Conference Agenda

This contribution presents a historical examination of aural culture within Jesuit missions in northwestern New Spain. This region represented a highly contested and conflictive space in the colonization process since the beginning of its evangelization in the 16th century. The paper concentrates on the writings of six Jesuits active during the 17th and 18th centuries among diverse indigenous groups spanning present-day Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja California in Mexico, as well as Arizona in the United States: Johannes Rattkay, Johannes (Juan) Nentvig, Joseph Och, Ignaz Pfefferkorn, Philipp Segesser and Johann Jakob Baegert. Through these texts, we discern traces of the aural, providing insights into the role of sound in shaping, defending, and subverting Jesuit missionary culture.

Written by European missionaries of a German-speaking background, these texts are legible aural inscriptions which reflect distinct listening practices (Samuels, Meintjes, Ochoa & Porcello, 2010), aligning with early modern Western categorization of sound into musical and non-musical forms, with the latter often dismissed as mere noise (Ochoa Gautier, 2014). Nevertheless, the sources illuminate the challenges and ambiguities missionaries confronted in their endeavors to maintain and uphold Western liturgical and musical norms within an aural space composed of a variety of sounds, many of which posed challenges to the success of the evangelization process.

Consequently, this paper delves into the diverse array of sounds—musical, non-musical, human, non-human, religious-liturgical, or distinctly indigenous—presenting a more comprehensive understanding of Jesuit missionary culture as a contested and often uncertain arena of interaction and exchange. Instead of segregating sound from other sensory experiences (Sykes, 2019), a closer examination of the sources reveals the interconnectedness of the aural with listening, speech, vision, space, the corporeal, and everyday objects (musical and non-musical), affirming the potential of these historical texts for a more holistic exploration of missionary culture.

The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and the Civil War (1861–1865) left a significant mark on the music and culture of the southwestern United States. In New Mexico, the presence of Anglo-American soldiers and settlers during the Anglo occupation fostered a process of cultural hybridization (García Canclini, 1990; Bhabha, 1994), blending native, Hispanic, and Mexican musical practices with Anglo-American influences. This convergence gave rise to a complex tapestry of distinctive musical traditions (Mendoza, 1986; Koegel, 1997; Lamadrid, 2003; Robb, 2014), with many customs either adapting or disappearing altogether.

Amidst this rearticulation of geographic, epistemic, and racial borders, the “Historia Musical” by Inocencio Martínez (1828–1893) holds particular significance. As a military musician from Taos who participated in the Civil War (Aragón, 2019), Martínez compiled a manuscript rich in oral memory. The “Historia” documents around 200 musical pieces heard by Martínez across New Mexico between 1833 and 1889, including church chants, folk songs, and dance music of Mexican, Anglo-American, and European origin. While the document lacks systematic organization, it occasionally references titles, genres, composers and musicians (many of whom were local), as well as particular occasions for performance, and specific details about tonality or instrumentation.

Drawing from archival research, in this presentation I provide the first in-depth analysis of “Historia Musical” to offer a comprehensive overview of the everyday music performed in rural New Mexico before, during, and after these two major American wars. I argue that Martínez, through his reliance on memory and professional activity, preserved his Hispanic New Mexican musical tradition as a form of cultural resistance and affirmation of his expressive identity. Additionally, I explore the “Historia musical” as an archive of cultural hybridization, reshaping our understanding of the performances and representations of music and dance in 19th-century New Mexico. Finally, I demonstrate how music continued to be a vital component of everyday life and community celebrations for Hispanic New Mexicans, serving as a symbolic link to the past.

Compared to the U.S. Civil War, the United States’ invasion of Mexico in 1846 occupies a marginal space in the collective historical memory of the United States’ long 19th century. Music of the Mexican war is shrouded even more in a collective forgetting. Yet, the war’s archival documents constitute a treasure trove of primary and secondary witnessing of the war’s violent and traumatic events. Whether in battlefield reports, soldier memoires, piano battle music, or lithographs, these sources provide entry points into the sonic dimensions of wartime in late 1840s North America.

This paper will focus on a pivotal battle of the Mexican War, the Battle of Buena Vista or La Batalla de Angostura as it’s known in Mexico, which occurred on February 22 and 23, 1847. Drawing primarily from J. Martin Daughtery’s theorizations of the belliphonic (Daughtery, 2015), I explore how this battle may have been experienced in sound by combatants on both sides, which included Mexican and U.S. soldiers carrying the rank of músico/musician. I also draw on Elizabeth Morgan’s pathbreaking work on piano battle music of the Mexican and US Civil War and her incorporation of Amy Wlodarski’s secondary musical witnesses for my own theorization of trauma of the Battle of Buena Vista/Angostura’s belliphonic as articulated in the archival documents of primary as well as secondary witnesses on the battlefield and back home in the United States and Mexico (Morgan, 2015, 2023; Wlodarski, 2015). I thus read against and along the bias grain (Fuentes, 2016) of Mexican and US archival memory regimes to argue that Mexican and U.S. witnesses from the battlefield speak to us from the archive not only on their own behalf as survivors but from their fallen comrades’ final moments of life consumed sonically and physically with fear, violence, and pain.