Sounding the Mexican South: Transborder Musics, Economies, and Belonging in the “Nuevo South”
Chair(s): David Garcia (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
Discussant(s): Alex Chávez (University of Notre Dame)
This panel brings together work that chronicles the understudied transborder musical exchanges of Mexico and the southern U.S. We consider both how music has functioned as a tool of empowerment and community-building for Mexican communities in the U.S. South, and also how elites in the music industry have capitalized on the labor of musicians in the South and across the border in Mexico. Often overlooked as a region of ethnomusicological study, the South is home to some of the largest and fastest growing Latinx diasporic communities in the U.S. who contribute to the regional cultural landscape as artists, musicians, and tradespeople. We invoke what scholars of the Latinx South have referred to as the idea of the “Nuevo South” to consider how legacies of white supremacy and racial difference have shaped the experiences of these Latinx southerners. Drawing on theoretical tools from ethnomusicology, history, and cultural anthropology, this panel shows how southern Latinx communities and their musical practices (focusing largely on Mexican traditions) map onto and transform regional economic, racial, and political dynamics. In the transformation of these dynamics are new sonic and musical orientations to place and region that tell stories of migration, articulate new ways of Latinx belonging, and point us toward an increasing southern Latinx future. We argue that ethnomusicology’s investment in local and regional traditions–and subsequent discourses of belonging in the performance, negotiation, and transmission of these traditions–warrants closer attention to the music of the Nuevo South, in all its complications and possibilities.
Presentations in the Session
“Uno anda buscando la música”: Mapping Southern Latinx Musical Economies
Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez
Emory University
December 1989 promised an exciting array of events for Latinx Atlantans in search of a good time. The local Spanish-language newspaper announced bailes (dances) and holiday fiestas at bars, event halls and restaurants to be held across the metropolitan region. A local conjunto (band) and mariachi were booked to play at El Azteca Ballroom, where the local musical acts were to be followed by a conjunto visiting from Houston. Also held on Saturdays were Papa Tino’s Latin American Bar & Grill weekly bailes where attendees could dance to cumbia, merengue and salsa. And finally, a local radio station, La Favorita, organized a baile with conjuntos from San Luis Potosí and Piedras Negras, Mexico for an evening of dancing to norteñas. 1989, in other words, made clear how local, regional and transnational cultural and labor networks contributed to Latinx community formations – and economies - in southern cities. The rich roots and routes of Latinx musical economies have been established and sustained in the US South for over four decades. Especially since the 1980s, Latinx musicians, band promoters, and festival organizers have enveloped southern places and spaces into an ever-growing transnational network made up of local and touring musical acts. Through an analysis of promotional materials, audio and visual media, and individual accounts, this paper shows how Latinx people transformed southern spaces into hubs of transnational exchange, reshaping the region’s cultural, economic, and social landscapes in the process.
Ralph Peer and the Emergence of the Mexican Popular Music Market
Amanda Marie Martinez
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Ralph Peer is a music industry executive known for his role in launching race records and hillbilly music, the marketing category that later evolved into country music. As such, he is credited with playing a crucial role in developing the recorded popular music market in the U.S. South and for “discovering” key southern artists including The Carter Family, whom he instructed to perform on “border radio” stations in the 1930s. These stations, on the Mexican side of the border with the U.S., faced fewer government regulations and could therefore reach much broader audiences. This tactic helped build The Carter Family’s audience in not only the U.S., but Mexico, marketing a cross-border “southern” image and sound. This paper analyzes Peer’s role in developing the popular music recording industry in Mexico. It pays particular attention to the power dynamics behind Peer’s success in developing this market, including his relationship with artists and local music industry professionals in Mexico, and the relationship he developed with Emilio Azcárraga Sr., who became the most significant figure in Mexican broadcasting for his dominance in the worlds of Mexican radio and television. This paper considers the lingering impacts of this relationship with Azcárraga on listeners on both sides of the border and how increased consolidation in the music industry over the past century has resulted in the descendants of both Peer and Azcárraga holding significant power over the music industry a century later.
“We played fiddle and we left smelling like tamales”: Mexican Music and Memory in the Mississippi Delta
Sophia Enríquez
Duke University
In the 1930s, a wave of Mexican immigrants arrived in the Mississippi Delta in search of greater economic opportunity. They formed small, tight-knit communities rich with traditional Mexican music, dance, and foodways while navigating a complicated racial dynamic in the Jim Crow South. Among these early Mexican Missisippians was Nicolás Enríquez, a fiddler share-cropper, and tamal-maker. Enríquez was active at regional fiddle contests, including the annual Mississippi State Fair fiddle contest, and started a country/honky-tonk jam in his backyard shed in the 1960s. As several scholars of Mexican migration to the South have shown, Mexican laborers in the Mississippi Delta made profound impacts on the political, economic, and cultural currents of the South throughout the twentieth century. This paper contributes to scholarship of the Latinx South and employs approaches from historical ethnomusicology to explore the untold story of Mexican music traditions in the Mississippi Delta. Video and audio recordings from the author’s family archives contextualize musical experiences inside the home while field interviews focus on more recently arrived Mexican migrants to the Delta. In tandem, these perspectives reveal how musicians like Enríquez helped to set precedents for the way future generations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Mississippi would make home in the South. As ethnomusicologists grapple with an ever-shifting and volatile discourse of Mexican migration to the U.S., this historical ethnomusicological study shows how paying closer attention to the music of the southern Mexican communities ultimately reveals a more nuanced narrative of Latinx belonging and futurity.
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