Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America

Nelson Varas-Díaz

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789383959
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The long-lasting effects of colonialism are still present throughout Latin America. Racism, political persecution, ethnic extermination and extreme capitalism are some salient examples. This new book explores how heavy metal music in the region has been used to critically challenge the historical legacy of colonialism and its present-day manifestations.

Through extensive ethnographic research in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Argentina, Varas-Díaz documents how metal music listeners and musicians engage in 'extreme decolonial dialogues' as a strategy to challenge past and ongoing forms of oppression. This allows readers to see metal music in a different light and as a call for justice in Latin America.

Heavy metal related scholarship has made strides in the past decade. Many books have aimed to explain its origins, uses and the social meanings ascribed to the music in a variety of contexts. For the most part, these have neglected to address the region of Latin America as an area of study.

It represents a historical and sociological journey in Latin American heavy metal music through rich ethnographic engagements with performers, fans and scholars of music. Its central premise is the dialogic relationship amongst deep histories of coloniality, systematic oppression, entrenched inequalities and the expressive forms generated by 'decolonial metal music'. The book also provides an exemplary and potentially iconic model of ethnomusicology and the anthropology of music.

Most previous work on metal music in Latin America has relied on theoretical frameworks developed in the Global North, and is therefore limited in understanding the region through its particular history and experiences. There is no scholarship of heavy metal scholarship in the Latin American region that achieves the depth or breadth of analysis represented by this book. It provides a roadmap and a model for this emerging mode of musical analysis, by demonstrating how decolonial metal scholarship can be achieved.

Academic readership for the book will come from multiple disciplines including cultural studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology, anthropology, cultural geography, history and Latin American studies. It will be of interest to music studies programmes, as well as for methods courses on structurally informed social research. The book will also be of interest to those outside academic settings – accessibly written, with its concise reviews of historical and political-economic contexts, and its vivid storytelling, it will be of interest to consumers of the metal musical genre.

1

Metal Music’s Decolonial Role in Latin America

Tendrás que saber, mi hijo,

te reclaman por ahí,

que hay gritos por todos lados,

para aquel que sabe oír.

(You should know, my son,

they call for you out there,

there are screams everywhere,

for those who know how to listen.)

(Arraigo 2012: n.pag.)

One hour into our interview he uttered a phrase that would completely change the direction of my research. “We are not here to entertain you.” He said it with such conviction and strength that it shook me to the core. The interviewee was Gustavo Zavala, the bass player for the Argentinian metal band Tren Loco. I asked him what he meant by it, and he went on to describe how metal was a way to “feel and see the world.” I asked him to elaborate. He took a deep breath, looked at the floor, and, with the reluctance of someone who had explained this before on many occasions, began to speak about the region’s colonial history. He described the colonial exploitation historically faced by the Latin American region, how that experience was later manifested through foreign support for local dictatorships, and how those practices were still present today. “For us metal is not entertainment. It is not.” A long silence filled the room.

This book is the product of almost a decade of travel throughout Latin America, researching heavy metal culture in nine countries: Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Perú, México, Colombia, and Guatemala. During that period, I was heavily engaged in ethnographic research throughout the region, which yielded, alongside multiple academic publications, three documentary films examining the intersection of heavy metal music, history, and culture in Latin America. The three films were released sequentially as my travels continued throughout these countries: The Distorted Island: Heavy Metal and Community in Puerto Rico (González-Sepúlveda et al. 2015), The Metal Islands: Culture, History and Politics in Caribbean Heavy Metal Music (Varas-Díaz et al. 2016), and Songs of Injustice: Heavy Metal in Latin America (Varas-Díaz et al. 2018).

As a heavy metal music fan, and a social scientist who has lived in a colonial setting for most of my life (i.e., Puerto Rico), I felt there were many reflections, based on my research endeavors in these settings, that needed further attention as they were limited by the restricted running times of the films and the constrained space afforded by short-format publications. I aim to extend these ongoing perusals by providing readers with a conceptual framework to understand the relation between metal music and the colonial experience, which I hope, alongside very specific examples from each country, can shed light on the role of heavy metal music in Latin America.

My travels through the region and conversations with musicians, fans, and researchers have led me to a conclusion that stands above all others: a significant number of metal artists in Latin America have become decolonial¹ in their respective artistry, philosophies, and lives. Thus, in this book I aim to define decolonial metal, describe its main characteristics in Latin America, and explain how it invites individuals to engage in critical reflections about the region’s history, politics, and everyday actions in each of their contexts. I posit that metal in Latin America fosters what I define as extreme decolonial dialogues, that is, a way to cope and transform oppressive contexts in light of the profound and ever-present consequences of colonialism. In this initial chapter, I will address the colonial experience in Latin America, explore its relation to metal music, and define the characteristics of decolonial metal in the region. Furthermore, I will address some of the tensions faced by decolonial music in Latin America with its musical counterparts in the Global North. The subsequent chapters will provide readers with specific examples of how decolonial metal is created, consumed, and used for social transformation by artists and fans throughout the region. Before defining decolonial metal, it is useful to examine a general idea of how colonialism, and more importantly coloniality, are experienced in the region.

Coloniality and the Latin American experience

To examine the manifestations of colonialism in Latin America, we must take an inclusive approach that is not constrained to a specific historical moment in the region’s development. Some analyses on the effects of colonialism tend to examine it solely as a phenomenon of the past and, therefore, relegate these efforts to the realm of historical studies. In many cases, particularly for outsiders, a discussion of Latin America’s colonial experience might seem limited to the European colonization process that began in the fifteenth century and was later challenged by the emergence of independent nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at the hands of local liberation movements. This is an important piece of the colonial puzzle for Latin America, as it marked the imposition of foreign cultures and worldviews on these lands and populations. This initial colonial experience was characterized by the subjugation of local indigenous peoples, the pillaging of natural resources for the development of the colonial metropoles, and the imposition of Western worldviews (i.e., notions on religion, morality, progress, knowledge production, and social order) on local people. Said colonial process, along with its plethora of consequences, was firmly established on the devaluation of local people through racial categorization; more specifically, the colonial process was, and remains, inherently racist. The colonial experience would have been hard enough for the region if it were limited to these axes of action and had culminated with the constitution of new nations as a challenge to the imperial powers of Europe, but it did not end there. Even after independence (for those who achieved it) and the symbolic end of political colonialism, many countries in Latin America faced the seemingly everlasting consequences of this experience.

Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano has described the ever-present legacy of colonialism in Latin America, long after the fifteenth-century period of colonization in the region (Quijano 2010). He has used the term “coloniality” (e.g., colonialidad del poder [“coloniality of power”]; Quijano 2000: 24) to describe a “form of domination in the world today, once colonialism as an explicit political order was destroyed.” Coloniality, therefore, encompasses a structure of oppression, linked to the colonial experience of the fifteenth-century, but one that simultaneously surpasses the end of that very period. This structure of oppression was based on the “superiority of the dominant, and the inferiority of the dominated” and was justified via racial categorization (2010: 25). But this strategy would not be limited to the control of racialized bodies, as it would also aim to colonize the locals’ imagination, knowledge, culture, history, and memory, rendering them all as inferior in the eyes of the colonizers.² This oppressive strategy may have been created, implemented, and/or exploited during the colonization process, but it became pervasive, as it served to sustain the project of modernity in Europe. Arturo Escobar has described Quijano’s coloniality as “a global hegemonic model of power in place since the conquest that articulates race and labor, space and peoples, according to the needs of capital and to the benefit of white European peoples” (Escobar 2010: 39). In this sense, the tactic of categorizing the local as inferior, used in colonial times to justify oppression, is still present today. Furthermore, it is used to explain and justify the project of modernity, which has relied, and still depends heavily, on the systematic exploitation of the local. Thus, coloniality remains an ongoing project.

The pervasive implications of the devaluation of the local generated through coloniality are best understood through particular examples. Two of them are exceptionally important: the devalued identity of indigenous peoples and the conceptualizations of local geographies, including nature itself, as an unending exploitable resource. The conception of local indigenous people as less than human enabled their extermination during colonial times. Their placement into a devalued social position (i.e., indigenous as nonhuman) was later used during the twentieth-century dictatorships and regional armed conflicts to justify their continued eradication. Finally, this devalued category is used today to justify the hostile takeover of their lands as part of the neoliberal exploitation of communities and geographies in the region. This continued exploitation of devalued local peoples is also present in conceptualizations of local geographies and nature. Under fifteenth-century colonialism, natural resources found in local geographies were conceived as settler property, exploited, and exported to the colonial metropoles. This notion was also present in the neoliberal policies that characterized many of the dictatorships in Latin America, which fueled the unbridled use of natural resources (e.g., deforestation in the case of Chile), and continue unchecked in the region today (see Chapter 4). Coloniality frames these examples, among many others, as reflections of the devalued categories of colonial domination that are still used and exploited in the present for the benefit of others – specifically, the modern project that fostered European expansion. Since this modern project was understood as unending, coloniality is, therefore, perpetual. As explained by Walter Mignolo (2010: ix), “There is no modernity without coloniality and that coloniality is constitutive, and not derivative, of modernity.” That Western modern project was, and continues to be, anchored in the exploitation and devaluation (geographical, physical, and psychological) of the colonial settings (Mignolo 2011).

As previously mentioned, the hierarchical categorizations that fostered oppressive experiences during the early stages of European colonialism remain in place to this day. The devaluation of indigenous people, local cultures, and regional knowledge/experiences continues in many of the countries that comprise the region. This devaluation of the local has been an intrinsically important component in the establishment of other mechanisms of oppression in Latin America. Some clear examples have been the imposed political dictatorships that have plagued the region in countries like Chile and Argentina, to name a few. These regimes were established mostly in collaboration with local and international powers, to the detriment of local peoples, particularly dissenters (Pizarro and Wittebroodt 2002; Díaz Vergara 2006; Soto 2008; Robaina 2015). Even today, when these dictatorships have been mostly vanquished throughout Latin America, the neoliberal practices implemented by local governments and international private companies (i.e., illegal use and privatization of essential natural resources) perpetuate the effects of said dictatorships, as the new model continues the exploitation of local peoples (Mojica 2010; Campos Medina and Campos Medina 2012; Barandiaran 2016).

Furthermore, the devaluation of individual lives and groups that characterized the initial colonial experience remains alive and well in more current forms of oppression. This process of devaluation is not limited to individuals and communities. In fact, it extends to cultural practices, including the development of local knowledge, memories, and histories. These are seen as less valuable and sometimes dangerous, as they can challenge the long-lasting effects of coloniality. For example, the value placed on Western ideas and ideals, which are promoted as universal and all-encompassing by the Global North, has, on many occasions, sought to devalue locally produced knowledge. The same can be said of local histories and memories, which have been subsumed under the universalistic approach toward history promoted by Western universities, among other spaces of knowledge production. While f...