Otra día amanece: The Book of Songs
Marcelo Puente
Georgian Bay Books (2025)
Review by Wally Brooker
Lovers of Nueva Cançion, the revolutionary Latin American song movement born in the 1960’s, will embrace Marcelo Puente’s Otra día amanece: The Book of Songs, a collection of stories and lyrics that reveals a beautiful poetic imagination. The Spanish part of the title means “Another day dawns.”
Marcelo Puente is a singer-songwriter who has long been greatly admired by the Latin American left both in Canada and “Nuestra América” as well as by those Canadians who have come to know his work. He has composed music for films, documentaries, plays and children’s books. Some of his songs have been translated into English, French, Italian and Greek, and one is preserved in the National Archive of Immigrant Songs. Now, with the publication of this bilingual memoir and song collection, his stature as an artist will be apparent to all.
Puente was born in Chile in 1947. He grew up in the port city of Valparaíso (to which he has paid tribute in a much-loved song of the same name). He came to Toronto as a refugee in July 1974, after the US engineered coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, when the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown and the brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet was installed.
Puente began writing original songs and poetry, as well as setting the works of other poets to music, shortly after his arrival in Toronto. He formed two groups that performed locally in the mid-1970s, Lallantú and Andén Sur, before co-founding the celebrated Chilean-Greek band Compañeros. That band, and The Trojan Horse Coffee House where they played, became an important focus of Toronto’s progressive cultural scene in the late 70’s and early 80’s. The band’s reputation spread across the country. Canadian folk music impresario Gary Cristall, who first heard Compañeros at the Vancouver Folk Festival, later called them “Canada’s first world music band.”
Marcelo Puente was central to Compañeros. All the Spanish songs on the band’s first album, Blazing Frontiers, were composed by him. He has subsequently dedicated himself to composing and singing, and supporting the Latin American and Canadian community in their solidarity work with the peoples of the Global South. Puente’s songs speak of that solidarity and his life in Canada, as well as nostalgia for his homeland and for his beloved barrios (neighbourhoods).
My friends from the bar are always right
They don’t listen to the newspapers or television
My friends from the bar speak loudly
so the world knows what weighs on their backs
They are looked at with fear, no one respects them
because they don’t wear ties or talk about their income
My friends from the bar never stop talking
About this or that team, about how it might cloud over
That there’s no better country than the one you were born in
No happier time than the one that’s already passed
My friends from the bar are the hearts
that go out for a stroll with their emotions
The party is over, they’ve closed the bar
Tomorrow is another day, tomorrow another truth
From home to work, from work to stroll
through all the taverns of this society
My friends from the bar, if you see them singing
Say Good Night to them, they are just dreaming.
(verses from “My Friends From the Bar”, 1981)
Otra día amanece: The Book of Songs is a collection of song lyrics, memories and anecdotes. It’s also a rich archive of photos and posters representing both Marcelo’s musical career and the struggles of the Chilean exile community in the Greater Toronto area. The songs stand alone here as beautiful poems. Marcelo has composed music for all of them, but finding recordings could be a challenge.
One thing that’s missing is a discography. For recordings like the classic Compañeros album Blazing Frontiers (1978) and Puente’s Mares y Barrios (1999) and Vida/Life (2006), with Toronto singer Heather Chetwynd, it might be best to start by corresponding with Marcelo via the email address below. Otherwise, search the internet and streaming platforms. It’s frustrating that such a talented artist’s work is not more easily accessible. Fortunately, his 2021 album El mas profundo de los ecos (“The Deepest of Echoes”) can be easily purchased and downloaded at Bandcamp.
To order Otra día amanece: The Book of Songs send an e-transfer for $28 to m.puente47 <at> yahoo.ca. Please provide your mailing address. Shipping is included in the price.
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