Heavy Metal Music in Latin America

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-Díaz, Nevárez Araújo, 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 durée 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-Díaz, Nevárez Araújo 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 González Moreno, Universidad de La Ha