Papers by Christina Azahar
Latin American Perspectives, 2023
Cueca brava, urban cueca from Santiago, has historically been a male-dominated song and dance pra... more Cueca brava, urban cueca from Santiago, has historically been a male-dominated song and dance practice. Its vocal technique, canto gritado, is often considered synonymous with masculine bravado. However, in the 2010s, the singer Josi Villanueva began transforming this scene by teaching women to sing cueca brava. The experiences of participants in Villanueva's community classes were shaped by Chile's Mayo Feminista movement in 2018, and her pedagogical practices help participants enact an embodied process of sacando la voz (raising one's voice) through which women dismantle the limits put on their bodies and voices when they are silenced in musical or social spaces.
Históricamente, la cueca brava, o cueca urbana de Santiago, ha sido una práctica de canto y baile dominada por hombres. Su técnica vocal, el canto gritado, es frequentemente considerado sinónimo de bravuconería masculina. Sin embargo, en la década de 2010, la cantora Josi Villanueva comenzó a transformar este escenario al enseñar a las mujeres a cantar cueca brava. Las experiencias de las participantes en las clases comunitarias de Villanueva fueron moldeadas por el movimiento chileno Mayo Feminista en 2018, y sus prácticas pedagógicas ayudan a las participantes a llevar a cabo un proceso encarnado de "sacar la voz" a través del cual desmantelan los límites impuestos a sus cuerpos y voces cuando son silenciadas en espacios musicales o sociales.
This dissertation engages the concept of resonance in order to explore how Chilean feminist activ... more This dissertation engages the concept of resonance in order to explore how Chilean feminist activists, musicians, industry leaders, and audiences have used popular musical practices to create space for themselves and their communities. Centrally, this study asks, how are feminist organizers in Chile engaging music to mobilize artists, audiences, and industries to end patterns of patriarchal oppression? To what extent do feminist musical practices allow participants to navigate, re-sound, and re-envision the physical, social, industrial, and virtual spaces of which they are a part? By examining a diversity of feminist musical practices from the mid-twentieth century to the present, I explain how musical and interpersonal resonances shape feminist coalition-building while also reconfiguring the gender politics of social and geophysical space. Each chapter in this dissertation makes audible distinct feminist understandings of Chilean music history, spatial politics, and the patriarchal systems that shape these. In Chapters Two and Three, I examine the role of cantautoras (women singer-songwriters) across generations of political movements, specifically addressing the feminist legacies, activism, and travels of folklorist Violeta Parra (b. 1917) and singer Pascuala Ilabaca (b. 1985). The latter two chapters examine two highly distinct community music practices. Chapter Four draws on my participant observation in women’s community cueca classes in Santiago to analyze the process of “sacando la voz” (raising, drawing out, or finding one’s voice) within the urban folk music tradition, cueca brava. Chapter Five examines the history of countercultural arts collective Coordinadora Femfest and their collaboration with trans performer Hija de Perra. I explain how members have used peripheral venues and DIY performance practices to develop a transfeminist coalition building based on “sounding from under”–outside mainstream institutions and in solidarity with marginalized communities.Each case, I argue, represents a different enactment of feminist worldmaking in which sound is made into a reclamation of space, an amplification of voices, or a mobilization of power. I define feminist worldmaking as the performative means through which musicians and musical collectives practice modes of existence and envision human futurity outside the strictures of sexism, classism, and xenophobia. Based on this perspective, I locate feminist worldmaking possibilities in these practices not only in the way their artistic imaginings envision new futures, but also in the very real ways that their organizing, production, and performance actively transform gender and sexual politics within their social context
Journal of the Society for American Music
Authored by a multiracial Salvadoran/U.S. American graduate student, this paper marks an effort t... more Authored by a multiracial Salvadoran/U.S. American graduate student, this paper marks an effort to engage both an autobiographical and a historical perspective on Los Torogoces de Morazán’s role in the evolution of Salvadoran cultural memory. The group’s formation in 1981 established them as the primary musical expression of the FMLN guerilla forces throughout the civil war that lasted until 1992, and they now continue performing to honor those lost during the conflict’s numerous state-sanctioned mass civilian executions. In this paper I argue that the ensemble has utilized processes which Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut term “intermundane collaborations,” or co-labor with the “deadness” of technology and the human dead in sonic realms that results in a rearrangement of temporal conceptions of agency, in this case connecting voices of the past to multiple presents and futures. I maintain that these processes sparked intense reactions to histories of violence during the war despite my not having direct connections to the events discussed. Therefore, the paper uses personal interjections to sustain my subsequent argument that through the leakage of sound and images from their original sources during the war, collective memories of death and violence can be experienced in a multi-sensory or embodied manner. After a short historical contextualization, this paper will discuss the circulation of Los Torogoces de Morazán’s music through Radio Venceremos, and will conclude by employing Diana Taylor’s work on memory and transmission to elaborate on theories of intermundane collaboration in Los Torogoces de Morazán’s song “El corrido de El Mozote.”
Book Reviews by Christina Azahar
Journal of the Society for American Music, 2021
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Papers by Christina Azahar
Históricamente, la cueca brava, o cueca urbana de Santiago, ha sido una práctica de canto y baile dominada por hombres. Su técnica vocal, el canto gritado, es frequentemente considerado sinónimo de bravuconería masculina. Sin embargo, en la década de 2010, la cantora Josi Villanueva comenzó a transformar este escenario al enseñar a las mujeres a cantar cueca brava. Las experiencias de las participantes en las clases comunitarias de Villanueva fueron moldeadas por el movimiento chileno Mayo Feminista en 2018, y sus prácticas pedagógicas ayudan a las participantes a llevar a cabo un proceso encarnado de "sacar la voz" a través del cual desmantelan los límites impuestos a sus cuerpos y voces cuando son silenciadas en espacios musicales o sociales.
Book Reviews by Christina Azahar
Históricamente, la cueca brava, o cueca urbana de Santiago, ha sido una práctica de canto y baile dominada por hombres. Su técnica vocal, el canto gritado, es frequentemente considerado sinónimo de bravuconería masculina. Sin embargo, en la década de 2010, la cantora Josi Villanueva comenzó a transformar este escenario al enseñar a las mujeres a cantar cueca brava. Las experiencias de las participantes en las clases comunitarias de Villanueva fueron moldeadas por el movimiento chileno Mayo Feminista en 2018, y sus prácticas pedagógicas ayudan a las participantes a llevar a cabo un proceso encarnado de "sacar la voz" a través del cual desmantelan los límites impuestos a sus cuerpos y voces cuando son silenciadas en espacios musicales o sociales.