performance than the sung variety, and there is frequent sesquialtera between the melody and the accompanying rhythms.
In Ecuador, the pasillo is a national song and dance, which during the end of the
colonial period was associated with Ecuadorian nationalism. The genre continued
to be popular throughout the 20th century, reaching the height of its popularity in
the 1950s and 1960s in the career of Julio Jaramillo (1935–1978), an Ecuadorian
pasillo singer. So closely was Jaramillo’s career bound to the pasillo, that in 1993,
President Sixto Duran Baellén declared September 27 (Juramillo’s birthday) as Día
del Pasillo Ecuatoriano (Day of the Ecuadorian Pasillo ).
Further Reading
Schechter, John Mendell. Music in Latin American Culture: Regional Traditions. New
York: Schirmer Books, 1999.
George Torres
Payada
The payada is an improvised poetic and musical genre practiced in the Southern
Cone regions of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and southern Brazil. It can either be
sung as a solo or as a duo accompanied by one or two guitars. Its origins go back to
19th century gaucho culture and thus was, and has mostly remained, a rural tradition
though some successful payadores ( payada singers) have enjoyed success beyond
their regions. In Argentina and Uruguay, the payada is often sung as a duel between
two singers. This type of improvised musical challenge has counterparts throughout
Latin America, including Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. A preferred
poetic form for the payada is the décima to which singers alternate verses with one another, often to rural themes relating to gaucho life and countryside. A preferred
musical form is the milonga , where singers may alternate the same melody, or the
singers may each choose their own melody that they will alternate for the perfor-
mance. The treatment of the melody tends to be more restricted in these milongas
than traditional ones. The winner of the payada contest is determined by either a
jury or the audience’s applause. The urbanization of traditional rural repertories
has brought the payada out from the countryside to the cities, which has led to the
300 | Peru
professionalism of some performers to seek an urban audience and mass media op-
portunities, such as large-scale concerts and recordings. The influence of the payada
was evident in the nueva canción movement; artists from this movement, such as
Atahualpa Yupanqui , included payadas in their repertoire.
Further Reading
Moreno Chá, Ercilia. “Music in the Southern Cone: Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay,” in
Music in Latin American Culture: Regional Traditions, edited by John Mendell Schechter,
236–301. New York: Schirmer Books, 1999.
George Torres
Peru
Peru is a country located in Western South America between Chile and Ecuador
that also borders the South Pacific Ocean. Its population is a diverse combina-
tion of Amerindians (45%), mestizos (37%), and whites (15%), as well as blacks,
Japanese, Chinese, and other (3%). Distinctive social and ethnic groups emerged
in Peru as a result of its geography. The country is divided into three distinct geo-
graphical and as a result cultural regions: the Andes region, the coastal region, and
the Amazonian region.
Geography has been especially important to the development of popular music
in Peru. Because Peru contains a low per capita amount of arable land, rural mi-
grants have moved toward urban centers in search of work. As a result, many of the
folkloric cultural and musical traditions from the Andes, coastal, and Amazonian
regions have become an important part of Peruvian popular music as migrants have
tried to reconcile their rural traditions with their urban lifestyles. Musicians such
as Victor Alberto Gil Malma, Florencio Coronado, and Yma Sumac that modi-
fied folkloric music to fit urban tastes have become successful recording artists
in Peru. The popularity of formerly folkloric music gained worldwide recognition
when Simon and Garfunkle recorded a cover of the traditional Peruvian song “El
Condor Pasa.”
In the Andes region, music is rooted in a combination of traditional indigenous
music coupled with European influences. Huayno is the most widespread popular
song and dance genre of the Peruvian Andes. While it has an autonomous form
(duple meter, AABB musical phrases, and usually features a closing section), it
has many regional varieties to reflect the musical tastes of different social and
ethnic groups. The huayno has changed over time as a result of the adaption of
European instruments and esthetic priorities. In the 1950s, it began to gain recog-
nition as a popular music form spreading into coastal and urban centers and even
beyond the borders of Peru to influence the neighboring nations such as Bolivia,
Peru | 301
Garcia Zárate, Raúl
Guitarist Raúl García Zárate (b. 1935) is among Peru’s most famous and inter-
nationally renowned musicians today. The foremost practitioner of Ayacucho’s
formidable mestizo folk guitar tradition since the 1960s, García Zárate has
drawn upon classical guitar technique and the esthetics of formal art music to
arrange, expand, and promote the repertoire and reputation of Peruvian gui-
tar music.
Less known in international circles are the series of ten LPs recorded by
García Zárate with his brother, the vocalist Nery García Zárate, between
1966 and 1980. Containing more than 100 tracks of Ayacuchan mestizo folk
music, primarily waynos, this series of recordings constituted a self-conscious
archival project by the brothers to document the music that had accompanied
their formative years growing up in the highland city. Released at the height of
the golden era of the wayno in Peru, the “Hermanos García Zárate” record-
ings set a standard for performance style and repertoire that came to defi ne
Ayacuchan mestizo music as a whole. The LPs remain treasured possessions
among Ayacuchanos today, with pirate editions still for sale at music markets
throughout the country.
Further Reading
Arguedas, José María. 1977. Nuestra Music Popular y sus Interpretes. Lima: Mosca
Azul and Horizonte.
Jonathan Ritter
Argentina, and Chile. More recently, in the 1970s and 1980s, the huayno fused
with other musical styles such as cumbia and rock as Peruvian musicians wrestled with their ethnic identity divided between European, North American, and Amerindian influences.
It is on the Peruvian coasts that the traditional Peruvian music styles (such as
huayno ) have been exposed to the musical tastes of other parts of the world and
fused to create uniquely Peruvian styles of popular music. The music of the coasts,
known as musica criolla, combines indigenous, North American, European, Afri-
can, and Gypsy influences. In Peru, cumbia is a well-known example of a musical
style that was imported from another country and adjusted to fit Peruvian tastes.
Cumbia, imported from Colombia, grew in popularity in Peru among indigenous
migrants in the late 1960s that began to move to urban centers such as Lima.
They combined cumbia and música tropical with the Andean huayno
rhythm,
and garage-band style guitars to create a new musical style that became known
302 | Plena
as cumbia amazónica or chicha . For Peruvians, chicha became a symbol of cultural hybridity and the working class. In the late 1990s, cumbia once again came
to the forefront of popular music in Peru with the rise of techno- cumbia, which
combined elements of cumbia music with electronic instruments. Developed in a
time of political unrest in Peru, techno- cumbia was seen as the spontaneous ex-
pression of the people and became a favorite musical genre among Peruvians from
all different backgrounds.
Much like the rest of Latin America, Peru was strongly influenced by the rock
‘n’ roll movement as a result of the growing popularity of the radio in the 1950s
and 1960s. Peruvians developed their own interpretation of rock en español but,
unlike Argentinean rock bands, Peruvian rock artists only had limited international
distribution. Big names in Peruvian rock in the 1960s and 1970s included Los
Destellos, Los Mirlos, and Los Diablos Rojos. Today, while rock continues to be
popular, Latin pop dominates the Peruvian music market and is still distributed to
even remote parts of the country with the radio.
Further Reading
Romero, Raul. Debating the Past: Music, Memory, and Identity in the Andes . New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
Romero, Raul. “Popular Music and the Global City.” In From Tejano to Tango , edited
by Walter Aaron Clark, 217–39. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Tracy McFarlan
Plena
Plena, a dance music genre with pan-Caribbean commonalities, is considered to be
Puerto Rico ’ s foremost synthetic folk and popular expression.
Beginnings
Most sources agree that in the beginning of the 20th century, plena, as a dance and
song, emerged simultaneously in the marginal urban and rural barrios of the south-
ern municipality of Ponce a few years after immigrant workers from the British
Caribbean imported some of their own musical traditions and introduced them to
local sugarcane laborers. Catherine George, her husband, John Clark, and daugh-
ter, Carola, are tied to plena’s immediate antecedents. They are said to have arrived
from Barbados with the pandero (a tambourine-shaped instrument with no cym-
bals), and songs they helped disseminate with the assistance of fellow immigrants
from St. Kitts and Nevis.
Plena | 303
Their rhythms soon called the attention of a local sugarcane worker and plowman
Joselino “Bumbún” Oppenheimer (1884–1929), a descendant of African slaves
whose Spanish-based quatrains, or coplas, were improvised during his work hours
at a plantation nearby. They featured the joys and vicissitudes of his community
and were rehearsed a capella in a song-and-refrain, mostly in A-A, or A-B melodic
form with the assistance of young coworkers in charge of the refrain (invariably
the introductory melodic theme A), while they guided the ox and cleared the land
ahead of Bumbún’s plowing. In the evenings, back home in La Joya del Castillo
(a marginal neighborhood or arrabal, in the urban area of Ponce), Oppenheimer
introduced the new plena compositions to a growing number of fellow performers
(known popularly as pleneros ).
Afterwards, plena quickly became commonplace in the south and southwestern
regions of Puerto Rico; first with tambourine and guitar, and later (in the 1920s) with
the addition of double-keyboard accordion and güiro , the latter an indigenous component of Hispanic rural ensembles. Lesser commercial but still popular groups had
ensembles of three panderos. In order of size from the largest to the smallest, these
panderos were: the seguidor (providing the fundamental pulse), the segundo (showing plena’ s characteristic pattern), and the requinto , for high-pitched improvisation.
These groups played to dancing couples, displacing their bodies alternately to the
sides, mutually approaching and moving away in an endless parallel motion. In its be-
ginnings, plena was to be found in ill-reputed dance parties of arrabales, with at least one plena conjunto for each neighborhood. Three of the early barrio groups were led respectively by Chivo Román, Mario Rivera, and the Aranzamendi brothers.
Stylistic Sources
Given its specific association with working class and alien groups, plena is often
compared with the tango that was emerging around the same time in similar mar-
ginalized enclaves of Buenos Aires, Argentina. More significant, however, rural
workers of white ancestry (known as jíbaros ), laborers born of slaves like Bumbún,
and immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean converged in Puerto Rico at
the time, to give plena a musical and poetic profile that attests to its kinship with
forms like the Spanish-Caribbean guaracha and several Dominican rural forms
based on the copla. An expression also known as plena with similar sociohistorical
interests and poetic structure is also reported in the Dominican Republic around
the 1890s, although no clear musical or choreographic relationship with its Puerto
Rican namesake has been found, so far. In Panama, plena is a term used to refer to
reggae . The stress by pleneros on the fourth (and last) beat makes it a close relative of some versions of Trinitarian quadrilles, of calypso, and Jamaican mento. Related basic and near-improvisatory rhythms are registered in recordings of Trinitarian
quadrilles as well in early 20th century recordings of Puerto Rican danzas in Ponce.
304 | Plena
Evolution
The Great Depression, Migration, and Canario’s Ensemble
Given Puerto Rico’s condition as a colony of the United States, years of exploi-
tation and social turbulence during the 1910s and 1920s were compounded by the
period of Great Depression. Unemployment and misery had compelled rural labor-
ers to establish settlements in the swamps and mangrove areas of San Juan. Along
with them followed the rapid dissemination of plenas through the main sugarcane
centers. In San Juan, plena secured its place among the artisan groups of Puerta de
Tierra, one of the island’s oldest working-class barrios.
Around 1927, local musicians moved en masse to New York City and, that year,
Manuel Jiménez (“Canario”) made the first plena recordings in a compromise with
major American recording companies that entailed plena’s first successful inter-
national exposure, but one that required the subordination of the plena ensemble
and its iconic pandero to a Cuban- conjunto format. His group, Canario y su Con-
junto, embraced the use of a solo voice with guitar and accordion accompani-
ment, yet giving the trumpet, bongó, and clave an outstanding role. The required three-minute standard duration of recordings came to be in stark contrast to plena’s
long-lasting live dance performances. Other groups like Los Reyes de la Plena, the
Grupo Ponceño, Los Borinqueños, and Sexteto Flores also made strides by includ-
ing plena in major recordings. But if their repertoire was tied to the saga of the
Great Depression, the central theme was nostalgia for the Puerto Rican homeland.
Big Band and Elegant Plena
In Puerto Rico during the second half of the 1940s, industrialization, develop-
ment, and urbanization brought in flairs of musical ele
gance akin to those of
the major urban centers in the United States. Once an expression consisting
of lively sounds of arrabales and rural barrios, now, in the hands of the Or-
questa de César Concepción, plena suppressed the emblematic pandero and
acquiesced to soft-percussion styles presented a few years before by a visit-
ing Cuban orchestra. Standardized big-band musical arrangements and simple
dance steps were introduced to local upper- and middle-class couples in major
hotel ballrooms.
Back to Its Working-Class Roots
But the musical conformism of Cesar Concepción and his orchestra was over-
whelmed by the more active stance of poor neighborhood plenas: as the agricul-
tural economy declined and flocks of rural laborers settled in San Juan, conflicts
between the rural (slave-related) past and the industrial present fueled barrio ple-
nas with faster and satiric stories like “Déjalo que suba,” by Rafael Cortijo y su
Combo. A local Afro-Caribbean synthesis of big-band, Afro-Cuban, and jíbaro
Plena | 305
sounds, this group featured the unique, improvisatory soneos by singer Ismael Ri-
vera to the accompaniment of piano, the raw and raucuous suburban barrio sounds
of saxophone, trumpets, and a percussion section of bass (or marímbula ), bongós,
timbals, and güiro . Although Cortijo’s repertoire embraced a Caribbean mélange of guarachas , rumbas , congas , oriza rhythms, montunos , merengues , boleros , what is most significant is that plena became a rubric intimately tied with the
Afro-Puerto Rican bomba . After Cortijo, some ensembles are labeled as bomba
y plena groups. His appearance on television in 1954 earned the acceptance of a
widespread audience that years later enjoyed the humorous scat-singings of Efraín
“Mon” Rivera, whose plena “Aló, ¿quién ñama?,” narrates a labor conflict in his
native city of Mayagüez to his trombone-and-percussion ensemble.
A developmental gap is noticed until the 1970s, when a new group, Los Plene-
ros del Quinto Olivo entered the local mass media by embracing an instrumental
format similar to the then-in-vogue salsa ensembles. By this enhancement, not
only did they reintroduce the pandero, but adopted for commercial purposes the
Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music Page 52
