[Refried Elvis: the rise of the Mexican counterculture]

Eric Zolov

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. vii + 349 pp.

Adam Mack, University of South Carolina

Bemoaning the apparent complacency of the 1950s rock-and-roll scene, protest singer Phil Ochs said that the only hope for revolution in America was in convincing Elvis Presley to become an Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Some scholars have shared Ochs's assessment of rock-and-roll music by arguing that the medium--and mass culture more generally--has a dulling effect on its consumers, creating a depoliticized and passive population. Yet other scholars have deepened our understanding of popular culture by examining it as a contested phenomenon and highlighting the active role consumers take in shaping the meaning of cultural forms. An excellent example of this emphasis is Eric Zolov's new book on the history of rock and roll in Mexico and the rise of the domestic counterculture. Disputing the notion that commercialization and consumerism dampened common interest in politics in post-revolutionary Mexico, Zolov examines how rock music helped generate social and cultural conflict in years following its introduction in the early 1950s. "The 1950s may have witnessed the ascendancy of mass-media culture," Zolov argues, "but this emergence also marked the beginning of a new ideological questioning of authoritarian practices, not its death knell" (p. 9).

Refried Elvis begins with the contention that rock-and-roll music both signified Mexicans' aspirations for modernity and generated important challenges to the post-revolutionary social order. When it was first introduced to Mexico from the United States, many middle- and upper-class Mexicans welcomed rock and roll because they believed it signalled their possession of modern cultural values. At the same time, Zolov argues, rock music encouraged Mexican youth to question the patriarchal values that dominated their society. Central to the post-revolutionary order was the concept of the "Revolutionary Family," a gendered, authoritarian arrangement which was institutionalized at the national level by the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and reflected in the individual family unit itself, in which the father's authority was unquestioned and the mother's moral strength was viewed as an important stabilizing element. The youth culture associated with early rock and roll, Zolov contends, undermined the traditional order by celebrating raucous behaviour and encouraging dissent from parental authority. Moving beyond simple youthful rebellion, this defiance challenged the ideas of patriarchal authority that lay at the centre of the post-revolutionary social order. In response to these threats, the state worked with parents and the entertainment industry to narrow the influence of rock and roll by promoting rocanrol, a home-grown version of the medium which used the original rhythms of specific songs but introduced sanitized lyrics and clean-cut performers.

Containing rock and roll, however, became increasingly difficult in the 1960s as Mexican youth began listening to musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. By the end of the decade, this newer rock music--with its glorification of alternative lifestyles (including drug use) and overtly irreverent tone--had helped create a full-blown countercultural movement, known as La Onda. One of Zolov's central arguments is that the music of the counterculture helped create a "grammar of youth rebellion" that played an important supporting role in the student movement of the late 1960s (p. 118). Other influences (such as previous activism and international events) played determining roles, but the discourse surrounding the counterculture directly affected the development of the movement and encouraged many young Mexicans to speak out against authoritarianism. Although the student movement largely fell apart after the massacre at Tlatelolco, Zolov shows how the counterculture continued to provide a vehicle for youth rebellion. At this point, however, countercultural youth questioned authority by "dropping out" out of society completely and participating in a native hippie movement. Mexican hippies, Zolov argues, attempted to form a new collective identity based on ideas of Mexican nationalism and the discourse associated with the counterculture and thus challenged authority by questioning the state's ability to define national character.

Zolov concludes his study by tracing the decline of the countercultural movement and the changing nature of rock music in Mexico. Amid increasing criticisms from adults on both the right and left--who blamed the counterculture for what they saw as the moral perversion and/or depoliticization of their youth--and aggressive government crackdowns on drug use and other "subversive" aspects of hippies' lifestyles, the countercultural movement was driven underground in the early 1970s. In the following years, as many upper- and middle-class Mexicans supported a Latin American folk music revival, the performance of rock and roll shifted to the barrios and was used increasingly by lower-class Mexicans as a vehicle for social protest. In the 1980s, Zolov concludes, punk rock, performed mostly by working-class Mexican bands, re-emerged as a powerful form of social criticism and was embraced by many middle-class Mexicans and intellectuals as a legitimate form of protest. "Rock culture," Zolov suggests, "had come full circle as the redeemer of democratic practice and urban social protest" (p. 13).

Refried Elvis is a clearly written study based on research in a wide variety of sources. Zolov has searched government and entertainment industry records in archives in both Mexico and the United States, consulted a wide range of periodic and secondary literature and interviewed participants in the Mexican counterculture, including former band members, ex-hippies and music industry executives. Despite the breadth of research, however, one issue seems inadequately addressed. Although Zolov shows how rock and roll threatened state authority and thus triggered various attempts by government officials to contain it, he might have given more attention to how debates over rock music served the interests of the state by focusing public attention on the content of popular cultural forms instead of issues related to government abuses of power. Nevertheless, Refried Elvis is an outstanding book. It should be required reading for students of twentieth-century Mexican history and modern social movements.