In We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moveran: Biography of a Song of Struggle, David Spener has written a fascinating history of a song that most North American readers will recognize as one of the anthems of the 1960s Civil Rights struggle. What the average reader won’t know is that, over the course of its history, the song has crossed linguistic, racial, and cultural borders in surprising and fascinating ways.
The song “I Shall Not Be Moved” originated in the nineteenth century as part of the interracial religious movement known as the second Great Awakening. From there the song was passed on into the antebellum spiritual repertoire that helped sustain African Americans spiritually and emotionally through the horrors of slavery. After the Civil War the song remained in use in both white and black American church repertoires.
In the 1930s a number of primarily white unions changed the title of the song to “We Shall Overcome” and used it in their struggle against oppressive working conditions and low wages. Interestingly, Spener has found one example from the same decade in which the song was sung in a Spanish translation as “No Nos Moveran” by striking female pecan-shellers in a San Antonio jail. The song next appears in the Civil Rights movement where, as a result of white participation in the movement, the word “I” in the title becomes permanently changed to “We.”
In the 1960s, a Spanish student and activist, Xesco Boix, learned the song from a Pete Seeger album and translated it into Catalan. Boix was based in Barcelona. A childhood friend of his, Ferandez Toca, lived in Madrid and was associated with the resistance movement there. After visiting Boix and learning the song, he translated the words into Castilian Spanish. In Barcelona and Madrid the song was sung in both languages as an anthem of resistance against the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Toca also made a poor-quality recording of the song as one side of a single released on the short-lived Madrid-based student-run record label EDUMSA. Years later, the son of a Spanish Republican exile in Chile gave a copy of Toca’s recording to a member of a Chilean group, Tiemponuevo. Through Tiemponueuvo and other Chilean activists the song became closely associated with the election campaign and government of socialist leader Salvador Allende and, in fact, was the last song played by Radio Magallanes before the military shut down the station during the 1973 coup that brought Allende’s government to a swift and bitter end.
It is an amazing journey that sociologist and anthropologist Spener has meticulously researched through both interviews and a myriad of secondary sources. Spener’s unpacking of the history, in itself, is an impressive feat which he has tried to recount without using unnecessary disciplinary jargon while, at the same time, remaining academically rigorous.
After detailing the song’s history over the course of the book’s first six chapters, Spener attempts to theorize the song’s movement in chapters 7 and 8, and in the conclusion further theorizes the notion of “an internationalist culture of the singing left in the twentieth century.”
Spener’s prime interest is in how the song in its various permutations met the needs of the people in disparate movements. To that end, in chapter 7 he explores the social mechanisms that permitted the song’s widespread dissemination from one movement to another across cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries. In the process, he references and makes use of many of the standard works on globalization and material and social networks. In chapter 8 he explores the applicability of various instantiations of the notion of transculturation to the story of “We Shall Not Be Moved”/“No Nos Moveran.” While there is nothing particularly amiss about Spener’s conclusions, there is also nothing particularly revelatory.
More satisfying is his outline on pages seven and eight of the introduction as to why the singing of the song “has served as a powerful form of ritual action that enables social movement participants to accomplish a number of things that are crucial to a movement’s success and survival”: (1) it helped individuals to forge their identities as protagonists of their own history; (2) it helped in the formation of solidarity and cohesion in movements; (3) it helped members of movements keep up their spirits and cope with fear in situations of extreme adversity; (4) it contributed to the collective memory of movements many years after they concluded; and (5) it facilitated the raising of otherwise mundane moments of history to sacred or quasi-sacred levels.
Alongside the publication of the book, Spener has created a website with photos, videos, and other supplementary materials that nicely augment the text.
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[Review length: 775 words • Review posted on November 14, 2017]