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  • Hugo Chávez, Alí Primera and Venezuela: The Politics of Music in Latin America by Hazel Marsh
  • J. Patrice McSherry
Marsh, Hazel. Hugo Chávez, Alí Primera and Venezuela: The Politics of Music in Latin America. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Hazel Marsh has written a thought-provoking and original analysis of how popular song and folk musicians can generate unforeseen and rippling impacts for years to come in the politics of a changing country. Her case study centers on Alí Primera, a musician, best known for his song "Cardboard Houses," who was an integral part of the Nueva Canción [New Song] movement in Venezuela. Primera died in 1985, long before Hugo Chávez emerged as a central political actor in the country, yet the singer's musical legacy reverberated among the poor and excluded sectors [el pueblo] and subsequently was incorporated within Chavez's political campaigns in the 1990s. Marsh's work demonstrates how cantautores [singer-songwriters] can become symbolic and beloved figures when they challenge unjust social hierarchies and defend the interests of the dispossessed.

La Nueva Canción was a continental movement. In many countries across the region in the 1960s a new generation was politicized by the Cold War, the Cuban revolution, United States intervention, and national struggles for liberation. Tired of imported rock music from the global North, which they saw as a cultural invasion supplanting local and national music, young musicians drew from, adapted, and renovated traditional Latin American folk rhythms and forms to create original and innovative music. Some songs expressed a commitment to revolutionary political change, social justice, and el pueblo; others simply highlighted the rich cultural heritage of the region.

Marsh's key argument is that music "embodies political values, memories and feelings, and it constitutes a realm within which political ideas and social identities are asserted, resisted, contested, negotiated and renegotiated" (3). She [End Page 275] contends that Primera and his songs provided a wealth of cultural resources for Chávez to draw upon, allowing him to link Venezuela's historical traditions (such as the liberating role of Simón Bolívar) to contemporary struggles, and to demonstrate his commitment to el pueblo. Chávez often quoted, sang, and referred to Primera's songs, showing his allegiance to the common people and their struggles. Marsh is the first scholar to examine this phenomena in-depth. She shows how Chávez presented Primera's legacy as the embodiment and forerunner of Chávez's political thought, Bolivarianism, which, among the poor, added legitimacy to his challenge to elite political rule. "Chávez mobilized shared grassroots memories of Alí and his songs to represent his movement, and after 1999 his government, as the continuation of the struggles already begun by el pueblo" (134).

The first part of the book explores the significance of Primera's music in the 1970s and 1980s, before the ascension of Chávez. The songwriter and his songs were enmeshed in the social conflicts of the era, expressing political discontent and commitment to Venezuela's poor, which won him the loyalty of the masses. The second part examines how Chávez drew upon the tragic figure of Primera (who died in an auto accident in what many thought were suspicious circumstances) to identify himself with the dispossessed, their history of social resistance, and leftist political values. After becoming president Chávez used cultural policy, drawing on Primera's musical legacy, to raise the status of excluded sectors of Venezuelan society and break with the old elite order. Primera's songs were re-interpreted and re-signified; among anti-Chávez sectors, this process provoked anger and hatred, while among pro-Chávez sectors the identification with Primera deepened their devotion to the government.

Theoretically, Marsh rejects both a top-down and a bottom-up analysis of Primera's significance to the building of the Bolivarian movement. On the last page of the book, she states that Chávez's incorporation of Primera's musical legacy was neither "an emancipating rupture of hegemony emerging spontaneously from below nor an imposition of social control enforced from above" (213). Instead, Marsh concludes, "this was a complex, dynamic and paradoxical...

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