My research looks at the cantora as a cultural referent with anthropological relevance. With roots in subaltern popular culture in Chile, the concept of the cantora provides fertile ground for intersectional historical analysis involving not only gender but also class and race.
Dr María B. Batlle, Visiting Research Fellow
12 March 2026
Women folk singers reveal colonial legacies in Latin America
New research shows how the traditional figure of the ‘cantora’ – a woman who performs music and poetry – explains constructions of gender, race and class in Latin America and their roots in colonial culture.
Dr María B. Batlle, Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, examines the history behind the construction of the cantora in The Chilean Cantora: Women Music Poets in Latin American Post-Colonial Culture.
Cantoras are women who keep musical and cultural traditions alive by performing them at community events and passing them down through generations by word of mouth. Through analysing the cantora role, Dr Batlle traces the connections between contemporary class and gender dynamics in Chile and the colonial social hierarchies that shaped relations between Spaniards, creoles, Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans.
The history of the cantora
With an important presence in Chile, different versions of the figure of the cantora exist across the Iberian Americas. A cantora cultivates and performs traditional folk music by singing and playing guitar, a tradition dating back to at least the eighteenth century. These women, in their roles as historical bearers of identity and cultural resistance, have acted as guardians of folklore discourses and usages. They usually hail from rural or lower-class backgrounds and play a key role in local celebrations.
The cantora practice has typically been understood as influenced from Spain due to the word’s etymology and the use of repertoires from traditional Spanish songbooks. However, the singing styles and rural cultures of South American cantoras differ from Spanish women singers, more closely relating to other modes of Latin American singing and socialising.
Arguably one of the most famous cantoras is Violeta Parra, pioneer of the nueva canción chilena (The Chilean New Song) that spread renewed interest in traditional folk music through Latin America.
Social exclusion
Despite their cultural significance, cantoras have historically faced exclusion due to reasons of gender, class and race. Dr Batlle argues this exclusion stems from inherited colonial values, which favoured Christian solemnity and sobriety over festival, carnivalesque activities. This can be evidenced through the legal proscription of cantora genres, repertoires and modes of sociality in colonial times – and the ongoing aversion to popular festival culture from elites.
Dr Batlle also considers the figure of the cantora to dissect the limits placed on women’s roles in creativity and authorship, and how this reflects colonial ideas about who can use public space.
Cantoras were often excluded from other activities – typically creative or intellectual roles – that were then assigned to men. Considering what cantoras were allowed and not allowed to do sheds light on how these roles and hierarchies worked in society. Dr Batlle argues that many of these prohibitions remain both symbolically and practically relevant, driving contemporary cantoras to create subversion strategies.
Cantoras and political protest
Dr Batlle’s research took place during a period of protest and political unrest in Chile in 2020-22. Causes of such crises are often related to immediate or recent events, but Dr Batlle instead sets out to understand the roots of unrest as part of the cultural history of Chilean society.
She contends that the cultural meanings inherited and created during colonial times still carry enormous weight in the collective unconscious today, and that the antagonisms preceding unrest can potentially be better understood and navigated through this historical lens.
During the uprisings of October 2019, women writers, musicians, performers, cantoras and payadoras played a prominent role in providing aesthetic content to the demonstrations, reflecting a movement that had gained force over the previous decade and had been awakened by the anti-femicide campaign Ni una menos (Not one [woman] less).
Fifty cantoras also appeared at Festival de Viña in February 2020, one of the largest international music festivals in Latin America, to sing two feminist cuecas. Previously, this type of performance would not have happened – showing how cantoras are finding power through subversive acts.
Dr Batlle plans to expand her research on the cantora by better understanding the figure’s pre-Hispanic roots. Part of this work will attempt to locate cantora traditions in the Tiwanaku cultural region (now in present-day Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina).