Berkeley’s La Peña is one of many worldwide. Though the word peña has origins in Spanish sports clubs, this project is concerned with its roots in Pan-Latin American folkloric research, nueva canción, and the trajectory of global anti-imperialist struggle since its explosion in the 20th century.
The early 1900s were characterized by a stirring of revolutionary activity worldwide in reaction to centuries of colonial exploitation and in the aftermath of the first World War. Heightened interest in folklore emerged parallel to the rise of socialist and anti-colonial revolutions in countries such as Russia, Mexico and Egypt. Two focal points of these efforts to elevate oral culture were Chile and Argentina.
In Chile, folkloric studies were institutionalized in the early 1900s, setting the stage for generations of scholars, artists, and activists such as Violeta Parra to recover, raise up and redistribute the people’s culture. Parra and her family were responsible for creating several peñas of their own in the 1950s--places that served as folklore laboratories, cafes, political salons and multi-purpose art venues. By the 1960s, peñas flourished in the wake of the Cuban Revolution and the rise of the Chilean socialist movement that culminated with the election of socialist president Salvador Allende.
These centers began populating Latin American cities and the countryside, supporting musicians from Parra, to fellow Chilean Victor Jara, to Argentinian singer Mercedes Sosa and Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez. These artists were part of a world-wide revival of the musician’s role as a troubadour: a singer who is a repository of popular, often indigenous cultural forms. A practitioner of culture for the masses. For the people.
It is in this political and cultural environment that peñas emerged as a counter-space, an alternative institution, a worker’s canteen where people came to have political discourse and enjoyment.
A Brief History
Violeta Parra
Victor Jara
Sosa at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall (1996)
Putting La Peña in Perspective
Case Study: Dance & Diaspora
The commitments listed above were spacialized in Chile’s peñas.
One of the reasons that Chile and other Southern Cone nations such as Uruguay and Argentina became the center of peña activity and nueva canción (or New Song) was their longer tradition of textual art and study. This phenomenon is at least partly the result of their stronger European influence relative to many of their neighbors to the North. Nations with more prominent indigenous populations to date such as Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru have taken longer to textualize their rich oral traditions. Yet countries such as Peru have led the Western Hemisphere in establishing pluricultural states--places where indigenous populations have forced their governments to negotiate with their communities on their terms and ultimately forced their countries to reshape their constitutions in order to accommodate indigenous peoples as equal partners.
In this context, the revolutions in Chile and Cuba were especially crucial to the development and dispersal of nueva canción because their revolutionary governments established leftist record companies in recognition of popular music’s transformative power. The music of many neighboring countries, protest or otherwise, wouldn’t be transcribed until the proliferation of the cassette tape in the late 70s.
Peña as Place and Process
The diversity of peñas reflects the full spectrum of humanity. Still, there are a few peña principles that inform their shared mission:
Peñas tend to emphasize participation. There is no audience--performance and dialogue must involve everyone in the space.
Putting Peña Theory into Practice:
Nueva Canción and "La Maza"
As a dancer, I follow. As I navigate my world, the dance follows me.
Through the horrible global history of slavery and colonialism, we get beautiful forms of resistance. Music, dance, and art are strategies for marginalized peoples survival. Art brings joy and the principles of our arts teach us how to engage with our politics.
Dance amazes me in how it has traveled the world and followed diasporic people to their new homes. Their dances make places like La Peña a new home that can be shared for deeper cultural understanding and solidarity.
In the image, you see Chris and David practicing Kizomba, a dance originating from Angola’s colonial resistance in the 1970s. Imagine how many dancers have shared that floor, stepping their resistance into the foundation of La Peña.
- Abigail
That same space is devoted to the people. It is meant to express the quotidian aspects of life, heightening concrete reference points of the daily lives of working people to the sublime.
In order to include the wide variety of working people, the character of peñas has always been expansive--capable of articulating a Pan-Latin American experience. Musicians and scholars collected tradition from across the continent, never content to silo themselves from their neighbors.
Finally, the project of establishing and operating peñas has always been informed by engagement with leftist politics. From theorizing the role of art and culture in political struggle to actually proving a platform for organizing and performance, it is impossible to overstate critical role these spaces have played in stoking and sustaining revolutionary spirit in the face of authoritarian oppression and violence.
In his song “La Maza” from the 1982 album Unicornio, Silvio Rodriguez manages to capture the essence of the peña ethos and provide a powerful manifesto for nueva canción. Like the proliferation of peñas, the development of nueva canción reinforced both the importance of folk culture and musicians’ responsibility as public servants. One way “La Maza” can be understood is as a refusal of authoritarianism in all its forms and an affirmation of culture and artists' role as tools for justice.
The verses of “La Maza” are a litany of incomplete conditional statements (“If I didn’t believe in my song, if I didn’t believe in my silence”) that are completed in the song’s refrain with the question, “What would I be? What would the sculptor’s hammer be without the stone?”
Silvio Rodriguez
Like any great work of art, it allows many interpretations. Indeed, my father assumed for many years that the title of the song was “La Masa” meaning the masses of people rather than the word’s phonetic twin “maza,” which can mean both a blunt instrument like a hammer or mace as well as, alternatively, a dough. On its face, the song is a clear articulation of the socialist underpinning of nueva canción. It is an inversion of the common authoritarian claim that the stone is useless without a hammer to shape it, i.e. the masses are useless without a charismatic leader. Instead, Rodriguez seems to suggest that the individual and the leader is nothing without their relation to culture. The artist is nothing without the participation of their community.
The song is also remarkable for its balance of the personal and the political. Each verse is framed as a series of promises the artist makes to themselves, but each promise speaks to the experience of working people, the natural reference points of a campesino or rural laborer such as “el sinsonte” or “mockingbird” and “el monte” or “mountain.” The artist is nothing, Rodriguez posits, if they do not speak to or believe in their audience.
Since the U.S.-backed coup in Chile and the effort by the resulting dictatorship to silence dissent in activism and art, many of these individuals and groups who populated peñas were imprisoned, killed and expelled.
Yet musicians engaged with nueva canción and the other artists who found a home in peñas have always been border-crossers. An overarching theme of nueva canción has been sharing tradition across cultures. The project of Pan-Latin American and global resistance to imperialism has thrived on its ability to make common cause across difference. Though Rodriguez wrote “La Maza” and was first to record it, the song has since become a staple of many musicians’ oeuvre, most notably that of Argentinan singer Mercedes Sosa. Whereas the original version emphasizes existential self-reflection, Sosa’s arresting voice seems to highlight the song’s universal register, speaking to a shared human longing to be free.
The link between the Chilean coup and the establishment of Berkeley’s La Peña in 1975 underscores its place in the longer trajectory of cultural and political activism. Ours is a counterspace born from refusal to believe that authoritarian rule, white supremacist hierarchy or capitalist extraction and exploitation are inevitable. La Peña's origins lie in diaspora and the creation of chosen communities that have often been held together more by political commitment than by ethnicity, nationality, gender or sexuality.
The question is, where are we 42 years later? White nationalism and looming neofascism in the U.S. and abroad are again threatening the existence of dangerous institutions like La Peña and the dangerous populations they support. The word “dangerous” here is apt in the sense that building coalition across difference, making common cause, and rejoicing in the company and culture of our neighbors will always be dangerous to the integrity of white supremacy and other pernicious systems of domination.
La Peña is more than a Chilean space--indeed, it is more than a Pan-Latin American space. It reflects and supports the vast diversity of the Bay Area. We desperately need to preserve this counterspace, grow it and seed many more. Peñas near and far are places that do more than facilitate self-discovery; they encourage us to recover the rich histories of partnership and resistance that we are systematically denied in formal education and in corporate mass media.
It is beautiful that La Peña still serves the same purpose as Violeta Parra’s peñas in the 1950s and 60s. At La Peña, there is no audience. Its continued existence demands that we all take responsibility for becoming and supporting the next generation of thinkers, artists, and activists. It demands that we celebrate and learn from our differences and, in the process, become more human.
- Max
Click here to listen to Sosa's "La Maza"
Click here to listen to Rodriguez's "La Maza"