Bloody Nations: The Anthem as Cooptation of Lower, “National” Classes

• In Event: Cultura y Performance

Abstract

The origin, development, and officialization of national anthems in Latin America took up most of the nineteenth century after the breakup of the Spanish empire. Responding to the historical wars of independence, the discourse of the anthem adopts a military rationale for the nation in a poetic form that follows contemporaneous Romantic trends. This resulting categorical discourse, in addition, is based on a complex of mythical, territorial, cultural, and historical impulses that coopts the heterogeneous lower clases and ethnic groups inhabiting the space of the new nation. The anthem, a new symbol of the nation, marginalizes/erases these “other” identities, and underlying social tensions, as part of its discursive effort towards unity, “the people,” a simplified concept where voiceless and politically weak groups (slaves, indigenous peoples, peons, and women) are subordinated to the anthem’s totalizing discourse.

Author

• Eduardo Ruiz, Duquesne University