Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThis fascinating volume explores how music enables the definition of national and community-based identities, while at the same time its unstoppable flow makes it cross borders constantly. Nothing can stop the migration of sounds that express emotions intimately woven into identities produced in new territories. The authors in this volume address such paradox by examining different musical expressions of mexicanidad, a type of mexicanidad traversed by sounds that have migrated – such as cumbia or rumba – and which confronts a decentering of the nation. Thus, this original and provocative book approaches sonic spaces in terms of what I would call aural auras (to echo Walter Benjamin’s idea): spaces that wrap identities in specific social contexts. Mexicanidad has an aural aura that changes, breaks, or disappears, and it is analyzed from very diverse perspectives in this book. -- Roger Bartra, Emeritus Researcher, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
This unique collective work explores the dialectic between national self-assertion and its subversion, through a remarkable range of situated musical practices. Its authors are committed both to ethnographic and theoretical engagement, even as they invite readers to familiarize themselves with the rich and varied soundscapes that are reshaping the very idea of “Mexican identity" today.
-- Claudio Lomnitz, Columbia University
Table of ContentsForeword
by Chela Sandoval
Introduction: Post-Mexicanidad apropos of the Postnational
by Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell
1.Afrodiasporic Visual and Sonic Assemblages: Racialized Anxieties and the Disruption of Mexicanidad in Cine de Rumberas
by Laura G. Gutiérrez
2.The Danza de Inditas in the Mexican Huasteca Region: Decolonizig Nationalist Discourse
by Lizette Alegre González
3.Chavela’s Frida: Decolonial Performativity of the Queer Llorona
by Ana R. Alonso-Minutti
4.Vaquero World: Queer Mexicanidad, Trans Performance, and the Undoing of Nation
by Nadine Hubbs
5.“Soy gallo de Sinaloa jugado en varios palenques”: Production and Consumption of Narco-music in a Transnational World
by César Burgos Dávila and Helena Simonett
6.Yo lo digo sin tristezas (I say it without lament): Transnational Migration, Postnational Voicings, and the Aural Politics of Nation
by Alex E. Chávez
7.Reclaiming ‘the Border’ in Texas-Mexican Conjunto Heritage and Cultural Memory
by Cathy Ragland
8.Sounding Cumbia: Past and Present in a Globalized Mexican Periphery
by Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell
9.Southern California Chicanx Music and Culture: Affective Strategies within a Browning Temporal System of Global Contradictions
by Peter J. García
10.Listening from ‘The Other Side’: Music, Border Studies and The Limits of Identity Politics
by Alejandro L. Madrid
