Mexican Canto Nuevo: Music, Politics, and Resistance

The talk will serve as a book presentation for Mexican Canto Nuevo: Music, Politics, and Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2025). The work explores the Canto Nuevo movement, a musical and cultural phenomenon that profoundly impacted Mexican society from the 1960s to the late 1980s. Participants will be guided through the movement's origins, peak, and eventual decline, exploring its many facets—from its beginnings during the 1968 student movement to its ideological foundations rooted in Marxist-humanist principles. The seminar places Canto Nuevo within the broader context of the Latin American Nueva Canción, analyzing the relationship between music and politics, and ultimately emphasizing the lasting influence of this movement on Mexican cultural history. 

Claudio Palomares-Salas is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at Queen's University. He is the author of Mexican Canto Nuevo: Music, Politics, and Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2025); The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde (Brill, 2020), the novel El lugar más triste para soñar (Lugar Común, 2014), and of numerous academic articles. His areas of specialization are 20th - and 21st-century Spanish and Latin American literature, Latin American music, the Nueva Canción movements in Mexico and Latin America (1960-1980s), the transatlantic Hispanic avant-garde movements (1910-1920s), and the Latin American diasporas in the U.S. and Canada. In addition to his academic work, he is an active drummer in Montreal who has toured and recorded with various artists in Mexico, the USA, Canada, and abroad.