Nueva canción

Nueva canción (European Spanish: [ˈnweβa kanˈθjon], American Spanish: [ˈnweβa kanˈsjon]; 'new song') is a social movement and musical genre in Iberian America and the Iberian peninsula, characterized by folk-inspired styles and socially committed lyrics. Nueva canción is widely recognized to have played a profound role in the social upheavals in Portugal, Spain and Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. Nueva canción surfaced almost simultaneously during the 1960s in Argentina, Chile and Spain. The musical style emerged shortly afterwards in other areas of Latin America where it came to be known under similar names. Nueva canción renewed traditional Latin American folk music, and was soon associated with revolutionary movements, the Latin American New Left, Liberation Theology, hippie and human rights movements due to political lyrics. It would gain great popularity throughout Latin America, and left an imprint on several other genres like Ibero-American rock, Cumbia and Andean music. Nueva canción musicians often faced censorship, exile, forceful disappearances and even torture by the wave of right-wing military dictatorships that swept across Iberian America and the Iberian peninsula in the Cold War era, e.g. in Francoist Spain, Pinochet's Chile, Salazar's Portugal and Videla and Galtieri's Argentina. Due to nueva canción songs' strongly political messages, some of them have been used in later political campaigns, the Orange Revolution, which used Violeta Parra's "Gracias a la Vida". Nueva canción has become part of the Latin American and Iberian musical canon but is no longer a mainstream genre, and has given way to other genres, particularly Rock en español.