Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Refiguring American Music) - Softcover

Chávez, Alex E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822370182 ISBN 13: 9780822370185

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In Sounds of Crossing Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in the sounds and poetics of huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. Following the resonance of huapango's improvisational performance within the lives of audiences, musicians, and himself-from New Year's festivities in the highlands of Guanajuato, Mexico, to backyard get-togethers along the back roads of central Texas-Chávez shows how Mexicans living on both sides of the border use expressive culture to construct meaningful communities amid the United States' often vitriolic immigration politics. Through Chávez's writing, we gain an intimate look at the experience of migration and how huapango carries the voices of those in Mexico, those undertaking the dangerous trek across the border, and those living in the United States. Illuminating how huapango arribeño's performance refigures the sociopolitical and economic terms of migration through aesthetic means, Chávez adds fresh and compelling insights into the ways transnational music-making is at the center of everyday Mexican migrant life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alex E. ChÁvez is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and produced the album Serrano de CorazÓn by Guillermo VelÁzquez y Los Leones de la Sierra de XichÚ.

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Sounds of Crossing

Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño

By Alex E. Chávez

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-7018-5

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
INTRODUCTION: American Border/Lands, 
CHAPTER 1 Aurality and the Long American Century, 
CHAPTER 2 Companions of the Calling, 
CHAPTER 3 Verses and Flows at the Dawn of Neoliberal Mexico, 
CHAPTER 4 Regional Sounds: Mexican Texas and the Semiotics of Citizenship, 
CHAPTER 5 From Potosi to Tennessee: Clandestine Desires and the Poetic Border, 
CHAPTER 6 Huapango sin Fronteras: Mapping What Matters and Other Paths, 
CONCLUSION: They Dreamed of Bridges, 
EPILOGUE: "Born in the U.S.A.", 
COLOR PLATES, 
APPENDIX A: Musical Transcriptions, 
APPENDIX B: Improvised Saludados, 
NOTES, 
REFERENCES, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

AURALITY AND THE LONG AMERICAN CENTURY

A mild and enervating climate and their constant intercourse with the aborigines, who were and still are degraded to the very lowest class of human beings, all contributed to render the Mexicans a more ignorant and debauched people than their ancestors had been.

— JOEL POINSETT, LETTER TO SECRETARY OF STATE MARTIN VAN BUREN (1829)

Now sounds the march of new conquistadors in the American Southwest. ... Their movement is, despite its quiet and largely peaceful nature, both an invasion and a revolt.

— JOHN S. LANG AND JEANNYE THORNTON, "THE DISAPPEARING BORDER" IN U.S. NEWS

& WORLD REPORT (1985)

Nothing connects us all but imagined sound.

— BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

In beginning to explore the contemporary politics that surround Mexican migrants' musical expression within the cultural space of the U.S. nation-state, we must first historicize the aural constructions of Mexican culture as a nationalist project in Mexico and a racializing discourse in the United States. While twentieth-century cultural constructions in Mexico have positioned Mexican vernacular musics as authentic expressions of the national soul, to be found in the space of the idealized (though socially backward) countryside, narrative constructions in the United States have braced primitivist claims with regard to Mexican culture in the service of the projects of white racial hegemony and imperialism — or, in other words, a well-documented anti-Mexican xenophobia (Chavez 2008; Santa Ana 2002). I introduce the phrase the long American century to help frame the historical linkage between these ideological scriptings, which are central to both countries' nation-building projects.

Writing of the rise of industrial capitalism and the modern nation-state, British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm coined the long nineteenth century to refer to the period from the French Revolution to the start of World War I (1789–1914) in his striking trilogy The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (1962), The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1975), and The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (1987). We can identify similar processes of political and economic development in North America — in Mexico and the United States, specifically — from the mid-nineteenth century through the late twentieth century, beginning with the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), continuing through the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), and lasting up through the passage of NAFTA (1994). While Hobsbawm's sequel, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, makes the case for a short twentieth century — which according to him ends with the failure of state communism in 1991 — I call on Time publisher Henry Luce's infamous moral endorsement of the rise of U.S. hegemonic influence in global politics after World War II, which he terms the "American century." In other words, for ethnic Mexicans, the "American century" of U.S. political and economic domination began long before World War II — nearly a century earlier, to be precise. With this temporal frame in mind (1848–1994), two questions emerge for the purposes of this chapter: historically, how has the United States come to hear Mexico? And, indeed, what does Mexico sound like?

TRACK ONE: A MEXICAN SOUND?

The sonic landscape of Mexico is expansive, including everything from the popular regional Mexican stylings of contemporary banda and norteña to the electronic global chic of Nor-tec, the folk-inspired rock-hybrid sounds of Mexico City band CaféTacuba, and the vernacular afromestizo stringed music of Veracruz. However, more emblematic styles that have been deemed the sounds of a presumed national tradition — mariachi, for instance — come with their share of cultural baggage, always in need of disarticulation. Huapango is no exception.

The etymology of huapango is debated. To restate, Gabriel Saldívar (1937) maintains it is of Nahuatl origin, from the word cuahpanco, signifying "atop of the wood," a reference to the stomped zapateado dance performed atop a wooden platform. This seems to indicate that huapango refers explicitly to dance, and in part it does, for it may be seen as synonymous with the fandango social gathering centered around dance and music making in eighteenth-century New Spain, later banned during the Spanish Inquisition (G. Saldívar 1937; Sheehy 1979). Yet, over time, huapango has come to identify the musics played at such gatherings, particularly the huasteco and arribeño varieties. In music scholarship, within popular culture, and among practitioners of Mexican musics, the term huapango is, nevertheless, usually invoked as a reference to the galloping 6/8 rhythm that is typical of the style but has been interpreted across genres. This and other musicological features make it familiar and recognizable — many ethnic Mexicans and appreciators of Mexican music know huapango when they hear it in all of its variations, from huapango norteño to its echoes in the work of tribal DJs and its bel canto performance by the immortal stars of Mexican cinema. The last example is what sounds in the ears of many as a type of classic or authentic huapango. While the popularity of the form outside of its region of origin — along the Gulf coast and in the central states of Guanajuato, Hidalgo, Puebla, Querétaro, and San Luís Potosí — owes much to the silver screen, this stylized representation is, ultimately, a complicated one that reveals much about the knotted relationship between performance, the semiotics of authenticity, and the sonic borders of national identity.

A life lived in a sepia film — smoky mountains tower in the distance, endless plots of lush farmland roll out from the foothills, and a Spanish-tiled hacienda glows beneath a big, open sky dotted with giant feathery clouds. Impeccably dressed charros (horsemen) on horseback patrol caliche-paved streets flanked by primitive jacal dwellings as women sheepishly dash from one abode to the next, their heads down, tugging firmly at their rebozos. Swells of ambiguously folkloric music suddenly flood the landscape, flowing in diegetically from beyond. The atmosphere is now sonically poised for men (and rarely women) to croon heartfelt serenades beneath picturesque balconies or cry out passionately in crowded cantinas, projecting out in the full-throated estilo...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822370182
• ISBN 13: 9780822370185
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 456
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland