In the 1980s, a wide range of US-based folkloric and popular musicians, from grassroots artists to national figures, conveyed their strong opposition to the US government’s role in fueling the armed conflicts devastating much of Central America. Besides performing songs that critiqued US support for Nicaragua’s Contras and El Salvador’s right-wing regime, these artists regularly participated in fund-raising initiatives for the US-Central America Solidarity Movement. This paper discusses a leading Latinx ensemble active in this scene, Sangre Machehual of Los Angeles. Drawing from interviews with bandmembers and archival research, the presentation uncovers the group’s origins as a Chicano movement protest band in the 1970s, and then analyzes the transformation the ensemble underwent in the 1980s when the focus of its activism shifted to the US-Central America Solidarity Movement. Also receiving attention in this paper are the group’s collaborations with pop star Jackson Browne on his polemical 1986 album Lives in the Balance and subsequent concert tours, which gave Sangre Machehual a level of visibility far greater than that experienced by any other Latinx band aligned with the movement. As Latinx musical activism has not been the subject of published research on the US-Central America Solidarity Movement, this paper makes an important contribution to scholarship on the movement’s cultural dimensions. Moreover, by illuminating the challenges that Sangre Machehual and Solidarity Movement-affiliated musicians in general encountered in the conservative political climate of the 1980s, this presentation adds to the body of work examining protest music scenes in the so-called Age of Reagan.

Drawing on selected recordings from “Viva La Causa! Songs and Sounds from the Delano Strike!”, this paper examines the musical and sonic practices of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and how huelga songs and sound became the site of identity formation, solidarity building, and political mobilization. Based on my archival work in California and interviews with former UFW volunteers, I aim to analyze and theorize how music and sound intersected with race, politics, labor, and protest at the height of California's '60s civil rights movements.

Released in August 1966 by Thunderbird Records, a label founded by Luis Valdez and Agustin Lira of El Teatro Campesino, "Viva La Causa" features songs written and performed during the March to Sacramento—a 340-mile pilgrimage from Delano, CA, to the state capital. Songs like "Huelga en General" and "La Peregrinación" draw musical inspiration from corridos and boleros, tapping into the collective memory of the Mexican diaspora and Chicano/a communities. How did these huelga songs foster solidarity among diverse ethnic and racial groups? How can we move beyond a protest song's lyrics to analyze its structure, chords, and timbre? Finally, how can we better understand the UFW through its soundscape? This paper explores the musical and sonic elements of "Viva La Causa" and how the UFW conveyed its ideological beliefs.

In his 1964 speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X provclaimed that Black people were "fed up with the dillydallying, pussyfooting, compromising approach that we've been using. We want freedom now. But we're not going to get it saying 'We Shall Overcome.'" That same year, Malcolm introduced Fannie Lou Hamer at an event and said "we don't deserve to be recognized and respected as men as long as our women can be brutalized in the manner that this woman described and nothing being done about it, but we sit around singing 'We Shall Overcome.'" The freedom song "We Shall Overcome" became a frequent target for Malcolm, a stand-in for King's nonviolent resistance. This paper aruges that "The Ballot or the Bullet" marked the beginning of a rhetorical pattern for Malcolm and others after him—the conflation of singing with nonviolence, nonviolence with passivity, passivity with femininity in order to delegitimize an approach to political agitation with which they disagreed. Despite this critique, however, counter-examples from Black radical organizations such as the Black Panther Party and even Malcolm himself demonstrate that singing remained a meaningful component of the organizing strategy of Movement participants across the ideological spectrum.