Spanish Musicological Dominance in Postrevolutionary Mexico: Colonialist Discourse in the Writings of Adolfo Salazar

Eurocentrism in early 20th-century music history in Latin America demonstrates political and racial preferences that placed foreign art music over local music making practices. After the Mexican Revolution (roughly 1910–20), Mexican political and cultural leaders pushed for a “universal” aesthetic in their nation’s art music, implicitly devaluing musical references to Indigenous cultures. This contradicts the era’s indigenist cultural revolution popularized as an “Aztec Renaissance” that celebrated Mexico’s renewed notion of mestizaje (European-Indigenous racial mixture) in music and art. The Mexican elite turned to foreign intellectuals such as Adolfo Salazar (1890–1958), the Spanish-born composer and music critic who came to Mexico as an exile in 1939, to link Mexico’s postcolonial culture with the intellectual inheritance of Europe.This thesis offers discursive analysis of Salazar’s writings in the context of his Mexican years, revealing subtexts of Spanish racial and cultural superiority that indirectly served the elitist agendas of Mexican diplomats and musical tastemakers such as Carlos Chávez (1899–1978). Salazar’s hegemonic legacy in Spanish-language musicology has often been left unquestioned and therefore I assess his influence alongside the development of a music-historical paradigm that defined 20th-century Mexican art music as an international phenomenon. I argue that Salazar’s Spanish-oriented music history established dominance over musicmaking practices in Mexico through demeaning allusions to mestizaje and social hierarchies within musical nationalism. By considering Salazar’s role in Mexican musical nationalism, my thesis reveals how Eurocentric music history writing coincided with colonialist Mexican politics, legitimizing foreign intellectualism over local cultural processes.