Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Daily Overview |
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Resilience and Dystopian Cities in Latin America Session Chair: Kristen Graves Discussant: Alyssa Cottle | |
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Lila Downs’ Border/La Línea (2001): Representation, Neoliberalism, and “World Music” University of Maryland, College Park Since the beginning of her career in the mid-1990s, singer-songwriter Lila Downs (b. 1968) has represented her Mixtec Indigenous, Mexican, and U.S. American heritage in her music. Downs is known for blending musical styles, from traditional Mexican genres like rancheras and corridos, to cumbia, jazz, and hip hop. Also reflecting her tri-cultural background, she interprets songs with texts in Spanish, English, and Indigenous languages, especially Mixtec and Zapotec, and usually performs while wearing the huipil, a traditional Indigenous garment. Downs’ emergence as a “world music” artist occurred at a time of social, political, and economic transformation for Mexico and its relationship to the U.S., with the 1994 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and eruption of the Zapatista uprising, and a few years later, the aftermath of the 2000 Mexican presidential elections. It was in this context that she recorded the 2001 album Border/La Línea for the “world music” label Narada World. This release weaves themes of Indigeneity, gender inequality, and social justice, focusing on issues related to the U.S.-Mexico border and Mexican migrant experience. Besides songs that explore the effects of NAFTA on Mexico’s working-class, this album features a medley of “Pastures of Plenty” and “This Land Is Your Land,” thereby shifting the meanings of these classic Woody Guthrie songs. Building on scholarship on the intersections of popular music, migration, globalization, and U.S.-Mexico border politics (Ragland 2009; Madrid 2011; Ramos-Kittrell 2020; Días Santana-Garza 2021), this paper examines two songs from Border: “La Niña” (“The girl”), and “La Línea” (“The line”). Through musical and lyrical analysis, I investigate how Downs artistically represented conditions of neoliberalism at the U.S.-Mexico border in a manner that catered to cosmopolitan “world music” audiences. I argue that these songs illuminate the effects of neoliberalism in the region by depicting the labor conditions of vulnerable groups, especially women, while performing a “strategic exoticism” (Saavedra 2012; Guldin 2021) that aligned with “world music” aesthetics. Ultimately, this paper contributes to scholarly conversations about popular music and neoliberalism in the Americas at the turn of the twenty-first century. | |