A historical and sociological journey through Latin American heavy metal music. The long-lasting effects of colonialism--racism, political persecution, ethnic extermination, and extreme capitalism--are still felt throughout Latin America. This volume explores how heavy metal music in the region has been used to challenge coloniality and its present-day manifestations. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, Nelson Varas-Díaz documents how metal musicians and listeners engage in "extreme decolonial dialogues" as a strategy to challenge past and present forms of oppression. Most existing work on metal music in Latin America has relied on theoretical frameworks developed in the global North. By contrast, this volume explores the region through its own history and experiences, providing a roadmap for this emerging mode of musical analysis by demonstrating how decolonial metal scholarship can be achieved.

In Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South, the editors bring together scholars engaged in the study of heavy metal music in Latin America to reflect on the heavy metal genre from a regional perspective. The contributors’ southern voices diversify metal scholarship in the global north. An extreme musical genre for an extreme region, the contributors explore how issues like colonialism, dictatorships, violence, ethnic extermination and political persecution have shaped heavy metal music in Latin America, and how music has helped shape Latin American culture and politics.

This book brings together researchers from twelve countries in Latin America to reflect on the social dimensions of metal music in Latin America. An extreme musical genre for an extreme region, the contributors explore how issues like colonialism, dictatorships, violence, ethnic extermination and political persecution have shaped heavy metal music.

For many music fans, metal was visual before it was aural. The album artwork that caught one’s attention, the t-shirt worn by a friend, or the film that introduced fans to new bands were important to metal culture even before one musical note was heard. Varas-Díaz and Nevárez Araújo explore the visual dimensions of metal music from the specific socio-historic, geographic, and political positionality of Latin America and the Caribbean. They position metal music’s visual dimensions as storytelling devices to understand and challenge the legacies of social oppression faced in these parts of the world, a process marked by coloniality. In this context, the visual register of metal music allows creators and consumers to engage in four distinct strategies (i.e., seeing, revealing, inverting, and appearing) as part of what the authors have termed extreme decolonial dialogues. The authors support their position by using a diverse lens to examine a plethora of essential aspects of the visual dimensions of metal music: album artwork, clothing, film, traditional and virtual sites, activist practices, and even their research endeavors, all of which are constituent of metal music’s visual culture. You will never see metal music in the same light again.

Since its beginnings over fifty years ago, metal music has grown in popularity worldwide, not only as a musical culture but as a recognised field of study. This Companion, grounded in recent research, explores the various musical styles and cultures of metal, providing a reliable resource for students and researchers.

There is a strong heavy metal scene across Latin America, and within this scene Extreme metal bands incorporate and fuse regional indigenous sounds, images, and lyrics in the music. The central question and concern: how are decolonization expressed and carried out by the incorporation of local indigenous elements into the Heavy Metal genre in Mexico and El Salvador's heavy metal music scene? How can Extreme Metal be used as a viable tool towards decolonization and education? Music is an important form of art that enables a space for dialogue that can challenge dominant narratives, or to bridge an indigenous root that colonization has historically undermined. Colonial experiences in Latin America do not go unchallenged. The concern is to understand this decentralization of cultural diffusion and how it is a mechanism for decolonization. Indigenous sounds and culture are incorporated in fusion with American Heavy Metal framework that can become an educational tool for indigeneity and resistance towards colonial histories.