On the evening of 7 April, El Rincón de las Guitarras—a cozy dancehall in the Chilean city of Valparaíso—was strung with small coloured flags. These decorations, usually reserved for national holidays, had been hung in honour of the evening’s musical act. An audience of about 50 people of all ages sat around tables and chatted. Around 10.30, a singer, guitarist and pianist began to perform a bright tune to an off-kilter beat. Soon, pairs of dancers from the audience ambled to the floor, twirling handkerchiefs in the air, circling one another coquettishly and marking the rhythm with their feet.
The audience was dancing the cueca, the national dance of Chile. René Alfaro, the singer performing for them that night, has frequented El Rincón for over a decade. Beginning as a percussionist for musicians from older generations, he now enjoys the limelight, often sporting a fedora. In turn, he has become a mentor for the musicians who accompanied him that evening: the pianist Manuel Hernández and the guitarist Claudio Silva Rey, two young men in their twenties.
The energy and flair of the performance belied the dark history of the dance, which is tied to one of the bloodiest chapters of Chilean history. Alfaro, Hernández and Rey are part of a new generation that is reviving lost versions of the cueca, eager to preserve a past that is in danger of slipping away.
The cueca originated from a mix of traditions from the Spanish region of Andalusia and Afro-Peruvian communities. It first appeared in Chile shortly after the country declared independence from Spain in 1818. The form soon acquired a Chilean flavour, especially in the then booming port city of Valparaíso, whose diverse culture infused its cueca with a jazzy edge. Rural areas of Chile also developed their own variations of the dance. The cueca continued to flourish and evolve for over a century—the 1960s and early 1970s, in particular, were a period of cultural blossoming, during which cueca musicians in both Valparaíso and the nation’s capital, Santiago, put out major records.
But in 1973, the military took over the country in a brutal coup, killing the president, Salvador Allende, and installing the general Augusto Pinochet as dictator. Musicians, artists and writers were among the first people killed under Pinochet. The mutilated corpse of Victor Jara, the folk singer who wrote Allende’s campaign song, was found just after the coup. Though cueca musicians were not the primary targets of this crackdown, they did suffer greatly. The bohemian cueca nightlife of cities was wiped out through the army’s imposition of a nightly curfew, which closed most dancehalls—driving away the working-class audiences that had frequented them, and putting most musicians out of their jobs. The urban cueca became relegated to the homes of musicians, where only trusted friends were invited to hear clandestine, after-dark performances.
Meanwhile, the dictatorship embraced the cueca of rural communities. In 1979, the cueca huaso—or “the country cueca”—was declared the national dance of Chile. It was taught in every school, danced on every national holiday and televised in heavily promoted competitions. The cueca huaso “imposed an identity on Chile of the humble, dignified peasant,” Hernández explained. “It was a poor man’s cueca, poor in the sense of content, a stupid cueca.” The men dressed in sombreros and ponchos, the women in floral dresses—costumes inspired not by Chilean culture, but rather by the clothing from Mexican ranchero films. The dance’s central metaphor was that of a master seducing a reluctant-yet-willing servant girl. Andrea Martinez, a 31-year-old singer and co-author of two books on the cueca, recalled having to dance the cueca huaso as a schoolgirl. “I started to move my shoulders a bit, like the older styles, and the professor whacked me on the back,” she told me. “There’s a whole generation, from the 1980s and 1990s, that hates cueca.”
Under Pinochet, the cueca became a symbol of cultural conservatism and repression. The artist and activist Pedro Lemebel and his collaborator Francisco Casas famously danced the cueca before the 1989 Chilean Commission on Human Rights, stomping out the steps barefoot over a map of South America made from broken glass, their feet trailing blood everywhere. But while Lemebel chose the dance partly to evoke Pinochet’s repression, he was also citing an iconic form of resistance to the dictatorship called the cueca sola. In this, women whose husbands or sons had been “disappeared”—kidnapped and killed by the authorities—would dance alone in public spaces, staging a bold protest.
Pinochet’s rule ended in 1990, but the cueca continued to represent repression in the few years following that, when a democratically elected president assumed power. Things began to change in 1995, when Los Tres, a popular Chilean rock band, was invited to perform on the American television show MTV Unplugged. Halfway through the set, the lead singer announced, “These next songs we’re about to play are cueca. They were written by Roberto Parra, a great musician and mentor.” The band played old-school cueca for a North American audience: not the kind promoted by the dictatorship, but something that reached further back, to urban styles. Back in Chile, Los Tres’s album—which had the same songs as their MTV set list—went quadruple platinum.
Since then, the cueca has experienced a revival in Chile. A new generation of musicians began learning to play the dance in styles that predated the dictatorship, often apprenticing themselves to artists who had played through the 1960s. Many of these new musicians had heard the cueca in the houses of their elder relatives, but thought little of it. Alfaro, for example, had a grandmother who sang, but he wasn’t hooked until, at the age of 19, he heard Los Trukeros, a group that formed in 1997 and is now Chile’s most successful contemporary cueca ensemble. “There was something powerful, something Chilean about the way they sang,” he recalled. Hernández began learning cueca songs after hearing the piano part in the little-known original recording of “La Consentida,” a tune that many associate with the dance lessons imposed in schools under Pinochet. “I heard it and thought, ‘This is Chilean.’ There’s nothing from Peru or Argentina or anywhere else about this style of playing,” Hernández said.
Today’s cueca movement is driven by the search for an authentic Chilean identity, along with a sense of urgency to recover lost cultural history. The website of Los Trukeros describes how the band has “constantly directed their energies towards the research, musical and poetic creation, interpretation, and dispersion of traditional Chilean culture ... in one of the most representative and identifiable expressions of our tradition: the Chilean cueca.” Yet many still struggle to understand the cueca in any context other than the dictatorship. “People still hear La Consentida and think I’m a Pinochetist for playing it,” Hernández told me.
But in their search for tradition and roots, today’s musicians are also creating something new. “The cueca is a communal genre by definition,” Martinez said—especially in the format commonly performed by the younger generation. “The songs can’t be sung by one person.”
Many are also writing new cueca songs, and women like Martinez are breaking into a traditionally masculine musical form. In the past few years, young filmmakers have produced documentaries and public television specials about the urban cueca, capturing this process of cultural recuperation.
Around 1.30 am, after Alfaro, Hernández and Rey finished performing, I tagged along as they took a cab to the Liberty, one of the oldest bars in Valparaíso. Inside, around 20 musicians, both professional and amateur, had taken over the space, surrounded by a crowd of young admirers wearing leather and plaid. A few elderly patrons leaned up against the bar. Standing in a circle, the performers played the same style of cueca that I had heard earlier that night, but they took turns singing song verses. This gathering, which occurs weekly, was started by a group of young cueca musicians in 2011. Martinez, who is one of the founders, said: “We didn’t always sound great, but it was a space for teaching ourselves.”
I watched as Alfaro patted one of the musicians on the shoulder and stepped into the circle of performers, tipping the brim of his hat as he began to sing. When I turned to Hernández to ask what he thought of the gathering, he shrugged and smiled. “Some of the musicians are better than others, I suppose,” he said. “But I’m glad they’re here.”