Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture

“Rock [music],” novelist and cultural critic José Agustín once wrote, “is not the patrimony of the United States, even though it first surfaced there” (p. 113). Originating as the music of African American urban migration, rock ‘n’ roll grew into a global cultural idiom, a musical form that transcended national boundaries, fusing with local styles to create new cultural configurations. As Eric Zolov demonstrates in this superb work, rocanrol in Mexico developed hand in hand with the country’s expanding youth culture, itself underwritten by the country’s economic “miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s. This same youth movement, centered predominantly among university students in Mexico City, came to mount the era’s most significant protest movement, culminating in the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco. As the author reveals, although the tragedy at Tlatelolco did much to spell an end to organized student protest, the government had greater difficulty quelling rock and its attendant...