Learning from Jorge Drexler

“Al Otro Lado del Río” and the Possibilities of Latin American Humanism

For Scott Saul, Jorge Drexler’s “pocket anthems for the human race” point toward a truly Pan-American cultural and intellectual history.

At the 2005 Academy Awards

The 2005 Academy Awards ceremony was largely a slick pageant of familiar faces celebrating familiar stories (Million Dollar Baby won Best Picture, Clint Eastwood Best Director), but it did feature one genuinely surprising moment, courtesy of Uruguayan songwriter Jorge Drexler, barely known in the Anglosphere at the time. Winning in the category of Best Original Song for “Al Otro Lado del Río” from The Motorcycle Diaries, Drexler did not use his allotted time to thank those who contributed to his success, nor did he capitalize on his spotlight to advocate for a cause dear to his heart, as might be expected of a songwriter tied to a biopic about the young Che Guevara. Instead, Drexler bent down to the microphone—it had been lowered to accommodate the diminutive Prince, who had announced the award—and in that awkward, slanted position, he simply sang the first two couplets of his song:

Clavo mi remo en el agua, llevo tu remo en el mío

Creo que he visto una luz al otro lado del río

El día le irá pudiendo, poco a poco al frío

Creo que he visto una luz al otro lado del río[1]

His a cappella singing completed, Drexler said “Ciao” (or ‘Chau’ as Uruguayans would spell it), followed by a quick “thank you, gracias.” He then walked offstage, leaving behind a mix of smiling and puzzled faces.

What was the meaning of Drexler’s gesture at the Academy Awards, and what can we learn from him about the Latin American humanism that his music extends in innovative forms? How might the story of “Al Otro Lado del Río,” from the song’s inception to its Oscars moment, help us to shift toward a more capaciously “American” cultural and intellectual history, one that does not stop at the borders of the United States but rather sees, and hears, the interplay within the larger Americas?

What was the meaning of Drexler’s gesture at the Academy Awards, and what can we learn from him about the Latin American humanism that his music extends in innovative forms?

The Oscars ceremony has been intermittently electrified by political protest. Perhaps most memorably, in 1973, Marlon Brando asked the Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather to speak for him, and Littlefeather, with Brando’s support, indicted both the film industry and America-at-large for poor treatment of Native Americans. Yet Drexler’s far more oblique act of Oscars protest—what amounted to a non-acceptance speech—deserves to be equally remembered. “Al Otro Lado del Río” was the first Spanish-language song to be nominated for Best Original Song, and by singing his song a cappella, without the instrumentation and production that made it more graspable by a non-Spanish-speaking audience, Drexler italicized the difference it held within it: implicitly, we were asked to prick up our ears and give space to what eluded our understanding. Those who could understand Spanish would have caught that he was pledging to row for us even if we faltered, to take us to a further shore. But there was more to Drexler’s acceptance speech than just a coded message in Spanish. To register the true charge of Drexler’s act, we need to probe the song’s backstory in full.

América Latina

It’s a backstory that, on a biographical level, begins in the summer of 2003 when Drexler composed the song, but that, on a cultural and intellectual level, might be said to begin centuries earlier, with the development of a strain of Latin American humanism central to the politics and culture of the continent. In his new and magisterial America, América: A New History of the New World (2025), historian Greg Grandin offers this larger context through a synthetic history of the Americas that challenges much of what passes for common sense among US historians and the larger US public. The book asks anyone interested in US cultural and intellectual history to approach the field with a more porous and less nationalistic framework—to rove past its borders and be prepared for surprises.

Against those who trace the roots of democracy back, say, to Jefferson, Montesquieu, and the Athenian city-state, Grandin offers an alternative genealogy centered on Latin America. He finds, south of the Rio Grande, a more egalitarian tradition of universal humanism, whose fountainhead is the sixteenth-century Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas and whose legacy can be found in international and human-rights law and the social-democratic constitutions of countries across Latin America (which, for example, enshrine the “right to health care”). Since the establishment of the United States, Grandin argues, the universalist humanist ideals of Latin America have repeatedly clashed against the individualist ethos and narrow chauvinism of its northern neighbor in an ideological battle shaped by the US’s greater economic, political, and military power. In the words of the nineteenth-century Chilean philosopher and politician Francisco Bilbao, “América Latina” was called to serve as an ethical alternative to its “Yankee” counterpart: it was to be “the meeting place of all the elements of humanity, north and south, east and west, the Black, the Indian, the White.”[2]

Perhaps surnames like Torres, Galeano, and Buarque will come to claim their place on more twentieth-century intellectual history syllabi and become reference points as durable as, say, Luther, Machiavelli, and Montaigne.

Covering half a millennium of political, diplomatic, and intellectual history, America, América is an ambitious, wide-angled work that seems likely to stir substantive debate while galvanizing scores of researchers through its eye-opening framing moves.[3] When, for instance, Grandin contrasts the Renaissance humanism of Erasmus and Thomas More with that of de las Casas, he notes approvingly that “it was Las Casas, and only Las Casas, who hitched the Catholic Church’s prophetic, communitarian tradition that promised deliverance to political action.” Writing in a similarly appreciative vein about the upheavals of the 1960s, Grandin suggests that the “biggest irony is that the institution the philosopher Sidney Hook once called the ‘oldest and greatest totalitarian movement in history’—the Catholic church—supplied exploited communities with the tools for critical thinking.” The “new sociology,” a Catholicism-inflected movement which probed the experience of exploitation in everyday life, helped spark the hemisphere to come alive in “art, song, poetry, fiction, criticism, and social science”—and with “such intense intellectual vitality” that the period “should be considered equal to Europe’s Enlightenment,” Grandin writes. Although the footnote attached to that bold suggestion refers simply to a short intellectual biography of Father Camilo Torres, the founder of the new sociology and a forefather of liberation theology, it is easy to imagine many books and dissertations growing out of Grandin’s formulation of a “Second Enlightenment.” Perhaps surnames like Torres, Galeano, and Buarque will come to claim their place on more twentieth-century intellectual history syllabi and become reference points as durable as, say, Luther, Machiavelli, and Montaigne.[4]   

Identity Is an Infinite Series of Real Numbers

As a US cultural historian who tries to keep his ear bent to the sounds of Latin America, I count myself among the first generation of readers galvanized by America, América. For me, its emphasis on the persistence of universal humanism in Latin America, which strikes a sharp contrast to more familiar narratives in US cultural history about the discontinuities of post-modernism and post-humanism, has had the immediate effect of bringing the work of one artist, Jorge Drexler, into sharper focus.[5]

Drexler may be the most simultaneously tuneful, big-hearted, and erudite legatee of Grandin’s “Second Enlightenment” to emerge over the past three decades.

Drexler may be the most simultaneously tuneful, big-hearted, and erudite legatee of Grandin’s “Second Enlightenment” to emerge over the past three decades. Across fourteen albums that subtly link music to literature, cinema, art, ecology, social activism, and even evolutionary theory, he has crafted a body of songs that explore the dynamics of yearning from an ever-expanding set of angles (interpersonal, historical, political, and scientific), the goal being to refresh what, as Drexler delineates, is the oldest story in the book: the desire for new horizons and connections. The individual cell that, in the Mesoproterozoic era, takes the revolutionary step of merging with a nearby cell; the early group of homo sapiens who, after standing on two feet, follow a bison herd to somewhere new; the man speculating on the caloric path of his lover’s kiss after its heat infuses his body—these are a few representative protagonists of Drexler’s high-concept songs, their imagination fired by their desire and their desire fired by their imagination. While US-based music critics and cultural historians have meditated long and often about the “American dream” in the songs of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and others, Drexler’s border-questioning music prompts us to consider an alternative: what we might, following Grandin, think of as the Américan dream.[6]

Given the particularities of his background, Drexler’s emergence as a tribune of Pan-American humanism might seem surprising. In a predominantly Catholic region, he was born to a Jewish father and an agnostic mother, and he identifies as someone who early on lost faith in organized religion. He was raised in Uruguay, the smallest and least populous country on the continent. Within Montevideo, he grew up in what he has characterized as a “typical Jewish Berlin family,” a household that valued Kultur—the best literature and music—above all. Yet, from the start, for Drexler, culture was a bridge to larger connections and a larger political world. Exploring and developing his artistry, he found himself bound to projects tinged with solidarity and spirits of resistance. He took his first piano lessons from a neighbor whose daughter, a guerrilla, had been jailed by Uruguay’s dictatorship, and who adopted the young Jorge as she might adopt a grandchild. As a teen, he took guitar lessons at Abel Carlevaro’s School of Guitar, whose development had been spurred by Andrés Segovia’s exile from fascist Spain. When, as a medical student, he received an award for his poetry, one of the judges was the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, whose Venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America, 1971) was a touchstone text on the underdevelopment of the continent and exploitation of its peoples.[7]

Drexler’s in-between place within the whole of Latin American culture seems linked to his intellectual avidity, his desire to understand and bring together disparate elements. In his family growing up, the ethos was to be open to it all: on the turntable one might find Monteverdi, the Comedian Harmonists (a Weimar-era singing group who left Germany after the ascent of the Nazis), Uruguayan folk music, or the Beatles; on the bookshelves, science fiction sat next to Thomas Mann, Anaïs Nin, and Jorge Luis Borges. Likewise, in his own songs, Drexler has sought to weave together the many strands of Latin American music, which themselves reach outside the boundaries of the continent.

Since Drexler was young, his lodestar has been his fellow Uruguayan songwriter Eduardo Mateo, whose Mateo Solo Bien Se Lame (Mateo Licks Himself Well, 1971) brought together the local, the Latin American, and the international—the candombe drums Mateo heard in Montevideo’s Barrio Sur and Palermo neighborhoods with the guitar fingerwork of João Gilberto and the open tunings of Joni Mitchell. Following Mateo’s lead, Drexler started with the folk traditions and candombe beat of Uruguay and the musical cultures of its larger neighbors Argentina and Brazil (the repertoires of tango, zamba, nueva canción, samba, bossa nova, tropicalismo, post-bossa MPB); but, throughout his career, he has also expanded to tap into the musical worlds of Colombia, where he recorded Bailar en La Cueva (Dancing in the Cave, 2014); Mexico, where he recorded Salvavidas de Hielo (Ice Life Vests, 2017); and much more.[8]

As he has reached beyond his native Uruguay, Drexler’s approach has not been to skim for the sake of extraction but to delve for the sake of tactile engagement. As he says at the end of the TED talk he gave in 2017 on the form of the décima, a stanzaic form that has taken a different shape in every Latin American country: “Décimas, the milonga, songs, people—the closer you get to them, the more complex their identity becomes, and the more nuances and details appear. I learned that identity is an infinite series of real numbers, and that even if you get very close and zoom in, it never ends.” Bailar en la Cueva, accordingly, is not an attempt to distill Colombian music down to its essence but rather a Colombia-grounded exploration of the many offshoots of Latin American music, one that goes happily wayward when a song demands that approach. Drexler is far more interested in the workings of multiplicity than in claims of authenticity. Or perhaps it would be better to say that, for him, multiplicity is where authenticity is both found and confounded.[9]

Like a Cloud Goes with the Wind

Drexler’s attunement to complexity surfaces in the story of one of his best-known songs, “Al Otro Lado del Río.” The song itself is a cultural parable about the different accents that Latin American artists put on the humanist tradition. It suggests how meaningful those accents can be, yet how difficult they can be to hear in the US, especially when amplified via the usual circuits of the mass-culture industry and US exceptionalism. We US-centered historians should listen more closely than is customary and linger on both the details that jump out at us and the ones that are more textural, subdued, and part of a background we do not yet understand. We might need to sync ourselves to new patterns—or, as Drexler instructs on “Bailar en La Cueva,” to “go with the rhythm like a cloud goes with the wind”.[10]

Working on “Al Otro Lado del Río” in the early-morning hours in the summer of 2003, in time stolen from his family vacation, Drexler was not trying to alter the course of his career, much less challenge the hegemony of the English language in American movies and popular song. He was simply fulfilling a commission for a film’s soundtrack.[11] Yet this commission had several layers of urgency and personal resonance to it—layers that help explain why the song has reverberated. The commission had come from an artist Drexler admired intensely, Brazilian director Walter Salles, whose Oscar-nominated Central Station (1998) was a lyrical portrait of the bond that develops between a young boy and a middle-aged woman as they seek out the boy’s father in northeastern Brazil. Salles had asked Drexler to compose a song for another road drama of his: The Motorcycle Diaries, in which a young Ernesto “Che” Guevara, after completing his medical training in Buenos Aires, takes a trip northward, through Chile and Peru, that opens his eyes to the suffering of the many and the potential of Pan-American solidarity. Produced by Robert Redford, The Motorcycle Diaries was a heavily anticipated pre-history of Latin America’s revolutionary 1950s and 1960s, and there was so much secrecy around the production that Drexler was merely sent the screenplay rather than allowed to view any dailies from the film.[12]

The son of two doctors himself, Drexler had also trained to be a doctor. Like Che, he too had traveled across South America, hitchhiking across Brazil as an eighteen-year-old medical student. He instinctively recognized how treating the underprivileged could awaken a doctor’s conscience. And as Che himself had done in his twenties, so Drexler had given up the comforts of a career as a doctor, although in his case by taking up a guitar and pen rather than a rifle. Nonetheless, he also found himself questioning the borders that divide people and nations.

Four years before he had received the commission from Salles, he had begun his fifth album, Frontera (1999), with an anthem for those who live on the border and can see through the illusions of nationalism:

Set to a rollicking beat, “Frontera” managed to infuse a lyric about precarity and skepticism, about not knowing where you’re from or where you are going exactly, about the connection between unstable borders and flag-waving, about refusing the certitudes of “war and vanity,” with a celebratory, high-stepping feel. The album’s cover featured a mock version of the inside page of Drexler’s Uruguayan passport, in which Drexler cast a defiantly sardonic glance at any would-be border guards. (Not coincidentally, this was an album beloved by Salles: “I’ve been a fan since I heard ‘Frontera’ for the first time,” he said.)[13] Drexler was a good match, then, for the Motorcycle Diaries commission, which had a further sweetener attached to it: Salles proposed that Drexler’s song for the film would be performed by Mercedes Sosa, the Argentinian nueva canción legend known as “the voice of the voiceless ones,” whose deep alto was wedded to an equally deep sense of political commitment. For Drexler, a songwriter little-known outside of Uruguay and Spain (where he had transplanted himself for the sake of artistic opportunities), Sosa’s involvement promised to lend his songwriting a new authority and reach.

The morning after reading the film’s screenplay, Drexler had woken around 6 a.m., completely alert, the refrain of his new song having come to him in his sleep: “Creo que he visto una luz al otro lado del río” (“I think I’ve seen a light on the other side of the river”). He fixed on the emotional climax of the film: the asthmatic Guevara’s choice, at a leper colony in the Peruvian Amazon, to leave behind the cabins of his fellow doctors and swim to the shacks of the lepers on the other shore, violating the fiercely monitored boundary between the sano and the enfermo, the well and the ill. He projected himself into that moment when uncertainty and commitment dovetailed. At the same time, Drexler didn’t lash himself to the specifics of the film, drawing out the allegorical qualities of the scene instead. The person journeying to the other side of the river, seeking to arrive at the light they dimly make out, could be heard to represent any idealist struggling to achieve their goal, or any immigrant on their journey.

The words tumbled out of Drexler in a series of elegant but understated couplets. They worked to capture the leap of faith that stands behind Guevara’s commitment. The singer thinks he has seen a light, but he is not certain. He admits to the frailty of hope and of himself as its vehicle: “Sobre todo creo que no todo está perdido / Tanta lágrima, tanta lágrima y yo soy un vaso vacío” (“Above all I believe that not all is lost / So many tears, so many tears, and I’m an empty vessel”). Pushing against this undertow of difficulty, the singer hears a voice calling him like a sigh (“casi un suspiro”) and enjoining him to “row, row, row.” Tellingly, rather than being discouraged by the sigh—a common expression of disappointment, dejection, or fatigue—he feels himself beckoned onward by it, by that voice that is both his own and outside himself.

In the final couplet, Drexler dissolved the seeming tension between a life of adversity and a life of happiness:

Pursuing a vision of human interconnection, dedicating oneself to crossing over to worlds less comfortable and certain: this is hard, continuous work (thus “I keep rowing”), but it produces a form of happiness, a sense of authentic fulfillment (the smile “deep inside”), that is a beautiful compensation.

Crossing Our Own Aesthetic Rivers

For the music, Drexler worked to create a similarly understated complexity, layering a folkloric rhythm beneath more sophisticated harmonies. Mindful of Mercedes Sosa’s usual repertoire, Drexler laid down a loop in 3/4 that was furnished by playing his guitar percussively, his fingers against the guitar’s body. The simple pattern recalled the rhythm of the Argentinian zamba, a form associated with love and longing (and not to be confused with the often more celebratory Brazilian samba).

In its regularity, the pattern suggested a kind of rhythmic analogue to the work of rowing, the five taps across the two bars evoking five moments of rowing for every one of rest; the alternating tones—a deeper one followed by a lighter one—also evoked a sort of heartbeat, systole followed by diastole. Meanwhile, the song’s harmonies, its modulations outside the home key, and its chords with upper extensions suggested the more complex tonalities of jazz and bossa nova. As Drexler reflected later, “I realized that the song had this power of putting together different worlds, of crossing its own aesthetic rivers, going from one side to the other and mixing folk music with a very contemporary language.”[14]

Drexler recorded a bare-bones demo of the song—just the rhythmic loop, a guitar track, and a vocal track—with little more than a single take for each element, and was so excited by his song that he sent the recording immediately to Salles. The director responded, shortly thereafter, with an enthusiasm so strong as to be a bit disorienting: he loved the demo so much that he had simply placed it over the closing credits, he said, and everyone in the screening room had been so moved that he’d decided there was no need to do anything else with it, no need to replace Drexler’s voice with Mercedes Sosa’s and no need to add an arrangement to the song. Drexler accepted detaching Sosa from the project (which meant the song would feel less rooted in an earlier moment, the 1960s and 1970s of nueva canción), but successfully appealed to add some finishing touches—in a bona fide recording studio—to his demo. The final version featured a piano, some strings, and background vocals, but kept the original demo’s rhythmic loop, guitar track, and vocal. Try as he might, Drexler found in the studio that he could not improve on the early-morning vocal that he had performed just minutes after crafting the song itself. There was a plangency to his singing on the demo, traceable partly to his desire to “convince Walter Salles that the song was good” that he could not top now that Salles had already been convinced. In this way, Drexler’s desire to reach Salles, a Brazilian artist he admired, helped power the yearning the song evokes, Che’s desire to cross to the other side.[15]

All told, the final version of “Al Otro Lado del Río” accomplished the remarkable aesthetic feat of making Che’s revolutionary humanism sound both credible and contemporary. The song felt rooted in the singer’s sincere commitment, despite his frailty and struggles, to the work of connecting to people distant from himself. It also felt rooted on a musical level in the simple pulsing rhythm of the zamba, which evoked a boat ever-beating against the current. At the same time, it felt of the moment, through open-ended lyrics that rang beyond the era of Che to speak to the hopes of immigrants in the present, and through sonic elements such as the use of the tape loop and Drexler’s unadorned singing style. It had traces of the forthrightly political spirit of nueva canción but was more subdued, a song sung to oneself rather than the multitudes. Where Mercedes Sosa had a voice so powerful that it could boom through concert halls and stand as a sonic analogue to the latent power of el pueblo, Drexler took a different path to resonance: his music set his listener in a hushed space where a softer, yearning voice could be easily heard and met.

A Clarifying Dust-Up

The song might have remained simply what Drexler originally hoped it would be, a fine complement to the viewer’s experience of The Motorcycle Diaries, had it not resonated with the relevant members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who, by voting to nominate it for Best Original Song—the first Spanish-language song to receive that distinction—touched off a clarifying dust-up around the representation of Spanish-speaking cultures in Hollywood.

Drexler recoiled and protested: Cates’s substitutes, he told the Argentinian daily Clarín, filled him with “literal dread because they have no connection to what I do.”

The nomination itself was a surprise: “Al Otro Lado del Río” had been preferred by Academy voters over, for instance, “Old Habits Die Hard,” Mick Jagger’s song for the Alfie soundtrack, which was shut out despite its studio campaigning for it. While it was customary for nominees in Best Original Song to perform their own songs at the ceremony, the show’s producer, Gil Cates, considered Drexler too small-time for the Oscar stage. He offered Drexler a list of substitutes, among them teen heartthrob Enrique Iglesias. Drexler recoiled and protested: Cates’s substitutes, he told the Argentinian daily Clarín, filled him with “literal dread because they have no connection to what I do.” He proposed his own list, which had Caetano Veloso at the top but also included Beck and Beyoncé; he accommodated Cates’s objection to his low profile but put artistry first. Cates insisted on his own criteria and ended up substituting actor Antonio Banderas even though Banderas’s singing style—featured in the 1996 film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita, in which he had played Che—was the opposite of Drexler’s in tone. The best-known artists behind The Motorcycle Diaries objected publicly to Drexler’s exclusion. Gael García Bernal, who had played Che, pulled out of introducing the song at the Oscars, and Walter Salles issued a press release calling the choice of Banderas “not only ethically but aesthetically unacceptable.”[16]

At the ceremony itself, the performance went according to Cates’s plan, which is to say, “Al Otro Lado del Río” was turned into a showtune on the Oscars stage, its revolutionary ethos stripped of its credibility. The song was inflated through hyperbolic gestures that reduced and trivialized it. To use the technical term, “Al Otro Lado del Río” was “Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-ized.” Banderas belted out the song as he had belted out “Oh What a Circus” in Evita—with lusty and stagy insistence. Cates had also replaced Drexler on guitar with Mexican-American rocker Carlos Santana. Instead of hearing Drexler’s soft, bossa nova-influenced guitarwork as the lead accompaniment, Oscar viewers were treated to a steady diet of bluesy licks on electric guitar, one lick per pause in the lyrics. Ensuring that the performance achieved a sledgehammer level of subtlety, two motorcycles were propped up in front of the musicians, and Santana wore both a Che-styled black beret and Che T-shirt. When the Oscar cameras cut to Drexler in his seat, he appeared to be wincing.

Rio-based journalist Paulo Prado noted that what drove the debacle was a stunning incomprehension of the cultural map of the Spanish-speaking world: “Santana and Banderas, Mexican and Spanish by birth, struggled to perform a song whose roots lie in the slow, pulsating rhythms of folk music from southern South America. Imagine a Scotsman trying to wrap his brogue around hip-hop from Brooklyn or South Los Angeles.” Another journalist quipped that the performance “made about as much sense as if they had invited Michael Caine to sing bluegrass.” Here it might be helpful to distinguish between the artful crossing of aesthetic forms—Drexler’s marriage of zamba and looping, nueva canción and bossa nova—and what the Cates production of “Al Otro Lado del Río” worked toward: a pastiche of Latin American culture for the sake of “entertainment value,” with material taken up only to erase its softer accents and complexity. The Motorcycle Diaries and Drexler’s song had tried to flesh out the spirit of Che; Cates’s production shrunk and flattened him so he could fit again on the front of a T-shirt. As Salles telegraphed in his press release, there were ethical and aesthetic stakes to this act of unintentional burlesque.[17]

Putting One’s Oar in the Water

Drexler’s response to the travesty was elegant in conception and execution, pulled off in a manner that fit his larger artistic approach. As flailing as it was, Banderas’s performance could not sink “Al Otro Lado del Río”’s chances: the votes for Best Original Song had already been tallied, the envelope sealed before the ceremony, and the song won in its category, defeating songs performed by the likes of Josh Groban and the Counting Crows. Drexler filled his minute in the spotlight by simply performing the first two couplets of the song—couplets that tied the action of rowing to the other side of the river to the inexorable daily rising of the sun, “conquer[ing], little by little, the cold”—and then telegraphed his leaving the stage in three languages: “Ciao, thank you, gracias.”

Drexler later explained how he had alighted on a strategy for this acceptance speech that was no acceptance speech: the day before the Oscars, he had been presented an award from Latin American artists and had tried to give a speech that pivoted between Spanish and English while explaining his personal roots as an artist and his understanding of himself as both the child and the father of immigrants. He felt the speech, despite his noble intentions, had been a “complete mess.” So rather than deliver a message related to the song, he decided simply to do what Gil Cates had prohibited him from doing: sing his song.

If “Al Otro Lado del Rio” might be said to express the spirit of Latin American humanism, it does so in immanent terms—not by dueling with the forces of dehumanization but by giving positive voice to aspirations for connection and recognition.

For those involved in producing the Oscars, the gesture might have been seen as a “slap in the face,” but Drexler made a point of singing the song without explicitly tagging the act as one of protest: “I hate being aggressive. I don’t want to get mad. I hate getting mad. I’m no good at rage. So I said it’s going to be elegant, it’s going to be beautiful.” He downplayed the courage involved in the gesture: “I think I was very lucky I was brave enough to sing in that circumstance. My voice was trembling a little bit but not too much. I think that the most heroic thing I did that night was to keep my diaphragm steady to sing.”[18] Drexler’s handling of his Oscars moment was of a piece with the ethos of his song. “Putting one’s oar in the water” is a common metaphor to express the basic work one does to move oneself forward alongside others; it’s not the typical hero’s gesture unless we redefine heroism to match up with everyday labor. And “Al Otro Lado del Río” does not define the struggle of its singer in Manichean terms. His antagonist, the obstacle he faces, is not given an ugly face; it is merely the distance that he needs to traverse, through hard and steady work, to connect with the light.

If “Al Otro Lado del Rio” might be said to express the spirit of Latin American humanism, it does so in immanent terms—not by dueling with the forces of dehumanization but by giving positive voice to aspirations for connection and recognition. Arguably, there was no more fitting use, for Drexler, of the spotlight the Oscars provided: he offered a protest, but in the key of an alternative. Those viewers who only spoke English would have to reach for a translation to grasp it.

Meanwhile, in Uruguay, his Oscar win was “greeted with the enthusiasm reserved for international soccer upsets by the home team.” At the Montevideo house of Drexler’s parents, his family celebrated his win at 4:30 a.m. their time by spontaneously running out to their swimming pool and jumping in, clothes still on. Yet in the weeks that followed, Drexler refused to wear the garlands that his compatriots wished to present him. He did not want to be seen as a hero: “I don’t like heroes, I don’t want to be one. I did everything that was in my hand to avoid being treated like a hero in Uruguay.”  When he heard plans were afoot to honor him with tribute events, he put the kibosh on them, and when he did re-enter Uruguay a few weeks later to celebrate his father’s seventieth birthday, he did so privately, without notifying the press.[19]

The Possibility to Be Ethical

Drexler’s Oscar victory made a splash, then, but he did not seek to capitalize on it in the usual ways. He did not seek to penetrate the U.S. market by pitching himself as Uruguay’s answer to Paul Simon, or the thinking man’s Enrique Iglesias. “That would have been the perfect moment to do a Latin crossover and move to L.A. or to Miami,” Drexler reflected later. “If you have an Oscar, every door is going to be open, and you know you can call Rick Rubin and say, ‘I want to make the next record in LA with you.’”

Instead, Drexler’s personal circumstances pushed him in the opposite direction of the crossover dream. Four months after his Oscar victory, he and his wife, Ana Laan, separated. He told the New York Times, around the time of their separation, that although “the Oscar widened the space around me in every direction,” “what I want now is for it to stop expanding and contract a bit.” In pursuit of self-contraction, he moved not to L.A. or Miami but rather to Cabo Polonio, a remote hamlet on the eastern coast of Uruguay, unreachable by car, that had no electricity or running water. The result of this seclusion was the most melancholy record of his career, 12 Segundos de Oscuridad (12 Seconds of Darkness), its title inspired by the rhythm of Cabo Polonio’s lighthouse, which emitted one second of light for every twelve seconds of darkness. On the title track, Drexler stressed, against the grain, how sailors approaching Cabo Polonio orient themselves not simply by tracking the beam of light but by tuning into the contrast of light and darkness. Likewise, the album explored, in Drexler’s words, “darkness as a teacher, teaching you things during difficult times in life.”[20]

It was not an insistently political album, given that the balance of the record was filled out by what Drexler called “divorce songs,” but Drexler did signal his skepticism towards the U.S.-shaped world order through a cover of “Disneylandia” (1993) by the Brazilian rock group Titãs. Titãs’ original grunge-rock version had barked out the incongruities and disruptions of a Disneyfied world system: “Japanese lanterns and American gum in the Korean bazaars of São Paulo… Armenians naturalized in Chile looking for family members in Ethiopia.” By contrast, Drexler’s cover version was more subdued and stripped-down, the angry boil of the original song remade into a slow simmer. Replacing Titãs’s hard-rock guitars and groove with a light string arrangement and a lilting Middle Eastern rhythm, Drexler created a kind of meditative echo chamber, one in which the song’s clinching lines, “Iraqi children fleeing the war / can’t get a visa at the American consulate in Egypt / to enter Disneyland,” rang out more starkly. The 1993 song stood now as a kind of prophecy fulfilled, the dynamics of George H.W. Bush’s war in the Middle East repeated by his son’s administration, the plight of war refugees continuing to be juxtaposed ironically with the seductions of American capitalism.[21]

Musing twenty years later on his rejection of the crossover move, Drexler emphasized the ethics that stood behind it. The Oscar “gave me the chance to jump ahead and take a shortcut, or to stay true with what you want to do,” he said. “And that was a huge prize for me, bigger than the other prizes you know, to be proud of your intentions in this world. It gave me the possibility to be ethical with my songwriting.” The decision confirmed for him that he “was in the songwriting world for the reasons I love the most.” It was not to make money (after all, he had left behind a comfortable career in medicine for the uncertainty of a musician’s life, moving to a Madrid apartment that he shared with eight other Uruguayans when he was 30), but rather to explore himself and the possibilities of the art form he had chosen. In a world magnetized by “Disneylandia,” Drexler sincerely dedicated himself to interior scenes that were quieter and more ambiguous, and often more troubling.[22]

His purpose was to ask questions of himself in song, trusting that this inward process would link him to others. “Everything comes from empathy,” he explained. “I have the deep belief that I am part of the human race and so, go inside one human and you’ll be able to access all the other humans, at least in their culture and their generation.” For Drexler, “We have the same questions, or more or less. I don’t pretend to have the same questions as people who live in Taiwan or people who lived in the fourteenth century, but I do consider myself to have the average questions about life.” Drexler believed that the pursuit of “average questions,” in song, was his vocation, one that would, at once, push him deeper into himself and allow him to dissolve the forces that keep us apart, fixed in our solitude or our stances of anger and aggrievement. “I write for myself,” he said, “and I consider that since somehow I know people and feel equal to them, it will be useful to somebody else, what I do. And I’m really lucky because it looks like it happens.”[23]

Drexler’s description of his process, with its reliance on empathy and its faith in the commonalities of “the human race,” might sound old-fashioned or gauzily sentimental to ears trained on the “theory” debates of the postwar period in Western Europe and the U.S. Roland Barthes’s signature attack on Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition “The Family of Man,” in Mythologies (1957), tarred “classic humanism” as a form of ideological mystification, one that erased the historical differences that separated, say, the North African workers of Paris’s Goutte D’or district from those who had benefited from colonialism’s transfer of wealth. “The myth of the human ‘condition,’” Barthes wrote in a passage much-underlined by future undergraduates, “rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History.” Two decades later, Susan Sontag similarly skewered “The Family of Man” for its choice to emphasize ostensibly universal experiences over the fractures made by history: “By purporting to show that individuals are born, work, laugh, and die everywhere in the same way, ‘The Family of Man’ denies the determining weight of history—of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts.”

As Mark Greif observes in The Age of the Crisis of Man, the discourse of postwar humanism crumbled in the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. and Western Europe from a diverse set of pressures. Whether it was novelists who took “the abstract discourse of man into the realm of practicality and discovered its missing portions,” or activists who questioned “the concealment of differences in the rhetoric of man,” or thinkers who turned towards superpersonal structures and away from explanations rooted in individual consciousness, postwar humanism lost its authority as well as its ability to glue together many otherwise separate discourses. By the 1980s, the “family of man” seemed to have little purchase as an analytical concept, and a Western intellectual who relied on it risked the charge that they had succumbed to a gauzy sentimentality or abdicated their responsibility to parse the world in its complexity.[24]

Drexler maintains sincerity as a core value while at the same time disparaging the value of authenticity.

Perhaps, however, this story changes if we shift toward a South American perspective. To be sure, it’s well beyond the scope of this essay to speculate on the course of Latin American humanism in the wake of post-humanist theory, but the example of Jorge Drexler suggests, at the least, how humanist aspirations have served as midwives, rather than spoilers, of artistic innovation for Latin American artists. Here, Drexler could be considered in a line of innovative Latin American songwriters (many of whom he has collaborated with, such as the Panamanian Rubén Blades and the Brazilians Carlinhos Brown, Marisa Monte, Vitor Ramil, and Caetano Veloso), who have explored everyday life with far-ranging musical and lyrical wit.[25] He might also be regarded as cousin to the post-boomer U.S. fiction writers, such as David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jennifer Egan, and Susan Choi, who emerged at the same time as Drexler on the cultural scene and who revived the value of “sincerity” while recognizing that sincerity could not be achieved, artistically, by repeating the formulas of the past. As literary historian Adam Kelly has suggested, the U.S. writers of the “New Sincerity” combined “the cultivation of sincerity as a poetic value with an awareness of sincerity as a convention.”[26]

Notably, Drexler maintains sincerity as a core value (“I’m not only writing with my hands and with the words, I’m not only writing on the computer with my fingers, I have to feel that this is being pushed by a stronger force from behind”) while at the same time disparaging the value of authenticity: “I don’t think people should care about authenticity. Authenticity, it’s like sexual identity—you shouldn’t care about it because there’s not a lot you can do about that….Identity is one of the things that gets more sick in this society…and you have people from all the ranges of nationalism to fascism, people really trying to force an identity, and basically building an identity against another identity. That’s where lots of the problems come from.”[27] To be sincere but not invested in authenticity, to address others with no hierarchies in mind and be drawn to playful acts of collaborating and even merging with them: this is the moral and creative impetus behind Drexler’s art, often explicitly so.

Pocket Anthems for the Human Race

Drexler is an elegantly ludic pedagogue, opening his most recent albums with pocket anthems for the human race, songs that inventively reframe the “story of humankind” around long-lasting practices that traverse millennia and thousands of miles. In “Movimiento,” Drexler translates “immigration” from the register of the contemporary social sciences into the more poetic register of “movement.” The song evokes the epic and intimate quality of our movement as a species (“We crossed deserts, glaciers, continents / the whole world from end to end…We carry our wars with us, our lullabies / Our path made of verses, of migrations, of famines”), and traces the human need for movement back to the time “before time,” when “we were the drop of water traveling in the meteorite,” crossing “galaxies, the void, millennia.” “We were searching for oxygen,” Drexler intones, taking the point of view of the water drop in the meteorite. Then he quickly switches back to the human scale: “we found dreams.” The implication is that, for human beings as a species, the “dreams” inspired by our movement are our oxygen. To confine people to one spot is to issue their death sentence. Or, as Drexler evocatively ends his song: “It’s the same with songs, birds, alphabets / If you want something to die, keep it still.”[28]

“Bailar en la Cueva” inverts Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” welcoming the play of shadows in darkness rather than seeking after some greater reality.

On a larger aesthetic level, Drexler refused to “keep it still” on the album on which “Movimiento” appeared. On Salvavidas de Hielo, he asked his percussionists to abandon their usual drum sets and congas and instead use the guitar’s different percussive surfaces (the fretboard, the body, the sound hole, the bottom deck) as their only instrument. Even as he sang of age-old practices, then, Drexler was driven to make his own music new, to summon a fresh vocabulary of sound from a familiar instrument. 

“Bailar en la Cueva,” from the 2014 album of the same name, is a similarly fine marriage of form and function, a song about the renewing power of dance that also offers an unexpected twist on the genre of “dance music.” It was the fruit of a project on which Drexler self-consciously stepped away from his usual development of the “intellectual” and “emotional” components of song and embraced its “more physical aspects.” In “Bailar”’s lyrics, Drexler again happily merges a story about the present with a story about prehistoric times, connecting our own dancing underground to the practices of “cave” men and women. “The idea is eternally new,” he sings at the start, over a lightly plucked guitar. “The night falls / and we keep getting together to dance in the cave.” The beat of a bass drum enters in a four-to-the-floor pattern, and the song hits a new gear, its texture and groove thickening as its lyrics articulate how music bonds and transforms us.

“Bailar en la Cueva” is a song about the entanglements of “me” and “you,” and features singer Li Saumet from the Colombian group Bomba Estereo alongside Drexler, her insistent style complementing Drexler’s more relaxed one as they repeatedly evoke the imperative of dance: “Go with the rhythm like a cloud goes with the wind, / Not being in, but being the movement.” A repeated, syncopated guitar riff adds to the sense that there are many ways to “be” the movement itself; movement is made from the layering of many pulses on top of one another, not from a unison-like repetition. The singers embrace the loosening of the self, repeatedly asking the same question: “Do you guide me or do I guide you?” It’s a question formulated in wonder, not panic.[29]

“Bailar en la Cueva” inverts Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” welcoming the play of shadows in darkness rather than seeking after some greater reality. Near its end, Drexler moves into a recitative mode, one he often adopts when seeking to instruct his listeners:

In Plato’s allegory, those watching shadows on the wall are the unenlightened; in Drexler’s song, the shadows accompany an art form that, while sometimes dismissed as “primitive,” connects to our deeper capacities as a species. “Dance as a belief, as inheritance, as game”: Drexler connects dance to our ability to imagine, to draw from the past in the present, to be at play in the world. The practice may be more fundamental to human possibility, he implies, than a later invention like agriculture. And, of course, dance is tied to its cultural partner, music, which “teaches” as well as “dreams,” “hurts” as well as “heals”: the utopianism of the song is hedged by the acknowledgment that music can have a cutting edge or touch an exposed nerve, that its power to heal is tied to its power to hurt.

Over its last minute, “Bailar en la Cueva” almost seems to explode with its groove, in a way that is both inviting and jolting. Here, the song’s producers—Drexler, Carles ‘Campi’ Campón, and Sebastián Merlin—deserve credit for an arrangement that is cunning in design and delirious in effect: elements of the song, earlier introduced in sequence, are now layered on top of one another in simultaneity. The refrain “bailar en la cueva” interlaces with the repeated phrase “mi cuerpo al tuyo” (“my body in yours”), sung by Drexler and Saumet. A synthesizer adds a piercing note in the home key that flickers like a siren. The horn section of baritone sax, tenor sax, trombone, and trumpet becomes increasingly prominent in the mix, alternating between three riffs: a descending riff that would not be out of place in a marching band; a baritone sax riff that stomps on the beat; and a smeary ascending riff, with a more complex harmonic blend, that sounds like a motor revving.

At this ecstatic moment of culmination, the song both evokes the fundamentals of music-making and transports the listener into an utterly 21st-century soundscape—one where it seems sincerely possible to be “fully human” as we dance together.

About the Author

Scott Saul is Professor of English at UC-Berkeley and the author, most recently, of Becoming Richard Pryor.

Notes

The author wishes to thank Michael Kramer for his skillful editorial work since the conception of this piece, and Samuel Zipp and Bryan McCann for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft.

[1] Drexler’s lines might be translated into English as follows:

“I stick my paddle in the water, I carry your paddle in mine

I think I’ve seen a light on the other side of the river

The day will conquer, little by little, the cold

I think I’ve seen a light on the other side of the river”

[2] Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World (New York: Penguin, 2025), 287-290.

[3] Some otherwise appreciative reviewers have questioned Grandin’s handling of left-wing authoritarianism in Latin America: see Patrick Iber, “What America Can Learn from the Americas,” New Republic, 7 April 2025; Nicolás Medina Mora, “American Ideologies,” Dissent, 10 June 2025.

[4] America, América, pp. 52, 588-589. See also Grandin’s “Your Americanism and Mine: Americanism and Anti-Americanism in the Americas,” American Historical Review 111:4 (October 2006), 1042-1066, in which he suggests that “Catholic humanism, influenced by the Thomist school of rational natural law, injected into Latin American political liberalism a commitment to social solidarity and conscientiousness” (1053).

[5] For a historical account of humanism’s efflorescence in the midcentury U.S. and its subsequent loss of cultural purchase, see Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 (Princeton University Press, 2015).

[6] “El Plan Maestro,” Tinta y Tiempo (Sony Music, 2022); “Movimiento,” Salvavidas de Hielo (GASA, 2017); “Tudo Se Transforma,” Eco (Warner Music Latina, 2004).

[7] Leo Sidran, “Jorge Drexler: ‘Everything comes from empathy,” The Third Story, 28 January 2016; “Ecos de Drexler: Responde Jorge,” Montevideo Portal, 2 August 2004; Aaron Cohen, “Mixed emotions from Uruguay,” Chicago Tribune, 3 October 2005, E11; Hester Lacey, “Singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler: I don’t believe in shortcuts,” Financial Times, 15 April 2023; “Encuentro en el studio VII: Jorge Drexler,” Canal Encuentro (Argentina TV program), 27 July 2015.

[8] “Mixed emotions from Uruguay,” E11; “I Wanted This Record To Be Physical: An Interview with Jorge Drexler,” Sounds and Colours, 15 April 2015.

[9] Drexler, “Poetry, music and identity,” TED2017, April 2017.

[10] “Bailar en la Cueva,” Bailar en la Cueva (WEA, 2014).

[11] Leo Sidran, “Crossing the River: 20 Years After an Unexpected Oscar Win,” The Third Story, 4 March 2025. Sidran was a co-producer of “Al Otro Lado del Río,” and his podcast is an indispensable exploration of the song’s trajectory from conception to reception.

[12] “Crossing the River: 20 Years After an Unexpected Oscar Win”. See Richard Cándida Smith, Improvised Continent: Pan-Americanism and Cultural Exchange (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 262-274, for an expert consideration of The Motorcycle Diaries as a depiction of Guevara’s moral awakening that is liberal, not radical, but that also suggests the complexities of liberalism as an ideology.

[13] “Drexler: siempre al otro lado del río,” Clarín, 25 January 2005; Drexler, Frontera (Virgin Records Spain, 1999); Larry Rohter, “Latin American Singer’s Rainbow Coalition of Identities,” New York Times, 12 July 2005.

[14]  Jorge Drexler, “Al Otro Lado del Río,” Eco; “Crossing the River: 20 Years After an Unexpected Oscar Win”.

[15] “Crossing the River: 20 Years After an Unexpected Oscar Win”.

[16] “Crossing the River: 20 Years After an Unexpected Oscar Win”; Paula Prado, “A Tone-Deaf Oscar Snubbed the Best Song Winner,” Los Angeles Times, 2 March 2005, B13; Dana Stevens, “Ari, We Hardly Knew Ye,” Slate, 28 February 2005.

[17] Aaron Cohen, “Mixed emotions from Uruguay,” Chicago Tribune, 30 October 2005, E11; Prado, B13.

[18] “Crossing the River: 20 Years After an Unexpected Oscar Win.”

[19] Agustin Gurza, “Instant celebrity—for a song: Oscars win gives Drexler clout,” Chicago Tribune, 4 March 2005, B3; “Crossing the River: 20 Years After an Unexpected Oscar Win.”

[20] “Crossing the River: 20 Years After an Unexpected Oscar Win”; Rohter, “Latin American Singer’s Rainbow Coalition of Identities”; Andrés Pinzón Sinuco, “12 Segundos de Oscuridad: Jorge Drexler,” El Universal (Cartagena), 3 December 2011; Drexler, 12 Segundos de Oscuridad (Warner Music Latina 63828-2, 2006).

[21] Titãs, “Disneylandia,” Titanomaquia (WEA M993050-2, 1994).

[22] “Crossing the River: 20 Years After an Unexpected Oscar Win”; Rohter, “Latin American Singer’s Rainbow Coalition of Identities”.

[23] “Jorge Drexler: ‘Everything comes from empathy.”

[24] Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man, 255, 264, 285-286.

[25] Drexler has often cited Veloso as his “biggest influence” and inspiration. See, for instance, “Crossing the River: 20 Years After an Unexpected Oscar Win”; “La emoción de Jorge Drexler cuando Caetano Veloso le dedicó su show en Madrid: ‘Ningún premio iguala este’,” El Observador (Montevideo), 7 September 2023. On the aesthetic of the less-known Vitor Ramil, see Bryan McCann, “Seven Cold Cities: the Milonga of Vitor Ramil,” Brasiliana 4:1 (August 2015): 110-127.

[26] Adam Kelly, New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age (Stanford University Press, 2024). On the revival of sincerity in culture and the arts, with a focus on the post-Soviet case, see Ellen Rutten, Sincerity After Communism: A Cultural History (Yale University Press, 2017).

[27] Sidran, “Jorge Drexler: ‘Everything comes from empathy.”

[28] “Movimiento,” Salvavidas de Hielo. In the original Spanish, Drexler sings “Atravesamos desiertos, glaciares, continentes, / El mundo entero de extremo a extremo … Cargamos con nuestras guerras / Nuestro rumbo hecho de versos / De migraciones, de hámbrunas….Buscábamos oxígeno, / Encontramos sueños….Lo mismo con las canciones, los pájaros, los alfabetos / Si quiero que algo se muera, déjalo quieto.”

[29] “Jorge Drexler—Making of Bailar en la Cueva,” dir. Alberto Triano (Warner Music Spain), 25 March 2014; “Bailar en La Cueva.”

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