Reclaiming Cueca: The Brava Tradition and Imagined Identities Among Santiago's Cuequeros = Re-significando la Cueca: la tradición brava e identidades imaginadas entre cuequeros de Santiago

In 1970s Chile, Pinochet's military dictatorship co-opted the rural cueca campesina as a national symbol, culminating in its instatement as the country's institutionally ordained music and dance in 1979. In parallel to the appropriation of this rural musical form was an attempted erasure of its urban folkloric counterpart–cueca brava. Cueca brava remained largely hidden from Chilean public life during the cultural repression that accompanied Pinochet's regime between 1973 and 1990. Today, however, there is a revival of cueca brava that traces back to Chile's return to democracy in the 1990s. Using a place-based lens, we examine the resurgence of cueca brava in Santiago to demonstrate how musical traditions of the past offer raw material for the construction of contemporary Chilean identities. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews in Santiago, as well as lyrical analysis, we seek to characterize the current cueca brava movement. We ground our work in (social) identity theory, Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities, and Jan Assmann's notion of cultural memory. By examining how cuequeros engage memory, history, and place, we propose that the socio-spatial constructions of the contemporary cueca brava resurgence engender new individual and collective identities fortified by a dialogical relationship between past and present.