If there is no one to till the land, how do we live? Notion of ‘People’ in the protest vallenato of Máximo Jiménez

Abstract

The work of vallenato singer-songwriter Máximo Jiménez remains more relevant than ever. His songs have a testimonial and literary value that contributes to the construction of a plural narrative of Colombia and, therefore, also allows questioning the hegemonic narratives of our national mythology around the political conflict, to the extent that it concretizes the collective will of the peasantry to remember and remember their organizational processes as an aggregation, as well as to confront problems such as agrarian reform, political violence, gamonalism, state inertia and abandonment, and unequal land tenure, especially in the departments of Córdoba and Sucre since the end of the 1960s in the context of the demands of the association known as the Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos (ANUC). Contrary to what some thinkers such as Walter Ong assert about oral cultures, Máximo Jiménez’s music is critically and historically sensitive to Colombian politics and its power practices, as well as to the geopolitical and international panorama of the time. To that extent, this paper performs a socio-critical analysis of Máximo Jiménez’s songs, particularly focusing on his way of understanding the notion of the People and the way in which his songs establish a relationship between his texts and the social events that circulate around him, as well as on the way in which his songs establish a relationship between his texts and the social events of the time.