La Onda

La Onda (The Wave) was a multidisciplinary artistic movement created in Mexico by artists and intellectuals as part of the worldwide waves of the counterculture of the 1960s and the avant-garde. Its followers were called "onderos", "macizos" or "jipitecas".

La Onda encompassed artistic productions in the worlds of cinema, literature, visual arts and music and strongly addressed social issues of the time such as women's rights, ecology, spirituality, artistic freedom, open drug use and democracy, this in a country tightly ruled by the PRI.

According to Mexican intellectual Carlos Monsiváis, La Onda was "a new spirit, the repudiation of convention and prejudice, the creation of a new morality, the challenging of proper morals, the expansion of consciousness, the systematic revision and critique of the values offered by the West as sacred and perfect".

La Onda began with the importation of American and British rock and roll into the Mexican music culture. Throughout the world, rock and roll was spreading and taking root as "a wedge and a mirror for societies caught in the throes of rapid modernization". According to Eric Zolov, author of Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture, "rock was a wedge in the sense that it challenged traditional boundaries of propriety, gender relations, social hierarchies, and the very meaning of national identity" which the Mexican PRI (or the Institutional Revolutionary Party) was struggling to define.

By the late 1950s, "youth from the middle classes began to form their own bands…practicing as best they could versions of hit songs in English by their favorite foreign rock'n'rollers". The youth of Mexico began to identify with the youth of the United States and the United Kingdom, and it was only a matter of time before they were also inspired by the social activism of other modernizing countries.

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Wikipedia