Memory, Nostalgia, and Resistance: The Afro-Latin Art Song

As in the rest of the American continent, as a result of the Atlantic slave trade between the XV and XIX centuries, Latin America received a large number of people from Africa, a population forced to abandon their places of origin, leaving behind their families and culture. Motivated by nostalgia and the need to keep their memory and identity, the African diaspora developed alternative resistance mechanisms despite the acculturation processes. Dispossessed of material goods, they used sound, language, and rituals to keep their culture alive. In time, the immaterial and symbolic goods they created penetrated the societies in which they lived, sometimes becoming mainstream through a whitening process that threatened to dispossess them once more of their symbolic wealth. By observing the art song that resulted from the collaboration of poets and composers of the African diaspora in Latin America, we will analyze how the use of melodic, rhythmic, idiomatic, and textual elements in music worked as a strategy to integrate, penetrate, maintain, and reproduce their cultures of origin as well as to participate in the avant-garde and international artistic conversations, becoming a tool for social mobility and a mechanism for gaining social and political rights.