Latin American Culture

Enrique Tams Muoz, Ph.D.

Visual Arts
Although Latin American visual arts are not as well known as literature, they are internationally distinguished both for their cultural significance in the region and for their influence elsewhere.
Latin American visual art is a mixture that includes influences from Spain and Portugal, from other countries with significant immigrant populations, and from indigenous traditions.

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Visual Arts
In some parts of the region, this type of work was called 'Tequitqui': European work made by natives. The first Latin American artistic movement that was born in the new continent was the Plateresco style. Subsequently the Herreriano style appeared. Mudjar style also appeared in the seventeenth century, a style with Arab influence.

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Visual Arts
Some of the European styles that had major influence in the Americas were the Baroque and the Churrigueresco. Taxco and Zacatecas in Mexico, Potosi in Bolivia, are the most representative samples of these styles. We should also include the Brazilian sculptor, Antonio Francisco Lisboa, better known as Aleijandinho, a cripple mulatto who showed his artistic skills by creating fine religious sculptures and facades for churches.
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Mexican Muralism
In the 20th century, one of the most significant artistic movements in the world emerged from Latin America and this is the Mexican Muralism. Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jos Clemente Orozco, were painters who showed through their art the need to reaffirm the national values, in order to redefine a national identity.

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Visual Arts
The most important artists of the continent proposed a regional style but always as an expression of the vanguard. Rufino Tamayo, who mixed indigenous themes with the techniques derived from German Expressionism; the Chilean Roberto Matta Echaurren with his peculiar surrealism, and the Colombian Fernando Botero, whose voluminous figures are already well known worldwide are some examples.

Rufino Tamayo Fernando Botero Juan O'Gorman

Roberto Matta Echaurren

Luis Barragn Oscar Niemeyer Soares

During this same period we can also see the balance between the native and the modern in architecture, citing the Mexicans Luis Barragn and Juan O'Gorman, and the wellknown Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer Soares.
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Music
Latin American art has very strong popular links. This characteristic, of the popular and folk art, finds its strongest manifestation in music. Music represents what people want to say and the messages they want to share but it also demonstrates the shape and intensity with which they want to communicate those messages.

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Prehispanic music
Prehispanic music was based on wind instruments and percussion. Peru's indigenous culture succeeds in presenting one of the biggest wind instruments repertoires of the world, from trumpets to vertical flutes to the pan flute.

The latter is one of the most representative wind instruments of the Southern Cone.

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Music
In Mesoamerica there is a vast repertoire of percussion instruments.
To date, there are beautiful varieties of these instruments such as the tepoztli, drum known throughout America, or the huehuetl, played by the Huicholes. With the arrival of Africans to the New World, the percussions that have made music in that continent popular were introduced to the Americas.
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Alejo Carpentier
Habanero, Argentine tango, rumba, guaracha, bolero, Brazilian samba, were invading the world with its rhythms, its traditional instruments, and with their rich arsenal of percussions today incorporated to the symphonic ensembles. And now is the music from Mexico, from Venezuela, and from the Andes which are heard everywhere, with their accordions, guitars, flutes of old lineage, llaneras and harps...
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Latin American composers

Hctor Villa-Lobos

Julian Carrillo

Carlos Chvez

Amadeo Roldan

Camargo Guarnieri

Roque Cordero

Brazilian composer Hctor Villa-Lobos, composed ballets and concerts. Julian Carrillo, the famous creator of the Sound 13 (sonido 13). Mexican Carlos Chvez, a great composer of international fame, who knew how to include prehispanic instruments in some of the major symphony orchestras. Amadeo Roldan in Cuba, Camargo Guarnieri in Brazil and Roque Cordero in Panama.

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Latin American composers

Five Latin American personalities that have more relevance before the 1950s: Hector Villa-Lobos from Brazil, the Argentinians Juan Jos Castro and Juan Carlos Paz, Mexican Carlos Chvez, and Domingo Santa Cruz from Chile.
Hector Villa-Lobos

Juan Jos Castro

Juan Carlos Paz

Carlos Chvez

Domingo Santa Cruz

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Cuba
Cuba is, without question, the country in which more genres and styles have contributed to the popular music scene in the world: habanera, son, bolero, mambo, guaracha, conga, cha-cha-cha, just to mention the most important.

These rhythms distinguish the island and placed it in a prominent place. Colombia has brought cumbia; Argentina, tango; Brazil the bossa nova.
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New trends
Caribbean music has also contributed with new rhythms: calypso from Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic merengue and the world-renowned reggae which is a religious-musical movement that transmits the principles of the Rastafarians in Jamaica.

The new Latin American musical trends:

Popular Poetry, the New Song, and the Social Song. These are artistic movements committed to social causes that loudly cry the injustices done to the marginalized sectors of Latin America.

Three names stand out in this trend: the Chileans Victor Jara and Violeta Parra and the Argentinian Atahualpa Yupanqui.
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