El Salvador: Music and History

by Luis Rumbaut

El Salvador, the smallest country on the American mainland, came to be known in the U.S. during the fierce civil war of the 1980s, in which the U.S. was a major participant through its sponsorship of the Army and allied political parties. The war drove a sizable part of the population out of the country, taking many people to cities like Houston, Los Angeles, and Washington.

Hard-working Salvadorans have had a notable impact on these cities. Still, Salvadoran music has not reached far outside the Latin American community, and even among Latin Americans it is hardly as well known as the widespread Salvadoran cuisine. A good way to begin to understand it, as is the case with the music of any country, is to know something about the history of the country.

Economic development came late to El Salvador, never a pole of colonial trade or plunder, as were Perú, México, and Cuba. Nonetheless, El Salvador’s history shares much with that of Latin America generally. Aztec culture extended in its southernmost reach along the Pacific coast to what is now El Salvador, following the disappearance of the earlier Olmecs and Mayas. Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, was spoken by the Pipils, the predominant indigenous people in the area when the Spanish arrived, and who descended from the Toltecs and Aztecs. The Chorti, Lenca, and Pok'omame also lived in the Eastern part of the country. The colonial era, however, brought with it the supremacy of Spanish and later Creole culture. African slaves left their mark too, in certain musical instruments as well as physically in part of the population.

Traditional Salvadoran genres, as in other Latin American countries, include religious music and songs for Christmas and the feast days of the saints, and songs with motifs characteristic of rural life. They also show a satirical bent, having lampooned the rich and the politicians since the time of the Spanish dons. An example of this tradition is El torito pinto, now a popular children’s song.

Salvadoran popular music has incorporated indigenous and African instruments, principally in small percussion, scrapers, gourds, and so on, and flutes and wood drums. The roots of El Salvador’s music, however, are largely Hispanic, with later influences from Cuba and Mexico, the latter especially in the form of rancheras, whose name denotes the country origins of the genre. Instruments of European background in common use include those descended from the old military bands: in El Salvador, the Army has played historically not just instruments but a leading role in economic and political life.

By the early 1800s, the country’s land was practically all owned by a few families from Europe. Independence came in 1821, but did little to change the pattern of landownership. In 1833, Anastasio Aquino, the last great indigenous leader, led an uprising that was put down by the new government. Native culture, long repressed by the Spanish and their successors, suffered a final blow in the 1930s. Life was hard enough for the common people in normal times, but the economic collapse of 1929 in the U.S., rippling throughout the Americas, led to a collapse of coffee prices, making life unbearable for the poorer classes of El Salvador. In 1932, a planned revolt led by the local Communist Party was betrayed to the authorities. The abortive attempt was answered with a bloodbath in which 30,000 people died. The wrath of the Army focused on the popular base of the revolt, the indigenous people, and it became dangerous to look or sound like one of the latter. Native traditions would not survive except in vestigial form. Indeed, for decades thereafter, the country continued to be divided in feudal fashion, in an arrangement enforced by the Army, between a small group of rich landowners, oriented to U.S. and European culture, and a large mass of poor and unschooled peasants and farm workers, whose eclectic and battered culture lacked a clear identity. It is said that a president in the 1950s decreed the national dance to be the xuc, a form with no clear popular roots, in an effort to fill by mandate a vacuum in the national identity.

Beginning in the 1960s, rock music from the U.S. invaded the media, and now dominates the urban youth market together with rock en español, relegating rancheras to rural and semi- urban areas. In the 1980s, during the war, politically progressive bands took up New Song and Latin American styles, adding them to Salvadoran traditions in creating their own compositions, and bringing new life to Salvadoran music. The post-war government, however, led by the establishment party, has not favored these trends. Salvadorans have also taken up enthusiastically the Dominican merengue and, more recently, bachata.
Salvadoran bands frequently play a style called cumbia, distantly derived from the Colombian original, with a bouncy and repetitive 1-and-2, rest, bass line. Today, a Latin band that plays cumbias accompanied by a woman in gold lamé shorts who steps to the beat is likely to be Salvadoran. Around Washington one can also hear the chanchonas, smaller ensembles led by one or two violins, with a marked small-town flavor, a true popular musical expression.

El Salvador has not produced a genre that, like reggae, son, merengue, or tango, has found a universal or even broad Latin American reception. The music of El pulgarcito, the Thumbellina of America, has been largely defined by that of larger and more influential countries, from colonial Spain to Mexico and the U.S. The coming of globalization and mass-market culture, and the current ongoing integration of El Salvador into those trends, foretells a continuation of that history.