Thread by @doctorow

The Cold War is memorialized as a moment in which the world split into two: the east and west, the Warsaw Pact and NATO. But a sizeable number of countries sat out the Cold War, and many of them formed a third bloc called the "nonaligned countries."

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The nonaligned movement's founding member was Yugoslavia, and it became a socialist republic on the USSR's doorstep that had a simmering (and at times openly) hostile relationship with its vast neighbor.

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This betwixt/between posture left Yugoslavia cut off from both Hollywood movies and Soviet cinema: naturally, they turned to the Mexican film industry.

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The 1950s and 60s were the Yu-Mex moment, when the nation thrilled to imported Mexican movies that glorified the Mexican revolution. On @globalvoices, @razvigor tells the story of a quarter century of Yugoslavian Mexican music.

globalvoices.org/2021/01/14/rem…

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Dozens of bands recorded covers of Mexican classics, but the niche that Yugoslavian musicians dominated was Mexican parody music: novelty songs that used Mexican musical motifs to mock everything from rock and roll to spaghetti westerns (as these trickled into the country).

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"In 1983, singer-songwriter Đorđe Balašević, from Novi Sad in Serbia, released the album 'Celovečernji the Kid' (which could be translated as 'Wholevening the Kid') featuring the smash hit 'Don Francisco Long Play.'"



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Another hit: Bajaga & Instruktori's "Tekila, gerila," a song set in Macondo, the fictional town of Gabriel García Márquez's novel 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'.



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As Yugoslavia began to unravel, songs like "Mi imamos lots of problemos" by the Croatian band Duo Pegla used Yu-Mex music to comment on the state of the nation, referencing classic Mexican films and also, uh, Speedy Gonzales (aired daily on state TV).



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Speedy Gonzales isn't the only problematic element of Yu-Mex: there's a lot of "broad Mexican accents" in the classics of the genre, a lot of sombreros and mustaches in the videos.

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This is weird and often terrible stuff that developed in a tidepool of history; but beneath the racial stereotyping is a region whose film and music were shot through with Mexican cultural products.

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It's the tale of a land where a musician could reference a 30 year old Mexican movie and know that his listeners would all follow along and make the song a hit.

eof/