In Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South, the editors bring together scholars engaged in the study of heavy metal music in Latin America to reflect on the heavy metal genre from a regional perspective. The contributors' southern voices diversify metal scholarship in the global north. An extreme musical genre for an extreme region, the contributors explore how issues like colonialism, dictatorships, violence, ethnic extermination and political persecution have shaped heavy metal music in Latin America, and how music has helped shape Latin American culture and politics.
Nelson Varas-Diaz is professor of social-community psychology in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Daniel Nevarez Araujo received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Eliut Rivera Segarra is clinical psychologist and assistant professor at the Ponce Health Sciences University in Puerto Rico.
SECTION I: UNDERSTANDING METAL MUSIC IN LATIN AMERICA 5 Chapter 1 Conceptualizing the Distorted South: How to Understand Metal Music and Its Scholarship in Latin America Nelson Varas-Diaz, Daniel Nevarez Araujo, and Eliut Rivera-Segarra SECTION II: A SOUNDTRACK FOR A VIOLENT CONTEXT 37 Chapter 2 Decomposicion Cerebral: The Salvadoran Civil War and the Birth of Salvadoran Brutal Death Metal Christian M. Pack Chapter 3 Dictatorship and Metal in Chile: A Causal Relationship? Maximiliano Sanchez Mondaca Chapter 4 The Role of Death Metal in the Colombian Armed Conflict: The Case of the Band Masacre Pedro Manuel Lagos Chacon Chapter 5 Sounds of Exclusion and Seclusion: Peruvian Metal as a Model for Cultural Self-Segregation Jose Ignacio Lopez Ramirez Gaston SECTION III: DECOLONIZING LOCAL HISTORIES THROUGH MUSIC 131 Chapter 6 The Metal Scene in Havana, Cuba: An Assessment of Its Cultural Development from 2007 to 2017 Miriela Fernandez Lozano Chapter 7 In the Shadow of the Dictatorship: A Historical Approach to Uruguayan Heavy Metal Maria Ximena Rodriguez Molinari Chapter 8 Metal and Politics in Argentina: A Study into the Audienceship Surrounding Ricardo Iorio Manuela Belen Calvo Chapter 9 America, Avenge Yourself: The Emergence of Combative Discourse and Other Recent Directions in Contemporary Argentinian Metal (An Exploration in Three Movements) Emiliano Scaricaciottoli SECTION IV: MARGINALITY AND CULTURES OF RESISTANCE 217 Chapter 10 The Transfiguration of the Deity Maximon as a Practice of Resistance in Metal from San Pedro Sacatepequez, San Marcos, Guatemala Mario Efrain Castaneda Maldonado Chapter 11 La Periferia: Marginal Contexts for Metal Music in the State of Mexico Alfredo Nieves Molina Chapter 12 Differences in the Sociopolitical Perspectives of Brazilian and European Voelkisch Metal Guilherme Alfradique Klausner SECTION V: LIBERATION THROUGH METAL MUSIC 285 Chapter 13 "A Scream that Makes Us Visible": Latin American Heavy Metal Music and Liberation Psychology Eliut Rivera-Segarra, Jeffrey W. Ramos, and Nelson Varas-Diaz Chapter 14 Metal Migration: The Latin American Diasporic Experience in Heavy Metal Daniel Nevarez Araujo
Finally! With this pathbreaking volume, the vitality and iconoclastic spirit of Latin American metal studies scholarship becomes accessible to English readers. Heavy metal now belongs to the whole of humanity, but its intense, community-affirming roar has special significance in the Latin American region as a rallying cry for anti-colonial resistance and self-assertion in the context of oppression, injustice, and war. This collection of insightful essays on metal culture in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and the Latin American diaspora deserves mandatory reading status for metal scholars, Latin America specialists, and cultural theorists of all persuasions. -- Jeremy Wallach, Professor, Department of Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University, USA With this truly novel intervention into the study of music, society, and politics, Varas-Diaz, Nevarez Araujo, and Rivera Segarra have compiled a fabulous assortment of perspectives on metal all across the Latin American and Caribbean regions. Adopting "distortion" as a lens, and demonstrating how Latin American metal has never been simply a derivative product from the North, their global south perspective places the region's multiple different metal traditions in a complex series of dialogues, past and present. They tread through complex terrain, paying attention to how Latin American metal creatively responds and actively shapes social problems that define the region, the long duree of coloniality, the immediate history of military regimes and armed conflict, contemporary activisms around inequality and decolonial dreams, repertoires of sonic mestizaje and more....a wonderful read. -- Shane Greene, Indiana University, author of Punk and Revolution Varas-Diaz, Nevarez Araujo and Rivera-Seguerra have accomplished a significant feat with this book: as a work based on translations from Spanish and Portuguese, it is a generous gift to the admittedly embarrassingly restricted English-speaking field of metal scholarship. Representing 10 Latin American countries, metal music and culture enduring under a politics of violence, political oppression and marginalization make it strange that scholarship this loud has rarely been read before outside its context. Having broken free from its origins in the Global North, Latin American metal has become a decolonizing force best understood by paying attention to the context from which it has emerged. Creative, malleable and respectful to the diversity of its sources, rather than gazing at it, these scholars defiantly stand alongside what is studied. This book is a shining example on how metal studies is to be done. -- Niall W.R. Scott, Editor of Metal Music Studies, UCLan Without a doubt, a milestone in the field and history of Latin American metal music historiography. This varied collection of essays about metal music, originally conceived in Spanish and Portuguese, represents the first publication of its kind in the English language entirely devoted to the topic of metal in Latin America. Metal music has spawned one of the most relevant liberation and resistance cultures to be found in the continent. Showcasing 10 countries in the region, the book provides a historical and analytical survey of the different local scenes, in the process demystifying many of the ideas that have surrounded and served to stereotype the juncture between metal music and Latin American society for decades. The book brings to the fore the issues, roles, and dynamics that originate within the cultural practices of the various metal communities within the socio-historical context of the continent. The historically silenced voices, the marginalized communities, the theories and practices developed by the musicians and their audiences, the genre's relationship to politics, the influence of language, the move to decolonize local histories, and even the experiences of the Latin-American diaspora are but a few of the imperative narrative explorations enacted by the authors. -- Liliana Gonzalez Moreno, Universidad de La Habana
