“The musical Yankeeland is indispensable, even for dancing.”
–Luis A. Delgadillo, Los Domingos, 1918
Music accompanied the US intervention in Nicaragua. Above all other genres, US popular music dominated Nicaraguan culture beginning in 1919. And it never left. US music became nationalized, challenging Nicaraguan music traditions, and changing Nicaraguan culture. In 1932, Nicaraguan writer, journalist, and folklorist Pablo Antonio Cuadra, wrote to a local pianist friend, Eduardo Alaniz, on music and national culture.Footnote 1 In dismay, Cuadra observed that Nicaraguan music had all but vanished due to the “imitation of the foreign,” pointing to the spread of “Victrolas with a completely alien repertoire, cinema, [and] imported dance music.” He considered the popularity of US music “one of many ills” that the “hateful and insufferable foreign intervention” had brought to Nicaragua.Footnote 2 If continued, he worried, a musical conquest would occur: “We will dance to the music they play for us!” Indeed, Nicaraguans had been willing participants in the decline of their national culture. “We are de-musicking ourselves,” he concluded, and “our skeleton is becoming Yankee.”Footnote 3 Cuadra did not specify precisely which US music was responsible for the ebb of Nicaraguan traditional culture. Yet he cast the US intervention as the antagonist, the Victrola record player and silent film as its commercial instruments, and imported social dance music as the accompaniment. By early 1933, US popular music had settled permanently in Nicaragua.
Using archival sources from Nicaragua, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, this article examines the impact of US popular music in Nicaragua from 1919 to 1933. It employs the foxtrot, a US popular musical form and dance genre invented in 1914, as a lens for understanding how Nicaraguans saw themselves, how they negotiated the intervention, and how they acted upon the world. This article argues that Nicaraguans developed novel cultural expressions, making foreign culture their own, despite the dominance of US intervention. Through transculturation, a process coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940 denoting the creation of new culture out of local and foreign elements, Nicaraguans maintained agency and a sense of national identity.Footnote 4 As it took root, the foxtrot became more than a Nicaraguan entertainment. It grew into a discourse for reckoning with US intervention and contesting Nicaraguan cultural values. Remarkably, during the 1919–1933 period, the Nicaraguan foxtrot’s commercial circulation via US recording companies, particularly the Victor Talking Machine Company, transformed it from a local cultural expression into a global music.
This article is the first to examine music and the cultural impact of US intervention in Nicaragua. The opening section traces the origins and circulation of the foxtrot during the ragtime era of the 1890s to about 1917, followed by the early jazz period. The second section narrates the foxtrot’s 1919 arrival and rooting as a popular music in western Nicaragua. The third section surveys the foxtrot’s domestic and transnational dissemination via Nicaraguan entertainments and US recording companies from 1919 to 1933. The fourth section situates the Nicaraguan cultural embrace of the foxtrot during that same period. Conversely, the fifth section explores its literary critiques. The sixth and final section examines Nicaraguan composer Luis A. Delgadillo as a prominent advocate and critic of the foxtrot. The conclusion places the Nicaraguan foxtrot in context of greater Latin American production at the end of the intervention.
The historiography on early twentieth-century US political, economic, and military intervention in the Caribbean Basin is substantial.Footnote 5 Yet cultural histories are comparatively few, primarily focusing on Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Cuban historian Marial Iglesias Utset examined the cultural responses to US intervention in Cuba between 1898 and 1902, and the resulting transformation of Cuban national identity.Footnote 6 Dominican historian Diógenes Céspedes explored the cultural impact of US military occupation in the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, revealing its later resonances in the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship (1934–1961).Footnote 7 Studies of US intervention in Nicaragua between 1909 and 1933 have examined its interrelated mechanisms, including political paternalism, fiscal and financial protectionism, and military occupation.Footnote 8 The historian Michel Gobat’s Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule remains the most robust history of this topic. In one chapter, he examined Nicaraguan culture as part of Conservative elite responses to Americanization, particularly US missionaries, the “modern woman,” and the “bourgeois spirit.”Footnote 9 Nicaraguan expressive culture under intervention—music, dance, and theater—has yet to receive a dedicated study.Footnote 10 This article contributes to a gap in the literature by situating a struggle of local and foreign cultural forces as it unfolded among Nicaraguans.
Inventing the Foxtrot: New York City Origins and Transnational Circulation
In the 1910s, a confluence of social, musical, and commercial factors in the United States created “modern dancing,” the steps or patterns that couples danced to syncopated ragtime music.Footnote 11 Influenced by late nineteenth-century African American and European American dance traditions, modern dancing embodied notions of “newness, sophistication, and fashionability.”Footnote 12 The first signature ragtime music was the cakewalk. Originally a US southern “plantation dance,” forward-facing couples kicking in a processional strut characterized it from the late 1890s until about 1904.Footnote 13 Subsequent dance patterns in ragtime, popular up to 1914, went by the collective label “animal dances.” In the turkey trot, monkey glide, bunny hug, and grizzly bear, among others, dancers assumed postures in imitation of “animal shapes or motion.”Footnote 14 Linked to the history of US blackface minstrelsy, participants and observers understood animal dances as racially marked.Footnote 15 The dance historian Danielle Robinson has observed, animal dances “generated stereotypical renderings of African Americans relating to animality, primitivism, and sexuality.”Footnote 16
By 1914, the modern dances that followed the animal dances projected the antithesis of their predecessors, coming under the domain of social dance professionals and mass marketing.Footnote 17 They did not mimic but could evoke exoticized abstractions of the “Oriental, Indian [Native American], and Negro.”Footnote 18 An aesthetic of restraint became the hallmark of modern dance.Footnote 19 According to Robinson, dance professionals “valued control, containment, organization, rules, and inhibition” apparent in the most popular of the standardized modern dances—the one-step and foxtrot. The one-step was an adaptation of the turkey trot, while the foxtrot, influenced by the slow drag, embodied a catch-all term for a series of movements—walks, slides, drags, stomps, and pauses—accompanied by “blues, ragtime, jazz, [or] ‘lowdown’ music.”Footnote 20 Other modern dances included the tango, maxixe, half and half, Apache, and at least three types of waltz: Boston, hesitation, and lame duck.Footnote 21 Promoting them to the public as “refined,” dance professionals and printed dance manuals transformed their steps, thus, “rigidifying, diluting, and codifying” movements.Footnote 22 The marketing of modern dances through print and recorded media helped to popularize “refined” dances in the United States and abroad. Music halls and nightclubs became spaces to perform modern dancing and exchange dance steps among ethnic groups.Footnote 23 The participation of women in modern dancing allowed for unprecedented autonomy in public spaces where traditional gender roles were otherwise strictly observed. The dance historian Linda J. Tomko has asserted, “working women’s dancing bodies were important registers for experimenting with the measure of social and sexual autonomy that derived from their wage labor.”Footnote 24
In 1914, the foxtrot emerged from the experiments of New York City ballroom dancers.Footnote 25 Among its principal exponents were the Anglo-American couple Vernon and Irene Castle, a celebrated modern dance duo.Footnote 26 They credited their music director, James Reese Europe, a US composer and bandleader, with creating the foxtrot, though the origins of the name remain unclear.Footnote 27 While touring with the Castles in spring 1914, Europe was struck by the moderate pace of W.C. Handy’s song Memphis Blues. He recommended it to them as a contrast to the faster dances in their repertoire. They subsequently shaped the foxtrot steps at private parties.Footnote 28 In March, Vernon Castle became the dance series curator of the Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey.Footnote 29 Months later, in October, Victor introduced recordings of “the ‘Fox Trot,’ making New York ‘dance mad,’” in the Castle section of its catalog.Footnote 30 Europe later claimed that the foxtrot was a “development” of the nineteenth-century schottische.Footnote 31 On December 8, the Castles debuted the foxtrot in the Broadway musical Watch Your Step at the New Amsterdam Theatre, succesfully running for 171 performances.Footnote 32 The noted Russian-born composer Irving Berlin wrote the lyrics and music, highlighting the foxtrot in the first-act numbers “Show Us How to do the Fox Trot” and “The Syncopated Walk.”Footnote 33 The same month as the Watch Your Step premiere, Columbia Records recorded the latter number.Footnote 34 Vernon Castle published instructions for dancing the foxtrot, having “been received with great enthusiasm,” in the December issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal (Figure 1).Footnote 35 Thus, varied high-profile venues closely bound the Castles to the foxtrot.
Vernon and Irene Castle demonstrate the steps to their signature foxtrot. “Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle’s New Dances for this Winter,” Ladies’ Home Journal 31:12 (December 1914), 24–25.
Figure 1 Long description
Panel A: A man and a woman are shown in a dancing position, with the man leading and the woman following. They are both dressed in formal attire. Panel B: The couple is depicted in a side view, showing the man’s arm around the woman’s waist and their legs in motion. Panel C: The couple is shown from the front, with the man’s hand on the woman’s back and their legs in a stepping motion. Panel D: The couple is shown from a different angle, with the man’s arm around the woman’s waist and their legs in a different stepping motion. Panel E: The couple is shown from the back, with the man’s hand on the woman’s shoulder and their legs in a stepping motion. Panel F: The couple is shown from the side, with the man’s arm around the woman’s waist and their legs in a different stepping motion. Panel G: The couple is shown from the front, with the man’s hand on the woman’s back and their legs in a stepping motion. Panel H: The couple is shown from a different angle, with the man’s arm around the woman’s waist and their legs in a stepping motion.
From 1914 to 1917, a musical northeasterly wind swept over the Caribbean Basin, carrying the foxtrot and other modern dances to Mexico, Central and upper South America, and the West Indies.Footnote 36 The historian Lara Putnam has noted a contemporary flow of “intensifying commercial routes of the Greater Caribbean.”Footnote 37 Foxtrots with and without lyrics, as well as dance patterns, arrived via sound reproduction technologies, sheet music, and live performance, among others, wherever local musicians, dance teachers, merchants, and a ravenous public consumed the latest imports.Footnote 38 The demand for US popular music spread across social classes, and ethnic and racial lines.Footnote 39 In August 1914, San Salvador’s Diario del Salvador considered the foxtrot among the “new competitors” to the standing modern dances.Footnote 40 The following month, US singer Hector Downe regularly performed “three new ‘Song-Riots,’” including US songwriters Earl and Harry Carroll’s Do The Funny Fox Trot at “The International” in Panama City.Footnote 41 In September, the foxtrot was the “first word” in modern dance, described as “a mix of funeral march and the schottische with chloroform” in Venezuela.Footnote 42 Weeks later, one club began organizing foxtrot classes in Havana for “those who are fond of dancing.”Footnote 43 In early 1915, the Mexican government listed four US foxtrots that Mexican entrepreneur Enrique Munguía had registered under copyright on behalf of J.W. Stern and Company of New York City.Footnote 44 In November, one Costa Rican journalist praised the foxtrot as “very beautiful and full of elegant movements” that would be of “little difficulty in learning” in San José.Footnote 45 In April 1916, the foxtrot generated “a furor among connoisseurs” in Guatemala.Footnote 46 In November, US composers Paul Beise and F. Henri Klickmann’s foxtrot The Murray Walk appeared on a band concert program at Parque Independencia in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.Footnote 47 As elsewhere, a “foxtrot-mania” seized the Caribbean Basin.Footnote 48 Yet a burgeoning musical era soon extended the circulation of US dance music.
By 1917, the foxtrot’s global popularity continued to rise with the advent of jazz music and dance.Footnote 49 The foxtrot could be now understood as ragtime or jazz, or both, depending on the context. This was evident in a highly successful, commercially recorded US foxtrot “for dancing”—the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s Livery Stable Blues—released by Victor records in 1917.Footnote 50 In Latin America and the Caribbean, jazz took hold of the popular imagination.Footnote 51 The scholar Jason Borge has noted, “Vernacular music’s pervasiveness in political, social, and cultural discussions during the first half of the twentieth century ensured that jazz would also find a distinct place in the public sphere.”Footnote 52 More than a musical genre or style, the term “jazz” could also refer to a specific popular music ensemble. Latin American and Caribbean jazz groups emulated US models, including the drum set in their instrumentation. Mexican composer Pedro Luis Ogazón considered the drum set (batería) an “expression of the North American soul,” at once the foxtrot’s “inseparable companion.”Footnote 53 This was especially apparent in nations under US intervention—Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.Footnote 54 Notably, Cuba set the stage long before the arrival of jazz. The ethnomusicologist Robin Moore has observed, “Beginning in 1898, with the U.S. military occupation, Cuba was inundated with North American music and dance.”Footnote 55 More than two decades later, Nicaragua would march to a similar beat.
Cosmopolitan Desire: The Foxtrot in Nicaragua, 1919
From 1919 to 1933, the foxtrot carved a distinct place in Nicaraguan culture as a public and private entertainment.Footnote 56 It became a hallmark of a predominantly mixed-race nation-state, implicitly signaled in the periodical literature, yet overtly reflected in national demographics.Footnote 57 The foxtrot and other dance music appeared on the weekly concert programs of the Nicaraguan military Banda de los Supremos Poderes (Band of the Supreme Powers). Local agents of US recording companies facilitated popular dance music in private life, as did piano, player piano, and sheet music merchants. Social dancing in balls and dance halls expected fashionable music, also heard at the cinema.Footnote 58 Radio broadcast played no role in disseminating US popular music, as commercial radio stations were not established in western Nicaragua until after 1932.Footnote 59 More than an imported cultural commodity, the foxtrot became a target for questions of morality and citizenship associated with Nicaraguan and Central American identity. Nevertheless, as soon as local composers wrote a foxtrot, it became a national cultural expression—a Nicaraguan foxtrot. Some Nicaraguans embraced the foxtrot. Others resisted it. Some did both.
A mainstay of culture in Managua, the Banda de los Supremos Poderes weekly Central Park concerts served as a prominent channel of US music. Central Park was a public space for elite and working class, local and foreign, and racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse communities.Footnote 60 Beginning in January 1919, the band’s director, Luis A. Delgadillo, widely considered Nicaragua’s most prominent composer, selected the musical repertoire for official ceremonies and entertainments.Footnote 61 On occasion, he provided program notes for the Managua newspaper La Tribuna, the only local periodical to regularly publish band concert programs.Footnote 62 Delgadillo or his assistant director, Humberto Rivas, a Nicaraguan composer, conducted performances on Thursdays and Sundays, beginning around 8 p.m.Footnote 63 Among foreign observers, US visitors noted the band’s performance quality. A few years before, following her Managua debut, US soprano Julia Allen spoke “in flattering terms” of the band.Footnote 64 One writer for the local newspaper La Noticia reciprocated her gesture: she “reconciled us with Yankeeland” despite “so much ruin that had come from there.”Footnote 65 Much later, in 1924, the US Marine Corps magazine Leatherneck enthused, “the band, comprising only 25 or 30 players, affords some excellent classical music.”Footnote 66
For Central Park programs, Delgadillo typically selected six or seven compositions, sometimes his own musical arrangements or new works. Other Nicaraguan composers also provided music to band programs. Mingling art and popular music, the concerts presented European, US, or Nicaraguan music by an ensemble of woodwinds, brass, and percussion. Each program was drawn from a deep well of musical genres: European opera, Spanish zarzuela, US and European operetta, waltzes, and marches, as well as US popular songs, martial music, and modern dances (especially the one-step and foxtrot). Central Park band concerts reflected Delgadillo’s efforts to encourage appreciation for a wide range of musical genres, whether art or popular repertories. Although he had promoted musical culture in Managua since 1911, the year he returned from his European music conservatory studies, fostering local culture remained a pressing matter for him by early 1919. “The Banda de los Supremos Poderes… is committed,” he emphasized, “to the interpretation of ancient and modern music by the finest composers, in order to contribute a grain of sand to the urgent development of music in Nicaragua.”Footnote 67
Delgadillo regularly programmed US composers and songwriters. In 1919, he included some rousing Great War hits, perhaps as a diplomatic gesture to US agents in Nicaragua. Central Park concertgoers heard George M. Cohan’s one-step Over There, Leon Flatow and Arthur Fields’s song It’s a Long Way to Berlin, but We’ll Get There, and Carl D. Vandersloot’s one-step General Pershing, among others.Footnote 68 US foxtrots appeared frequently on band programs—S.R. Henry’s mocking Indianola, M.K. Jerome’s lyrical Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight (For Her Daddy Over There), and James Reese Europe and Chris Smith’s energetic Ballin’ the Jack.Footnote 69 Delgadillo loved Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight, programming it six times between June and December 1919.Footnote 70 He considered it “an attractive and sweet Yankee music” and admired “its originality.”Footnote 71 The band also performed foxtrots that took off in the US: the British-US duo Oliver G. Wallace and Harold Weeks’s Hindustan, and Belgian composer Ivan Caryll’s Chin-Chin.Footnote 72
For much of 1919, the music of Nicaraguan composers aside from Delgadillo appeared periodically on Banda de los Supremos Poderes programs, especially waltzes by Humberto Rivas, José Antonio Zapata, Carlos Ramírez Velásquez, Francisco “Paco” Soto Carrión, and José de la Cruz Mena.Footnote 73 Delgadillo considered the waltz an appropriate music for Latin American culture. “The slow waltz, the Boston, the hesitation,” he ruminated, “are dances quite adaptable to our indolence and the eternal slowness of our spirit.”Footnote 74 The waltz had been among the most popular social dances in Central America for years, and a likely favorite in Managua during the intervention.Footnote 75 Ramírez Velásquez, a Nicaraguan band leader, had his waltzes Anita, Bronces históricos, and Carmencita performed over four band programs between March and November 1919.Footnote 76 Nicaraguan journalist Hernán Robleto commissioned him to write Carmencita in honor of his wife, Carmelita “Carmencita” Zelaya.Footnote 77 Apart from waltzes, Ramírez Velásquez’s one-step Yo sé, que no sé (I Know That I Don’t Know) and Nicaraguan pianist Carlos Tünnermann López’s foxtrot Revista femenina, dedicated to a local women’s culture magazine, also made the band programs.Footnote 78
Delgadillo programmed his own popular music for Central Park concerts in 1919, including the premieres or repeat performances, some a petición (by request), of his foxtrots Dulce y sabroso (Sweet and Savory), El zanatillo (The Little Grackle), and Mexicanas de Vera Cruz (Mexican Women from Vera Cruz). Concertgoers also heard his waltzes Bellas josefinas (Beautiful Josephines) and Orlando, and marches Apolínea, A la reina (To The Queen) and Fragata Sarmiento (Sarmiento Frigate).Footnote 79 His folksong medley Aires populares de Nicaragua (Popular Songs of Nicaragua), premiered premiered years before, was heard in a band concert during Nicaraguan Independence Day celebrations on September 14.Footnote 80 Performed less frequently, band arrangements of his orchestral music included the Obertura indiana, Symphonic Prelude No. 6, and Escenas pastoriles (Pastoral Landscapes).Footnote 81 Delgadillo also included his band arrangements of European repertories—Kyrie from a Mass by Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Largo by German composer George Frederic Handel, and Minuet in G, Op. 14, No. 1 by Polish composer and diplomat Ignacy Jan Paderewski, among small-scale works.Footnote 82
Until his departure from the Banda de los Supremos Poderes in 1921, Delgadillo continued to program his original and arranged music, especially the foxtrot, whose popularity remained ascendant in Managua. He premiered three foxtrots in 1920. In January, La Serbulita, a “national foxtrot,” followed in the mold of his foxtrot El zanatillo (Figure 2), both based on local sources.Footnote 83 La Serbulita quoted the Nicaraguan tunes El Zopilote (The Vulture) and Don Simón.Footnote 84 The same month, Delgadillo followed with his foxtrot La escuadra (The Squad), whose inspiration remains unclear.Footnote 85 In March, Contestando a Indostán (Responding to Hindustan), was based on a famous US model (Figure 3): “The foxtrot Contestando a Hindostán,” Delgadillo noted, “was composed with the exact musical meter of the North American fox Hindustan by [the British-US duo] Wallace [and Weeks]. The author is please to rehearse the North American style, responding in kind to such a popular little Yankee work.”Footnote 86 Delgadillo appeared to incorporate exoticist themes, in this case, from the US into his music, reproducing its evocative qualities.
A clarinet part from Luis A. Delgadillo’s foxtrot El zanatillo (The Little Grackle) for band, [1919]. Luis A. Delgadillo, “El zanatillo,” foxtrot for band, clarinet 1, box 7.1, folder 13, LADR, Fondo Histórico Documental de la Música Nicaragüense, Archivo General de la Nación, Managua, Nicaragua.
Front cover pages to Luis A. Delgadillo’s foxtrot Contestando as Indostán (Responding to Hindustan) and Oliver G. Wallace and Harold Weeks’s foxtrot Hindustan (l to r). Luis A. Delgadillo Contestando as Indostán, foxtrot for piano, A. Wagner y Levien, 1922; Oliver G. Wallace and Harold Weeks, Hindustan, foxtrot for piano, Forster Music Publisher, 1918. Author’s personal collection.
In Nicaragua, as elsewhere in the Americas, foxtrot composers formulated seemingly endless musical ideas on a simple blueprint, a standardized musical structure. Dancers responded to its conventions, reproducing fixed steps that allowed for variations, often improvised, in movement. In August 1921, Julin Varona, the pseudonym of Dominican writer Julio Acosta, Jr., described the foxtrot form he had seen in New York City. Writing in Managua’s La Tribuna, he explained that the foxtrot comprised three parts: it opened with an “introduction made up of novel musical material,” followed by a “song taken from whichever pretty music and appropriate for energetic movement.” Finally, it conluded with an “increasingly noisy, syncopated, [and] dizzying” section.Footnote 87 Early twentieth-century printed and recorded foxtrots followed this basic formula.
Agents of Leisure: Player Pianos and Sheet Music
The intervention coincided with the “heyday of the player piano in Latin America.”Footnote 88 The electrically powered player or automatic piano, or pianola—a luxury item of leisure and entertainment—was a major commercial channel for the global circulation of US popular music.Footnote 89 Its piano rolls, or continuous rolls of paper with punched holes, stored music selections that could vary in genre. In Managua, the sound of the player piano permeated public and private spaces with imported popular music. Established in the 1910s, three local agents met demand for US-made player pianos in western Nicaragua. By January 1913, Nicaraguan entrepreneur Deogracias Rivas sold “the prettiest, the most economical, and the most durable” pianolas from the Starr automatic piano company of Richmond, Indiana (Figure 4).Footnote 90 Nearly three years later, by October 1916, Mexican composer and pianist Indalecio Hernández became the agent for Kingston model player pianos made by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company of Cincinnati, Ohio.Footnote 91 He met local demands for foxtrots with the “loveliest and newest” pieces on piano roll, as well as sheet music.Footnote 92 By May 1918, Nicaraguan entrepreneur Dionisio Villa represented the Aeolian Company of New York City.Footnote 93 Nicaraguan composer Luis A. Delgadillo preferred Aeolian player pianos “because [they] could delight the finest audience in the performance of the most difficult piano music.”Footnote 94 He was not alone. Another Nicaraguan composer, Fernando Midence, felt similarly: “the [Aeolian] Pianola permits the instrument to transmit the inspiration and soul of the performer.”Footnote 95 In 1920, local agents sold fourteen player pianos in Nicaragua, valued at $7, 525, as well as $931 in piano rolls.Footnote 96 Modest in number, Nicaraguan sales were nevertheless significant in a country where ownership of a player piano signaled economic status and material wealth like few other possessions.
An advertisement for the Starr Piano Co. player pianos, Managua, 1915. “Acaban de llegarme para la venta,” El Comercio (Managua), January 14, 1915, 1.
The commercial availability of piano sheet music became yet another channel for the spread of US popular music in Nicaragua. The conventional piano was a social instrument for participatory music-making in the home, school, cantina, and social club, as well as the cinema and concert venues. Piano teachers gave private instruction in the homes of the elite.Footnote 97 The piano was an educational tool and part of the national grade school curriculum.Footnote 98 In Managua, some theaters employed pianists to accompany silent films, likely from sheet music. In 1930, the Managua magazine El Moderno highlighted the precision of Nicaraguan pianist Carlos Tünnermann López, a house accompanist at Teatro Variedades, who drew from the works of European composers: the Frenchman Claude Debussy, the Austrian Wolfgang A. Mozart, and the German Richard Wagner, among others.Footnote 99
Commercially available sheet music offered professionals and aficionados a varied and steady stream of repertories. In 1918, Managua residents could find an assortment of foxtrots for piano at the Juan J. Roiz bookstore.Footnote 100 For much of the 1920s, the Managua culture magazines Faces y Facetas, El Pensador, and Los Domingos published piano sheet music as part of their weekly offerings. Faces y Facetas included at least ten foxtrots by Nicaraguan composers between November 1923 and September 1924, usually appearing in installments likely to encourage sales. Gilberto Vega Miranda (Bella Angelita [Beautiful Angelita]), Carlos Tünnermann [López] (Nena), Ramiro Vega Jiménez (Clotilde) and “R.S.C.” (Alma de Ofelia Luna [Ofelia Luna’s Soul]) titled their works after women.Footnote 101 Santos José Cermeño evoked a man’s name (Mario).Footnote 102 Evaristo Espinoza (Firpino), Gilberto Vega Miranda (Club Argentino), and Carlos Ramírez Velásquez (Helen Club) dedicated theirs to local social clubs.Footnote 103 Ramírez Velásquez collaborated with the editor of Faces y Facetas, Augusto Flores Z., a recognized Nicaraguan poet, who wrote the lyrics to Helen Club (“Digamos frente al sol” [Let Us Declare before the Sun]).Footnote 104 Other foxtrot titles were more abstract, yet likely hinted at the US intervention. Ramón Ruiz titled his foxtrot Ecos del norte (Echoes from the North).Footnote 105
The Managua literary magazine El Pensador included sheet music in its monthly issues. Between June and September 1923, Gilberto Vega Miranda’s foxtrots Jilma, Adelita, Olguita María, and Ojos raros (Unusual Eyes) appeared among its pages.Footnote 106 A member of a renowned Nicaraguan family of musicians, Vega Miranda became one of the more prolific foxtrot composers during the intervention.Footnote 107 In October that year, El Pensador followed with the foxtrot Adiós mamá, adiós papá (Goodbye Mom, Goodbye Dad) by Arturo José Medal [Morales], a fourteen-year-old Nicaraguan composer and pianist. This work was a musical farewell written on the eve of his departure for Italy, where he received music training at the Milan Conservatory.Footnote 108 In January 1924, the magazine included the foxtrot Luisa Emilia by A. Vega.Footnote 109
Managua’s preeminent weekly magazine Los Domingos published Nicaraguan popular music.Footnote 110 The foxtrots that appeared regularly between 1924 and 1926 carried titles not unlike Faces y Facetas and El Pensador: Sueños de un niño (Dreams of a Child) by Arturo José Medal, Lilia by J. Jesús García, Gretchen and Amame siempre! (Love Me Forever!) by Carlos Tünnermann [López], Mina by Alberto Ramírez G., Aisabé kikí (Goodbye My Love) by Carlos Ramírez Velásquez, and Lola Abaunza, María Ernestina, and Tollita by Gilberto Vega Miranda.Footnote 111 Ramírez Velásquez employed a Miskitu phrase in his foxtrot title, referencing an Indigenous language spoken on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast.Footnote 112 Nicaraguan composers consistently referenced personal and local meaning in their titles, helping to transform the foxtrot from a foreign music into a Nicaraguan cultural expression. This was also true of Nicaraguan foxtrots on recording.
The Victor Talking Machine Company and Nicaragua, 1914–1930
Between 1914 and 1930, the Victor Talking Machine Company issued more than one-hundred recordings of songs, dances, and patriotic music by Nicaraguan composers, launching the Nicaraguan foxtrot globally in 1922. The Camden, New Jersey company had led the global market for phonographs, or record players, and discs for more than a decade.Footnote 113 Carlos Ramírez Velásquez and Alejandro Vega Matus were the only Nicaraguan composers in the catalog between 1914 and 1922. The first Nicaraguan popular music on 78rpm disc, Ramírez Velásquez’s waltz Club social, dedicated to the elite Masaya social club, appeared in 1914.Footnote 114 Victor subsequently added his gavota Chela in 1916, and waltzes Flor de ensueño the same year and Carmencita in 1918.Footnote 115 Four years passed before Vega Matus saw his foxtrot As rojo (Red Ace) and waltz Isaura issued on the same disc in 1922. The sale of approximately 11,661 discs of that recording was the highest documented among Nicaraguan composers during the intervention.Footnote 116 These sales numbers were nearly ten times what Victor would have considered profitable.Footnote 117 Likely building upon this success, most of Victor’s catalog of Nicaraguan music was generated during the 1920s.
Nicaraguan entrepreneur Manuel Riguero was Victor’s “exclusive agent” in Managua by July 1919, and an important figure for the local media distribution of the foxtrot.Footnote 118 He also represented other US enterprises in Nicaragua—the Ford Motor Company, the United States Rubber Export Company, and the Underwood Typewriter Company.Footnote 119 Riguero’s advertisements for Victrola phonographs and discs promised to elevate lifestyles and fulfill cosmopolitan desires by “listening to the best artists in the world.”Footnote 120 Riguero did not necessarily corner the local market.Footnote 121 José Gordillo Arana was the Nicaraguan agent for the Columbia Gramophone Company of New York by August 1920.Footnote 122 He stocked “whirlwind waltzes, fantastic fox-trots, one-step war songs, and weird, wild ‘Blues’ that out-jazz old Mr. Jazz himself.”Footnote 123 Notably, Gordillo Arana placed only English-language advertisements in Managua periodicals, likely targetting anglophone residents in Nicaragua. Three years later, “W. Wheelock” was the Central American representative for Thomas A. Edison, Inc. of Orange, New Jersey. Visually austere in comparison to his competition, Wheelock’s Managua advertisements for players and discs included a photograph of Edison listening attentively to his phonograph, accompanied by “Mr. Edison and his favorite invention.”Footnote 124
Riguero advertised Victor phonographs and discs in Managua magazines and newspapers, tempting readers with free accessories and payment plans (Figure 5).Footnote 125 On occasion, he listed the names of local customers who had purchased a Victrola, or included a detailed inventory of the latest discs.Footnote 126 He stocked popular music heard at Banda de los Supremos Poderes concerts—Wallace and Week’s Hindustan and S.R. Henry’s Indianola, among others—helping to reinforce the foxtrot’s popularity and distinct place in Nicaraguan culture during the intervention.Footnote 127 Riguero sold phonographs for both the home and on the go. In June 1924, he placed an ad in Los Domingos for the “Portable Victrola No. 50,” which boasted of having sold “more than 2000” players in Nicaragua, a model “most suitable for trips to the countryside.”Footnote 128 Riguero also managed subagents in western and northern Nicaragua—César A. Terán in León, Manuel A. Arcia in Granada, Félix Saravia in Chinandega, and F. González in Matagalpa and the Department of Carazo—expanding the reach of Victrolas in Western Nicaragua.Footnote 129 On occasion, Riguero did not have to do much to promote the Victrola. Local events did the job for him. In August 1928, Managua’s Teatro Variedades held a “baile de resistencia” (dance marathon), drawing “some ten thousand people” to the theater, including seventeen competitor couples, over a sixty-four-hour dance event. Three orchestras and five Victrolas, four of which broke down, provided the musical accompaniment.Footnote 130
A Managua advertisement for Victrola phonographs by Manuel J. Riguero. “La alegría del hogar,” El Comercio (Managua), August 20, 1919, 1.
On Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, Alberto Benard sold Victrolas at “reduced prices” in Bluefields.Footnote 131 Los Sobrinos de Jorge Dreyfus & Compañia were the local Columbia agents, who also managed subagents in the region: Ralph Sinclair in Río Grande Bar, R. Zúñiga Jr. in La Cruz [de Río Grande], Hugo R. Gruss in Prinzapolka, and Bilway Trading Company in Puerto Cabezas.Footnote 132 In Bluefields, Ernesto Rivera & Compañía, a jeweler and watchmaker, repaired record players (grafófonos).Footnote 133 The local market for players and discs likely included both residents and visitors on Caribbean steamer routes from New Orleans, Havana, and New York City.Footnote 134 Local shortwave radio reception complemented this market.Footnote 135 On April 9, 1930, the Bluefields weekly Excelsior advertised a Pan American Union concert in Washington, D.C., aired by the National Broadcasting Corporation and International General Electric Company.Footnote 136 These would have been among the principal transmission lines for US popular music in Eastern Nicaragua.
In Managua, Riguero was both a distributor and a procurer of music manuscripts for potential addition to the Victor catalog.Footnote 137 He may have also been on the lookout for recording talent.Footnote 138 Nicaraguan composer and bandleader Carlos Ramírez Velásquez recollected how the acquisition process worked for him. In an instrumental part to his waltz Carmencita, he noted, “Mr. Manuel J. Riguero sent [this waltz] to Victor and the records [later] arrived in Nicaragua.”Footnote 139 Victor recorded Carmencita in 1918.Footnote 140 Once Riguero sent a manuscript score to Victor in Camden, New Jersey, the company’s Foreign Department division orchestrated, recorded, and selected the best “rendition.” The title and other information were translated into English for the catalog, then marketed globally.Footnote 141 Some of the music by Nicaraguan composers made its way back to Managua where Riguero sold it alongside other selections. In October 1928, Riguero advertised a disc of music by Nicaraguan ensemble director Gilberto Vega Miranda—Cantos de amor (Songs of Love) and Patria (Homeland)—selling more than 200 copies globally.Footnote 142
The trajectory of Delgadillo’s foxtrot Dulce y sabroso (Sweet and Savory) can be traced from manuscript and early performances to piano sheet music publication and ensemble recording. On May 22, 1919, Delgadillo drafted a version for piano.Footnote 143 Weeks later, on June 22, his assistant director, Humberto Rivas, conducted the Banda de los Supremos Poderes in the local premiere of Dulce y sabroso, likely arranged for band by Delgadillo.Footnote 144 The following year, on October 12, Delgadillo programmed and directed the band in a performance of this foxtrot.Footnote 145 On September 14, 1921, Dulce y sabroso appeared in a band program at the Central American Independence Day celebrations in Managua, once again directed by Humberto Rivas.Footnote 146 Delgadillo then took Dulce y sabroso with him to Mexico, where it emerged in new guises. In 1922, Salvador Cabrera, a prominent Mexico City music printing house, published a piano edition of Dulce y sabroso, while Delgadillo registered it under Mexican copyright.Footnote 147 At some point, Manuel Riguero or a Mexico City counterpart likely sent a score to Victor in New Jersey. In late February 1923, the International Novelty Orchestra, better known in Latin America as the Orquesta Internacional, a renowned and extensively deployed Victor resident ensemble, recorded an in-house arrangement at the Victor studios in New York City. Dulce y sabroso, alongside Contestando a Indostán on the reverse, appeared on the market some seven months later.Footnote 148 Both Cabrera in Mexico and Victor in New Jersey projected Delgadillo’s foxtrots well beyond Nicaragua. It was among a number of Nicaraguan foxtrots consumed globally in the Americas.
Nicaraguan foxtrot titles suggest details beyond the recording itself, shedding light on the social contexts in which the foxtrot appeared. Implying a dedicatory purpose, titles carried women’s first names, some in diminutive form, and men’s names to a lesser extent, or referred to physical attributes. Among complete attribution was Gilberto Vega Miranda’s foxtrot Rosibel Riguero, dedicated to the daughter of the Victor agent in Managua, which Victor recorded in 1924.Footnote 149 Begun in March 1923, competitive Nicaraguan basketball clubs, the domain of elite women, boasted signature foxtrots.Footnote 150 Victor recorded Carlos Tünnermann [López]’s Club alpino and Gilberto Vega Miranda’s Club deportivo that year.Footnote 151 Both foxtrots referenced basketball clubs established in Managua that same year, an auspicious period in which basketball received more attention than baseball in the local sports news.Footnote 152 Vega Miranda soon followed with another basketball foxtrot, Club capitalino, whose celebratory lyrics were published in Los Domingos, and recorded by Victor the following year.Footnote 153 Some athletics clubs saw their foxtrots occasionally published in Faces y Facetas.Footnote 154 Victor recordings with the titles Patria (Homeland) or Nica (Nicaraguan) carried explicitly nationalist or patriotic meaning. Other titles referred to figures from Nicaraguan history: Alejandro Vega Matus’s foxtrot El cacique Tenderí, recorded by Victor in 1924, evoked an early modern Indigenous leader.Footnote 155 Initially titled “Mister Tenderí,” this foxtrot received a memorable premiere the previous year, leading Los Domingos to profess, the music “translated all of the sentimentalism of the Indigenous race.”Footnote 156 Vega Matus, a celebrated band leader, was among the most renowned Nicaraguan composers of popular music, whose reputation grew with each Victor release of his music.Footnote 157 Some foxtrot titles were less clear in their original purpose or context, but suggested a Nicaraguan popular aesthetic or sentiment.
Outside of local culture, US diplomats and soldiers also brought Victor’s machines to Nicaragua, another important channel for the transmission of US popular music. In 1912, James Weldon Johnson, US Consul, writer, and poet, owned a Victrola and “a large supply of records” that he and his wife, Grace, considered to be the “greatest pleasure-giving piece of all.”Footnote 158 Years later, a Victrola amused the US Marines stationed in Nicaragua. On July 28, 1928, private Emil “Porter” Thomas, a member of the 11th Regiment US Marine Corps Band based at Ocotal, located 140 miles north of Managua, observed a Victrola “going full blast” in the camp recreation hall.Footnote 159
Much more than a window into a rich local production, Victor sales and marketing made the Nicaraguan foxtrot a global music for much of the 1920s. Nicaraguan composers represented mostly dance music among their 101 works in the Victor catalog between 1914 and 1930.Footnote 160 Of these, fifty-five foxtrots comprised more than half of all Nicaraguan dance music. Nearly every Nicaraguan composer produced at least one foxtrot, some by the dozen, making it the backbone of commercially recorded Nicaraguan popular music. Victor first added Nicaraguan foxtrots to its catalog in November 1922, and continued steadily for the rest of the decade.Footnote 161 Some carried the marketing genre “Imported and overseas” or “Latin America,” intended for international consumption.Footnote 162 Extant Victor ledgers account for the sales of more than 55,100 discs of Nicaraguan foxtrots by Arturo J. Medal, Carlos Quinto J., Ramiro Vega Jiménez, Alejandro Vega Matus, and Gilberto Vega Miranda.Footnote 163 Between 1923 and 1929, Spanish-language Victor catalogs circulated a number of these across the Americas.Footnote 164 Thus, the Nicaraguan foxtrot became a global phenomenon.
Embracing the Foxtrot
The foxtrot was the most popular of local or imported US social dance music in Nicaragua during the intervention. It was a musical embodiment of cosmopolitan desire found across the Nicaraguan socio-economic spectrum—from the elite to the urban worker and rural peasant (campesino).Footnote 165 The extant sources remain unclear as to racial or ethnic makeup of these communities.Footnote 166 Nicaraguan society embraced the foxtrot and other modern dances that circulated through social, political, and commercial channels. Beyond the musical instruments, machines, and accessories, or public concerts, widespread social dancing sustained the popularity of the foxtrot, an activity that brought couples together through movements mirroring one another. The slow pace of the foxtrot appealed to single adults experimenting with physical intimacy in public spaces, often under family supervision, otherwise prohibited by early twentieth-century Nicaraguan cultural norms.
Dancing the foxtrot became integral to the lives of elite Nicaraguan women, yet echoed to some extent by working class women. Their personal aesthetics, social gatherings, and literature reflected the expressions of the “modern woman.”Footnote 167 Women’s appearance was emphasized and part of the public dialogue. The magazine Los Domingos celebrated the pelona, a woman who wore a bob hairstyle, popularized by the celebrated US modern dancer Irene Castle: “It is confusing to see a contemporary woman dancing the foxtrot, played by a jazz band, wearing a large bush of hair in uneven mounds, which would be fine for dancing the calm mazurka of yesteryear. The foxtrot, cinema, automobile, basketball… also cry out for the [modern] mane.”Footnote 168 The foxtrot brought together women with potential husbands.Footnote 169 Women’s basketball clubs hosted dances in and out of Managua. One team celebrated victories at “evening parties where young men and women danced the fox-trot,” according to the historian Michel Gobat.Footnote 170 Writers and poets took inspiration from dance gatherings. In 1919, Nicaraguan poet Efraín Sequeira painted a melancholy picture of his dancing partner in the poem Del baile (Of the Dance). His muse may have lost interest, either in him or the event. “You no longer cared for the joyful party,” he sighed, “nor did the modern steps of the foxtrot encourage you.”Footnote 171 Four years later, in March 1923, Aura Rostand [María de la Selva], the first published Nicaraguan woman poet, evoked physical intimacy among couples in Fox-trot. Her descriptions of “languid glances,” “crimson mouths,” and “delicate hands” emphasized the sensuality of social dancing.Footnote 172 In November 1924, one Los Domingos writer observed that a jazz band “took possession” of the Managua’s Social Club: “Its dissonant noise brought…uncommon enthusiasm and joy to the dancers.”Footnote 173 Indeed, Nicaraguan writer Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s later anxieties over the disappearance of Nicaraguan traditional music was not unfounded—the Nicaraguan “skeleton” may have become “Yankee” with the rising popularity of the foxtrot.
The embrace of the foxtrot marked a major cultural shift in Nicaraguan society. For some, the foxtrot, either the music or dance, often understood to mean the same thing, had become part of national identity. Nicaraguan composers met popular demand, and contributed to its popularity. More importantly, they created the Nicaraguan foxtrot. In October 1922, under the subheading “National Music,” Los Domingos announced the regional premiere of foxtrots by local composers—J. Jesús Urroz’s Luisa and Alejandro Vega Matus’s Beso (Kiss).Footnote 174 The following year, the composer Santos José Cermeño dedicated a “new fox” to “Maríita Huezo,” premiered at Managua’s Cine Margot.Footnote 175 Foxtrots had changed. In January 1924, Nicaraguan writer Octavio Delgado recalled the “melody of a joyful Latin American foxtrot.”Footnote 176 The same year, another Nicaraguan writer, Darío Zúñiga Pallais, described Vega Matus’s foxtrot Corazón de india (Heart of an Indian Woman) as “a Nicaraguan foxtrot.”Footnote 177 In September 1924, Los Domingos published a “national edition” of music for Nicaraguan Independence Day—the composer Carlos Tünnermann López’s foxtrot Gretchen, dedicated to the “beautiful and distinguished” Sofía Brockmann.Footnote 178 In March 1926, Nicaraguan writer A. García Espinosa dedicated poem Fox-trot to Vega Matus, “so original in his music, as national.”Footnote 179 The following year, the same Vega Matus achieved further international success with his foxtrot Don Pancho.Footnote 180 The US pharmaceutical company Casa Bayer issued an ensemble recording and a sheet music edition of this foxtrot, inspired by the unattributed poem La salvación de Don Pancho (Don Pancho’s Salvation), for the global sale of their aspirin product (Cafiaspirina). The front cover of the sheet music featured a drawing of the titular character happily dancing alongside animals from his ranch, evidently having benefitted from the aspirin, as well as a photograph of the “famous and inspired” Vega Matus (Figure 6).Footnote 181
Front cover of Alejandro Vega Matus, Don Pancho, foxtrot for voice and piano, Casa Bayer, [1927]. Author’s personal collection.
Figure 6 Long description
A man in a top hat and vest dances with animals around him, including a donkey, a cow, a pig, a duck, a rabbit, and a mouse. The text on the poster reads Don Pancho and mentions a foxtrot for singing and dancing. The poster includes a photograph of Alejandro Vega Matus and text indicating that the foxtrot is an original composition. The bottom of the poster notes that the last page contains a poem that gave rise to this first foxtrot.
One well-known foxtrot was not by a Nicaraguan composer, yet paid tribute to a Nicaraguan heroic figure. In 1929, Managua’s La Noticia admired the “celebrated” foxtrot General Sandino by twenty-two-year-old Guatemalan composer Mario Bolaños García. Titled after Augusto César Sandino, the famed Nicaraguan Liberal revolutionary nationalist, La Noticia kept a fragment of a 1928 Victor recording of the foxtrot as a “memento of Yankee fury.” The fragment had come from a Managua cantina incident. On January 11, patrons of the Charles Bar were interrupted while listening to the foxtrot. In a fit of rage, a US Marine official stormed into the bar, ripped the disc from a Victrola and threw it to the ground, stomping it to pieces in a “vigorous and barbarous” dance. A shard with the foxtrot’s title ended up at La Noticia.Footnote 182 Other US Marines in Nicaragua found a different use for the same Victor recording. Months later, in July, the US Marine 58th Company pursuing Sandino in the northern Nicaraguan Yali region kept a copy of General Sandino. “It isn’t bad enough chasing him,” one US Marine quipped, “We will have to play it some night for him if we ever get close enough.”Footnote 183
The Nicaraguan urban worker and rural campesino (peasant) danced the foxtrot, circulating popular music outside of elite economic and political spaces (Figure 7). On September 15, 1928, among Nicaraguan Independence Day observances, a “Labor Celebration” took place at Teatro Variedades in Managua. Four years in the making, its organizers invited “all of the workers of this capital and society, in general.”Footnote 184 As a featured speaker, Nicaraguan composer Luis A. Delgadillo presented a talk on “musical nationalization.”Footnote 185 The program included the unattributed anthems Centro América (Central America) and Obrerismo Organizado de Nicaragua (Organized Workers of Nicaragua), as well as Nicaraguan works—José de la Cruz Mena’s waltzes Ruinas (Ruins) and Amores de Abraham (Abraham’s Loves), and Daniel Cuadra’s march Obreros organizados (Organized Workers). Three foxtrots studded the program—Cuadra’s Obreros y obreras (Men and Women Workers) and the unattributed La prensa (The Press) and Oh Paris—undoubtedly to encourage social dancing. The event closed with the singing of the French national anthem La marseillaise, a universal expression of political solidarity in Latin America.Footnote 186 Cuadra’s foxtrot was not the only Nicaraguan music dedicated to a labor organization. Two years later, the local composer Gilberto Vega Miranda honored one Managua labor union with his foxtrot Club obrero (Worker Club), recorded by Victor in June 1930.Footnote 187 This Nicaraguan foxtrot was another example of its important place in local culture, and of its continuing marketability beyond Nicaragua.
A photograph of a workers’ dance held in Managua in March 1928. “A detail of the great workers’ ball for General José María Zelaya C., in the salons of the new Municipal Palace, on the night of March 17. The beautiful and elegant obreras, Chepita Meza, Hermisenda Pérez, Trini Pérez, and Manuelita Díaz are present.” “Festivales Simpáticos. Baile obrero al Gral. Zelaya C.,” La Noticia Ilustrada, March 25, 1928, 8. “Un aspecto del gran baile obrero al General José María Zelaya C., en los salones del nuevo Palacio Municipal, la noche del 17 del corriente. Aparecen las bellas y elegantes obreras, Srtas. Chepita Meza, Hermisenda Pérez, Trini Pérez y Manuelita Díaz.”
Away from the city, rural communities enjoyed US popular music and dance. In 1919, while in the sierras above Managua, Nicaraguan writer and polemicist Gustavo Alemán Bolaños participated in an outdoor celebration, leaving him impressed with the “joy and amusement” of the men and women farmhands: “Our people are so alive!” he exclaimed, “A one-step or foxtrot? Well, just like in a New York City cabaret.”Footnote 188 It appears that the entirety of Nicaraguan society had come under the spell of US popular music during the intervention. Some hardly found it joyful or amusing.
Resisting the Foxtrot
As Nicaraguans embraced the foxtrot, critics likened it to a cultural Trojan Horse. For some, foxtrots and other popular music were to blame for the underappreciation of Nicaraguan traditional music. Detractors saw the foxtrot as a vice to avoid. Critics of its popularity as a symbol of US cultural encroachment made repeated attempts to convince the public of its corrupting influence on Nicaraguan culture. Their pleas came to little.
In June 1920, Francisco “Paco” Soto Carrión, a Nicaraguan musician and bandleader, dispatched a sharp assessment on the state of Nicaraguan music. “Nothing, almost nothing can be said of the musical arts in Nicaragua,” he fumed, “so little known at present as it was a century ago.”Footnote 189 He admitted that national music was singularly represented in the foxtrot, yet considered it “anti-national,” blaming popular demand for the modern dance. Soto Carrión noted that Nicaragua resembled other countries, where music and dance were indistinguishable from one another, and where the pulse was more important than the musical idea. He pointed to the typical Nicaraguan dance ensemble that included the drum kit, a recent accessory, “always in imitation of the Yankees.”Footnote 190 He was not the only Nicaraguan musician with strong opinions against the foxtrot.
In February 1921, a Nicaraguan pianist named Sinforoso complained about the treatment he endured playing for receptions in León, northwest of Managua. “Many times, I have played… the [European] music of Liszt, Gounod, Verdi,” he recalled, yet “people come to silence you only to request a foxtrot.”Footnote 191 He chalked it up to a lack of cultural appreciation. This may have also been the case for the city of Granada, southeast of Managua, on the shores of Lake Nicaragua. There, La cucaracha, a popular song of the Mexican Revolution, was more in demand than other songs.Footnote 192 Later, in January 1923, Azarías Pallais, a Nicaraguan priest and poet, warned a young worker against succumbing to “dances that are now being danced.” He recognized that the Romans, whom he called the “Yankees of Ancient History,” would have easily taken to the foxtrot. Yet, he disapproved of the foxtrot in a modern context, especially for its corrupting potential on Catholic women.Footnote 193 In January 1924, an editorial in Faces y Facetas lamented the entertainment preferences of younger adults as evidence of “self-absorption.” The culprits were dancing, immoral propaganda, and smoking, represented by the foxtrot, cinema, and US Camel brand cigarette.Footnote 194 That August, Los Domingos implored workers to keep their house in order: “Tell your children to learn everything that is good before knowing how to dance the foxtrot.”Footnote 195
Other cultural voices railed against popular culture, taking aim at the foxtrot. In February 1925, Los Domingos reprinted a cultural polemic that had appeared in the Mexico City magazine La Antorcha.Footnote 196 The author, José Vasconcelos, former head of the Mexican Secretariat of Education, set his sights on the cinema, a growing challenge to traditional culture. “The stupid cinema,” he launched, “cultivator of a blind generation, a school of vulgarity, an example of poor taste, a seedy establishment of erotic fumbling in rhythm with the grotesque tripping of the foxtrot.”Footnote 197 Under intervention, the foxtrot, cinema, and other forms of entertainment disarmed the masses. This led one writer, to fight back that August, so that Nicaraguans might “emerge from the swamp” created by the foxtrot and other popular music, especially “La cucaracha.”Footnote 198 The following year, the Managua magazine Cultura called Nicaraguan taste into question, especially those who cannot distinguish between modern dances, needing “to ask if a foxtrot or a waltz” was played.Footnote 199 In 1928, Tucho Montealegre, Nicaraguan director of the Banda de los Supremos Poderes, summarily dismissed the foxtrot as “accordion music.”Footnote 200
Even the beloved player piano could not escape the critical Nicaraguan ear when it played a foxtrot. Its association with the US cultural presence in Managua led Hernán Robleto, a Nicaraguan journalist and writer, to evoke a dystopian image of the instrument in his 1933 novel Los estrangulados (The Strangled Ones). “The piano strikes the notes of a bizarre foxtrot,” he opened, “There is no one sitting at the little bench of the piano—it is mechanical, soulless, with little more inflection than the pulsation of the electrical current.”Footnote 201 Robleto’s portrait was unambiguous—he struck down two US imports (modern dance and player piano) with one Nicaraguan pen. Yet, some writers were more conflicted. They appeared to vacillate between resistance and submission to the foxtrot, an apparent quality one Nicaraguan composer turned into an vocation.
Cultural Ambivalence: Luis A. Delgadillo and the Foxtrot
From 1919 to 1933, Nicaraguan composer Luis A. Delgadillo maintained an ambivalent stance towards the foxtrot, promoting and criticizing its cultural role (Figure 8). He composed and programmed foxtrots as director of the Banda de los Supremos Poderes, occasionally praising them. Nevertheless, he was a forceful critic of the foxtrot’s impact on Nicaraguan culture. His experience was unusual and paradoxical. It evidenced the workings of Americanization—the Nicaraguan negotiation of US cultural goods and entertainments—in a figure who helped shape local musical culture. Delgadillo understood the foxtrot as more than a US musical product. He saw it as a vehicle for discussions of identity, education, progress, and culture, which may have also been implicit critiques of the intervention’s soft power and cultural impact in Nicaragua. He considered US musical influences “unjust, antipatriotic, and unadvanced.”Footnote 202 In 1918, a year before the foxtrot took off in Nicaragua, he lamented the disappearance of older popular dances among the tastes of “modern young people,” who “no longer want to dance polkas, mazurcas, schottische, or galops. [As for] the dances from Havana, Cuba, not even in dreams; the Argentine tango passed like a weak arrow through theaters and salons.” He added, “dance programs ceased to include waltzes or two-steps.”Footnote 203 Some nonetheless continued to find favor, yet the foxtrot reigned supreme.
Nicaraguan musicians Luis A. Delgadillo and Carlos Tünnermann [López] (seated l to r); Arturo José Medal Morales, [unknown], and Tomás Urroz (standing l to r). Delgadillo, Tünnermann López, and Medal Morales composed foxtrots, and recorded some with the Victor Talking Machine Company. “[Untitled] Nicaraguan musicians,” ca. 1930, Delgadillo Tapia Family Archive, Managua, Nicaragua. Courtesy of the Delgadillo Tapia Family.
By 1921, Delgadillo composed at least five foxtrots for the Banda de los Supremos Poderes concerts. Of these, El zanatillo (The Little Grackle) encapsulated a syncretic music that celebrated Nicaraguan musical folklore. In 1919, he wanted its debut to be received as “contemporary US music with a local or homegrown flavor.”Footnote 204 He thus created a novel hybrid music, a product of transculturation, from a Nicaraguan traditional melody and a US musical genre. That same year, he characterized US popular dances as low-quality music and poor models for imitation, describing them as “light music,” “rat’s nest music,” “weeds on music staves,” and “pretty dance stupidities.”Footnote 205 He urged piano students to avoid inexpressive or mechanical playing: “the best friends of someone who bangs on the piano are disorder, impulse, [and] foxtrots.”Footnote 206 Yet, he made exceptions. In 1920, he praised Nicaraguan pianist Carlos Alfonso Zelaya’s success in the US, noting that he was well-paid for playing foxtrots.Footnote 207 Delgadillo nevertheless remained a foxtrot critic. A year later, he lost patience with music students, especially pianists, who “learn foxtrots purely through trial and error, and just to drive the neighbors crazy.”Footnote 208
The 1920s witnessed Delgadillo’s conditional love for the foxtrot mature. In 1922, he published foxtrots with Mexico City printing houses, which Victor recorded the following year.Footnote 209 During that time, he composed at least one unpublished foxtrot, titled Zobeida, in Mexico City.Footnote 210 In 1924, he set the lyrics “En la ciudad que alegría” (What Joy in the City) to a foxtrot in his musical adaptation of Nicaraguan writer Hernán Robleto’s play La rosa del paraíso (The Rose of Paradise).Footnote 211 Later, Delgadillo composed the foxtrot Perry Girton, in honor of a US theater empresario, whom he met in San José, Costa Rica.Footnote 212 Meanwhile, his thinking evolved, reconciling the foxtrot as part of Latin American expressive culture. In 1929, he considered the Nicaraguan foxtrot “a Yankee music with meaningful nuances of lyricism particular to Latin American romanticism.” He concluded: “Such are Central American foxtrots—wanting to be black [African American], they are [instead] of a Spanish or creole character.”Footnote 213 Among his extant manuscripts, the unpublished foxtrots Mi Juanin (My Juanin), a reference to his wife, and No tiene nombre (It is Unnamed) were likely composed during the intervention.Footnote 214 Like his other foxtrots, these also spoke to his sustained engagement with this dance genre.
The foxtrot also became a vehicle for Delgadillo to raise objections over jazz, echoing his Latin American contemporaries. In 1931, he blamed New York City radio broadcasts for creating an “oppressive” soundscape: “‘degenerative jazz’ with the howling of cats, of crazy dogs, and unpleasant saxophone and trumpet dissonances with outrageous ‘drums.’”Footnote 215 His description included the “strident” foxtrot, which he believed could hardly “symbolize the alma mater of America.”Footnote 216 Years earlier, in 1924, his contemporaries in Mexico City, where he resided at the time, set the tone with their critiques of jazz.Footnote 217 Finding public spaces awash with US popular music, Mexican pianist and folklorist Manuel M. Ponce considered jazz an affront to those looking for “tranquility” at the cinema or “solace” in a restaurant.Footnote 218 Dismissing the musical genre altogether, Mexican pianist and orchestra conductor Julián Carrillo rejected jazz as an “artistic innovation.”Footnote 219 Delgadillo, Ponce, and Carrillo wrote for local venues. They were among the Latin American voices, as the scholar Jason Borge has observed, who “played central roles in interpreting the meaning of jazz for local readers, listeners, and fans.”Footnote 220 For his part, whether embracing or resisting the foxtrot, Delgadillo considered US popular music “indispensable, even for dancing.”Footnote 221
Conclusion
The northeasterly musical wind that swept over the Caribbean Basin in the 1910s delivered US popular music to Central America. Facilitated by US political, economic, and military intervention, the dissemination of ragtime and jazz music, among a steady stream of imported US goods and entertainments, helped to push their integration into Nicaraguan culture. Local demand for commercial sound reproduction technologies, keyboard instruments, and sheet music circulated a wide variety of US popular music. Diverse segments of urban and rural communities consumed ragtime and jazz through live performance in public parks, dance halls, theaters, and haciendas. Cultural Americanization in Nicaragua developed a soundtrack. The foxtrot was its musical emblem.
More than an entertainment, the foxtrot was a discursive symbol for contesting Nicaraguan cultural values under US intervention. From 1919 to 1933, consumers and critics assessed its cultural impact: some embraced the foxtrot wholeheartedly, others rejected its corrupting potential, especially on young people. US popular music appeared to prevail over Nicaraguan traditions. However, a new music emerged from local contestation—a Nicaraguan foxtrot—combining native and foreign elements that Nicaraguans made their own. Taking inspiration from US models, Nicaraguan composers wrote foxtrots to meet increasing local demand, attracting the sustained attention of US recording companies. A champion of Nicaraguan popular music, the Victor Talking Machine Company sold tens of thousands of Nicaraguan foxtrot recordings across the Americas and beyond, keeping it firmly on the global stage for much of the 1920s. As a result, local composers saw their reputations grow at home and abroad.
Nicaraguan composer Luis A. Delgadillo negotiated the torrent of US popular music by both praising and excoriating the foxtrot. It became a useful vehicle for him to address the state of Nicaraguan culture and education. His critiques were part of broader contemporary discussions of ragtime and jazz in Latin America and the Caribbean. Wherever these took place, the foxtrot and other US dances gripped popular culture. In response, local composers created their own—Colombian, Costa Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Guatemalan, Honduran, Mexican, Panamanian, Salvadoran, and Venezuelan foxtrots, among others—a vast production that generated a veritable Latin American foxtrot.Footnote 222
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