Full Description
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.
Contents
List of Figures ; List of Music Examples ; Acknowledgements ; Map of the U.S.-Mexico Border ; Chapter 1. Transnational Musical Encounters at the U.S.-Mexico Border: An Introduction by Alejandro L. Madrid ; I. Border Meanings ; Chapter 2. Reggae on the Border: The Possibilities of a Frontera Soundscape by Luis Alvarez ; Chapter 3. Breaking Borders / Quebrando fronteras: Dancing in the Borderscape by Sydney Hutchinson ; Chapter 4. Narcocorridos: Narratives of a Cultural Persona and Power on the Border by Mark C. Edberg ; II. Nationalisms ; Chapter 5. Mariachi Reimaginings: Encounters with Technology, Aesthetics, and Identity by Donald Henriques ; Chapter 6. "This is Our Musica, Guy!: Tejanos and Ethno/Regional Musical Nationalism by Jose E. Limon ; III. Indigeneity and Modernity ; Chapter 7. Re-localized Rap and its Representation of the Hombre digno by Helena Simonett ; Chapter 8. Waila as Transnational Practice by Joan Titus ; IV. Cultural Citizenship and Rights ; Chapter 9. Transnational Identity, the Singing of and the
