Abstract
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.
On March 8, 2018, International Women’s Day, I attended a concert at Chile’s presidential palace, La Moneda, commemorating the end of Michelle Bachelet’s second term of office. The final act in the concert, Flor de Juanas, was introduced as a women’s cueca ensemble. 1 Cueca, Chile’s national music and dance, has several regional and stylistic variations. Given the setting, it seemed only fitting that the performance would involve a form of the state-endorsed cueca that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That version—typically practiced during the Fiestas Patrias (Independence Day celebrations)—includes stylized costumes emulating peasant women and dashing huasos (cowboys) and a couple’s dance in which partners coquettishly wield handkerchiefs in a performance of courtship. The dance is generally accompanied by banal lyrics idealizing the lifestyles of the rural landowning classes of the Central Valley region. However, as Flor de Juanas came on to perform, it was immediately clear that their cueca would be anything but typical.
Over a dozen women formed a line across center stage, their dresses an explosion of color with floral embroidery and ribbons adorning their skirts. Their makeup was bold and Carnivalesque. Some had flowers braided into their hair. The accompaniment went silent, and when they began to sing, a wall of raised voices erupted from the stage declaiming the story of two women who fell victim to atrocious acts of domestic violence. Each singer raised a red handkerchief to cover her eyes, and as a soloist began the next verse, a woman dressed all in black advanced to center stage and performed a cueca sola—a solitary version of the cueca couple’s dance created during Chile’s military dictatorship and performed since that time to denounce the detention and disappearance of loved ones at the hands of the state (Vargas Araya, 2021).
Along with the critical content of their lyrics and dance, the sheer volume and the shouted, nasal timbre of their voices was striking. Women’s cueca singing is typically much softer and more lyrical. A quick social media search revealed that the group’s director, Josi Villanueva, was offering a community class on canto femenino cuequero (women’s cueca singing). Specifically, she was teaching women 2 to sing cueca brava, an urban form of cueca defined by harsh themes and a loud, gritty vocal timbre known as canto gritado (shouted song) that has historically been performed only by men (Spencer, 2011). Without hesitating, I signed up.
From April to December 2018 I was a participant-observer in Josi Villanueva’s community classes. This timing coincided with a period of distinct significance in the trajectory of feminist movements in Chile and beyond. The event recounted above took place not long after the #NiUnaMenos movement began sweeping Latin America in late 2016 3 and the #MeToo movement took hold in the United States and other Western countries in 2017. 4 It also occurred two short months before Chile’s Mayo Feminista (Feminist May), led by university students, began critiquing sexism and abuse in higher education in 2018, and just over one year before the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis swept the world in late 2019 with its viral performance “Un violador en tu camino” (A Rapist in Your Path) in the wake of massive social uprisings known collectively as Chile Despertó (Chile Awakened).
In this investigation, I examine the study and practice of canto femenino cuequero as a liberatory pedagogy that has evolved in direct and indirect dialogue with recent feminist movements in Chile and transformed understandings of cultural intimacy (Herzfeld, 2005) by staging new forms of femininity and chilenidad (Chileanness). Because of its official status as national music (Carreño, 2010; Spencer, 2011; Solís, 2013) and its prominence in Chilean Fiestas Patrias, cueca constitutes a performance of national identity in which hierarchical relationships of sex, class, and ethnicity are played out in highly public spaces. In traditional cueca dance forms and their lyrics, women understood to be of lower-class or indigenous background are framed as objects of desire and of conquest. And though rural cueca has commonly featured women singers, in urban cueca practices in Santiago and the surrounding region canto gritado became yet one more way in which male dominance was performed. Yet, women have always performed in urban cueca as dancers, instrumentalists, and singers. In fact, as Christian Spencer (2011) has documented, women have been participating in cueca brava as professional singers and adopting the canto gritado timbre since around the early 2000s. In what follows, I document how Josi Villanueva, formerly one of these professional singers, is now helping women engage in this practice as amateurs.
As I came to realize in 2018, my process of entry into Villanueva’s classes was similar to the stories of many other participants. After hearing Villanueva or her group Flor de Juanas sing, prospective students report being captivated by their vocal power. However, the pedagogical practice of sacando la voz often proves a mentally, emotionally, and corporeally draining process. The phrase sacando la voz translates most easily into English as “lifting or raising one’s voice,” but sacar is frequently used to mean “to draw out” or “to extract.” Sacando la voz, in this context, then literally means “reach in, find one’s voice, and draw it out.”
Drawing on my ethnographic experience in Villanueva’s classes and the broader urban cueca community in Santiago, in this study I analyze the process of sacando la voz in the cueca tradition as a vocal practice that affords participants what I call a “spaciousness of voice.” By this I mean the capacity to take up material space through projection and timbre and the way this vocal spatiality emplaces singing bodies within social systems. I argue that the vocal spaciousness women achieve through these classes enables them to sonically dismantle the limits imposed on their voices and their bodies in performance spaces—when, for example, they are prevented from singing—while also transforming their collective political sensibility through a vocal performance of feminist solidarity. By examining the pedagogical practice of sacando la voz and the spaciousness of voice it affords, I address not only individual vocal practices but also the interpersonal relationships that are forged or transformed as class and performance spaces are filled with women’s collective song (Guilbault, 2010). As I demonstrate below, the relationships and political sensibilities that emerged in Villanueva’s community canto femenino cuequero classes have proved to be crucial sites where participants make sense of and often initiate participation in ongoing feminist social movements. After providing a more detailed history of the construction and representation of gender in cueca practices, I draw on class recordings, interviews, performance observations, and social media activity to explore how canto femenino cuequero has evolved in relation to rapidly shifting social and political landscapes.
The Gendered History of Canto Cuequero
Women have had a principal role as singers in cueca since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when cantoras were the main protagonists of rural outdoor festivities such as rodeos and chinganas (rustic, often open-air taverns). Chinganas were primarily spaces where cueca and other folkloric genres developed in the Central Valley region following Chile’s independence. These venues were typically run by single women who took over rural dwellings near areas of transit and subsisted by selling food, drink, and lodging and offering dancing and music to workers or soldiers coming to or from the port of Valparaíso (Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, n.d.). In the early twentieth century, with the movement of much of Chile’s rural population into urban centers such as Santiago and Valparaíso, these rural festivities gradually became more associated with casas de canto, which generally were understood to be brothels (Jordán and Rojas, 2009; Carreño, 2010; Spencer, 2011).
Though recordings do not exist from the chinganas and casas de canto of this era, oral histories indicate that women’s singing in these spaces was loud enough and their timbre piercing enough to be heard over the din of partygoers and music. However, with the rise of the recording industry in the 1920s and 1930s, the vocal timbre of women’s cueca was smoothed, and arrangements were orchestrated to fit what Fernando Rios (2008) calls a “modernist-cosmopolitan” acoustic aesthetic (Spencer, 2011; González and Rolle, 2005). The more clandestine nature of casas de canto means that knowledge of the timbre and volume of women’s voices in these spaces faded from popular memory, but, as Christian Spencer (2011) and Rubí Carreño Bolivar (2010) have indicated, women entering urban cueca spaces after 1990 have increasingly drawn on oral histories of that time to reclaim its vocal practices.
During the same period of urbanization in the early twentieth century, elite sectors of Chilean society began looking to consolidate their national identity in a respectable music and dance genre. Similar to the well-documented emergence of musical nationalisms throughout Latin America (Turino, 2003) among them tango in Argentina (Liska, 2016) and merengue in the Dominican Republic (Hutchinson, 2016), what had been a form of popular sensual revelry became sanitized into a salon dance defined by restraint and respectability (González and Rolle, 2005) in which heteronormative iterations of hypermasculinity and passive femininity were performed and reproduced. Couples no longer touched as they were dancing, and though cueca remained a performance of romantic pursuit, women were expected to perform with delicate docility, often using a handkerchief to shield their faces, while men performed with strident bravado and airs of conquest. For both men and women, stylized rural costumes became standard, and men increasingly donned the traditional hats and ponchos of huasos. In the salon and other urban festivities, performances of the rural through cueca huasa (deriving its name from its association with huaso lifestyles) came to be associated with a patriotic, productive middle/upper class.
The notion of cueca huasa as an authentic representation of Chilean national identity was bolstered in the mid-twentieth century by the rise of academic grupos de proyección folklórica (folkloric projection groups) that aimed to collect, revitalize, and disseminate traditional music and dance. Many of these efforts became consolidated at the Universidad de Chile when the Institute of Folk Music Research was created in April 1944. Here, research and programming on Chilean traditional musics developed simultaneously with the chamber musics of Western classical traditions, and once again vocal timbres were smoothed and melodic and harmonic arrangements refined to make performances more appealing to middle-and upper-class concertgoers. The duo Las Hermanas Loyola, formed by the renowned folklorist Margot Loyola and her sister Estela Loyola, was among the most recognized interpreters of this emerging repertoire of Chilean traditional musics (González and Rolle, 2005; Spencer, 2011).
After the military coup in 1973, the regime adopted a highly stylized form of cueca huasa as the national dance by Decree 23 of November 6, 1979. As Jordán and Rojas (2009: 74) explain in their article on cueca during the dictatorship, 5
During the period of the military government, Chilean identity is partially corporealized in the figure of the huaso. This subject was revived from the imaginary created in the 1920s, in which [the huaso] was supposed to be the depository of national identity as a totality. Its peasant origins and its vulgar elements are eliminated, cleaned up, to create a new rural subject—landholding, gallant, and invincible. For the years after 1973 it would once again come to incarnate values of a so-called [national] way of being.
During the dictatorship cueca became inseparable from Fiestas Patrias, when national cueca competitions were organized and it was mandated to be taught in schools. If the figure of the huaso became a corporealized performance of idealized neoliberal masculinity in these official spaces, ideal femininity was personified in the figure of la huasa or la china, 6 the rural woman whom women’s costumes were supposed to represent. Rubí Carreño (2010) contends that these official cueca practices defined civic life in terms of celebration even as their performance erased the realities of the women and rural/working-class groups who historically performed these types of cueca.
In Santiago’s working-class neighborhoods in the early twentieth century, cueca and other forms of urban popular song performed by male vendors and laborers were resounding in the streets, plazas, and markets. Though several variants of urban cueca emerged throughout Chile during this time, cueca brava, named for the barrios bravos (rougher neighborhoods) where it emerged, is the style most associated with the Chilean capital (Spencer, 2011). Different from rural forms in which the figure of the huaso holds primacy, in cueca brava the figure of el roto (loosely, a man of the people and of humble origins) dominates the social imaginary and came to characterize a performance of national identity tied more to popular celebrations in working-class spaces than to those of the landed elites. As cueca brava groups began to record in the 1940s and 1950s, their lyrics and imagery remained tied to themes of urban night life, working-class livelihoods, and social critique (Spencer, 2011; Jordán and Rojas, 2009).
Another crucial difference from cueca huasa is that in cueca brava the primary purpose of the social gathering was to sing, not to dance. Groups of men would gather in a circle and individually sing stanzas of the song, using melodic and textual ornamentation to compete with one another (Spencer, 2011: 12). This participatory spatial arrangement is called canto a la rueda. These ruedas were defined by canto gritado, a loud, penetrating vocal technique achieved by projecting through the nasal voice and upper facial resonators to produce a thin, twangy timbre in the upper limits of the singer’s range. Masculinity became so entrenched in these ruedas that many, even some women, believed that canto gritado was achievable only by the male voice.
After the transition from military government in 1990 and the reopening of public spaces and night life, there was a resurgence of interest in folkloric practices countering what had been established as official culture during the dictatorship. This coincided with a period of societal opening for women. By the early 2000s groups of women such as Las Niñas, Las Capitalinas, and Las Torcazas began establishing themselves as professional singers in the cueca brava scene, adopting the same timbre and volume as men’s canto gritado. Rather than adopting the demure personae of women from cueca huasa or cueca campesina, women post-1990 utilized canto gritado along with elegant modern stage attire as a way to revive the image of madams and performers in chinganas and casas de canto from the late nineteenth and twentieth century.
This is not to say that women participating in cueca brava since 1990 have uncritically identified themselves as or in relation to the sex workers of previous decades. Rather, according to discussions in women’s cueca classes, they saw the revival of women’s practices from the early twentieth century as a way to validate these figures as mujeres bravas or choras (bold or tenacious women). Adopting the empowered vocal practice of canto gritado and using elegant modern costuming are ways in which women began to reimagine the vocal and visual aesthetics of cueca brava to fit their contemporary gender and sexual identities. This process of transformation has continued in recent years as women not only have made adaptations in cueca’s vocal practices but also have begun to experiment with combining cueca with other musical genres.
Transforming the Gender Politics of Cueca Brava: Josi Villanueva and Flor de Juanas
Josi Villanueva is a singer, songwriter, and music educator currently living in Barrio Yungay, Santiago, one of the historical centers of cueca brava’s emergence. She was a member of Las Niñas as a singer and guitarist from 2011 to 2015 and was active in transforming the gender politics of cueca brava in Santiago by helping open ruedas for women to participate in as singers rather than just spectators or dancers. Yet, as she said in our interview in August 2018, despite this opening and despite the desire of women to participate, she began to recognize that many women needed support to develop the vocal capacity to make themselves heard. After the group Las Niñas disbanded in 2015, she decided to launch her own classes. In her words, “Teaching cueca was born out of a necessity. People really lacked the ability to project their voice. And because of shame or insecurity, whatever it is, it was very difficult for them. People wanted to be able to hit those shouted notes. Because that’s what you do in cueca, somebody teaches you, pah! To find your voice!”
After launching her classes in 2015, Villanueva had great success enrolling women of diverse ages and backgrounds. As these groups developed, she realized that many students found it difficult to leave the classes and the community that they had developed throughout the course of rehearsals and performances. For many, it was their first time participating in something created by and for women, and the group provided a sense of comfort and safety to discuss issues that were not brought up in other spaces. Trying to imagine a way to create continuity for these students, Villanueva was inspired by her background performing with an Uruguayan-style murga during her university years and thought to combine elements of murga with her own cueca practice. Murga uruguaya is a genre of satirical musical theater with roots in festival practices from Cadiz, Spain. It is now most commonly associated with Uruguay, though it is practiced throughout the Southern Cone, particularly in the Rio de la Plata region (Spanne, 2013). Like cueca brava, murga has historically been a male-dominated practice, but unlike the cueca, which is typically sung in duets, murga is meant to be sung in chorus. During annual carnivals, community troupes prepare several original songs, usually critiquing current social issues or events. Defined by spectacle, their biting commentary and brazen, satirical humor are accompanied by bold, colorful makeup and loud costumes full of symbolism connected to the themes of their performance (Fornaro, 2002).
Villanueva began to utilize the choral and theatrical practices of murga uruguaya to create the new ensemble Flor de Juanas. This group was born out of the first class of cueca students whom she taught. For them, murga became a way to amplify the vocal capacities of canto gritado through collective singing and to transform cueca brava into a performance practice centered on women’s social commentary (Josi Villanueva, interview, Santiago, August 20, 2018).
Since Flor de Juanas was officially formed in 2016, it has become an artistic and social cornerstone of the community that has evolved out of Josi Villanueva’s ongoing classes. On the one hand, it has come to serve as an example of the type of vocal projection, timbre, and capacity to harmonize in a group that Villanueva helps students to achieve in her classes. For many classmates and audience members whom I spoke to, Flor de Juanas’s plurality of voices represents a call, an invitation for listeners to find their own voices—to revel in their power to sonically rupture the norms of feminine docility. Their block of raised voices gives them control over a space during their performances, and their shouted song fractures the idea of a passive, quiet, feminine body meant only to be gazed upon. The group takes this collective vocal practice based on murga aesthetics and blends it with the instrumentation, syncopated rhythms, and strict poetic form more typical of Chilean cueca. 7
Combining murga with cueca was not only a matter of blending compositional styles. It also entailed a new mode of cultural imagination that placed the social archetype of the roto chileno in synchrony with the more abstract, allegoric character representations in murga uruguaya. In this new artistic world, with new scenography and dance forms, the cueca brava archetype of la mujer rota, the woman of the people—hostess, entertainer, and keeper of the domestic sphere—has been reframed as a more complex subject with a public political voice. In Flor de Juanas’s performances, women’s bodies are understood not only as sites of pleasure but also as places from which memory is enacted, untold traumas are shared, and unspoken hopes are expressed.
The song “Veleidoso,” which Flor de Juanas performed at the opening of its set at the presidential palace in 2018, illustrates many of these new compositional elements. This piece was initially written for Carola Barría, a resident of Punta Arenas, one of Chile’s southernmost cities. In 2013 Barría was brutally attacked by her romantic partner in front of their five-month-old child. Her aggressor, acting in a jealous rage, beat her and gouged out her eyes before shooting two other men he suspected to be her lovers and abandoning her and their baby on the side of the road, where they were not found until the next day. Her ex-partner was killed soon afterward in a shootout with police (G. Garcia, 2016). At the time of this event, Josi Villanueva’s sister-in-law Ani, a social worker, was living in Punta Arenas. Villanueva and her partner, Raúl, went to Punta Arenas for a performance shortly after the incident and were shocked to realize that the attack on Carola Barria was not making headlines or even truly being discussed in the city. After hearing more of the gruesome details from Ani, Villanueva composed the song with Raúl that night (Josi Villanueva, group interview of Flor de Juanas, November 27, 2018).
When Flor de Juanas initially began performing “Veleidoso,” the piece was introduced by reciting improvised verses about Carola Barria. However, in 2016 another woman in the southern town of Coyhaique suffered a similar attack. Nabila Rifo was beaten unconscious and her eyes were gouged out by her romantic partner. This attack occurred in the midst of #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneLess) antifemicide movements that had begun in Argentina and swept South America and immediately sparked national and international outrage (BBC, 2017). Villanueva, wanting to respond to the situation, composed an extended introduction that honored both Carola Barria and Nabila Rifo, weaving in the symbolism of their sight’s being taken away. The first two stanzas form an introduction that extends the typical poetic structure of a cueca. The cueca itself begins with a copla made of four octosyllabic lines (8a-8b-8a-8b), followed by two seguidillas consisting of four lines each and alternating between seven and five syllables (7a-5b-7a-5b), and a remate, a two-line verse of seven and five syllables respectively (7a-5a). The lines in parentheses are muletillas, ornamental phrases added only when performed:
Veleidoso (Fickle One)
The muletilla “tiki tiki ti, tiki tiki ti veleidoso” also gives the piece its title. This phrase is a lyrical and melodic quotation from the monumental 1960 “El gavilán” (The Hawk) by Violeta Parra (1917–1967). In both songs, “tiki tiki ti,” normally a lighthearted interjection in more traditional cuecas, is used in dark irony to curse the “veleidoso,” the fickle or untrue lover. “El gavilán” used the allegory of an abusive lover who is like a hawk preparing to strike its prey to describe the experience of violent oppression at the hands of larger systems of patriarchal and capitalist oppression (Valdebenito, 2018). Similarly, “Veleidoso” by Flor de Juanas uses two cases of domestic violence to critique the unequal justice systems and religious institutions that continue to grant impunity to abusers, torturers, and rapists across contemporary Chilean society and beyond. Wielding the intertextual trope of the “veleidoso” shifts the blame from victims to perpetrators in cases of sexual violence.
During the performance of this piece one member steps in front of the group and performs a cueca sola created in 1978 by members of the Conjunto Folklórico de la Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos (Folkloric Ensemble of the Group for Families of the Detained and Disappeared). In this version of the dance, individuals perform their half of the choreography alone, leaving space in their movements for a loved one who is no longer physically present. In performing this absent presence, the cueca sola subverts this nationalist performance practice and converts it into a rejection of state silence and denial of torture and disappearances during the regime and even in the years of democracy since 1990. 8
In Flor de Juanas’s rendition, the cueca sola performed with “Veleidoso” mourns women who have lost their lives or have lived with physical and emotional abuse. It stages the experience of women’s suffering, but in its movements it gestures toward the possibility of life. In this liminal moment of performance, past losses meet future creations as the dancer conjures another presence with the twirl of her red handkerchief. The garment itself has ceased to be an ornament of modesty and is transformed into a bandera de lucha, a call to joint struggle. Flor de Juanas has continued this struggle through its ongoing creation of a new feminist repertoire—performing and composing cuecas addressing femicide, gendered labor inequalities, sexual violence, and abuse at the hands of the government. This repertoire has formed the basis for Josi Villanueva’s community women’s cueca classes.
Sacando la Voz: Feminist Movements and Canto Femenino Cuequero
As I came to understand during the first few weeks of the canto femenino cuequero class beginning in April 2018, Villanueva’s pedagogical practice of sacando la voz valorizes the corporeal as a realm of power. Because cueca brava has historically been a space where women’s voices are silenced and their bodies objectified, this has been a major draw for students regardless of their musical backgrounds. A common reminder to breathe from the abdomen was “Desde el utero las mujeres sacamos la fuerza” (Women get our strength from the uterus). This playful metaphor for technique implicitly rejects the phallus as a symbol of power. When working on interpretation and timbre, Villanueva would remind us, “Es una voz aguerrida” (It’s a battle-driven voice). Voz as a feminine noun here elicits in the adjective aguerrida the imagery of a feminine warrior. To get us to project, she would exclaim, pointing at a wall across the room, “¡Canten para que tus voces lleguen para allá!” (Sing so your voices make it over there!). According to multiple students, this type of rhetoric helped them to reacquaint themselves with their bodies and to develop what Cate Poynton (1996) calls a new internal choreography for projecting their voices. But at the beginning of the year—April to July, if I’m being honest—I simply could not sing this way.
In one of the earliest classes, Villanueva demonstrated how to achieve canto gritado through a combined chest and head voice supported deeply by the diaphragm. After demonstrating in a loud, piercing voice what it sounded like to open your mouth, chest, and body fully and support your breath from the core, she went on to compare this with a head voice or what she described as falsetto. She began to sing sarcastically in a thin, quiet manner and made us all laugh, and she reminded us we’d never get invited out to sing with voices like that. However, before making us sing again, she cautioned that singing in this manner with improper technique could easily put too much strain on your vocal cords. After we had sung together she asked, “Did anybody find this painful?” and about half of us, including myself, raised our hands.
This feeling of pain—voice cracking, pride hurt—is something that other students and I dealt with constantly in the first few months of the class. Even practicing on my own in my apartment, I struggled to get my voice to sound the way I wanted it to. I blamed this at first on the fact that for a classically trained singer canto gritado was the opposite of almost every vocal technique I had ever been taught. But, eventually being honest with myself, I realized that the real issue was fear: fear of pushing my body, fear of being heard or of not being heard, fear of taking up too much space. This, I realized, was the pain of sacando la voz. It was a bodily practice, a development of technique, but it was also a psychological letting go of years of being conditioned into silence, into deference, into making space for others, not myself.
As I went through the eight months of classes, questions would arise with my fellow students. Why are we doing this? What is the value of what we’re accomplishing in our singing? There was of course the practical reason of being able to enter mixed performance contexts and occupy sonic space once dominated by men. As someone put it in one class, “I like that a bit, that challenge, as if [men] feel a bit invaded in their own territory.” A more significant reason, however, was being able to use one’s voice as an act of solidarity (Bohlman, 2016), a way of forging public intimacy (Guilbault, 2010) when others attempted to enter the space. As my classmate Dani explained (transcription of class recording, Santiago, September 13, 2018), I don’t really sing well, but sometimes I’ve tried because I have female friends that want to, so we support each other a lot. . . . In ruedas with male friends, often a guy will come in and lose the rhythm or something, and they’re like “oh, well,” and everyone deals with it. But when a woman messes up? No, everyone stops playing. I think it also has to do with the social context we’re living in. Men so suddenly start to feel like they’re being violated.
Dani’s comment alludes to the double standard women often face when being assessed in a space of musical performance. However, the context of heightened defensiveness among her male friends is a reference to the massive feminist student movements that swept Chile between May and August 2018.
Mayo Feminista 2018 (Feminist May 2018), as it came to be called, saw the largest mobilization of feminist students in Chilean history (Zerán, 2018). Sick of their educational systems, fed up with unchecked sexual harassment and assault, students decided to take these institutions over in collective actions known as tomas. On April 17 of that year, students at the Universidad Austral in Valdivia, a town in southern Chile, occupied their department building after the university failed to press sexual assault charges against a professor known for making advances against female students (Aguilera, 2018). After this initial toma, students across the country experiencing similar circumstances followed suit. At the movement’s peak in late May, more than 20 universities and secondary schools were being occupied or on strike, fighting for a nonsexist education (Montes, 2018) and in some cases demanding a parallel feminist curriculum. The tomas carried on throughout the winter months of June and July. Even the most prestigious law program in the country at the Universidad de Chile was under toma for more than three months.
The movement brought spectacular actions to the street as well, with massive demonstrations in cities across the nation in May and June. These marches featured dramatic actions where women used their bodies—–often masked and bare-breasted—to perform a collective struggle against core patriarchal power systems such as the Catholic Church (Colectivo Granada, 2018). Unsurprisingly, these marches are what received the most media attention. However these actions were represented—as bold revolutionary interventions or violent displays of anarchism—they were undeniably a catalyst in bringing feminism and issues of sexual harassment into public conversations (El Desconcierto, 2018). Yet, for those following the movements more closely, it was in the more private, reclaimed university spaces of the tomas that the true sparks of new feminist sensibilities were ignited.
Claiming the sanctified halls of universities as their own not only spelled out a direct challenge to Chile’s largely for-profit higher education system and the way its neoliberal agenda was entwined with patriarchal systems of power. It also provided these students the space and time to reattune themselves to what dialogue and collaboration might mean outside of spaces entrenched in structural sexism.
To my knowledge, most of the women in the cueca classes (who were generally in their late twenties and early thirties) were not participating directly in these marches or tomas. However, many had participated in the student movements of 2006 and 2011 (Wiley, 2013) or had friends and family members who were directly involved with Mayo Feminista and felt vindicated seeing this younger generation force issues of sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual violence into the realm of university and national politics. All seemed to feel the shifts they created in daily social life. Because of the way Mayo Feminista was able to stoke public and private conversations on feminism and gender equality throughout the country, the significance of the feminist student movements across extremely diverse groups of women and gender minorities cannot be overstated. In making themselves heard, they made room for other voices to join them.
As Dani and other cueca students confirmed, this opening represented a call that they sought to replicate in ruedas de cueca outside of classes. In these spaces, though my classmates reported that some men did in fact become more attentive to listening and making space for women, many became more defensive. Several reported that even their male friends began silencing them in ruedas de cueca in addition to silencing their opinions and concerns regarding the feminist movement and women’s rights in Chile. In these instances, the spaciousness of voice developed in classes not only facilitated individual empowerment but also constituted an act of public intimacy in which women collaboratively resisted being silenced. In no way equating the exclusion of women by male peers in musical spaces to the masculine violence being fought in the broader feminist movements, I argue that the vocal spaciousness developed in classes and later in these ruedas de cueca helped women to materially experience the agency of their voices and to strengthen the sense of intimacy forged when they used their voices collectively.
During one class in mid-September 2018, just before Fiestas Patrias, Josi invited a former member of Las Niñas to speak to us. The session became a turning point in the way the group thought about the patriarchal legacies of cueca and understood its own cueca practice in relation to the ongoing feminist movements. In the following excerpt of our conversation, Josi alludes to some of the complicated ways in which cueca has been politicized by both conservative and more progressive sectors of society (transcription of class recording, Santiago, September 13, 2018): Josi Villanueva: A flyer came out with someone wearing a green handkerchief (a symbol of the feminist movements) saying “cueca is patriarchal.” But the whole “no more cueca” movement didn’t really exist. [This flyer] was an effort to discredit the movement. However, there are women who do feel extremely violated by the cueca Pinochet installed in this country. Student: The fascist cueca . . . Josi Villanueva: The cueca [that we practice] comes from ages past. This other stylized cueca, cueca huasa, the cueca the dictator of this country made the national song and dance. . . . It reenacts masters running after peasant women. This is what happened throughout history, especially to indigenous women. That could bother the feminist movement, that side of it. It bothers me too, in fact. It’s not as though I’m taking up a banner of the feminist cause. It’s bothered me since I was five years old.
To conclude the conversation, Josi contended that our job as women practicing cueca brava was to create an alternative to cueca’s patriarchal, authoritarian legacy by using our performances to demonstrate the power of women collaborating to control sonic and social space.
This moment made it clear that contemporary cueca brava practitioners—professionals and amateurs alike—must grapple with the ways in which cueca was manipulated during the dictatorship. A few women in the class who were in their sixties and who actively practiced cueca huasa at community dance competitions expressed unease at the idea that these contemporary events might maintain fascist connotations, but even these women acknowledged that it was understandable for indigenous women and lower-class women to feel threatened by the history of this form of cueca. Conversely, the dialogue among younger class members—most of whom had been born near or after the end of Pinochet’s regime and were now in their twenties and thirties—revealed the degree to which cueca huasa, although it predated the dictatorship, evoked strong connections with it in their generation.
It is evident in this discussion that antifeminist groups feared that the feminist movements were destabilizing the imagined community of the nation (Anderson, 2006). They could not have been more correct in their estimation. But a closer look into the ways the feminist movements manifested themselves across Chile outside of university tomas and marches reveals that, rather than seeking to eviscerate national traditions, feminist artists and musicians were beginning to utilize national traditions to perform new modes of gendered sociality. In the case of these cueca classes, the sonic space of women’s raised voices opened the way for this national music to be reconceived as a mode of creating solidarity.
Throughout the course of the year, I came to realize that the vocal practice of cueca brava was not something that could be achieved easily, if at all, in isolation. In November, two weeks before the end of our class and our final concert, I went to Quinta Normal, a nearby park, with the three classmates I would soon be performing with. It was springtime, and we’d chosen this spot to practice because of its openness and inviting green spaces. All of us felt less shy rehearsing outdoors than inside where our voices echoed and we would constantly worry about neighbors hearing us. It was our first time practicing together as a group, and though we admitted to still feeling a bit nervous and insecure about our voices, we all felt that we had made significant progress mastering canto gritado throughout the past several months. Still timid, we stood in a circle to begin practicing the song “Mañana va a ser muy tarde” (Tomorrow Will Be Too Late). During the first four-month-long class from April to July, when the feminist movements were at their height, this piece had come to signify a collective sense of frustration and urgency as women continued to occupy university campuses, to march in the streets, and to circulate their demands. “Tomorrow will be too late to give us control over our own bodies! Tomorrow will be too late to stop women from being attacked and killed” one group of students proclaimed before singing this cueca at the end-of-class performance in July.
Remembering that performance, we stood in the park in November still daunted by the challenging melodic range of this song, which began at the upper limits of most of our vocal ranges. Taking turns singing each of the stanzas, we all felt uncomfortable knowing that we were being watched and heard. Then, as we began again, we all finally made eye contact and started walking backwards, making the circle larger. “Lanza tú voz para acá!” (Launch your voice over here!) one of us would say as the other was singing. When my turn came, for the first time I truly felt what it was like to sing canto gritado without inhibition. Finally, in community, I had found my voice. When the day of our performance finally arrived, there were mistakes, missed notes, and late entrances, but we knew this time that our voices had in fact made it across the room—had filled the space and been heard.
Conclusion
On October 18, 2019, the Chilean government under President Sebastian Piñera began using police and military force to violently repress a social uprising that had begun a few days earlier as high school students began mass evasions of metro fares in protest of rising costs of living and inequality. For the first time since the Pinochet dictatorship ended in 1990, a state of emergency was imposed, allowing the armed forces to restrict civilian movement and enforce nightly curfews. As demonstrations continued, low estimates confirmed at least 31 protesters dead at the hands of the military and police between October 2019 and March 2020 (Ulloa, 2020). Nearly 4,000 protesters were injured, and nearly 1,000 reported being tortured while in detention. Of those injured, more than 400 suffered ocular lesions or lost eyes from pellet bullets shot at point-blank range. Among those tortured, nearly 200 reported having been sexually abused. 9 Once again, Flor de Juanas’s “Veleidoso” and its critique of patriarchal violence, “te llevaste la luz clara que iluminaba mis ojos” (you took the clear light that illumined my eyes), had devastating resonance.
These uprisings, which came to be known as Chile Despertó, aimed to remind the national and international community that while the military dictatorship may have ended during the transition to democracy in 1990, the neoliberal socioeconomic systems that the dictatorship installed, as well as the militarized police and armed forces that enabled these systems to maintain power, were never truly gone.
Amidst the beginning of the Chile Despertó movement, a feminist collective called Las Tesis created a viral performance called “Un violador en tu camino” (A Rapist in Your Path) that was shared and reenacted by thousands of women in dozens of countries around the world. 10 The piece was a flash-mob-style spoken-word and dance conceived and written by Las Tesis members Daffne Valdés, Sibila Sotomayor, Paula Corneta, and Lea Cáceres (Minutaglio, 2020). Launched on November 25, 2019, the International Day against Violence toward Women, this piece was inspired by the writings of the Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato (Minutaglio, 2020). According to their own testimony at a live-streamed event on December 12, 2019, Las Tesis wanted to use this performance to communicate that sexual violence cannot be understood as simply violence between individuals or isolated acts of aggression. Rather, their performance contends that it is public in nature—that sexual violence is conditioned, condoned, and even perpetrated by the state. It is police and military raping women and girls. It is justice systems failing to press charges against perpetrators. It is supervisors and family members and domestic partners telling victims to remain silent if they want to maintain their dignity, their careers, or their lives. 11
In this article I have proposed that across its sites of rehearsal and performance, canto femenino cuequero has become a musical practice through which feminist solidarity is not only voiced but made manifest through the embodied and liberatory pedagogy of sacando la voz.
As sites of political engagement, Josi Villanueva’s women’s cueca classes have proved vital in the formation of self-reflexivity, social awareness, and direct action. Toward the end of my field research in late 2018, the feminist artistic collective La SiHembra (a play on sembrar [to plant] and hembra [female]), emerged from the community of Villanueva’s students. In 2019, in the wake of Chile Despertó and “Un violador en tu camino,” this group became highly involved in bringing members to sing and dance at marches, 12 and during COVID-19 in 2020–2021 they facilitated the creation of virtual performances such as their original cueca “Amiga,” recorded entirely via Zoom to offer support and mutual aid during quarantine. 13 The ongoing activities of this new collective make clear that the vocal spaciousness women are cultivating through canto femenino cuequero continues to expand their agency, determination, and resilience in forging the world they seek to live in.
Footnotes
Notes
Christina Azahar received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at UC Berkeley. Research for this article was supported by a Fulbright IIE and an AAUW American Fellowship.