
would necessitate a reevaluation of the categories of analysis, judgment,
taste, and emotional response to aesthetic stimuli. At the foundation of
decolonial aesthetics is a convergence of Marxist/socialist ideology with
ideas about liberation, decolonization, creating a national identity, pro-
moting national culture, building alliances with regional partners, and
turning to different modes of creating works of art to move and engage
audiences. Steering away from principles of passivity, complacency, com-
fort, and enjoyment, decolonial aesthetics turns to social realism (not to
be confused with early twentieth century forms of realism) and every-
day means of communication as ways to generate in audiences contrast-
ing emotions of pleasure, enjoyment, anger, and frustration. Decolonial
aesthetics’ intent is to translate the aesthetic experience into a source of
social awareness, political engagement, and potential identification with
others experiencing deplorable labor conditions, inadequate access to
education, selective access to health, uneven distribution of wealth, sys-
temic sexism, and other state practices that make social welfare and eq-
uity a reality for an elite few, but only an elusive mirage for the majority.
As such, in decolonial art, the images and techniques in a film, the instru-
mentation or lyrics in a song, or the verses and imagery in a poem are per-
haps not enjoyable, beautiful, or sublime if they are studied, understood,
and evaluated in terms of established parameters of aesthetics. However,
if antipoetry, nueva canción, or the films of New Latin American Cinema
were to be reevaluated in terms of decolonial aesthetics, the decolonial
would be added to existing evaluative aesthetic categories. In turn, these
artistic movements draw attention to a need to challenge or go against
hegemonic and elitist constructions of culture.
Decolonial aesthetics thus steers away from precepts that determine
the value and quality of a given work of art based on its presumed formal
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 199

accomplishment, technical innovation, or favorable critical reception.

Likewise, decolonial aesthetics does not qualify a work of art in terms of
binary categories as either good or bad, high or low, pleasant or unpleas-
ant. Instead, decolonial artists are concerned with connecting with audi-
ences for whom “high art” might be irrelevant. In doing so, decolonial
artists present audiences with artistic works that problematize the rela-
tion between art and audiences. They also question the medium, tech-
niques, language, messages, and purpose of art beyond the principle of
entertainment. This is not to say, however, that decolonial artists create
art divorced from leisure. Quite the contrary; leisure is constitutive of the
decolonial aesthetic, as it becomes a way to awaken audiences to systemic
inequities and politicize the aesthetic experience. Decolonial aesthetics
injects a political dimension into leisure, so that leisure is no longer sim-
ply used for escapism. Instead, decolonial art confronts its audiences with
their quotidian realities, while exposing systemic inequities. In doing so,
decolonial art reminds audiences of how coloniality shapes their daily
existence.
Another foundation for this proposed framework for the study of a
constellation of artists at a particular moment in Latin America’s cultural
history lies in the recent work of Latin Americanist scholars, particularly
those who have been working around the concept of coloniality. The basis
for such groups finds its seeds in Aníbal Quijano’s theorization of coloni-
ality. For Quijano, the categories employed to divide groups along racial
and national axes reveal a hierarchical relation of power that traditionally
privileged the race and culture of Europeans and other whites over those
of mestizos, blacks, or indigenous peoples. In essence, coloniality names
the pervasive mechanisms of colonial subjugation and social stratification
that gave European elites control over mestizos, indigenous peoples, and
blacks during colonial times. Coloniality also underscores the processes
of the transfer of power from European elites to mestizo elites with the
advent of Latin American republics in the nineteenth century. As such,
racial divisions were rearticulated and disguised as class divisions, which
maintained the hierarchical structures of subjugation despite the shift
in power from one group to another. In other words, coloniality reveals
the mechanisms of subjugation and dominance that have pinned similar
groups together in colonial and postcolonial (that is, post-independence)
times, though the categories and terms of power relations have evolved
200 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

with time. Coloniality expresses a continuum in the forms of domination,

despite the perceived notion that with independence, equality became a
reality for all social and racial groups.2
The concept of coloniality also points to an uneven relation of post-
independence cultures in Latin America with European and U.S. mod-
els, particularly with the pervasive dichotomy of inferiority-superiority
that Leopoldo Zea and Germán Arciniegas identified during this period.3
Linked to the conceptualization of coloniality are Raúl Prebisch’s con-
cepts of center-periphery, which named the uneven economic relation-
ships among Europe, the United States, and Latin America. This relation
left those at the periphery (such as those in Latin America) in a state
of dependency on those at the center (the United States and Europe).4
While this concept is pertinent to economics, it has also been widely
used to describe relations of power in postcolonial studies and world-sys-
tems analysis, and for decolonial scholars, the concept became a point of
departure.
The remnants of colonial hierarchical relations of power continued to
facilitate ways for those in control of nation-states to exclude and alienate
large sectors of the population via racist, sexist, and classist mechanisms
of oppression. Since coloniality names the mechanisms and continuities
of oppression from colonial times through post-independence in Latin
America, I propose the category of decolonial as a way to understand the
ways in which antipoetry, nueva canción, and New Latin American Cin-
ema artists were addressing such long-standing social inequities.5 While
some artists were preoccupied with exploring issues surrounding eco-
nomic domination, others were concerned with political and institu-
tionalized authority as another form of domination. Some became pre-
occupied with addressing issues around gender, while others focused on
subjectivity and knowledge. Around the concept of coloniality, these four
axes (race, economics, ontology, and knowledge) have been identified
as the domains that give birth to a colonial matrix of power.6 As seen in
the preceding chapters, decolonial artists approached these domains of
power and sometimes attempted to engage multiple domains within the
same artwork.
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 201

Coloniality of Knowledge and Decolonial Aesthetics

We should understand coloniality of knowledge as an axis of the colo-

niality of power that articulates the uneven modalities of production-
consumption of cultural capital. This leads to a hierarchical relationship
of power that determines who produces and who consumes cultural arti-
facts and knowledge. This relationship also opens two parallel questions:
1. Who is in a position to judge what type of knowledge gets produced,
and how? 2. Who gets to consume that knowledge? For instance, in the
mid-1960s, Augusto Salazar Bondy argued for the need for a cohesive and
conjoined effort among Latin American nations in superseding a long-
standing “culture of dependency” in relation to the West, while also chal-
lenging the logic of underdevelopment. For Salazar Bondy, a reaffirma-
tion of the value of national culture cannot hope to challenge the culture
of dependency without a transregional consciousness-raising and valori-
zation of Latin American national cultural models.7 Among Latin Ameri-
can intellectuals there has been a long history of intellectual dependency
as they looked toward European models of cultural knowledge. In doing
so, Latin American intellectuals assumed (almost unproblematically) a
subaltern position in the matrix of knowledge production-consumption.
The colonial heritage that denied native knowledge any worth or value,
and imposed its own aesthetic values, persisted through the foundation
of new republics and remained almost unmodified into the twentieth
century.8
In relation to an epistemic shift that decenters Eurocentric knowledge,
Grosfoguel has argued for the need to make a distinction between “epis-
temic location” and “social location.” Grosfoguel adds the following:
The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power
relations, does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically
thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success
of the modern/colonial world-system consists in making subjects
that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial dif-
ference, to think epistemically like the ones on the dominant posi-
tions. (67)
In this distinction there is an implicit call to reevaluate Latin America’s
intellectual and cultural traditions and how these have perpetuated a
202 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

non-critical epistemic perspective on the Eurocentric production and

consumption of knowledge. There is also an implication that artists as in-
tellectuals ought to situate themselves within these intellectual traditions
as a way to determine the effects of the uneven production and consump-
tion of knowledge (including art) and how this has led the oppressed to
think and embrace the values of the oppressor.
Following Grosfoguel, then, the situated subject-producer of subal-
tern knowledge—a type of knowledge seeking to challenge Eurocentric
or dominant types of knowledge—needs to establish a relation to ethnic,
racial, gender, sexual, political, social, and class-based demands and epis-
temic locations. In doing so, this situated subject-producer of knowledge
refrains from further mythologizing the Western claim to and need for
universal truths and absolutist categories, which have led to the West’s
self-validation and self-justification as the bearer of logic, knowledge, and
culture in terms of modes of sensing or aesthetics. Around the sixteenth
century the West stratified knowledge into binaries that demarcated the
barrier between those with advanced, superior, and valid knowledge, and
those without. By extension, this also served to justify oppressors as su-
perior beings and the oppressed as inferiors.9 As Grosfoguel reminds us,
“We went from the sixteenth century characterization of ‘people with-
out writing’ to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization
of ‘people without history,’ to the twentieth century characterization of
‘people without development’ and more recently, to the early twenty-first
century characterization of ‘people without democracy’” (68). This criti-
cal challenge of inverting the long-standing coloniality of knowledge and
the subjugation of non-Western perspectives was taken up by decolonial
artists precisely to validate their position as outsiders in the dominant
global design. Under such rubrics as antipoetry, nueva canción, and New
Latin American Cinema, we find examples of how artists sought to distin-
guish themselves from the dominant forms of making art, while also seek-
ing to challenge the accepted ways of producing and consuming cultural
artifacts as sources of knowledge.
Needless to say, the subject-producer of knowledge in relation to deco-
lonial aesthetics seeks to make evident its epistemic location in relation to
ethnic, racial, gender, sexual, and class categorizations, while also making
political demands and identifying social inequities. The decolonial art-
ist positions her- or himself as a subaltern producer of knowledge. This
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 203

is not a claim for a populist replacement of one universal paradigm with

another. Instead, a Western or Eurocentric perspective on aesthetics has
rendered it as concerned either with theories of beauty and the sublime or
with categorical judgments on the value and merit of art. The foundation
of aesthetics presumed a uniform effect on a universal and homogeneous
audience. Simply put, it was assumed that great and beautiful artworks
would be viewed and recognized as such regardless of the viewer’s geopo-
litical location or the passage of time. The test of the aesthetic worth of a
work of art was its ability to stand the passage of time and still enrapture
audiences across the world. Of course, this only became possible through
Europe’s self-positioning and self-affirmation as the matrix of aesthetics-
producing art.
As Western or Eurocentric art has been the benchmark or paradigm for
great artworks, it is no wonder that there is a traditional claim for the cen-
trality of the Western tradition. If we return to Prebisch’s spatial metaphor
of the center-periphery dichotomy, it becomes apparent that Europe’s self-
positioning at the center of all production-consumption of knowledge
often leads to unilateral transactions of knowledge and culture in which
what is at the center remains privileged and unchallenged by peripheral
and subaltern ways of knowing. Linked to this uneven relationship of pro-
duction/consumption of knowledge was the way in which creole (criollo)
groups in Latin America historically upheld the belief that Europe was
the location to which emerging republics ought to turn as an authorized
producer of culture and knowledge. As new sites of production (in eco-
nomic, cultural, and political terms), Latin American republics continued
validating Europe’s claim to power in the center-periphery dyad by merely
modeling cultural production on European examples. Prime examples of
this can be seen in the ways in which nineteenth-century intellectuals and
authors embraced romanticism, realism, Parnassianism, symbolism, etc.
Likewise, literary and cultural critics can only examine Latin American
cultural productions via European parameters. For instance, if we were
to examine an introspective Puerto Rican novel such as Eugenio María
de Hostos’s La peregrinación de Bayoán (1863) in relation to the European
realist or psychological novel, what would be the result? As a hypothetical
exercise, is it possible to speak of Latin America’s influence on the likes of
Zola or Dostoyevsky? Clearly, such an exercise would prove unproduc-
tive and even irrelevant. This is precisely my argument here, in that most
204 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

of the cultural production emerging from Latin America from the forma-
tion of the republics until well into the twentieth century was at best imi-
tative, adaptive, or parodic, despite some attempts at creating subaltern
knowledge/culture. My argument here echoes my opening statements in
the introduction to Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics, specifically in relation to
Fernández Retamar’s and Benedetti’s positioning of the work produced
in the 1960s and how it differed from that of previous generations of au-
thors. Latin American intellectuals have always been well aware of the lat-
est ideas coming from Europe and the United States, but seldom has the
exchange of knowledge gone in the opposite direction. In the instances
in which there have been attempts at creating artworks of a different sort,
such as modernismo, novelas de la tierra or Afrocentric poetry (i.e., Luis
Palés Matos or Nicolás Guillén), such examples of cultural production
were dubbed too context-specific or regionalist (in a derogatory sense),
and thus lacking in universality. The claim and quest for the universal in
its cosmopolitan dimension is another way of placing cultural production
within the accepted framework of a Eurocentered matrix of cultural pro-
duction, reception, circulation, and consumption.
When considering this critique of coloniality of knowledge, however,
one must also be aware of the relative danger in dismissing previous intel-
lectual work due to its debt to European intellectual categories of analy-
sis, or because it operates within a Eurocentric framework of knowledge.
Doing this can lead one to seek the origins and permutations of an An-
glo-Eurocentrism that has thwarted the emergence of a Latin American
subjectivity as a non-subaltern being. In this sense, when conceptualizing
decolonial aesthetics, the question of how this form of aesthetics reacts to
cultural colonization becomes of prime importance. Following the logic
that there is an established order of dominance in which some countries
exert power while others endure it (dependency and center-periphery),
Sergio Bagú argued that someone living in a country under economic and
political subordination is more likely to be convinced that the country is
incapable of cultural creation (50). In this sense, Bagú is calling into ques-
tion the degree to which a country under cultural colonization, or what
I have been calling throughout this book the coloniality of aesthetics, is
able to engage in innovative and original processes of cultural creation.
Implicit in Bagú’s formulation is the assumption that cultural colonization
closes off the possibility of cultural emancipation, which is a necessary
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 205

step toward cultural decolonization. Furthermore, Bagú argues that when

someone embraces cultural colonization, what is encountered is a dead
end at which one realizes that the only possible way to elicit creation is to
“importar técnicas y modos de pensar y hacer de países supuestamente
superiores en el terreno de la cultura” [import techniques and modes of
thinking and doing from supposedly superior countries in the terrain of
culture] (50). Prevalent in Bagú’s assertion is the hierarchical relation that
privileges that which is foreign to Latin America. If modes of thinking,
cultural production, and critical apparatuses are produced abroad, usually
in Europe or the United States, this preference for what is foreign reveals
a xenophilic attitude that places a higher value on foreign ideas and cul-
ture over what can be produced in one’s own country. As Bagú continues
to suggest, it is usually the intellectuals and arbiters of culture who proj-
ect such xenophilic preferences onto wider sectors of the population in
a given country (50). At the root of Bagú’s critique is the suggestion that
importing foreign cultural models without a critical perspective on what
such importation does to one’s own culture is to enable the subjugation of
autochthonous culture in favor of dominant (foreign) models.
Decolonial aesthetics turns to art as its medium through which to seek
a decolonization of the mind. As such, decolonial aesthetics becomes a
model that questions accepted conventions of aesthetics and complicates
the established categories that demarcate the type of poetry, films, music,
novels, and other forms of art and cultural production that are raised to
the level of universality and canonicity, based on perceived assumptions
of their inherent value and contribution to global culture understood
strictly from a Western perspective. In other words, if elites turned to high
art to seek distinction and distance from the “plebes,” decolonial artists
embraced low or popular art forms and conjugated them with established
genres to produce art geared toward speaking directly to ordinary people
in a given country’s population. The archive of decolonial aesthetic ges-
tures to which I have been drawing attention in the preceding chapters
sought to put into practice ways of communicating with Latin American
audiences to elicit awareness of the extrinsic forces of cultural imperial-
ism and the intrinsic sub-valorization of autochthonous arts. By uncover-
ing embedded preferences for foreign cultural products over native ones,
decolonial artists sought to counteract such xenophilic tendencies.
206 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Coloniality of Being and Decolonial Aesthetics

As suggested in the previous section, coloniality of knowledge is linked

to the effects of forms of domination at the level of the mind. Nonethe-
less, it has a more concrete function due to its linkage to uneven modes
of production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge, including art.
In conjunction with the coloniality of knowledge, the concept of colonial-
ity of being deals with the various modalities of systemic oppression at
the level of lived experience and everyday language (Maldonado-Torres
96). The production and consumption of knowledge cannot be separated
or abstracted from those beings who are allowed to produce or consume
that knowledge. In this sense, the coloniality of being is preoccupied with
a re-examination of ontological categories constitutive of a Eurocentric
modernity that has validated the existence of beings as thinkers (in a Car-
tesian sense) and non-beings as incapable of rational thought.10 If coloni-
ality of knowledge has been used to justify a hierarchical relation of power
between the oppressor and the oppressed, between the privileged and the
wretched (in the Fanonian sense), it has also been used to negate the va-
lidity of popular, indigenous, or Afro-descendant thought, since those are
non-aligned with Eurocentric or Western epistemologies.11
In the work of Maldonado-Torres we find an approximation of a di-
mension of coloniality as it relates to subjectivity and knowledge, particu-
larly in connection to the coloniality of being, which is based on the work
of Levinas, Dussel, and Fanon. Maldonado-Torres argues that colonial-
ity stratifies Being into beings and non-beings. On the one hand, one can
argue that there are those who are considered full beings and therefore
fully capable of rational thought, and of creating art and appreciating it.
In contrast, for the non-beings or sub-beings, the expressions of their
thoughts are dismissed on the grounds of their irrationality. The colo-
nized non-being embraces, consumes, and internalizes such stratification
and subjugation. Upon achieving his or her political independence from
the colonizer, the colonized non-being reclaims his or her right to full hu-
manity, to create and express thoughts, to have political autonomy and
self-determination, and to voice and share previously dismissed (indig-
enous and/or popular) thought.12
In the process of independence throughout Latin America, such rights
were reclaimed for some, but negated for others. In an attempt to engage
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 207

with the question of the Eurocentric ego/subject, what coloniality seeks

to do is not merely replace one ego or subject with another; instead, de-
coloniality seeks to reposition the non-Eurocentric ego without falling
into the trap of center-periphery, which would reify a hierarchical rela-
tion of power. In so doing, decoloniality confirms the non-Eurocentric
ego as an equally valid and important being. This validation comes from
the non-Eurocentric ego or the oppressed and their ability to draw from
experiential subjugation and silencing as a means to articulate a critique
of Eurocentric logic, knowledge, and aesthetics (as related to the realm of
the perceptible).13
A pivotal component of Maldonado-Torres’s ontological critique is the
way in which language is used as a means to negate the ability of the non-
being (non-Western) subject to employ Western languages in any valid
or coherent form, let alone produce high-quality or groundbreaking art-
work. In this sense, this critique takes us back to the metaphorical correla-
tion of the barbaric (indigenous, poor, oppressed) with Caliban. In rela-
tion to this point, and as a warning of the deep-rootedness of what would
decades later be called the coloniality of knowledge and of being, Germán
Arciniegas argued the following:
El complejo del colonialismo asalta a muchas personas a cien y a
ciento cincuenta años de ganada, como se dice, la guerra de inde-
pendencia. Queda aún, como escoria, el espíritu acomplejado de
quienes, por huir del imperialismo yanqui, se precipitan a entregar
a los rusos su cuerpo y alma. O el de quienes tratan de volver a un
planteamiento colonial que coloque bajo cualquier denominación
europea al hombre americano. . . . Sólo que si hay algo íntimo, in-
transferible, es el derecho a expresarse con una voz propia, así sea
en el balbuciente iniciarse de un pequeño mundo que nace, y que
tiene, como los demás, más que el derecho, la obligación de darle un
discurso a su espíritu para mostrar la variedad innumerable de las
voces humanas. (Cosas del pueblo 78)

[One hundred and one hundred and fifty years after winning the
war of independence, as it is commonly called, the complex of colo-
nialism affects many people. There still remains, like dross, the spirit
of those with an inferiority complex who rushed to hand over their
body and soul to the Russians in an attempt to escape American
208 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

(Yankee) imperialism. And there are those who want to return to

a colonial set-up by subsuming the (Latin) American man under
any European influence. . . . But if there is something intimate, non-
transferable, it is the right to self-expression in one’s own voice, even
if it’s the stammering beginning of a small world at its birth, and
which has, like others, more than the right, the obligation to give
its spirit freedom of speech to display the great variety of human
voices.]

In this sense, Arciniegas acknowledges the implicit pervasiveness of neo-

colonial forces, or what Quijano has termed coloniality. More impor-
tantly, however, Arciniegas warns Latin Americans against easily taking
sides with the Soviets in an attempt to combat American imperialism,
while also admonishing those wanting to revert to European or Eurocen-
tric formal colonialism. Implicit in Arciniegas’s analysis is the notion that
even without the formal and permanent presence of colonial or imperial
enterprises in Latin America, there have continued to be uneven relation-
ships of power, particularly in the categorization of wide sectors of the
population as non-beings incapable of thought and speech. Arciniegas
thus makes it a point to articulate an urgent call for the oppressed and the
silenced to come together to begin articulating their demands, even if at
first what emerges is nothing other than incoherent or imperfectly for-
mulated utterances. What is important for Arciniegas is that the right to
speak no longer be taken away from the oppressed. By underscoring how
the right to speak and the right to use language serve as a means by which
to make demands and articulate injustices and various modalities of op-
pression, Arciniegas prefigures what Torres-Maldonado would articulate
almost fifty years later as the coloniality of being.
In conjunction with Arciniegas’s and Maldonado-Torres’s conceptu-
alizations of the centrality of language to the decolonization of the sub-
jugated and oppressed, I should add here the connection I see between
coloniality of being and decolonial aesthetics. Whereas the coloniality of
being names the processes by which the oppressed have been reduced to
non-beings and therefore denied the right to speak, articulate ideas, or
produce knowledge, decolonial aesthetics becomes a means by which
to challenge Eurocentric categories of the perceptible as a way to meet
the demands of the subject in the process of decolonization or undoing
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 209

coloniality. In a recent volume published in Colombia under the title of

Estéticas y opción decolonial (2012), Walter D. Mignolo and Pedro Pablo
Gómez collected an array of essays that explore the linkages between
ways of conceiving of aesthetics and decolonial thinking as an option
among the other existing political, theoretical, philosophical, historical,
and cultural alternatives available in recent times. The articles in this vol-
ume deal with thinking about aesthetics as related to former Soviet lo-
cations, the Balkans and the European Union, and various sites in Latin
America, including Colombia, Bolivia, and Panama. In the opening ar-
ticle, Mignolo lays out some of the theoretical considerations that enable
us to think about aesthetics and the decolonial in relation to each other.
Here Mignolo argues that aesthetics has been construed as a Eurocentric
philosophical discourse that originated in the eighteenth century and has
been historically used to devalue and colonize modes of expressing feel-
ing, sensing, and affect (“Lo nuevo y lo decolonial” 29). As stated earlier
in this chapter, the decolonial artist cannot produce artworks that critique
Eurocentric aesthetics and ways of knowing without a mutuality that al-
lows the artist both to educate and learn from an audience. The ultimate
function of decolonial aesthetics is to alert audiences (the subjugated, the
oppressed, non-beings) about the pervasive mechanisms of the colonial-
ity of power. In other words, one of the aims of decolonial aesthetics is
to debunk the myth that with independence movements, Latin America
freed itself from colonial forces and mechanisms of oppression. A second
aim is to valorize popular, indigenous, and Afro-descendant knowledges.
In this way, a decolonial process of undoing Eurocentric knowledge and
hierarchical ontological categories paves the way for a decolonial subject
capable of producing, consuming, and critiquing Eurocentric and non-
Eurocentric (decolonial) artworks and their corresponding aesthetics.

Decolonial Aesthetics and Its Challenges

At this juncture I turn to Raymond Williams’s seminal essay “Literature

and Sociology,” in which he warns literary and cultural scholars against
the dangers of having “false totalities,” which can take the shape of defined
literary genres with little or no room for permeation of other ideas or cate-
gories that might disrupt such totalities (16). As an analytical concept, de-
colonial aesthetics does not seek to be totalizing. Quite the contrary—it
210 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

aims to expand current categorizations of works of art, generate a cross-

analysis of overlapping and underlying ideas, and open up possibilities of
interpretation. To go beyond such closed and static categorizations that
restrict genre-based analyses, Williams employs the term “structures of
feelings” as a way to “indicate certain common characteristics in a group
of writers but also of others, in a particular historical situation” (22). As
such, the concept of structures of feelings enables an analysis of common
undercurrents in seemingly dissimilar works of art. It allows for a re-eval-
uation of an already demarcated group of artists (a movement) and those
who might have shared certain of its preoccupations, even if they did not
align with such a movement or have not been studied alongside such a
group. The structures of feelings also elicit the collapsing and transgres-
sion of genres as limiting categories and create the possibility of analyzing
sources of critique across forms or modes of art.
In Williams’s words, structures of feeling in which we scrutinize struc-
ture itself, not merely content, “can show us the organizing principle by
which a particular view of the world, and from that the coherence of the
social group which maintains it, really operates in consciousness” (23).
Put differently, the emphasis in a cross-genre analysis is to explore the
underlying and common structure of ideas, feelings, and tendencies that
form a common source of critique while also paying attention to the di-
verse modalities of critique. I diverge, however, from some of Williams’s
ideas in a number of ways. As a concept, decolonial aesthetics seeks to
unearth the “organizing principle” or principles that generate a common
approach to viewing and critiquing social problems and inequities. Iden-
tifying an organizing principle, however, does not necessarily equate with
having a coherent social group or movement uphold or strengthen such
principles, leading to critiques. This is why this book has identified het-
erogeneous examples contributing to an archive of artworks that critique
coloniality and that, in so doing, become part of a decolonial ethos. Put
differently, the organizing principle or structure reveals disjunctures and
fissures among the members of such a group of artists. Moreover, with de-
colonial aesthetics, the continuation, longevity, and strength of a group’s
common structure do not rest entirely on its coherence or stability, but
rather on the types of critiques and modes in which artworks serve such
critiques, while also having an aesthetic value that resonates with the gen-
eral public and the oppressed.
 Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America · 211

Following Williams’s emphasis on structure, my work on decolonial

aesthetics seeks to explore the foundation that grounds a common world-
view. When invoking the idea of a common worldview, however, I am
cautious about avoiding the trap of false totalities. A common worldview,
as used here, recognizes both common ground and points of dispute
among artists and intellectuals. It acknowledges discrepancies among
artists and their respective projects. For the purposes of decolonial aes-
thetics, a common worldview from a Latin American vantage point en-
gages with currents of cultural influence, forces of economic dominance,
factors of political manipulation, and growing social unrest coming from
the United States and Europe. The common worldview as a foundational
structure of decolonial aesthetics in Latin America is attuned to the larger
picture of a polarized economic and political world. Furthermore, one
can argue that the common worldview among decolonial artists studied
here elicited the production of decolonial artwork as a response to such
global dynamics and the ways in which these affected both their respec-
tive countries and the entire region. The structure of feeling (that is, this
the common worldview) enables us to identify some artists’ common
points of contestation and modalities of critique through their art, while
we sift through convergent and divergent approaches to deal with the
identified problems.
If aesthetics is concerned with a specific type of art and its value, de-
colonial aesthetics is concerned with what is left outside of that purview.
Judgment of taste is different for those not privy to the technical terms
or concepts against which one is expected to judge the value of a work
of art. For the non-specialist, the decolonial art-object is a democratizing
tool through which art moves and affects its non-specialist audience. Due
to their refusal to romanticize beauty or reality, decolonial art objects to
value judgments made according to existing paradigms or labels. Parallel
to the opposition between traditional aesthetics and decolonial aesthet-
ics is the seeming opposition between tradition and revolution.14 Such an
opposition requires a nuanced look at types of tradition and types of rev-
olution, how they become means to specific ends, and who the actors are
who embrace either side of the dichotomy. If tradition is passing down an
ideology, a belief system, norms, social codes, and established structures,
as Fals-Borda has suggested, inevitably revolution stands as its opposite in
the sense that it wants to resist, reject, and break away from the fixity and
212 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

weight of tradition.15 Yet, revolution has its foundation in tradition (in the
dominant culture) as an object against which it reacts. As it seeks to dis-
tance itself from tradition, revolution aims to create new (viable) alterna-
tives to supersede that which is dated, wrong, and harmful in a given tra-
dition. Fals-Borda suggests that revolution rejects stagnation and prefers
renovation, which presupposes a constant awareness of its foundational
reference point. As such, revolution does not aim to destroy tradition
in its entirety, but wants to keep what is considered of value in order to
generate new paths. Revolution, then, appropriates and reconfigures ele-
ments of tradition in a new guise. In this way, revolution’s indebtedness to
tradition is always present in the new cultural product, though sometimes
such a relation may not be readily acknowledged or evident. Revolution’s
desire for a radical break or departure from tradition is thus not entirely
possible, as it marks a triperspectival view of time: revolution is preoc-
cupied with the weight of tradition (past), and self-awareness of its duty
(present), while seeking to renovate and prolong its effect (future). In the
preceding chapters, I have sought to examine the degree to which antipo-
etry, nueva canción, and New Latin American cinema were “revolution-
ary” in their attempts at producing a radical break or departure from the
types of poetry, music, and cinema that had been produced across Latin
America in the decades leading up to the 1960s. The emphasis in my anal-
ysis, however, was to pay close attention to what antipoets, nueva canción
musicians, and New Latin American cinema filmmakers set out to do and
the means by which they aimed to accomplish their respective projects as
they deployed critiques of coloniality and thus must be read as contribut-
ing to a decolonial ethos. Even if terms such as coloniality and decolonial
have relatively recent currency in academic circles, the preceding chapters
and the book as a whole have sought to read specific case studies of po-
ets, musicians, and filmmakers as belonging to a heterogeneous archive
of decolonial perspectives emerging from the arts, and not just from the
academy.
 Conclusion
Sensing the Irresolute Past in the Present

In Fanon’s seminal study of the modalities of colonial violence, he argues

that in a colonized world, it is education, particularly in relation to “aes-
thetic forms of the status quo,” that helps to maintain divisions at all levels
of society. Fanon writes, “In capitalist societies, education, whether secu-
lar or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes handed down from father
to son, the exemplary integrity of workers decorated after fifty years of
loyal and faithful service, the fostering of love for harmony and wisdom,
those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited
a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task
of agents of law and order” (Fanon 3–4). In addition to these insights,
which are as relevant and timely today as they were in the early 1960s,
I also see Fanon’s sense of “the aesthetic forms of the status quo” as re-
lated to modes of learning and knowing, which are used to regulate what
is learned and how such knowledge is consumed. Put differently, I read
Fanon’s use of the aesthetic as a way to regulate how forms of knowledge,
including art and aesthetics, are sensed.
In this light, Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics aims to make an intervention
in the ways we understand the cultural historiography of the 1960s and
early 1970s in Latin America. To place my book into perspective, in a 1984
volume of Social Text dedicated to a re-evaluation of the 1960s, the edi-
tors echoed the Gramscian use of hegemony in relation to the neoconser-
vative backlash against the countercultural values of the 1960s. As noted
214 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

by the editors of this volume, “Gramsci’s term of hegemony remains the

most convenient shorthand . . . [to understand] a conflict which includes
contests over interpretations of history” (Sayres et al. 8). If hegemony
names the struggles over historical interpretations and ideological ten-
sions related to the 1960s, a broadening of our understanding of the pe-
riod is necessary to elicit re-evaluations and reinterpretations of what
cultural texts of the sixties have come to mean beyond neoconservative,
nostalgic, or apologetic positions that seek either to diminish or magnify
the significance of that decade. Moreover, the editors of the same volume
note that “visions of history play an enormous—if incalculable—role in
people’s political practice in the present: and this all the more when the
interpretation in question is a matter, not of ‘attitudes’ towards a bygone
age like the era of the Wobblies or of the American Revolution, but rather
of people’s immediate past” (Sayres et al. 8). While the volume was edited
in the mid-1980s, the urgency of the editors’ intervention against what
they perceived as the “trashing” of or backlash against the legacy of the
sixties is still present and much-needed.
Whereas our distance from the 1960s grows with each passing year
(obviously this decade is not as immediate now as it was in 1984 when
the Social Text volume appeared), the call for a more in-depth and nu-
anced understanding of Latin America’s past has recently become quite
urgent given the cultural and political developments in the region, its
shift toward what political scientists have named the “pink tide” over the
last decade, and what might come after that tide. In contemporary Latin
America’s cultural and political terrains, we have seen similar gradations
in the left as in the past. There are those who stand to the more “radical”
left (Hugo Chavez, Nicolás Maduro, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa). There
are also other leaders (Daniel Ortega, Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva, Dilma
Rousseff, José Mujica) who participated in social and political move-
ments during the 1970s and 1980s and still maintain some affinities with
the left, while being receptive to the economic demands of Latin Ameri-
ca’s “post-neoliberalism,” the ensuing effects of the global economic crisis,
and the maneuvering of strong political opposition emerging from their
respective countries.
As Sergio Chejfec reminds us about literary and cultural production of
the 1960s and 1970s:
 Conclusion: Sensing the Irresolute Past in the Present · 215

We live in a time in which socioeconomic conditions have, generally

speaking, not gotten better but instead have either deteriorated or
been fundamentally altered. These outdated works, therefore, speak
to us of an antiquated understanding, obsolete in many ways, yet
authentic in its transitory moment: this past offers both a promise
and a threat to contemporary literature. It suggests that engagement
with the social and the political is possible, but that the realization
of this desire is inherently imperfect. (113)

While some of the practical and theoretical positions of the period, such
as guerrilla warfare and liberation theology, seem to be of less concern
in our days, and thus appear to us as less fashionable or intellectually rel-
evant, the social foundations that sparked those types of struggles remain
in place today and have taken on newer dimensions. To mention a few
contemporary examples that reveal how works from the long decade of
the sixties continue to affect cultural production in Latin America, we
could point to Latin American fiction such as Roberto Bolaño’s Los detec-
tives salvajes (1998) or Elmer Mendoza’s El amante de Janis Joplin (2003).
The presence and salience of Nicanor Parra’s poetry is perhaps more
celebrated today than it was in the 1960s, particularly since his longev-
ity has recently been celebrated in terms of his impact as a poet and his
age. In terms of critical appraisal, Parra was awarded in 2011 the Premio
de Literatura en Lengua Castellana Miguel de Cervantes, and has been
nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. Mario Benedetti’s legacy is
now well-secured given that the Universidad de Alicante has named its
Center for Latin American Studies after him and that his works are now
housed in the Fundación Mario Benedetti in Montevideo. Violeta Parra’s
works have a virtual presence, much like those of her brother and Bene-
detti, due to their availability on a website hosted by a foundation bearing
her name. Beyond the Internet, Violeta’s impact on younger generations
of Chilean (and Latin American) musicians can quickly be gleaned from a
performance aired on Televisión Nacional de Chile on November 16, 2011,
in which artists such as Inti Illimani, Pedro Aznar, Ana Tijoux, Francisca
Valenzuela, and Camila Moreno (the last three being contemporary Chil-
ean singer-songwriters influenced by Violeta’s work) covered some of Vi-
oleta’s most representative songs before a packed stadium. Most recently,
216 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Chilean director Andrés Wood made a biopic entitled Violeta Went to

Heaven (2011), based on Ángel Parra’s biographical account of his mother,
which has had significant international circulation and rekindled an inter-
est in Violeta’s life and her works. In terms of thinking about the impact of
other musicians who were part of nueva canción, Francisca Valenzuela also
contributed to a tribute album for Inti Illimani when she covered the song
“Vuelvo” in 2009 and Natalia Lafourcade did a cover of “Qué he sacado
con quererte” in her 2017 album Musas. Contemporary musicians and
groups such as Kalfu, Gepe, Manuel García, and Camila Moreno continue
invoking some of the musical traditions, indigenous instruments, and mu-
sical arrangements evocative of the 1960s generation, albeit in an updated
fashion for contemporary audiences. Not coincidentally, these people are
among the artists gaining greater visibility across Latin America and into
the United States among Latino populations. Chilean rapper and singer
Ana Tijoux recently released a cover of Víctor Jara’s song “Luchín,” which
is widely available on YouTube or Spotify; this has become perhaps the
most recent instance of a sustained interest in what that generation of mu-
sicians and artists represents not only in terms of their historical context,
but also for what they have come to resignify for contemporary genera-
tions of artists and audiences alike. In this gesture by Tijoux of covering
Víctor Jara’s song, I read an ongoing interest on Tijoux’s behalf in employ-
ing music as a way to denounce various modes of systemic oppression and
various forms of coloniality (see her own songs “Antipatriarca” or “Somos
sur”). The song “Luchín,” in particular, refers to children who live in dire
poverty and disenfranchisement from society.
Before Mercedes Sosa’s death in 2009, she recorded two CDs under
the title Cantora, which featured duets with artists ranging from pop sing-
ers such as Shakira and Julieta Venegas, to rock singers such as Gustavo
Cerati, Charlie García, and Fito Paez, to urban musicians such as Calle
13. This last collaboration aimed to bridge presumed generation gaps
between those practitioners of nueva canción and newer trends in pop,
rock, and hip-hop music. By bringing together some of the biggest names
in Latin American music to cover songs such as Silvio Rodríguez’s “La
maza” (recorded with Shakira) or overtly socially committed songs such
“Canción para un niño de la calle” (recorded with Calle 13) with her, Sosa
changed these songs from mere objects of the past to reinscribed pieces
of the ongoing social and political struggles facing Latin America. In 2013,
 Conclusion: Sensing the Irresolute Past in the Present · 217

Rodrigo H. Vila released the documentary Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of

Latin America, which was screened at various film festivals in the United
States, Europe, and Latin America. As with the case of Violeta Parra’s bi-
opic, the life of this pioneering musician has the potential to reach au-
diences that may have otherwise not heard of or been aware of her sig-
nificance to the evolution of music across Latin America. Another recent
instance of the renewed relevance the musicians discussed in Sensing De-
colonial Aesthetics is the case of Chilean rock band Los Bunkers when they
made an entire CD entitled Música libre (2010). On this CD, they covered
songs by Silvio Rodríguez as a way to pay homage to his work and to a
spirit of brotherhood between Cuba and Chile, and with Latin America at
large. In doing the covers, and updating the songs’ sound to meet modern
tastes and sensibilities, Los Bunkers were also careful about maintaining
the revolutionary and political spirit, as well as the affective weight, of Ro-
dríguez’s songs. In fact, in a historical gesture that has a Latin American
reach, the photograph on the CD cover was shot in the square of Tlate-
lolco in Mexico, a site of irresolute memories. I could go on listing the
ways in which the work of the musicians, poets, and filmmakers I have
discussed in Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics continues to have an impact on
today’s cultural scene in Latin America in both perceptible and subdued
ways. My intention in presenting these examples has been to get us think-
ing about how we deal with cultural texts emerging from the past.
Contemporary generations are temporally and seemingly affectively
distant from Latin American artworks of the 1960s. So, in thinking
about how these audiences encounter these artworks or how they get
to know them, one must think about what Félix Guattari calls “affective
contamination,” in the sense that specific aesthetic experiences and sen-
sorial encounters with the arts become not a matter “of representation
and discursivity, but of existence” (92–93). In Guattari’s line of thinking,
this encounter with the arts through “affective contamination,” as ideas,
sounds, and sensorial registers that are out there, coexisting, and not
neatly divided or compartmentalized, has the ultimate transformative ef-
fect of generating a sensibility for recognizing oneself in another being or
in experiences beyond what we know and how we sense. It is in this ges-
ture of moving beyond our restrictive sentient, epistemological subjec-
tivity as linked to specific experiences and affects that an encounter with
art—that is, being affectively contaminated by the arts—enables Guattari
218 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

to write “I am no longer as I was before, I am swept away by a becoming

other, carried beyond my familiar existential Territories” (93). Moving
beyond experiences and encounters with artworks implies exposing our-
selves to other geopolitical and temporal ways of knowing and sensing.
Our affective response to these encounters cannot just be to sense as we
do, or as we are comfortable sensing, but indeed to sense otherwise.
To understand contemporary social and political movements bet-
ter—those movements understood by Mignolo and others as a “decolo-
nial turn” in the region—one needs to retrace some of the origins of this
sociopolitical and cultural shift, which I place in the 1960s. In relation to
many decolonial scholars who place an emphasis on present social and
cultural struggles, my work in Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics has sought to
identify some of the cultural texts and trends that engaged in questioning
different modalities of oppression and social inequity by referencing and
sensing the irresolute legacy of the decade. While collectively identifying
this moment of cultural production as various modalities of cultural resis-
tance (critiquing and delinking from coloniality) emerging from various
art forms, and reading them through a decolonial lens, one is fully aware
of the problems in aligning poets, film directors, and musicians along a
conjoining thread. However, the goal in doing so has been to generate
a broader understanding of how artists struggled against dominant and
political culture and notions of Western/Eurocentric aesthetics, though
their modes of expressing such struggles varied in vision, approach, tech-
niques, goals, and ideological foundations. Nonetheless, in reinterpreting
the role of such artists as part of a heterogeneous cultural moment and
as contributing to an expanding archive of decolonial gestures emerg-
ing from the arts, one can see how ideas are exchanged, contested, and
expounded across genres and national borders. Ultimately, as this book
has tried to articulate, it is not simply a matter of employing the concept
and practices of the decolonial in order to understand contemporary art
practices exhibited in either museums or public spaces. To understand
truly how the decolonial responds to and seeks to delink from colonial-
ity, it becomes imperative to expand the archive of decolonial works and
gestures to include a variety of art practices and a more capacious tem-
poral engagement with the decolonial ethos. As one critic has argued,
“Decolonizing aesthetics seeks to recognize open options for liberating
the senses” (Rojas-Sotelo, “Decolonizing Aesthetics” 303). To liberate
 Conclusion: Sensing the Irresolute Past in the Present · 219

the senses, as I have argued throughout Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics, also

means to sense artworks from the past as artifacts and texts that create a
more expansive register of moments of resistance, from the arts to modes
of regulating knowledges and the sensorial. Sensing otherwise such art-
works offers us the ability to begin thinking in historical terms about re-
tracing moments and gestures aimed at delinking from coloniality as they
emerge from artistic practices such as poetry, music, and film.
As one example of the ways in which the 1960s have been studied,
with particular attention to the role of memory, Diana Sorensen’s book A
Turbulent Decade Remembered (2007) seeks to illuminate “scenes” of par-
ticular importance to understanding the long decade of the 1960s in Latin
America. In her introduction, Sorensen writes that in her view, “Latin
America in the sixties encapsulates its [the decade’s] predicament: a mo-
ment of hope and celebration produced a sense of multiple possibilities,
only to reach a closure and despair in its culmination. At the time of pres-
ent writing, well into the twenty-first century, it is hard to avoid a melan-
cholic sense of loss as one contemplates the aftermath of this utopian de-
cade, as if one had reached the end of a plot with a cheerless outcome. For
the sixties were followed by brutal regimes and economic crises whose
impact has been profound and long standing” (3). Sensing Decolonial Aes-
thetics seeks to avoid this “melancholic sense of loss” without falling into
a naively or historically blindsided utopianism. The melancholic sense of
loss will take hold of the present if the cultural and material texts of the
1960s continue to be read exclusively as products of their time, as memo-
rabilia of a utopian decade, or as reminders and remainders of the short-
comings and failures of the decade’s euphoria and hope.
Throughout Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics, I have employed a decolonial
approach, with an emphasis on aesthetics, as a way to reach a more nu-
anced and relational understanding of Latin America’s cultural scene in
the 1960s and early 1970s. Contrary to critical positions that may read-
ily dismiss antipoetry, nueva canción, and third cinema for their alleged
lack of aesthetic value, I have emphasized the need to rethink the ways in
which academia and the public shape canon formation. A reason for the
relative dismissal or neglect of the above-mentioned forms has been that
they have often been placed in similar categories as Marxist, socialist, or
leftist art and, on those grounds alone, have been historically given a “neg-
ative” connotation and only propagandistic value. Likewise, in framing
220 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

my project, I became interested in looking at relations among artworks,

rather than focusing my book on only one genre—in part because, like
Benedetto Croce, I believe that “The so-called arts do not have aesthetic
boundaries, since, in order for there to be such boundaries, they would
have to have aesthetic existence qua particular arts; and we have shown
precisely the purely empirical and extrinsic origins of such divisions. It
also follows from this that any attempt to give an aesthetic classification
of the particular arts is absurd” (Croce 127). Following this line of think-
ing, Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics presents questions and posits the need to
discuss what the arts can do in relation to each other and not as separate
forms of aesthetic expression.
As such, I looked at key examples of such movements in relation to
what I have termed decolonial aesthetics with the purpose of going be-
yond the claims that such artworks are only important because of their
nostalgic aura of a long-gone revolutionary past. In relation to nostalgia
for the past, one critic has stated the following:
Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of a mythical
return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and
values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nos-
talgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the
edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. The nos-
talgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he
looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them. (Boym 8)
Without falling into nostalgic traps, my interventions have emphasized
the subtleties in the artists’ gradations of social and political commit-
ment, levels of leftist tendencies, differences in approaches to combining
leftist ideologies and new art, and how these artist-intellectuals contrib-
uted to the shaping of heterogeneous decolonial efforts and articulations
of decolonial thought in the region. In other words, such art predates and
serves as a foundation for the discourses that circulate in academic and
intellectual circles today. Surprisingly, however, academia has not given
sufficient attention to this period as a cornerstone of postcolonial/deco-
lonial thought.
In the chapters in which I have discussed poetry, music, and films from
the 1960s, I have done so with the intent of reading cultural artifacts/texts
as artworks through a lens of decolonial aesthetics so as to sense them
 Conclusion: Sensing the Irresolute Past in the Present · 221

otherwise. Though these artworks may be deemed populist by some or

legacies of historically stagnant time, the decolonial artists studied in
Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics sought to make their art more accessible to
the very public that might not have had access to much of the high-art
cultural products of their time. Likewise, as shown earlier in this con-
clusion, sensing the past requires a rethinking of the presumed fixity of
historical time by way of focusing on time’s oscillation and the multidi-
rectional temporal arches that can be traced to reconfigure relations and
the grounds of comparison. Decolonial artists aimed to draw attention to
those groups that were left out of the scope of Western/Eurocentric aes-
thetics and technical experiments during the 1960s, including the “boom”
writers. Of course, some decolonial artists succeeded more than others in
staying close to their own aesthetic projects, and some have survived bet-
ter in the present’s recurring return to the past.
In general terms, decolonial artists resisted having to compromise their
work for the sake of commercial success, thrived on alternative modes of
dissemination (such as grassroots modes of distribution, small presses,
and select film festivals), and by extension suffered from the triple-bind
of negative/inadequate reception by academic critics, limited exposure to
audiences, and state censorship and persecution. Cuba, of course, was an
isolated case in that different forces were at work: writers who questioned
the revolution were persecuted, while those who embraced it received full
government support.
Keeping in mind the historical scope of this book project, which
sought to explore cultural texts produced from 1960 until roughly 1975, in
this conclusion, I have sought to explore briefly how this irresolute past
continues manifesting itself in the twenty-first century. Sensing artworks
from the past through decolonial aesthetics implies sensing them as liv-
ing culture. Clear indications of how these works operate as living culture
are the multiple references I offer above that signal the continued pres-
ence and emergence of artworks from this decade among contemporary
artists and audiences. In this sense, I am thinking of Albert Memmi’s no-
tion of living culture as one that “is an ongoing question of traditional be-
liefs—testing and adapting them to the inevitable transformation all soci-
eties undergo. It is thus inherently dangerous, iconoclastic and heretical,
because it needs to free itself of all restraints in order to breathe freely”
(41–42). For living culture to “breathe freely,” it must question the very
222 · Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

aesthetic dimensions that circumscribe and determine cultural categories,

and particularly those cultural texts used to maintain “the aesthetics of
the status quo,” to echo Fanon’s words at the beginning of this conclusion.
In one of the concluding chapters of Latinamericanism after 9/11, John
Beverly lauds the cultural production and the reach of 1960s filmmakers,
novelist, poets, and musicians in the region. And yet, Beverly is also aware
of the difficulties in thinking about and remembering the past, particu-
larly if there is an inclination from the “generation of the sixties,” in which
Beverly includes himself, “to see where we went wrong [rather] than
what we did right” (109). Beverly continues his elucidation of what he
calls the “paradigm of disillusion” in relation to armed struggles and the
sixties when he argues the following: “But in a way, our disillusion has
not been thorough enough. It has not worked through the melancholia of
defeat. . . . In that way, the paradigm of disillusion has not prepared us
to accept that the possibility of radical change has opened up once again
in the Americas, North and South” (109, emphasis in original). As I have
claimed throughout this book, sensing otherwise, particularly when we
are confronted with the task of sensing the irresolute past, implies recog-
nizing the limitations of “the paradigm of disillusion” (to borrow Bever-
ly’s term) and its bearing on the pervasiveness of keywords such as “mel-
ancholia,” “defeat,” “disillusion,” or “loss” when facing, remembering, and
rethinking the past. The logic of dismissiveness through the language of
defeat reduces works of the past to mere cultural artifacts emerging from
a historically, politically, and theoretically determined epoch, while pre-
supposing that they have little to offer us today. I believe that the oppor-
tunities or options for radical change in the present necessitate a refram-
ing of the past so that we may sense it anew and otherwise, lest we fall
into the ineluctable traps and weight of cultural and political-economic
presentisms.
 NOTES

Introduction
1. A few recent studies have engaged with this question of Latin American
literature and its place in either cosmopolitan or world literary contexts. For an
emphasis on modernismo and the boom, see Mariano Siskind’s Cosmopolitan De-
sires: Global Modernity and Literature in Latin America (2014). For an emphasis
on contemporary Latin American literature, see Héctor Hoyos’s Beyond Bolaño:
The Global Latin American Novel (2015). For a study that triangulates the literary
and cultural exchanges across the Atlantic, see Rachel Price’s The Object of the
Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 (2014).
2. In this essay, Benedetti is cautious not to undermine the genealogy and de-
velopment of Latin American literatures. In fact, his essay begins with a brief dis-
cussion of El Inca Garcilaso, moving to Andrés Bello and Sarmiento, touching
on the indigenista and social realist authors of the 1930s, while placing a strong
emphasis on the uniqueness of the boom writers and poets of this same period.
Among the landmark books of this period, Benedetti mentions Guimarães
Rosa’s Grande Sertão (1956), Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1956), Julio Cortázar’s
Rayuela (1963), and Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967). Fur-
thermore, Benedetti highlights the contributions that Nicanor Parra, Ernesto
Cardenal, Roque Dalton, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Claribel Alegría, Jorge
Enrique Adoum, and José María Arguedas, among many others, made to the
development of “letras de osadía” [letters of audacity or courageousness].
3. Some recent examples of aesthetic models or propositions seeking to recu-
perate the past from a philosophical perspective are Alain Badiou’s A Handbook
of Inaesthetics (2005) and Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic
Regime of Art (2013). From cultural anthropology, some examples are Mark M.
224 · Notes to Pages 4–12

Smith’s Sensing the Past (2008), and David Howes and Constance Classen’s Ways
of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (2013). For the Latin American
case, see Doris Sommer’s The Work of Art in the World (2014).
4. Some examples include an exhibit entitled “Estéticas Descoloniales” held
in Bogotá in November 2010, an issue of Fuse magazine (Fall 2013) dedicated to
decolonial aesthetics, an article published in a Romanian magazine by Miguel
Rojas-Sotelo and Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet entitled “Decolonial Aes-
thetics,” and the now-annual Be.Bop Black European Bodies conference and cu-
ratorial event held in various locations in Europe, which brings together artists
from various locations across the globe.
5. For a more detailed distinction between Mignolo’s formulation of the geo-
politics of knowledge and geopolitics of knowing, see his book The Darker Side
of Western Modernity (2011), particularly chapters 3 and 5.
6. On the confrontation between the sensorial and the written, I am thinking
about the following statement by Robert Hopkins: “literature, like art, is about
the sensory. Poetry in any form, drama, short stories, and novels all concern the
world as we experience it through our various senses. They are able to do so
because the sensory imagination brings that world before us even when our cur-
rent sensory experience is confined to the sight of words on a page, or—if we
silently recite a poem from memory—less” (“Senses and Art” 531).
7. Francisca Valenzuela did several covers of Violeta Parra’s songs in the con-
text of a tribute concert held in the Plaza de Armas in Santiago, Chile, in 2011
and then in a series of her own concerts. More detailed reflections on this tem-
poral move of music from the 1960s into the present appear in the conclusion to
this book.
8. For a discussion of how coloniality and music intersect, see Carolina San-
tamaría Delgado’s study on the history and reception of bambuco in musicology
in her essay “El bambuco, los saberes mestizos y la academia” (2007). Similar
claims could be made for the case of Violeta Parra in her reliance on the cueca
or the mazurca as popular musical styles and forms of accompaniment to her
lyrical compositions.
9. Some prime examples of scholarship focusing on this period and that tend
to privilege the boom novels are Jean Franco’s The Decline and Fall of the Let-
tered City (2002), Diana Sorensen’s A Turbulent Decade Remembered (2007),
and, more recently, Jerónimo Arellano’s Magical Realism and the History of Emo-
tions in Latin America (2015) and Lucille Kerr and Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola’s
Teaching the Latin American Boom (2015).
10. For a succinct genealogy of decolonial thinking, see Mabel Moraña’s
“Postscriptum: Decolonial Scenarios and Alternative Thinking: Critical and
 Notes to Pages 12–20 · 225

Theoretical Explorations” (2016). For an example of non-academic circulation

and use of decolonial thinking beyond Latin America, see the website Decoloni-
ality London.
11. There is already a growing body of scholarship that seeks to read Latin
American authors from a decolonial perspective. See Michael Handelsman’s Gé-
nero, raza y nación en la literatura ecuatoriana (2011), Sara Castro-Klarén’s The
Narrow Pass of Our Nerves (2011), Sara Castro-Klarén and Christian Fernández’s
Inca Garcilaso and Contemporary World-Making (2016), Mabel Moraña’s Churata
postcolonial (2015), and Juan G. Ramos and Tara Daly’s Decolonial Approaches to
Latin American Literatures (2016).
12. For ways in which decolonial thinking has moved beyond Latin Amer-
ica, see Madina Tlostanova’s “La aesthesis trans-moderna en la zona fronteriza
eurasiática y el anti-sublime decolonial” (2011), Tanja Ostojić’s “Cruzando fron-
teras” (2012), and Marina Grzinic’s “[Estéticas] decoloniales como/ en/ a la
frontera” (2012). Other directions of decolonial aesthetics can be seen in Social
Text’s periscope dossier, edited by Walter D. Mignolo and Rolando Vásquez, pri-
marily Ovidiu Tichindeleanu’s “Europe: Potential Paths of Liberation” (2013),
Vivian Lee’s “Decolonial Moments in Hong Kong Cinema” (2013), and Hong-
An Truong, Nayuong Aimee Kwon, and Guo-Jin Hong’s “What/Where is ‘De-
colonial Asia’?” (2013).
Chapter 1. Sensing Otherwise
1. The question of literary canonicity is one that is that has never been al-
together out of fashion. Joan L. Brown’s Confronting Our Canons: Spanish and
Latin American Studies in the 21st Century (2010) provides an in-depth assess-
ment of the current formation of the Latin American canon, how it has been
formed, and how it is taught at major U.S. universities. For a recent study on
the question of canonicity in relation to postcolonial theory, see Ankhi Mukher-
jee’s What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (2013).
The question of the literary canon has also been rekindled in relation to theo-
retical engagements between world literature and comparative literature. For
some representative and key studies that have propelled this question, see David
Damrosch’s What is World Literature? (2003); Emily Apter’s Against World Lit-
erature (2013); Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2004); Franco
Moretti’s Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (1996)
and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005); and Jona-
than Culler’s The Literary in Theory (2007).
2. For an eloquent discussion of the role of revolutionary intellectuals during
this decade, see Claudia Gilman’s Entre la pluma y el fusil (2003), particularly
226 · Notes to Pages 20–35

for a detailed historical context of the involvement of intellectuals pertinent to

the present study such as Fernández Retamar, Benedetti, or Dalton in the jour-
nal Casa de las Américas. In contrast, a study that seeks to trace key moments
in Latin American popular culture from the nineteenth century until now, but
fails to acknowledge fully the centrality of the 1960s to an understanding of the
evolution of popular culture, is Geoffrey Kantaris and Rory O’Brien’s edited
volume Latin American Popular Culture (2013), particularly their introduction
to the volume. Stephan Hart’s chapter in this volume focuses on Cuba’s engage-
ment with popular culture through the ICAIC.
3. See Diana Sorensen’s A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the
Latin American Sixties (2007) and Jean Franco’s The Decline and Fall of the Let-
tered City: Latin America in the Cold War (2002).
4. See Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011), particu-
larly chapter 3, in which he talks at length about delinking as both a conceptual
tool and also a set of actions necessary for decoloniality to have its effect on an
experiential and not simply a theoretical level.
5. See Patricio Rodríguez-Plaza’s “Crítica, estética y mayorías latinoamerica-
nas” (2005) for further elaboration of these questions.
6. As suggested earlier, a return to aesthetics as a mode of sensing opens up
the possibility of discussing how sounds, foods, and textures are linked to aes-
thetic sensibilities. For a discussion of how decolonial aesthetics is linked to
questions of memory, the nation, ancestral memories, coloniality, and taste/
food, see Adolfo Albán Achinte’s essay “Comida y colonialidad: tensiones entre
el proyecto hegemónico moderno y las memorias del paladar” (2010).
7. For a study that critiques both globalization and a return to cosmopoli-
tanism, see Walter Mignolo’s “Cosmopolitanism and the De-colonial Option”
(2009), particularly on Mignolo’s proposal for a decolonial cosmopolitanism.
8. For a prime example of how coloniality of aesthetics operated throughout
the nineteenth century in Latin America, see the variety of studies in a variety
of art forms present in Paul B. Niell and Stacie G. Widdfield’s Buen Gusto and
Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910 (2013). While the au-
thors in this volume do not necessarily engage with concepts such as coloniality
or decoloniality, the studies certainly argue in eloquent ways that the colonial-
ity of aesthetics operates on two levels: that of colonial/state powers, and that
of the ingrained coloniality among elite and popular sectors of Latin American
populations.
9. My emphasis on the singularity of the 1960s in Latin America as an un-
precedented moment of explosion in the arts, and not exclusively in fiction—as
the term “the boom” might indicate—is grounded in essays by Benedetti and
 Notes to Pages 35–45 · 227

Fernández Retamar, which I point out in my introduction, and, more recently,

in Claudia Gilman’s Entre la pluma y el fusil (2003), Hector Amaya’s Screening
Cuba (2010), and Pablo Vila’s The Military Song Movement in Latin America
(2014).
Chapter 2. The Poetics of Sensing: Decolonial Verses in Antipoetry and
Conversational Poetry
Author’s note: Esta es la reedición de un artículo publicado en Hispanófila “Uto-
pian Thinking in Verse: Temporality and Poetic Imaginary in the Poetry of Nicanor
Parra, Mario Benedetti, and Roque Dalton” (vol 178, Diciembre 2016). Se puede
ingresar a Hispanofila en la red en: http://muse.jhu.edu/ [https://muse.jhu.edu/
article/656803.
This is a reprint of parts of an article, “Utopian Thinking in Verse: Temporality
and Poetic Imaginary in the Poetry of Nicanor Parra, Mario Benedetti, and Roque
Dalton,” published in Hispanófila (vol 178, December 2016). The article can be ac-
cessed electronically through Hispanófila: http://muse.jhu.edu/ [https://muse.
jhu.edu/article/656803.
1. As much as I appreciate the efforts in contemporary scholarship to critique
a coloniality of aesthetics by proposing decolonial aesthetics as a critical con-
cept, I feel it is important to note that there are two distinct, though comple-
mentary, emphases on the decolonial. On the one hand, some efforts primarily
focus on alternative spaces of exhibition for performance-based or visual arti-
facts striving toward a critique of various modalities of coloniality. Prime exam-
ples are the Social Text periscope dedicated to decolonial aesthetics, or Joaquín
Barriendo’s essay “Geopolitics as Global Art” (2009). A second point of empha-
sis deals with popular art forms or food as aesthetic (sensorial) experience, as in
the case of Carolina Santamaría Delgado’s “El bambuco, los saberes mestizos, y
la academia” (2007) or Adolfo Albán Achinte’s “Comida y colonialidad” (2010).
Yet, only recently have Latin Americanists begun engaging decolonial thinking
in relation to literary and cultural analysis, particularly in the case of scholarship
produced in English. For some examples of recent scholarship in English seek-
ing to trace an archive of decolonial thinking in relation to literary and cultural
practices in the Americas, see Sara Castro Klarén’s edited volume A Companion
to Latin American Literatures and Cultures (2008), Javier Sanjinés’s Embers of the
Past (2013), Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s Coloniality of Diasporas (2014), and
Juan G. Ramos and Tara Daly’s Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Litera-
tures and Cultures (2016).
2. For instance, see Alemany Bay, Poética coloquial hispanoamericana (1997);
Brotherston, Latin American Poetry: Origins and Presence (1975); Fernández Re-
228 · Notes to Pages 45–82

tamar, “Antipoesía y poesía conversacional en Hispanoamérica” (1995); Gross-

man, The Antipoetry of Nicanor Parra (1975); Rowe, Poets of Contemporary Latin
America: History and Inner Life (2000); Sarabia, Poetas de la palabra hablada: un
estudio de la poesía hispanoamericana contemporánea (1997).
3. “Roller Coaster” By Nicanor Parra, translated by Miller Williams, from Po-
ems and Antipoems, copyright 1967 by Nicanor Parra. Reprinted by permission
of New Directions Publishing Corp.
4. A discussion about the relationship between antipoetry and visual art is
beyond the scope of this chapter and study.
5. “Changes of Name” By Nicanor Parra, translated by Miller Williams, from
Poems and Antipoems, copyright 1967 by Nicanor Parra. Reprinted by permis-
sion of New Directions Publishing Corp.
6. “Litany of the Little Bourgeois” By Nicanor Parra, translated by James
Laughlin, from Poems and Antipoems, copyright 1967 by Nicanor Parra. Re-
printed by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
7. “Test” By Nicanor Parra, translated by Miller Williams, from Poems and
Antipoems, copyright 1967 by Nicanor Parra. Reprinted by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corp.
8. Another instance of Parra’s decolonial gestures in his antipoetry is the use
of the cueca as a musical and poetic form that is quintessential to Chilean iden-
tity, but that can be used in anti-traditional ways. An in-depth critique or study
of this connection is beyond the scope of this chapter. A clear distinction be-
tween musical styles and poetic propositions in relation to Neruda and Parra is
present in Mario Rodríguez’s “Dos metonimias de Neruda y Parra” (2011).
9. “Porque no debemos olvidar que, a lo largo del proceso hispano-american-
izante de nuestro pensamiento, palpita y vive y corre, de manera intermitente
pero indestructible, el hilo de sangre indígena, como cifra dominante de nuestro
porvenir” (Vallejo, “Una gran reunión latino-americana” 31–32).
10. See Benedetti, “Ernesto Cardenal: Evangelio y revolución” (1972);
Fernández Retamar, “Antipoesía y poesía conversacional en Hispanoamérica”
(1995); Alemany Bay, Poética coloquial hispanoamericana (1997).
11. For some recent reassessments of Dalton’s poetry in relation to Salvador-
ian history and politics, see Adriana P. Álvarez Cruz et al.’s “Por la vía de la poe-
sía” (2015), Leonel Delgado Aburto’s “Ironías materiales” (2009), Juana M. Ra-
mos’s “La construcción de una po(ética)” (2011), and Mario Vázquez Olivera’s
“‘País mío no existes’” (2005).
12. “Sobre Nuestra Moral Poética”/ “On Our Poetic Moral.” In Poemas Clan-
destinos/ Clandestine Poems. Translated by Jack Hirschman. Edited by Barbara
Paschke and Eric Weaver. Introduction by Margaret Randall. Willimantic, CT:
 Notes to Pages 82–102 · 229

Curbstone Press, 1990. Originally published in San Francisco by Solidarity Pub-

lications, 1984. Copyright 1986. (82)
13. See María Lugones’s “Interseccionalidad y feminismo decolonial” (2012)
and “The Coloniality of Gender” (2010) and Rita Segato’s “Género y coloniali-
dad” (2011).
14. “Arte Poética 1974”/ “Poetic Art 1974.” In Poemas Clandestinos/ Clandes-
tine Poems. Translated by Jack Hirschman. Edited by Barbara Paschke and Eric
Weaver. Introduction by Margaret Randall. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press,
1990. Originally published in San Francisco by Solidarity Publications, 1984.
Copyright 1986.
15. For a more in-depth discussion of how these poets saw themselves as de-
scending from Vallejo’s poetic lineage perhaps more in spirit than in form or lan-
guage, see Mario Benedetti’s interviews with Roque Dalton and Nicanor Parra
in Los Poetas comunicantes (1972).
16. See Fernández Retamar, “Antipoesía y poesía conversacional en Hispano-
américa” (1995); Rowe, Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and Inner
Life (2000); Brotherston, Latin American Poetry: Origins and Presence (1975);
Sarabia, Poetas de la palabra hablada: un estudio de la poesía hispanoamericana
contemporánea (1997); and Alemany Bay, Poética coloquial hispanoamericana
(1997).
Chapter 3. Decolonial Sounds: Redolent Echoes of Nueva Canción
1. For a more detailed assessment of commercial pop music of the period in
Chile, see Osvaldo Rodríguez Musso’s La nueva canción chilena (1988) and Patri-
cia Vilches’s “De Violeta Parra a Víctor Jara y Los Prisioneros” (2004).
2. For the usage of “countersong,” see Fernando Reyes Matta’s “The ‘New
Song’ and Its Confrontation in Latin America” 448.
3. For an article that explores the communal function of arpilleras as a modal-
ity of feminist resistance and preservation of memory, see Eliana Moya-Raggio’s
“‘Arpilleras’” (1984).
4. The wealth of popular songs, musical styles, notes on instrumentation, and
musical arrangements were collected and published after Violeta’s death. For a
broader account of popular music Violeta collected, see Violeta Parra’s Cantos
folklóricos chilenos (1979).
5. In addition to a renewed interest in exploring musical traditions in Latin
America, there is also a growing body of scholarship that also looks at the role
of media and modes of dissemination of sound across the region. For a recent
exploration of the role of media and sound studies in Latin America, see Ale-
230 · Notes to Pages 102–145

jandra Bronfman and Andrew Grant Wood’s Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin
America and the Caribbean (2012).
6. According to Juan Pablo González (2005), the tonada has a 6/8 meter and
the cueca has a 3/4 meter.
7. For additional information on this period of Violeta’s artistic career, see
Ericka Kim Verba’s “To Paris and Back” (2013). Permission granted by the Fun-
dación Violeta Parra to reprint lyrics from “Cantores que Reflexionan” and
“Mazúrquica Modérnica.”
8. Hereafter the translations of Violeta Parra’s lyrics are mine.
9. For a representation of the political turmoil and factions in Chilean soci-
ety, please refer to Patricio Guzmán’s film trilogy The Battle of Chile (1975–1979).
10. The information on Mercedes Sosa’s albums was gathered from her of-
ficial webpage.
11. According to Moore (2006), Días y flores was the “first widely dissemi-
nated nueva trova LP” (156).
12. For particular philosophical inquiries that explore the relationship among
listening, music, and history, see Peter Szendy (2007), Jean-Luc Nancy (2007),
and Lawrence M. Zbikowski (2013).
Chapter 4. Decolonial Visuality and New Latin American Cinema
1. For in-depth studies that examine the appearance of cinema in Latin
America and its relationship to early film aesthetics, see Ana M. López’s “‘A
Train of Shadows’: Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America” (2000); Ana
M. López’s “The State of Things: New Directions in Latin American Film His-
tory (2006); Jorge Finkielman’s The Film Industry in Argentina (2004); and Flora
Süsekind’s Cinematograph of Words: Literature, Technique, and Modernization in
Brazil (1997).
2. Here I am following Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s The Right to Look: A Counterhis-
tory of Visuality (2011), particularly when he writes in the Preface that “visual-
ity and its visualizing history are part of how the ‘West’ historicizes and dis-
tinguishes itself from others” (xiv). Later in the Preface, Mirzoeff adds that he
considers visuality “to be both a medium for transmission and dissemination
of authority, and a means for the mediation of those subject to that authority”
(xv).
3. Unless otherwise noted, translations from Spanish into English are mine.
4. For critical work linking Fanon’s work with coloniality, see Catherine
Walsh, “Fanon y la pedagogía de-colonial” (2009) and Nelson Maldonado Tor-
res’s “On the Coloniality of Being” (2007).
 Notes to Pages 146–177 · 231

5. For a more updated account of New Latin American Cinema, see Paul A.
Schroeder Rodríguez’s “After New Latin American Cinema” (2012).
6. In “Estética y ser,” Enrique Dussel (1994) points to the ways in which aes-
thetics has been employed to privilege certain forms of (Eurocentric/Western)
knowledge. In a different and more updated articulation of this linkage, Mi-
gnolo (2012) also argues for this connection, but goes a step farther by arguing
for certain ways in which art can produce and be seen from the perspective of
decolonial aesthetics as an option to other existing aesthetic projects.
7. In his work The Emancipated Spectator (2011), Rancière argues for the
need to emancipate the spectator from ulterior responsibilities or duties. In-
stead, Rancière argues, “Being a spectator is not some passive condition that
we should transform into activity. It is our normal situation. We also learn and
teach, act and know, as spectators who all the time link what we see to what we
have seen and said, done and dreamed. . . . We do not have to transform specta-
tors into actors, and ignoramuses into scholars. We have to recognize the knowl-
edge at work in the ignoramus and the activity peculiar to the spectator. Every
spectator is already an actor in her story; every actor, every man of action, is
the spectator of the same story” (17). While I do not agree with the distinction
made between a so-called ignoramus and the spectator, Rancière’s notion that
the spectator is always an active participant and constructs knowledge by mak-
ing associations or establishing relations between what she or he sees/experi-
ences/senses and her or his prior knowledge is a thought-provoking suggestion
to explore more fully elsewhere. For the sake of my overall argument, I cannot
engage more fully with this proposition here.
8. For a detailed account of the reception of Memories of Underdevelopment in
both Cuba and the United States, see Hector Amaya’s Screening Cuba: Film Criti-
cism as Political Performance During the Cold War 107–124.
9. For a detailed account of the reception of Lucía in both Cuba and the
United States, see Hector Amaya’s Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Per-
formance During the Cold War 125–143.
10. For an account of Chilean cinema surrounding Salvador Allende’s govern-
ment, see Camilo D. Trumper’s “Social Violence, Political Conflict, and Latin
American Film: The Politics of Place in the ‘Cinema of Allende’” (2010).
11. For recent critical work on Gleyzer’s films, see David William Foster’s
“Contestando una revolución” (2011), Fernando Martín Peña’s “Raymundo
Gleyzer (1941–1976): El otro cine militante” (2002), Valeria Manzano’s “Com-
bates por la historia” (2004), David M. J. Wood’s “Raiding the Archive” (2011),
and Mariano Mestman’s “Third Cinema/Militant Cinema” (2011).
232 · Notes to Pages 179–200

12. For a more in-depth discussion of decolonial approaches to indigenous

filmmaking and media production, see Freya Schiwy’s Indianizing Film: Decolo-
nization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology (2009).
13. For a recent discussion of the Tlatelolco massacre as a key moment in the
long decade of the 1960s, see Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered:
Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (2007), Samuel Steinberg’s Photopoetics at
Tlatelolco (2016), and Juan J. Rojo’s Revisiting the Mexican Student Movement of
1968 (2016). In Sorensen’s treatment of this tragic episode in Mexican history,
and in other instances in her book, she does not engage with Gleyzer’s docu-
mentary film as a text that provides an almost immediate outsider’s perspective
on the event.
Chapter 5. Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America
1. For an example of early reception of the music and poetry of the 1960s,
particularly in relation to Nicanor Parra and the poets of his generation, see
Roberto Falabella’s “Problemas estilísticos del joven compositor en América
y en Chile” (1958). For an early American review of Otto Rene Castillo, one
of Roque Dalton’s contemporaries, and a discussion of whether Castillo’s po-
etry belongs to history rather literature, see Guy Davenport’s review “Distant
Voices” (1971–1972), particularly his contrast of low poetry and belles lettres in
the case of his high opinion of Octavio Paz. These are just two instances that
illustrate my point.
2. For a more detailed articulation of coloniality of power, see Quijano’s “Co-
loniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” (2000), Quijano’s “Colo-
nialidad del poder y clasificación social” (2007), and Walter D. Mignolo’s Local
Histories/Global Designs (2012 [2000]).
3. Key arguments are presented in Leopoldo Zea’s Colonización y descoloni-
zación de la cultura latinoamericana (1970) and Germán Arciniégas’s Cosas del
pueblo: crónicas de la historia vulgar (1962).
4. See Prebisch’s The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal
Problems (1950).
5. Mignolo has employed the term decolonial in a variety of theoretical writ-
ings. For his use of the concept, see, for example, his coedited volume with Ar-
turo Escobar, Globalization and the Decolonial Option (2010), or his most recent
book, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011). For Mignolo’s use of deco-
lonial aesthetics, see his article “Lo nuevo y lo decolonial” (2012). For differ-
ent perspectives on the concept of the decolonial, see Ramón Grosfoguel’s “The
Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms” (2010) and
 Notes to Pages 200–212 · 233

Arturo Escobar’s “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American

Modernity/Coloniality Research Program” (2010).
6. For a discussion of the domains in the matrix of the coloniality of power,
see Quijano (2000).
7. See Salazar Bondy’s La cultura de la dependencia (1966).
8. See Escobar (2010), Grosfoguel (2010), and Mignolo’s “Epistemic Disobe-
dience, Independent Thoughts and Decolonial Freedom” (2009).
9. See Grosfoguel (2010), Quijano (2000), Kusch (1975), Arciniegas (1962),
and O’Gorman’s La invención de América (1986) [1958].
10. For a more detailed analysis of the ontological critique that coloniality of
being posits, see Maldonado-Torres’s “On the Coloniality of Being: Contribu-
tions to the Development of a Concept” (2010).
11. See Maldonado-Torres (2010), Kusch (2010), Kusch (1975), and Lao-
Montes’s “Decolonial Moves: Trans-locating African Diaspora Spaces” (2007).
12. See Maldonado-Torres (2010), Kusch (2010), and Kusch’s La negación en
el pensamiento popular (1975).
13. See Maldonado-Torres (2010) and Rancière’s “The Rationality of Dis-
agreement” (1999).
14. See Fals-Borda’s “Casos de imitación intelectual colonialista.” (1970) and
Las revoluciones inconclusas en América Latina (1809–1968). (1970).
15. See Fals-Borda’s Las revoluciones inconclusas en América Latina (1809–
1968). (1970).
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 INDEX

Advis, Luis Ariel, 33–34, 188

and Cantata de Santa María de Iquique, See also Fernández Retamar, Roberto;
108 Rodó, José Enrique
and Canto para una semilla, 113–14 Assemblage, 14
Affective (affect), 7, 19, 27, 32, 33, 36, 69, 74,
86, 88, 96, 112, 114, 134, 140, 147, 149, 160, Badiou, Alain, 10, 14, 195–96
166, 178, 194, 207, 209, 211, 215, 217–18 and inaesthetics, 4, 85–86
contamination (Félix Guattari), 217 Bagú, Sergio, 204–5
expressions, 3 Benedetti, Mario, 1–3, 7, 17, 29, 39–40,
resonances, 11 43–44, 52–53, 57, 63–72, 77, 84, 89, 90
response, 4, 68, 134 and Ernesto Cardenal, 73, 76
Aisthesis, 5–7, 14, 23–26, 28–30 and ethics of rebelliousness (rebellious
See also Mignolo, Walter; Nancy, Jean- art), 21–22, 65, 189
Luc; Rancière, Jacques and Nicanor Parra, 46, 49–51, 54–55, 58,
Allende, Salvador, 27, 116, 118–19, 132–33, 60, 86 (see also antipoetry)
181 and poet-as-communicator (poeta comu-
Anthropos, 87 nicante), 14, 39–42, 52, 66–68, 79
See also Mignolo, Walter and Roque Dalton, 79, 83
Antipoetry, 12, 14–19, 41–44, 86 Birri, Fernando, 144, 157, 177, 183
and Mario Benedetti, 63 Boff, Leonardo, on the dispossessed of the
and Nicanor Parra, 45–62 earth, 78, 181
and Pablo Neruda, 63 Boom (Latin American Boom Novels), 1, 3,
and Roque Dalton, 79 11–12, 221
See also Benedetti, Mario; Fernández Bosteels, Bruno, 25–26
Retamar, Roberto; Parra, Nicanor Brouwer, Leo, 132, 164, 172
Arciniegas, Germán, 200, 207–8
Argentina, 89, 127, 144, 151–54, 156, 177–79, Caliban, 34, 188, 207
181–86, 188 Cantata, 104, 114, 172–73
See also Getino, Octavio; Gleyzer, Ray- Cantata de Chile, 16, 26, 108, 113, 132, 168–74,
mundo; Solanas, Fernando; Sosa, 176–77, 185
Mercedes See also Solás, Humberto
252 · Index

Cantata sudamericana, 126–30 Dalton, Roque, 4, 7, 9, 14, 20, 39–41, 43–45,

See also Sosa, Mercedes 49, 52–53, 57, 63, 65, 67, 77, 79–86, 90,
Cardenal, Ernesto, 7, 14, 39–41, 43–45, 49, 188–89, 195
52–53, 57, 63, 65, 73–79, 84–86, 90, 189, 195 and revolutionary poetry, 65, 76–77
and liberation theology, 35, 53, 73, 77–79 Decolonial, 5, 8–9, 12–14, 16, 21, 26, 29, 37–38,
Castro, Fidel, 131–32, 135, 159–60, 167, 184 42–44, 61–62, 79, 86–87, 129, 137–38, 140,
Cheah, Pheng, and cosmopolitics, 31 143, 148, 151, 163, 191, 198–200, 202, 209,
Chile 218–21
and Nicanor Parra, 44–46, 48, 54, 61, 65 delinking, 12–13, 143
and nueva canción chilena, 98, 100, 114, film aesthetics, 169, 179
115–20, 137 gestures, 11–12, 41, 50, 52, 61, 72, 82, 88,
and Violeta Parra, 92, 97, 100–105, 108–9, 95, 105, 116, 122, 143, 150, 155–56, 168,
111–12, 114 182–86, 218
Choral film, 172 option, 13, 116, 162, 183
Clayton, Michelle, and lyric poetry, 83–84, poetics, 65, 90
86, 88 sounds, 97, 114, 128–29, 137–40
Coloniality, 5, 9, 11–12, 16, 27, 36, 42–44, 56, thinking, 13–14, 39, 62, 86–87, 116, 209
61–62, 64, 68–69, 73, 79, 81–82, 87–88, visual aesthetics, 142, 144, 146–49, 177
90, 97, 99, 104, 115, 122, 124, 128–29, 140, Decolonial Aesthetics, 4, 6, 9–12, 14–18, 22–
143, 148, 150, 153–55, 158, 160–63, 176, 179, 23, 26, 29–33, 36, 38, 42, 52–54, 62, 73–74,
183–85, 196, 199–200, 206–9, 210, 212, 216, 90, 97, 116, 128, 141, 169, 174, 187, 190–94,
218, 219 198–99, 202, 204–5, 208–11, 220–21
of aesthetics, 12, 65, 68, 94, 204 Decoloniality, 42–43, 61–63, 88, 125, 161, 180,
of being, 17, 206, 208 207
of gender, 82, 103, 162, 165–68, 184 (See De Hostos, Eugenio María, 203
also Lugones, María; Segato, Rita) Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 203
of images, 151 Dussel, Enrique, 91, 206
of knowledge, 17, 28, 62, 96, 101, 150, 156, and philosophy of liberation (aesthetics
184, 201–2, 204, 206–7 of liberation), 16, 52, 191–98
of language, 65 Dwelling, 9, 87
of poetic language, 41, 64–66, 74 See also Mignolo, Walter
of power, 18, 21, 27–28, 69, 71, 83, 87, 94,
111, 120, 124, 148, 151, 157, 164, 166, 180, Elites, 109, 178, 199, 205
201, 209 (see also Quijano, Aníbal) Elitism, 140
of race, 103, 181 Enlightenment, 23, 156
of sound, 102, 114, 125 Eurocentrism, 26, 37, 157, 204
of visuality, 143, 162, 183–84, 186 Existential Territory (Félix Guattari), 32
Comparative Arts (Daniel Albright), 3, 10, Exteriorist poetry, 65, 76
26
Comparison, 37–38, 116, 221 Fals-Borda, Orlando, 44, 211–12
Cosmopolitan, 12, 32, 204 Fanon, Frantz, 20, 29, 34, 43, 61, 71, 78, 116,
Cosmopolitanism, 32 125, 145, 152, 181, 206
Counterculture, 94, 102, 153 and aesthetic forms of the status quo,
Croce, Benedetto, 220 213, 222
and aesthetics as a science of expression, and cultural authenticity, 21–22
52–53 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 1–3, 63, 89,
and art criticism, 88 204
 Index · 253

and antipoetry, 45, 50, 64 Manns, Patricio, 15, 114–15, 137, 172–73
and Caliban, 34 Martí, José, 1, 34–35, 46, 84
and conversational poetry, 45, 88 Marxism, 14, 20, 81
and Ernesto Cardenal, 74 Melodrama, 164, 166, 168–69, 172–74, 177,
Frei, Eduardo, 108 184–85
Freire, Paolo, 195–96 Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias
del subdesarrollo), 4, 158, 161, 165, 184
Getino, Octavio, 16, 144–46, 148, 150, 152–57, México, 180–82, 185–86, 217
182–86, 193 See also Gleyzer, Raymundo; PRI
Gleyzer, Raymundo, 16, 144, 152, 177–83, Mexico, The Frozen Revolution (México, la
185–86, 188, 190, 194–95 revolución congelada), 16, 152, 177, 179–81,
Glissant, Édouard, 33, 38, 64–65, 72 185
Grossman, Edith, and antipoetry, 50 See also Gleyzer, Raymundo
Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 117, 145, 154 Mignolo, Walter, 5–6, 8–9, 13–14, 28–29, 36,
Guillén, Nicolás, 42, 189, 204 43, 62, 68, 87, 116, 140, 157, 169, 209, 218
Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, 4, 16, 144, 157–59, Milanés, Pablo, 132
162, 164, 183–86, 190 Mistral, Gabriela, 1, 45–46, 104–5
See also Memories of Underdevelopment Modernismo (modernista), 2, 40, 45, 204
Modernity, 5, 9, 25, 30, 36, 42, 68, 83–84,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and aes- 87–88, 104, 161, 206
thetics, 23–24
Heidegger, Martin, 68 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 6, 8–9, 11
Hermeticism (poetry), 40–41, 45, 86, 89 and aisthesis, 6–7
Humanitas, 87 and fragmentary art, 6–7
See also Mignolo, Walter Neruda, Pablo, 34, 40, 45–46, 54, 57, 63, 83,
104–5, 117, 172, 189
Jara, Víctor, 15, 93, 100, 114–26, 130, 137–39, New Latin American Cinema, 11–12, 15–19,
183, 188, 195, 216 143–46, 148–49, 185–86, 188, 190, 198, 200,
202, 212
Kant, Immanuel, 28, 169 Nueva canción (new song movement), 3,
Kusch, Rodolfo, and aesthetics of America- 11–12, 15–19, 92–103, 105, 107–8, 111, 113–17,
nity (estética de lo americano), 13, 44, 74, 119, 124–26, 129–34, 137–41, 172, 188–90,
87, 195–96, 198 196, 198, 200, 202, 212, 216, 219
Nueva trova cubana, 15, 98, 131–32
Legrás, Horacio, and decolonial ethos, 44,
62 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 44
Liberation Theology, 14, 35, 53, 73, 75, 77–79, Onganía, Juan Carlos, 178
83, 117, 215 Ontology, 73, 200
Los Bunkers, 17, 217
Lucía, 16, 164–68, 177, 184 Palés Matos, Luis, 42, 204
See also Solás, Humberto Panaesthetics (Daniel Albright), 10, 26–27
Lugones, María, 13, 82, 168 Parra, Nicanor, and antipoetry, 7, 14–15, 17,
See also coloniality: of gender 39–63, 66, 70, 76–77, 79, 84–86, 89–90, 92,
104–05, 116, 189, 215
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 13, 206–8 Parra, Violeta, 4, 10–11, 15, 17, 20, 34, 92–93,
Mallarmé, Stéphane, and symbolist poetry, 97, 100–101, 103–7, 109–17, 119, 123–26,
26, 45, 85–86, 195 130–31, 137–39, 172, 188, 195, 215, 217
254 · Index

Paz, Octavio, 189, 231 The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hor-
Pinochet, Augusto, 15, 26–27, 94–95, 115, nos), 145, 148, 150, 154–58, 160, 178, 184–85
132–33, 170, 172–73, 175–77 See also Getino, Octavio; Solanas, Fer-
PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), nando; Third Cinema
179–81, 185 Third Cinema, 12, 16–18, 146, 148–51, 155–58,
164, 182, 184–86, 190, 196, 219
Quijano, Aníbal, and coloniality of power, See also Getino, Octavio; Solanas,
16, 21, 28, 43, 69, 111, 151, 180, 199, 208 Fernando
Tijoux, Ana, 115–16, 215–16
Rancière, Jacques, 6–11, 14, 24–26, 28, Tlatelolco, 181, 185, 217
146–47 Tragedy, 134, 166, 171–72, 174–76, 184
and inaesthetics, 85–86 (see also Badiou, Trans-Americanity ( José David Saldívar),
Alain) 69
and the aesthetic regime of art, 22, 28, 35
and the distribution of the sensible, 7–9, Valenzuela, Francisca, 10, 17, 100, 215–16
11, 26–28 Vallejo, César, 1, 35, 40–42, 46–49, 57, 65,
and the emancipated spectator, 149 83–84
Rodó, José Enrique, and Ariel and arielismo,
33–34 Xenophilia (Xenophilic), 35, 163, 190
Rodríguez, Silvio, 15, 17, 26–27, 93, 130–39,
216–17 Yupanqui, Atahualpa, 97, 126, 131,

Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, and civiliza- Zea, Leopoldo, 200

tion and barbarism, 33–34, 87 Zola, Émile, 203
Segato, Rita, 13, 82
See also coloniality: of gender
Solanas, Fernando, 16, 144–46, 148, 150–57,
177–78, 182–86, 190, 193
Solás, Humberto, 9, 16, 26–27, 29, 108, 113,
132, 142–45, 164–77, 183–86, 190
See also Cantata de Chile; Lucía
Sosa, Mercedes, 9, 15, 17, 29, 93, 100, 125–31,
134, 137–39, 216–17
Juan G. Ramos is associate professor of Spanish
at the College of the Holy Cross. He is coeditor of
Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures
and Cultures.