This book brings together researchers from twelve countries in Latin America to reflect on the social dimensions of metal music in Latin America. An extreme musical genre for an extreme region, the contributors explore how issues like colonialism, dictatorships, violence, ethnic extermination and political persecution have shaped heavy metal music.

In Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South, the editors bring together scholars engaged in the study of heavy metal music in Latin America to reflect on the heavy metal genre from a regional perspective. The contributors’ southern voices diversify metal scholarship in the global north. An extreme musical genre for an extreme region, the contributors explore how issues like colonialism, dictatorships, violence, ethnic extermination and political persecution have shaped heavy metal music in Latin America, and how music has helped shape Latin American culture and politics.

SECTION I: UNDERSTANDING METAL MUSIC IN LATIN AMERICA 5

Chapter 1 Conceptualizing the Distorted South: How to Understand Metal Music and Its Scholarship in Latin America

Nelson Varas-Díaz, Daniel Nevárez Araújo, and Eliut Rivera-Segarra

SECTION II: A SOUNDTRACK FOR A VIOLENT CONTEXT 37

Chapter 2 Decomposición Cerebral: The Salvadoran Civil War and the Birth of Salvadoran Brutal Death Metal

Christian M. Pack

Chapter 3 Dictatorship and Metal in Chile: A Causal Relationship?

Maximiliano Sánchez Mondaca

Chapter 4 The Role of Death Metal in the Colombian Armed Conflict: The Case of the Band Masacre

Pedro Manuel Lagos Chacón

Chapter 5 Sounds of Exclusion and Seclusion: Peruvian Metal as a Model for Cultural Self-Segregation

José Ignacio López Ramírez Gastón

SECTION III: DECOLONIZING LOCAL HISTORIES THROUGH MUSIC 131

Chapter 6 The Metal Scene in Havana, Cuba: An Assessment of Its Cultural Development from 2007 to 2017

Miriela Fernández Lozano

Chapter 7 In the Shadow of the Dictatorship: A Historical Approach to Uruguayan Heavy Metal

María Ximena Rodríguez Molinari

Chapter 8 Metal and Politics in Argentina: A Study into the Audienceship Surrounding Ricardo Iorio

Manuela Belén Calvo

Chapter 9 America, Avenge Yourself: The Emergence of Combative Discourse and Other Recent Directions in Contemporary Argentinian Metal (An Exploration in Three Movements)

Emiliano Scaricaciottoli

SECTION IV: MARGINALITY AND CULTURES OF RESISTANCE 217

Chapter 10 The Transfiguration of the Deity Maximón as a Practice of Resistance in Metal from San Pedro Sacatepéquez, San Marcos, Guatemala

Mario Efraín Castañeda Maldonado

Chapter 11 La Periferia: Marginal Contexts for Metal Music in the State of México

Alfredo Nieves Molina

Chapter 12 Differences in the Sociopolitical Perspectives of Brazilian and European Völkisch Metal

Guilherme Alfradique Klausner

SECTION V: LIBERATION THROUGH METAL MUSIC 285

Chapter 13 “A Scream that Makes Us Visible”: Latin American Heavy Metal Music and Liberation Psychology

Eliut Rivera-Segarra, Jeffrey W. Ramos, and Nelson Varas-Díaz

Chapter 14 Metal Migration: The Latin American Diasporic Experience in Heavy Metal

Daniel Nevárez Araújo