Los Huayras celebrated 50 years of keeping protest music alive.

▲ Huayrapamushka performed on August 20th at the Fernando Calderón Theater in Zacatecas. Photo courtesy of the group.

Alfredo Valadez Rodríguez

Correspondent

La Jornada Newspaper, Sunday, September 7, 2025, p. 4

Zacatecas, Zac., A special recital at the Fernando Calderón Theater in the capital of Zacatecas commemorated the 50th anniversary of the creation of the university folkloric and protest music group Huayrapamushka: Los Hijos del Viento, through which dozens of virtuoso men and women of music and song from the Autonomous University of Zacatecas (UAZ) have passed.

The group's founding musicians performed at the commemorative concert: Marie Annick Morisse—a French flamenco singer and dancer who arrived from Paris accompanied by Zacatecas painter and sculptor Ismael Guardado—Javier del Muro Escareño, Francisco Javier Saldaña López, and Carlos García Sánchez. These four were the precursors to the university group in 1972, although it wasn't until 1975 that the then-rector, Jesús Manuel Díaz Casas, formally established it as part of the university, and other members began to join.

Huayrapamushka is an Ecuadorian term, derived from the indigenous Quechua language, meaning "children of the wind." Marie Annick Morisse explained during the recital that it could also be translated as "children of the bitch," as it was used derogatorily to refer to the offspring of native women raped by the Spanish during the Conquest, during forced interbreeding.

Now, centuries later, in Zacatecas, the land of the Chichimecas who fought Captain Pedro de Alvarado during the Spanish colonization, the members of the group decided, at the suggestion of the Frenchwoman Morisse, to name themselves Huayrapamushka and be identified as Los Huayras.

Today, they are the UAZ university reference for recovering and keeping alive through music the popular leftist ideology of the era in which Latin America suffered coups d'état and student repression, by interpreting authors and groups such as Atahualpa Yupanqui, Víctor Jara, Violeta Parra, Los Olimareños, Alfredo Zitarrosa, Daniel Viglietti, Inti-Illimani, Quilapayún, Los Calchakis, Silvio Rodríguez, Noel Nicola and Pablo Milanés, among many others.

But Huayrapamushka, explained Esaúl Arteaga Domínguez (a former member of the group, of which he was a guitarist for more than 30 years) in an interview with this newspaper, has also given a primary space to the rescue and promotion of traditional Mexican music, by including corridos, valonas, polkas, huapangos and sones, as well as interpretations of singers such as Óscar Chávez, José de Molina and Judith Reyes.

Among many others who have participated prominently with Los Huayras are Adrián Villagómez (current director of the group and first voice), José Manuel Pinedo Chávez, Alejandra Aguilera Miranda, Joaquín Correa, Ignacio Rosales Encina, Verónica Dávila Navarro, César Ortiz Estrada, Roberto Ibarra Medrano, Nicolás Acosta García, Aída Martínez Olivares, Miguel Carlos Ruedas and Antonio Dueñez, who with their talent in singing or playing –some play up to three instruments– have forged the history of this group for half a century.

Arteaga, who has also written, photographed and documented some of the main events of Huayrapamushka, told La Jornada how, during the 70s, 80s and 90s, times of student and social effervescence in Zacatecas, the group offered "concerts in the UAZ schools, since they responded to all the invitations from social and student organizations in the state, as well as from workers, settlers and peasants.

“They were regularly invited to national and international festivals organized by government cultural institutions and universities… places like Oaxaca, Guerrero, San Luis Potosí, Querétaro, Chihuahua, and Monterrey.”

In his performance on August 20 in Zacatecas, Huayrapamushka kicked off his 50th anniversary concert, before some 500 attendees gathered at the Fernando Calderón Theater, with a must-see song: The Right to Live in Peace, by Chilean singer Víctor Jara.

They also performed La naranjita, a Bolivian carnivalito; Subo, an Argentine vidala; Pampa Lirima, a Chilean one; Lo que más quiero, by Violeta Parra; Tierra mestiza, by Gerardo Tamez; Tinku , a Bolivian one; La marcha del indio, by Afranio Parra from Colombia; Sobre tu playa, by the Chilean group Inti Illimani; La muralla, by the Cuban Nicolás Guillen; and the closing performance was performed by all the musicians present of El pueblo Unido, by the group Quilapayún.

The audience gave a standing ovation.

▲ The artist in his exhibition , *Unbearable Modernity*, secondhand drawings. Photo courtesy of the Taller Popular de Oaxaca.

From the Editorial Staff

La Jornada Newspaper, Sunday, September 7, 2025, p. 4

Through 40 illustrations, mostly on brown paper, artist Daniel Guzmán “presents the process of unfolding and dissolving of the masculine being, a violent and destructive agent, that man who should be dead,” in the exhibition La modernidad insufrible, dibujo de segunda mano (Insufferable Modernity, Second-Hand Drawings), on display at the Taller Popular in Oaxaca.

The exhibition is part of the project The Man Who Should Be Dead (EHQDEM), a series of collections from the Tamayo, National Art Museum (Munal), Amparo, and Contemporary Art Museum (Marco).

In 2017, Guzmán began a series of drawings, which he divided into chapters; the most recent presents an investigation of moments and scenes inhabited by the man he speaks of. “Drawings that are a human mixture and a breeding ground prepared with portions of the accompaniment of William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Mariana Enríquez, Ricardo Piglia, Leila Guerriero, Lucia Berlin, Paul B. Preciado, Roberto Bolaño, Phillip K. Dick, and Mark Fisher, as well as films and other artifacts of so-called popular culture. From cradle to grave, customs, values, and beliefs are inheritances, knowledge, used junk, passed from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, and from generation to generation: secondhand things,” the artist details in the text accompanying the exhibition.

Guzmán, whose drawings are the result of a constant and disciplined search, guided by the intuition of the hand that translates the imagination, believes that “like walking Xipe Totecs, we carry the infamous skin of modern and contemporary history, the horror of bloody and violent habits, the garments of multiple personalities: king, master, businessman, capitalist, colonialist, fascist, Nazi: all white, all black, all red, all yellow. To hide the ruin and the slaughterhouse that the planet we inhabit has become, we invented our personalized, digital and portable concentration camp, which separates us from the horror of this end of the world until destiny catches up with us.”

In a conversation with Mónica de la Torre, the artist mentioned that throughout his life he has had a connection with literature, “I love books, I like reading, my first love was books, more than the plastic or visual arts, because as a child, my father bought Mexican comics at home and looked at the graphics, but more than that, I was interested in reading. When I began this series of drawings, I think the conceptual framework was like a novel or a short story, not in terms of graphics, but in terms of concepts. That's why I used subtitles to divide it.”

That's why he created a visual narrative: "Many of my earlier drawings had text taken from the newspaper or books I read; then I removed them all and kept the visual, to experience something that didn't convey meaning."

Guzmán's visual language ranges from comics to pre-Hispanic iconography, including newspapers, caricatures, and popular music. His work is characterized by the integration of elements of the urban landscape and autobiographical references.

Unbearable Modernity, Secondhand Drawings: EHQDEM by Daniel Guzmán will remain on display until October 17, 2025, at Taller Popular (Porfirio Díaz 413, Historic Center of Oaxaca) from Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.