crooners Frank Sinatra and Julio Iglesias. In order to compete with the modern
trends, Mexican bolero composers modernized the genre by incorporating elements
of rock ‘n’ roll. This new pop ballad genre came to be known as balada . Singers
such as José José and Juan Gabriel defined balada’s golden era in the 1970s. In the
following decade, the Mexican balada was largely absorbed into the international
Latin pop category. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s most composers and song-
writers drew from previously popular styles. Luis Miguel, a young Mexican pop
star, was instrumental in reintroducing the romantic bolero to a new, transnational
generation in the 1990s.
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era
During the early 1960s rock ‘n’ roll became a major influence on Mexican poli-
tics, society, and culture. Derived from an imported commodity, rock en español
quickly established itself as an authentic local form of music in Mexico City.
The rise of a massive student-led resistance, which revolted against authoritar-
ian rule in 1968, linked rock ‘n’ roll with protest against the government. This
countercultural movement, La Onda (The Wave, also known as La Onda Chi-
cana ), emerged as a vehicle for resistance politics and as an outlet for alternative
articulations of self and national identity among middle-class Mexican youths.
Like elsewhere in Latin America, rock music was considered subversive and
threatening by both the nationalist establishment on the right and the intellectual
critics on the left. While critics condemned Mexican rock music as a bourgeois
imitation of an imperialist cultural expression, rock artists and fans alike suffered
harassment and abuse at the hands of the Mexican government and its police
force. After the countercultural movement had lost momentum and most native
rock bands had broken up, the genre was absorbed by the disempowered lower-
class youths of the marginalized zones of urban Mexico. In the early 1980s, the
punk-rock youth from the barrios ( los chavos banda ) made themselves heard
with a music that addressed their needs and concerns. The 1980s also produced
two other trends of native rock: the rock-fusion carried by the middle classes
and the other rock, a commercialized and sanitized teenybopper rock movement.
With the 1986 student protests, rock music (both foreign and national) experi-
enced a revival.
Mexico
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257
Música Grupera
The onda grupera (literally the group wave) is a hybrid as well as transnational
phenomenon. Inspired by the 1960s Mexican pop ballad/rock groups that imitated
English and American rock music and the Colombian cumbia craze that swept
Mexico in the early 1960s, the grupo (group) ensemble with its synthesized instru-
ments, electric guitar, and lead vocalist emerged as one of Mexico’s commercially
most successful forms of popular music in the 1980s. Grupos play easy-listening
Mexican and international pop ballads as well as tropical cumbias (a typical Mexi-
can style not to be confused with its Afro-Colombian source) and are characterized
by a common-denominator bubblegum sound rather than a distinctive Mexican re-
gional style or flavor. Due to a lack of access to the mainstream media as well as for
economic survival in the local music market, the first generation of gruperos ( grupo
musicians) in the 1970s developed a hybrid music style and mixed repertoire that
borrowed from the balada pop tradition, cumbia tropical (tropical cumbia ), rock, and ranchera (Mexican country music) and that would mainly appeal to the lower
classes. The pioneer groups hailed from anywhere between the southeastern pen-
insula of Yucatán to Acapulco on the Pacific coast, but eventually Mexico’s north-
east became the hub for the grupo movement. The phenomenon peaked in the early
1990s when it became part of massive, Woodstock-style marathon dance concerts
in major cities such as Monterrey, Nuevo León, and Guadalajara, Jalisco.
Other Transnational Music Phenomena
In the mid-1980s, a grupo version of the acoustic banda sinaloense appeared in
Guadalajara. This fusion became known as tecnobanda ( technobanda) or simply
banda (consisting of electric bass, keyboard synthesizer, saxophone, trumpets,
drums, and vocalist). In the early 1990s, southern California was swept by the
banda movement, carried and supported by large numbers of recent immigrants
from Mexico and Central America. Tecnobanda’s accelerated tempo and powerful
amplification set off a dance craze that spread to other parts of the United States and
back to Mexico. After the Mexican media mogul Televisa discovered tecnobanda
as a transnational marketable commodity, it soon entered the Mexican mainstream
and opened the doors for other regional popular music forms. A decade after tec-
nobanda’s international breakthrough, a local group that, like tecnobanda, fused
Mexican rural-rooted music with synthesizers and drum sets, busted out of Chicago
and made headlines in the United States when peaking the Billboard Latin charts in
2003. The novelty sound became known as pasito duranguense (little step from Du-
rango). Although the Durango groups mainly reinterpret Mexican standards such
as rancheras and baladas, el pasito duranguense is a distinctly Chicago invention,
and in the Mexican home state of Durango, it is consequently called Chicago sound.
258 | Mexico
Both the tecnobanda and the pasito duranguense phenomena owe much to the onda
grupera, which paved the way in the music industry for keyboard-driven, eclectic
youth music, yet rooted in Mexican sensibilities.
Mexicanized Foreign Dance Music
Various dance music imported from the Caribbean were popularized and Mexican-
ized throughout the 20th century such as the Cuban danzón and the mambo . Cuban bandleader Pérez Prado ’ s work in Mexico in the 1950s made the mambo even more
fashionable and local dance bands quickly integrated the new trend into their own
repertories. This dance music is known in Mexico as música tropical (tropical music)
or música bailable (danceable music), which also encompasses the cumbia, a genre
that has been popular among Mexico’s dancing audiences since the 1960s. Mexican
regional ensembles, from accordion-based groups to brass bands, joined the cumbia
craze, popularizing the genre in urban and rural areas alike. Over time, cumbia music
became more associated with Mexico’s lower and working classes. Instrumental in
the development and dissemination of cumbia has been Monterrey, the center of a po-
tent cultural industry promoting predominantly música norteña and música grupera.
During the 1980s, Monterrey’s increasingly more professional recording and enter-
tainment industries propelled the pop- influenced grupera music and grupo/norteño
fusions out of their regional confines. By the early 1990s, commercial cumbias en-
joyed prominence in the whole of Mexico as well as in parts of the United States.
Apart from this heavily commercialized music, there exists a lesser-known regional
style of cumbia, the Monterrey colombiana, which has remained more closely con-
nected to the original musical style from the Caribbean coastal region of Colombia,
&n
bsp; in sound as well as in instrumentation (Olvera Gudiño 2005). Apart from cumbias,
colombianos (Colombians) also reinterpreted other popular Colombian genres like
porro and vallenato as an expression of their own rural origins and marginalization.
In spite of the indifference and even open hostility of the local mass media, the music
was able to transcend its marginal confines, and within two decades, it had spread to
other cities of the Mexican northeast. The late 1990s saw an increasing acceptance
of the Monterrey colombiana after the popular culture industry had discovered it as
a potentially lucrative new musical style. Due to the increasing decentralization of
Mexico’s culture industry and the proliferation of new channels of communication in
the 1990s, popular genres such as the tropical cumbia began to be recorded outside
of the established recording centers, both south and north of the border.
Electronica
In the beginning of the the 21st century, the nor-tec phenomenon emerged from the
border city of Tijuana and, through the Internet, it quickly conquered a global audi-
ence. Marketed as a kind of ethnic electronic dance music, nor-tec samples sounds
Milonga
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259
of traditional music from northern Mexico and transforms them through computer
technology used in European and American techno music and electronica.
Further Reading
Carrizosa, Toño. La Onda Grupera: Historia del Movimiento Grupero [The Grupo
Wave: A History of the Grupo Movement]. Mexico City: EDAMEX, 1997.
Madrid, Alejandro L. Nor-tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Olvera Gudiño, José Juan. Colombianos en Monterrey: Origen de un gusto musical y
su papel en la construcción de una identidad social. Monterrey, NL: Fondo Estatal para la
Cultura y las Artes de Nuevo León, 2005.
Pedelty, Mark. Musical Ritual in Mexico City: From the Aztec to NAFTA. Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 2004.
Simonett, Helena. Banda: Mexican Musical Life across Borders. Middletown, CT: Wes-
leyan University Press, 2001.
Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1999.
Helena Simonett
Milonga
An African-derived word native to the Río de la Plata region of Argentina and
Uruguay, milonga can refer to a number of interrelated concepts: an improvisatory
song form, of which exist distinct rural and urban versions; a lively couples dance
played by tango ensembles; a social event where dancers gather to dance tango,
vals , and milonga; and the location where such an event takes place.
The precise etymology of the term milonga is unclear, although it is undoubt-
edly Afro-Argentine in origin. Scholars have identified possible cognates in Kim-
bundu and Ki-Kongo meaning word, argument, and moving lines of dancers. In
any case, it is clear that the term came into use in River Plate Spanish in the mid-
19th century; one of its first appearances in print is in José Hernández’s classic
gauchesco poem “ Martín Fierro” in 1872. In this early period, the milonga in ques-
tion was a song form for solo voice and guitar accompaniment, and was based
on texts consisting of octosyllabic lines, frequently in the ten-line décima stanzas derived from popular Spanish poetry. These texts could be either pre-composed
or improvised, and the milonga formed the rhythmic and musical basis for impro-
vised song duels known as payadas or contrapuntos. Musically, these milongas were distinguished by a rhythmic base related to the habanera , sometimes simplified to the pattern known as tresillo in Cuba, known locally as a 3–3-2 rhythm, referring to the number of eighth note subdivisions in each of the three notes of
the pattern.
260 | Milonga
In the 20th century, the milonga was given new prominence by the urban folk-
lore boom, becoming a vehicle for populist folk poetry by musicians such as Ata-
hualpa Yupanqui (1908–1992). A distinctly urban milonga emerged in both
instrumental and vocal versions among tango musicians starting in the 1930s with
important milongas by composer Sebastian Piana (1903–1994) such as “ Milonga
triste ” and “ Milonga sentimental.” Frequently these pieces were in livelier tem-
pos than the folkloric versions, and were danced, like the tango, by embracing
couples. Many important tango composers also wrote milongas, including notable
contributions by Anibal Troilo (1914–1975; “La tablada,” “La trampera”), Pedro
Laurenz (1902–1972; “Milonga de mis amores”), and Julián Plaza (1928–2003;
“Nocturna”). Among the proponents of urban sung milongas, guitarist and singer
Edmundo Rivero (1911–1986) was particularly well-known for an oeuvre rich in
a nearly archaic version of lunfardo, the underworld slang of Buenos Aires, which
frequently deals with criminal themes. Tango nuevo composer Astor Piazzolla
(1921–1992) also wrote both instrumental and sung milongas, including the well-
known “Milonga del angel” in the former case, and “Jacinto chiclana” in the latter,
to a text by Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).
Milonga as a specific dance form, rather than a general term for a social gath-
ering involving dance, was strongly influenced by the choreography of the Afro-
rioplatense candombe. In fact, early commentators suggested that milonga prior
to the turn of the 20th century was nothing other than compadritos (European-
descended lower-class urban men) copying the steps they had witnessed in the can-
dombe. Over the course of the 20th century, the milonga became a lively, playful
dance where dancers maintain a more constant motion than in tango, occasionally
dancing in rhythmic counterpoint to the musical phrase rather than in rhythmic
unison with it.
The term milonga as referring to the event or locale for such dancing also gen-
erated two related terms: milonguero, a person who dances tango and milonga in such locales, and milonguita, a working-class woman whose skill in dancing made
her a popular partner for bourgeois men and an object of their desires. The milon-
guita becomes a literary trope in tango lyrics; she is typically originally naïve, but
the limited options offered by her station in life lead her into whirlwind, inevita-
bly fatalistic romances with the playboys who romance her. Usually in these nar-
ratives the only true freedom the milonguita is afforded is to betray and abandon
these men.
Further Reading
Collier, Simon. “The Tango is Born: 1880s–1920s.” In Tango! The Dance, The Song,
The Story, edited by Simon Collier. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
Savigliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion . Boulder, CO: West-
view Press, 1995.
Mizik
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Thompson, Robert Farris. Tango: The Art History of Love. New York: Pantheon Books.
2005.
Michael O’Brien
Mizik Rasin
Mizik rasin is a roots music that emerged in the 1980s, which brought traditional
Afro-Haitian music, especially the music of rara (Haitian Carnival music) and
Vodou, together with popular music. T
he movement was influenced, in large part,
by reggae . Besides having its texts in Creole the music was heavily influenced by Haitian Vodou, to the point where musicians would incorporate instruments and
rhythms of Vodou ceremonies, often going directly to the practitioners of Vodou
ceremonies to receive legitimate instruction. Because roots music that is Vodou-
influenced was suppressed during the reigns of the two Duvaliers, Papa Doc and
Baby Doc, the movement did not surface until after 1987, though the formations
of the movement date from before then.
Early attempts at unifying traditional music and popular music in Haiti existed
prior to mizik rasin. Groups such as Jazz de Jeunes either attempted a stylistic in-
terpretation of Vodou rhythms and themes, or would entitle their songs with names
or deities from Vodou. Prior to the end of the Duvalier regime, Afro-Haitian music
(i.e., Vodou and rara ) was seen by the much of the dominant population (Haitian
government, elites, and the Catholic church) as an undesirable cultural element,
and so allusions and references to Haitian Vodou were frowned upon by the these
civic and social groups. During this kilti libete (freedom culture) movement of the
1970s, much of which existed in exile as a result of the Haitian brain drain when
many intellectuals left Haiti because of the repressive Duvalier era, many artists
influenced by the works of groups like Jazz de Jeunes began to experiment with
a more serious and methodical appropriation of Afro-Haitian music and dance.
It was on the heels of this period that misik rasin came about, and, within Haiti,
musicians followed their inspiration to the lakou (ceremonial Vodou compounds
or communities), where musicians learned the authentic practices of Vodou music
and dance. When the Duvalier regime finally imploded, the musicians were free
to come out of artistic exile, both at home and abroad, with their musical style.
What resulted was what Gerdès Fleurent has called a bi-musicality where musi-
cians were trained in both Western and Afro-Haitian styles of music composition
and performance.
Notable examples of
mizik rasin
artists include
Boukman Eksperyans,
Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music Page 45
