Indigenismo and Church Music: Retracing Vatican Second's Latin American Influences

Some church music scholars have recorded the effervescence of interdenominational, nationalistic, and ecumenical liturgical projects between the 1960s and 1970s (Hawn 2003; Silva Steuernagel 2021). Most trace the influences of the Vatican Second’s liturgical reformation to Latin American liberation theologians (Elias 2021). Few scholars, though, have considered if indigenismo—an early twentieth-century Latin American political and ideological movement that utilized essentialized notions of indigeneity (Nielsen 2020)—plays a role in the theological and musicological debates that led to the Sacrosanctum Concilium. This paper investigates how early Latin American twentieth-century indigenista musical projects influenced projects of Latin American liberation theologians. By providing a historical account of Indigenismo and cross-referencing hymnological literature on early twentieth-century church music, I argue that broader cultural, socio-economical, and political trends, as well as indigenismo, are imbricated with the theological projects articulated in the Sacrosanctum Concilium.