A genre of musical theatre performed competitively during Montevideo's forty-day-long carnival, murga plays a crucial role in the life of the city, providing a forum within which the public can question the existing social order. I argue that murga is a form of cultural and identity politics, positioned at the intersection of historical narrative, collective memory, and physical location. Murga is both a locus of commemoration and a repository for histories which run parallel to official accounts and are often conscious expressions of political affiliation. Original lyrics recounting significant events of the past year and laced with social and political critique are set to existing melodies, usually drawn from a repertoire of well-known popular songs. Consequently, murga provides an unusually rich source of contemporary information: it is not only a record of events and responses to them, but also a testimony to the importance of popular musical genres over time, and a documentation of debates about modes and means of cultural production.

Murga also acts as a creator of communal space and collective identity through both physical presence and shared imagination. Intimately tied to place—neighbourhood, city, nation—it is a marker of identity for performers and audience members in Montevideo, and a link to home for Uruguayans further afield through radio, television and internet media. I examine these themes as they are addressed with an often conscious self-reflexivity by participants both on and off stage, drawing on critical analyses of lyrics, musical features, and interviews with performers and spectators. Uruguay and murga have been conspicuously absent from academic dialogue thus far, yet the idiosyncrasies of Montevidean carnival offer an important contribution to existing theoretical work on carnival, providing an example of interactions largely defined by class rather than racial politics, and a form of ritual inversion which simultaneously embraces elements of the status quo.