The Course of Mexican Music

Janet Sturman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317551126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

The Course of Mexican Music provides students with a cohesive introductory understanding of the scope and influence of Mexican music. The textbook highlights individual musical examples as a means of exploring the processes of selection that led to specific musical styles in different times and places, with a supporting companion website with audio and video tracks helping to reinforce readers' understanding of key concepts. The aim is for students to learn an exemplary body of music as a window for understanding Mexican music, history and culture in a manner that reveals its importance well beyond the borders of that nation.

Chapter 1
Why Study Mexican Music?

Mutually Engaged Audiences

“Why Mexican music?” was a question I heard often when I told people that I was writing an introduction to Mexican music for university students in the United States. People asked: “Why not write a book about Latin American music in general? Why not broaden your scope?” Why the focus on Mexican music? My answer begins by pointing out the great influence that Mexican music has exerted on musical culture throughout the Americas, meaning all the countries of North, Central, and South America. It can be argued as well that the mutual engagement between the United States and Mexico stands as the most powerful international relationship in the hemisphere. The fortunes of Mexico and the United States are inextricably related and any study that promises deeper insight into the history, culture, and values of people, as our investigation of music certainly will, is well worth the effort. Mexico has shaped what U.S. citizens call American culture,¹ past and present, just as the United States has influenced the course of history in Mexico. The observations of historian Juan Gonzalez address this link and remind us of its complicating tensions:

The Mexican Diaspora is at the core of our country’s Latino heritage. Not only are two of every three Latinos in the United States of Mexican origin, but only Mexicans can claim to be both early settlers on U.S. soil and the largest group of new arrivals. So many Mexicans have come since 1820 that they are now the second-largest immigrant nationality in our history. No Hispanic group has contributed more to the nation’s prosperity than Mexicans, yet none makes white America more uneasy about the future.

(Gonzalez 2000:96)

Gonzalez’s statement resonates with the contemporary politics that frame American scholarship and study of Mexico. In Arizona, to take one state at the center of current debates regarding immigration policies, the rhetoric regarding Mexico has been heated, vacillating between interest and dismissal; acceptance and rejection. Yet, despite the Arizona legislature’s suspicion of ethnic studies courses and the ruling by the state board of regents to eliminate or marginalize Mexican studies courses in K-12 education in Arizona public schools,² the University of Arizona remains a leader in Mexican and Mexican-American studies, as well as in Latin American studies in general. Furthermore, the University of Arizona’s course on the Music of Mexico, which inspired this book, is so popular that students have filled every one of the 50–70 seats available each semester since 1980, when the course was first offered.

Mexico is not simply a neighbor to the United States; the destinies of these two nations are linked. Equally important, Mexico has been described as a gateway to Latin America. Mexican music has a long history of interaction and exchange with music throughout Latin America, where we find shared legacies, formats, and contemporary concerns, despite important cultural distinctions. Profitable comparisons may be made between Mexico and virtually any nation in the Americas and the Hispanic world.

To explore the culture of Mexico is to engage with the scope and grandeur of the American experience writ large. As a specific case study, our investigation allows us to explore in depth forms and processes that reveal the power of music to enrich human experience. The study of Mexican music, like that of any music, offers a productive and positive avenue to deepen understanding of a culture while also developing an appreciation for the role of music in society and the generalizable power of human creative genius.

Examining Music as an Integrative Frame

The concept of integration unifies this text. There is no single activity that speaks to the genius and expressive power of Mexican music overall more than the process of integration. At every turn in history, and in different ways in different communities, Mexican musicians have adopted foreign elements, integrating some of them into existing practices, and transforming the result into expressions that serve local needs. However, the musical integration, like that of cultural and social integration, has been selective and uneven. Only in recent decades, for example, have the music and culture of Afro-Mexicans been promoted, or some cases even recognized, as with the Mascogo capayuye, the black gospel singers of Coahuila (Madrid 2011:171–190). Nor did the official narrative of mestizaje (racial mixture) give much attention to Mexicans of Chinese ancestry, despite the strong presence and contributions of this population. Chinese-Mexican presence in life and music is explored in Chapter 7. The process of merging people, perspectives, and resources is one that Mexico shares with many nations and cultures. Throughout this text, we will explore the choices of the Mexican people, to discover what makes them distinctive, as well as what we can learn from them.

The contents of this book integrate music of various musical styles, contrasting contexts, and different time periods, connecting them all to the practices and expectations of various communities of people. Individuals and groups divided by ethnicity, social class, occupation, economic status, gender, or age are often united through music—even when that same music once served as a marker of exclusion or difference. While a truly comprehensive treatment is neither possible nor desirable in a textbook, this book aims to reflect the rich scope of Mexican musical life. It is the author’s hope that the material included in this text will stimulate individual investigations and invite additional examination of the social and artistic interactions that are often obscured by our custom of thinking in simple categories.

Immigrant Identities and Contributions

Migration and immigration are processes that have affected Mexican culture in much broader ways than most Americans recognize. Music resulting from migration is an important subject of this book. U.S. residents tend to focus on the migration of Mexicans into the United States. There is little question that the back and forth travel that characterizes Mexican–U.S. migration has shaped culture on both sides of the Rio Grande. Less recognized however, is the scope of foreign immigration into Mexico. Spaniards may be considered the first immigrants, and we will explore the results of Iberian rule in Chapters 3–5. The musical legacy of French and German influence in later decades is explored in Chapter 6.

Cosmopolitan aspirations stimulated internal migration from the provinces to the cities, as well as Mexican travel abroad, a topic explored in Chapter 7. As historian Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp (2007) points out, trade with Asia stimulated migration from the Near East, particularly merchants from Turkey, Christians from Lebanon, and Jews from Syria. The richest man in Mexico, and currently in the world, Carlos Slim Heliú, offers a prominent example. His father immigrated to Mexico from Lebanon in 1902 and his mother’s parents, also Lebanese, arrived in the nineteenth century. Social histories by Romero-Chan (2010), Truett (2006), and others, document the arrival of businessmen and laborers from the Far East, particularly China, Korea, and Japan, who began coming in large numbers in the nineteenth century to Mexico. Russian immigration swelled in the years surrounding the Revolution of 1910. In the years following the Mexican Revolution, people of various backgrounds considered Mexico as a promised land (Katz 1981). Migrants from Central Europe and the Near East acted on this belief, and those arriving in Mexico seeking fortune or relief from religious persecution during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries included Mormons, Mennonites, and Jews (Buchenau 2001).

The nation did not always welcome immigration without discrimination, and Mexican laws to limit foreign immigration initiated after 1920 are but one example of concurrent resistance to a multicultural society.

Nonetheless, integration proceeded, even if its constituents were submerged in the official narratives of Mexicanidad (Mexicanness). The constant effort to adjust the blend, as reflected or guided by music, pervades discussion throughout this book.

Geographies and Contexts

Place matters. People turn to musicians to help them mark territory, and like food and dress, music also serves as an important calling card for regional identity and pride. A comfortable knowledge of the geographical map of Mexico, including knowing the names and locations of the 32 federal entities of the modern United States of Mexico, is essential for informed reflection on Mexican music. See Figure 1.1 for a map showing the states of Mexico, which readers are encouraged to memorize. Our study of the long-standing associations of music with specific geographic regions of Mexico peaks with our examination of regional poetic dance song (sones regionales) in Chapter 5. Discussion throughout the text, and particularly in Chapters 7–12, invites consideration of persistent distinctions between center and periphery, with examples that show how musical practice both reflects and promotes political position, economic power, local values, and transnational experience.

Examining Difference, Evaluating Concepts of the Essential

Exploring music as a social act as well as a sonic act is a complex project. Often what most interests listeners and the music student are those aspects of musical practice that differentiate one culture’s music from another. Yet, as anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod (2006) has noted, celebrating difference without examining and critiquing the philosophies and habits of mind that promote those differences, may lead to promoting social inequities. Reducing people and their cultural expressions to a limited set of essential characteristics, a process that critics refer to as “essentialization” (see Krupat 1996), leads to static or confining stereotypes. Ronald Radano (2000) offers an example of this process with his discussion of how Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century came to view the so-called “hot rhythms” of jazz as representing the essential quality of all African-American music. While white Americans considered the hot rhythms of African-American jazz as different and exciting, they also associated them with beast-like primitivism, thus reinforcing justifications for racial segregation and discrimination. At the same time, Radano observes, society’s enthusiasm for hot rhythm helped create new professional opportunities for black musicians. Similar contradictions can be observed in the ways that Mexican society simultaneously and over time, stereotyped, rejected, consumed, and incorporated minority or foreign musical styles, including American jazz and Cuban music. As we will explore, the gradual creation of an official mariachi repertory that both homogenized and celebrated regional practices, or the early development of a tradition of classical art music that both reinvented ancient indigenous music, focusing on a few select characteristics, while rejecting local Indian peasants provide two other examples colored by processes of cultural essentialization. Careful readers will look for how nuances of identity, and correspondingly, recognition and value, may have been lost in the process of integration and promotion. Readers of this text should think reflexively about the processes of simplification, including those necessary for their own understanding. Consider how the promotion of various music reflects social policies, reinforces or denies power, and undergirds creative expression. As we shall see, a society’s celebration of essential qualities carries social and artistic consequences.

To question cultural essentialization is not to dismiss the value of generalizations in all contexts. While there are good reasons to resist reducing complexity to a set of simple principles and forms, the purpose of any introductory text is to make th...