{"id":6328,"date":"2021-12-15T16:09:47","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T22:09:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/?p=6328"},"modified":"2021-12-15T16:11:22","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T22:11:22","slug":"new-spanish-villancicos-and-cultural-appropriation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/2021\/12\/15\/new-spanish-villancicos-and-cultural-appropriation\/","title":{"rendered":"New Spanish Villancicos and Cultural Appropriation"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

The villancico<\/em> was the most popular musical genre in the Spanish colonies of New Spain and Peru, dominating the cathedral radio waves from the 16th century through the end of the 18th. A somewhat ambiguous term, villancicos<\/em> are best understood as folk tunes and texts formalized into a Renaissance or Baroque style and performed by cathedral musicians on feast days and holidays, especially the feasts of Immaculate Conception, Corpus Christi, and Christmas. There was a wide variety of texts and instrumentations used to compose these villancicos<\/em>; especially in the colonies, they would also take on the dialect or “style” of an ethnic group, particularly that of Aztecs and enslaved Africans in the form of tocotines<\/em> and\u00a0negrillos<\/em>, respectively.1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n

It isn’t difficult to see the parallels throughout the history of the Americas; as they say, history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The ubiquity of villancicos negros<\/em> is just an early iteration of the same general trend of Europeans appropriating dialect associated with enslaved Africans and their descendants for views, just like 19th century minstrelsy and 21st century white TikTokers. In New Spain and Peru, villancicos <\/em>negros\u00a0<\/em>were extremely popular and can be found in almost every major cathedral archive.2<\/sup><\/a> Beyond being labeled as such,\u00a0negrillos<\/em> can best be identified by the use of onomatopoetic syllables and dialectic speech in the text, and syncopation in the music; besides these elements, they tended to be composed much the same as other villancicos<\/em>.3<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\r\n

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