When scholars and cultural promoters alike speak of the Huasteca and its music, overwhelming attention is afforded to local repertories of sones, huapangos, and danzas, which are upheld as markers of regional identity and tradition. However, the sonic environment of the Huasteca is largely defined by musical genres that are at once commercial and regionally-bound: these include wewa, a style of keyboard-forward tropical cumbia, and the trío versátil, a group that adapts popular styles such as ranchera, norteña, corrido, and canción to the instrumentation of a trío huasteco. While wewa and tríos versátiles both boast a decades-long history of popular reception in the region, official state-sponsored cultural programming has actively resisted their inclusion into framings of Huasteco identity. An emergent class of new traditionalist performers, referred to tongue-in-cheek as the “policía del son,” identify these styles as indicators of a culture under assault and in decline. This presentation provides an overview of the cultural-ideological landscape among Huasteco musicians. It demonstrates how performers who are linked to the formal cultural sector are more likely to align with the “police”, while performers who depend on playing private events have fewer qualms playing popular styles. This presentation challenges assumptions about tradition and heritage, exposing how ideological purity among musicians hardly correlates with other widely-celebrated markers of Huasteco authenticity, such as age, geographical remoteness, indigeneity, or hereditary musicianship. Indeed, as in all forms of policing, those who seek to regulate repertory ultimately rely on certain social privileges to establish and maintain authority.

Musical performance and participation have long been central to the social life of Irish-language communities in Ireland and abroad, serving as both a pedagogical tool and a linguistic soundtrack, particularly for new speakers of Irish. In recent years, hip hop has emerged as a powerful genre that empowers new Irish speakers by providing a platform for cultural expression while also serving as an educational tool and community builder. This paper examines how Kneecap, a Belfast-based Irish-language hip-hop group, has fostered interest in Irish and reshaped cultural identity as an Irish-language speaker. Since their debut in 2017, Kneecap's tracks have garnered over two million streams each on Spotify. Although not the pioneers of hip hop as Gaeilge, Kneecap distinguishes themselves by innovatively integrating Irish into a genre typically dominated by English, challenging traditional linguistic norms and making the Irish language more relevant to younger, cosmopolitan audiences in Ireland as well as the global Irish diasporic community. The paper will analyze Kneecap's lyrics, music videos, live performances, and interviews to understand their impact on the Irish language community and aims to show how hip hop as Gaeilge influences Irish language revitalization and redefines aspects of identity for Irish-language speakers.

The consumption of Persian music among Iranian Jews in Israel is often intertwined with the dynamics of the kitchenspace, the ritual and gendered space of cultural and social production where food is prepared and consumed. In a diasporic society like Israel where different cultures compete to be codified through ritual practice, the music and food consumed at religious celebrations officiated at home like Erev Shabat and Pesach blur the lines between public and private selves. However, studies on the multi-sensorial dimension of such celebrations and its impact on the experience of Jewishness and Iranianness are scarce, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of this liminal space of expression and the interactions between food and music. In this paper I demonstrate that these gatherings enable the negotiation and display of multiple aspects of identity, as Iranian Jews find a sense of community in the act of remembering performed through sensorial stimulation and the consumption of cultural symbols. Providing ethnographic evidence from fieldwork conducted in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv throughout 2023 analysed through the lenses of ethnomusicology and anthropology of food, I describe a multi-sensorial kitchenspace that simultaneously reinforces and is created by gender roles, providing women with power and agency as the bearers of cultural tradition. In doing so, I argue that in Israel, whose national identity is defined by ethno-religious belonging, these rituals assume further importance as liminal sites of counterpublic citizenship, as the sensorially elicited images of an imagined homeland inform alternative modes of being Jewish and Israeli.