Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (review)

Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. By Eric Zolov. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 349 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $18.95.

"Rock [music]," novelist and cultural critic José Agustín once wrote, "is not the patrimony of the United States, even though it first surfaced there" (p. 113). Originating as the music of African American urban migration, rock 'n' roll grew into a global cultural idiom, a musical form that transcended national boundaries, fusing with local styles to create new cultural configurations. As Eric Zolov demonstrates in this superb work, rocanrol in Mexico developed hand in hand with the country's expanding youth culture, itself underwritten by the country's economic "miracle" of the 1950s and 1960s. This same youth movement, centered predominantly among university students in Mexico City, came to mount the era's most significant protest movement, culminating in the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco. As the author reveals, although the tragedy at Tlatelolco did much to spell an end to organized student protest, the government had greater difficulty quelling rock and its attendant countercultural revolt. Based on an impressive array of sources, including uncataloged government papers, oral histories, radio and television broadcasts, corporate documents, and films, Refried Elvis is a stunning work of historical reconstruction, a richly detailed and wholly original investigation of the fundamental place of rock, as both commodity and broader social movement, in Mexican popular culture.

Zolov's study begins in the late 1950s, when jazz orchestras first introduced rock 'n' roll to nightclub audiences. Unlike in the U.S., where the musical style took hold among working-class youth, in Mexico rock 'n' roll was first embraced by upper-class adults, who associated it with "modernity" and cosmopolitanism. Soon, homegrown bands formed, performing refritos (Spanish-language covers of U.S. songs) and conveying a sanitized version of rock 'n' roll. Despite its clean-cut image, conservatives lashed out against rock, accusing it of fomenting desmadre, a term signifying social chaos and the collapse of patriarchal values.

With artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan bringing a heightened political awareness to music, rock soon developed into a "wedge against traditional social values" (p. 102). Even hippies, the turned-on, tuned-in, and dropped-out critics of all things "square," appeared among Mexico's youth, leaving many to wonder how a movement rebelling against material abundance could take shape in an impoverished country like Mexico. Yet, as the author asserts, hippies' revalorization of indigenous culture "allowed youth to invent new ways of being Mexican . . . that ran counter to the dominant ideology of state-sponsored nationalism" (p. 111). Linked to this was La Onda, Mexico's own countercultural movement, "grounded in a fusion of native and foreign rock, literature, language and fashion" (p. 114). Although the connection he draws is at times tenuous, Zolov contends that La Onda significantly influenced the 1968 student movement and served as a "vehicle for channeling the rage and cynicism" (p. 132) felt toward Mexico's political system. The author maintains that much of this cultural and political defiance evinced itself in La Onda Chicana, a native rock movement that blended Latin and rock rhythms, psychedelic sensibilities, and English-language lyrics. The movement reached its apogee in 1971 at the Avandaro rock festival, patterned after the far-muddier Woodstock and far-bloodier Altamont festivals. As the author shows, unlike Woodstock, the Mexican festival never spawned soundtrack albums or a now cliche, split-screen documentary. Instead, Avandaro sunk into oblivion, "its cultural significance . . . largely forgotten" (p. 249). What native rock did survive, Zolov concludes, retreated to working-class barrios, where it articulated the frustrations of the economically downtrodden.

Zolov's study accomplishes what few other investigations of Mexican cultural history have heretofore achieved: it firmly situates popular culture within its political and economic context, providing a nuanced analysis of how a specific cultural form was...