The Guarani and its Great Voices: The Genre that Spoke for a Nation (1925–present)

The response the system gave was institutional silence. The response he gave himself was guarani.

Flores took a Paraguayan polka known as Maerãpa Reikuaase, by Rogelio Recalde — and made it play slower. Herminio Giménez directed the experiment at reduced speed. The result had the body's rhythmic pulse of the polka paraguaya — that 6/8 beat which is the mark of water for all the country's music — but slow tempo left space for longer, more lyrical, more charged with melancholy phrases, ñe'ã py'a — the weight of the heart.

He gave it the name of a poem: Canto a la Raza (1910), by Guillermo Molinas Rolón, used the term "guarani" to refer to the land of the Guaraníes. It was the right word.

José Asunción Flores y Manuel Ortiz Guerrero: the duo that defined the genre

Every great musical genre needs an alliance between the musician and the poet. Guarania found its match in 1928, when Flores met Manuel Ortiz Guerrero, poet from Guairá who lived with lupus in his body and a sensitivity that transformed physical pain into images of extraordinary precision.

The Flores-Ortiz Guerrero duo produced the greatest guaranias: "India" — declared national popular song by decree of the Paraguayan Executive Power in 1944, the same distinction that only shared with "Campamento Cerro León" and "Cerro Corá" —, "Ne Rendápe Aju" (Vine a tus pies), "Arribeño Resay", "Kerasy". Songs that played on the radios, at parties, at funerals, in the mouths of people who many times didn't know they had a name or author but who felt them as their own.

Ortiz Guerrero died in 1934, before seeing the magnitude of what they had created together. Flores continued composing"Panambi Verá", the symphonic guaranias, the most ambitious sound poems — and continued paying the price of his politics. He was a communist in a country that at different moments of his life was governed by military regimes and by the dictatorship of Stroessner. He lived half of his life exiled in Buenos Aires, where he developed a substantial part of his work. He died on May 16, 1972, in Argentina. His remains were repatriated to Paraguay only in 1991, after the fall of Stroessner, and he now rests in a plaza in Asunción that bears his name.

That the creator of the most national genre of Paraguay spent decades exiled from the country he loved — with his songs being listened to and sung by the very Paraguayans that the regime that expelled him governed — is one of the most painful paradoxes of Latin American cultural history.

Herminio Giménez: the musician who set the metronome

Herminio Giménez (1905–1991) was the musician who in 1925 directed the first experiment of guarania, the man who literally marked the new tempo. As a composer, he was one of the most prolific of the foundational generation: "Lejanía", "Mi Oración Azul", "Cerro Corá" — the last one also declared national popular song in 1944. As an interpreter, he developed a career that combined popular music with symphonic composition.

The dictatorship of Stroessner pushed him into exile in Argentina, where he lived most of his life in the city of Corrientes — the city of the most culturally linked to Paraguay on the Argentine coast, where Guarani is heard in the streets and guarania on the radios. He returned to Paraguay after the fall of Stroessner in 1989 and died in Asunción in 1991, at the age of eighty-six, after having seen his country recover democracy and his music be reclaimed.

Agustín Barboza: the first recorded voice of the guarania

Agustín Pío Barboza (1913–1998) holds a unique place in the history of the guarania: he was the first interpreter to record the genre. In 1934, in Buenos Aires, he sang with José Asunción Flores the guarania "Ñasaindype" — the first existing recording of guarania. It was the voice that gave body to Flores' invention, translating the instrumental melody into song.

Barboza had arrived in Buenos Aires from Asunción as a teenager, embarked as a sailor on the river Paraná, and had built in the Argentine capital a career as an interpreter that made him one of the most beloved singers of Paraguayan music abroad. He formed a trio with Félix Pérez Cardozo and Eulogio Cardozo — the guitar, the harp and the voice in their most classic combination — and recorded dozens of discs that circulated throughout Latin America. He died in Asunción in 1998, at the age of eighty-five, with the title of patriarch of the guarania rightly earned.

Demetrio Ortiz: the composer of the two world anthems

If Flores was the inventor and Barboza the first interpreter, Demetrio Ortiz was the composer who brought guarania to listeners around the world without many of them knowing it was Paraguayan.

His two best-known works are the most internationalized guaranias in the history of the genre. "Recuerdos de Ypacaraí" — with lyrics by Zulema de Mirkin about Lake Ypacaraí, that water mirror thirty kilometers from Asunción, which in the collective imagination of Paraguay is the equivalent of the Danube for Central Europeans — was recorded by Julio Iglesias and became one of the most listened-to songs in Latin American music in Spain and Iberoamerica. "Mis Noches sin Ti" was recorded by Nino Bravo and became a hit in Spain during the 1970s, listened to by millions without knowing it was a Paraguayan guarania.

Ortiz received that indirect recognition in silence — his famous songs around the world signed with his name but identified by listeners as "Spanish music" or "Latin American music" without further precision — which is the fate of composers from small countries whose interpreters are from large countries.

Luis Alberto del Paraná: the ambassador with guitar and voice

If the guarania had a composer who invented it (Flores), a musician who defined the tempo (Herminio Giménez), a first recorded interpreter (Barboza) and a composer who internationalized it without knowing it (Demetrio Ortiz), it also had an ambassador who took it personally to the stages of the world with an energy and persistence that no other Paraguayan musician had had before.

Luis Alberto del Paraná — whose real name was Luis Osmer Meza, born in Altos, Cordillera, on June 21, 1926 — was the son of a school teacher, grew up among siblings near Ypacaraí and showed vocal talent from a young age. At sixteen, he participated in a singing contest in Asunción. He won.

In 1953, the Paraguayan government entrusted him with a mission that had all the characteristics of impossibility: to take Paraguayan music to Europe. They gave him three thousand two hundred dollars along with each of his two companions — the harpist Digno García and the guitarist and singer Agustín Barboza — and sent them across the Atlantic as an Official Cultural Mission. The three boarded from Buenos Aires on the transatlantic Giulio Cesare heading to Genoa.

The first performance of that trip was at Radio Vaticano, where they performed "India" by José Asunción Flores. The Pope listened to Paraguayan guarania in Rome. It was May of 1954.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary careers in Latin American popular music of the 20th century. Luis Alberto del Paraná y Los Paraguayos — the group that built around that first formation — performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London, at the Olympia in Paris, at the Hilton Hotel in Cairo, at the Elizabeth Theatre in Hong Kong, at the Madison Square Garden in New York, in front of twenty thousand people in a single concert. They toured more than seventy-six countries. They recorded more than five hundred songs in fifty-one albums. They sold more than thirty million discs — for which they received the Golden Globe in Germany in 1971.

Luis Alberto del Paraná died in London on September 15, 1974, at the age of forty-eight, while still on tour. He had planned to return definitively to Paraguay — he had told his doctor that same year that he would go to settle all matters in Europe and return — but death came before. Paraguay said goodbye with the broadcast on all the country's radio stations, from the arrival of the coffin at Asunción airport to the burial in the Italian Cemetery of Recoleta.

Florentín Giménez and the second generation

The first generation of guarania composers — Flores, Herminio Giménez, Demetrio Ortiz, Cardozo Ocampo — was followed by a second that took the genre and expanded it without abandoning its essence. Florentín Giménez wrote "Así Canta mi Patria" and "Ka'aguype" — the latter one of the most lyrical and most performed guaranias in concerts of the second half of the twentieth century. Maneco Galeano, Eladio Martínez, Emigdio Ayala Báez and Mauricio Cardozo Ocampo composed guaranias that expanded the repertoire with a consistency that no other popular Paraguayan genre has matched.

Guarania outside Paraguay: Brazil, Argentina, the world

The guarania did not stay in Paraguay. Due to geographical and emotional reasons, the genre crossed the Paraná River early on and settled in the northeastern part of Argentina — Misiones, Corrientes, Formosa, Chaco, Entre Ríos — where Guarani is a living language and Paraguayan music is part of the everyday soundscape. In Argentina, guarania has the status of regional music with deep popular roots, especially in the communities of Paraguayan immigrants and in the border provinces.

In Brazil, the singer duo Cascatinha e Inhana — Francisco dos Santos and Ana Eufrosina, a married couple of sertanejo singers — recorded guaranias in Portuguese since the 1940s and took them to the deep interior of rural Brazil, where the public adopted them as part of their own repertoire without too much concern for their Paraguayan origin. This is how truly popular music works: it crosses borders because it says things that borders cannot contain.

Julio Iglesias, Gal Costa, Nino Bravo, Joan Manuel Serrat, Chico Buarque, Silvio Rodríguez, León Gieco, Ricardo Montaner, Toquinho: the list of artists who performed guaranias says more about the power of the genre than any critical argument.

The Guarania in the 21st Century

In 2020 the Guarania was declared Cultural Heritage of the Nation in Paraguay. In December of 2024 it was inscribed in the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity List of UNESCO — the highest recognition the international community can give to a living cultural expression. The year 2025, on the centenary of the creation of the genre, Paraguay officially declared it Year of the Guarania.

A hundred years after José Asunción Flores slowed the tempo of a polka in the Asunción Police Band, the genre he invented is heritage of humanity. The creator died in exile in Buenos Aires. His songs survived him in the heart of the people he loved and that the regime which expelled him could not protect him from listening to.

Editor's note: There is in the history of guarania an economy of injustice worth mentioning. José Asunción Flores created the most national genre of Paraguay and lived half of his life exiled from the country that had produced him. Herminio Giménez co-directed the first experiment and also ended up in the exile of Corrientes. Luis Alberto del Paraná took Paraguayan music to seventy-six countries and died in London without having been able to return. They are stories of love for a country that did not always know how to receive its own older children. That guarania has survived all of this — that it still sounds as true today as it did in 1925 — says something fundamental about the difference between politics and music.