Transnational Encounters Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border

by Madrid, Alejandro L.

• ISBN13: 9780199735921
• ISBN10: 0199735921
• Edition: Bilingual
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-28
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Through the study of a large variety of musical practices from the U.S.-Mexico border, this book seeks to provide a new perspective on the complex character of this geographic area. By focusing not only on nortena, banda or conjunto musics (the most stereotypical musical traditions among Hispanics in the area) but also engaging a number of musical practices that have often been neglected in the study of this border's history and culture (indigenous musics, African American musical traditions, pop musics), the authors in this book provide a glance into the diversity of ethnic groups that have encountered each other throughout the area's history. Against common misconceptions about the U.S.-Mexico border as a predominant Mexican area, this book argues that it is diversity and not homogeneity what characterizes it. From a wide variety of disciplinary and multidisciplinary enunciations, the essays in this book explore the transnational connections that inform these musical cultures while keeping an eye on their powerful local significance, in an attempt to redefine notions like "border," "nation," "migration," "diaspora," etc. Looking at music and its performative power through the looking glass of cultural criticism allows this book to contribute to larger intellectual concerns and help redefine the field of U.S.-Mexico border studies beyond the North/South and American/Mexican dichotomies. Furthermore, the essays in this book, from a wide variety of disciplinary and multidisciplinary enunciations, problematize some of the widespread misconceptions about U.S.-Mexico border history and culture in the current debate about immigration.

Author Biography

Alejandro L. Madrid is a musicologist and cultural theorist whose research focuses on the intersection of modernity, tradition and globalization in music and expressive culture from Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the circum-Caribbean. His books have received IASPMs Woody Guthrie Rook Award and the Casa tie las Amricas Musicology Prize, hie is associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the U

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. xi
List of Music Examples	p. xiii
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Map of the U.S.-Mexico Border	p. xvii
Transnational Musical Encounters at the U.S.-Mexico Border: An Introduction	p. 1
Border Meanings
Reggae on the Border: The Possibilities of a Frontera Soundscape	p. 19
Breaking Borders/Quebrando fronteras: Dancing in the Borderscape	p. 41
Narcocorridos: Narratives of a Cultural Persona and Power on the Border	p. 67
Nationalisms
Mariachi Reimaginings: Encounters with Technology, Aesthetics, and Identity	p. 85
"This Is Our Música, Guy!": Tejanos and Ethno/Regional Musical Nationalism	p. 111
Indigeneity and Modernity
Re-localized Rap and its Representation of the Hombre digno	p. 129
Waila as Transnational Practice	p. 149
Cultural Citizenship and Rights
Transnational Identity, the Singing of Spirituals, and the Performance of Blackness among Mascogos	p. 171
Transnational Cultural Constructions: Cumbia Music and the Making of Locality in Monterrey	p. 191
Patriotic Citizenship, the Border Wall, and the "El Veterano" Conjunto Festival	p. 207
Trans-Border Cosmopolitan Audiotopias
The Tijuana Sound: Brass, Blues, and the Border of the 1960s	p. 231
La avanzada regia: Monterrey's Alternative Music Scene and the Aesthetics of Transnationalism	p. 252
Contested Identities
New Mexico and 'Manitos at the Borderlands of Popular Music in Greater Mexico	p. 287
"Todos me llaman El Gringo": Place, Identity, and Erasure within the New Mexico Hispano Music Scene	p. 312
Performing Locality and Gender
From Pistol-Packing Pelado to Border Crossing Mojado: El Piporro and the Making of a "Mexican" Border Space	p. 341
Dancing Reggaetón with Cowboy Boots	p. 373
Contributors	p. 393
Index	p. 399
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