Archives of Global South folk and Indigenous field recordings from the early twentieth century are an uncomfortable part of the disciplinary legacy of ethnomusicologists. Despite their foundational role in the discipline, many resulted from colonial practices that extracted knowledge from dominated groups and reframed it under ethnocentric categories that reproduced racial and cultural hierarchies. While ethnomusicologists have critically engaged with this legacy from ethical and epistemological perspectives (e.g., García 2019; Ajotikar and Van Straaten 2021), it also bears an understudied infrastructural component. These archives resulted not only from colonial mindsets but also from imperial resources, institutional arrangements, and networks that enabled the extraction, accumulation, and scrutiny of foreign musical knowledge. Studying these infrastructures is important because they framed the scope of what researchers could actually do, and hence foundational inquiries, methods, and theories of the field. Drawing from Science and Technology studies, this paper addresses the importance of knowledge infrastructures to the construction of field recording archives of folk and indigenous music during the mid-20th century. Defined as the institutionalized assemblages that enable knowledge production (Edwards 2010; Larkin 2013), knowledge infrastructures both reflect existing colonial power structures and the conditions of possibility for knowledge production. Focused on cases in the U.S. and Peru, the paper explores how colonial knowledge infrastructures may impact the research inquiries, methods, and theories, and the role of archives in these infrastructures. It also problematizes the infrastructural legacy of both field recording archives and ethnomusicological practice, whose foundational resources still sustain ethnomusicological practices in non-obvious ways.

This paper examines the New Mexican musical repertory compiled by Juan Bautista Ralliere (1834–1915) as preserved and reactivated in two major U.S. Hispanic sound archives: the John Donald Robb and Rubén Cobos collections (1940s–1970s). A French-born Catholic priest who served in Tomé, New Mexico for over fifty years, Ralliere compiled nearly one thousand sacred and secular melodies in manuscript notebooks and in his devotional songbook Cánticos espirituales, issued in at least fifteen editions, attesting to its wide circulation. As John Koegel notes, these compilations document the intersection of Mexican, French, and Anglo-American influences that shaped an emerging Nuevomexicano musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century (Koegel 1997). Ralliere’s work constitutes the first systematic effort to record this tradition. Drawing on archival research in Ralliere’s manuscripts and printed editions, alongside comparative analysis of Robb’s and Cobos’s recordings and field notes, my paper traces the recurrence of specific alabados, hymns, and secular songs across manuscript, print, and sound. The Robb Archive (University of New Mexico), foundational to his published corpus (Robb 1980), reflects an institutional project privileging genre taxonomy and musical transcription. The Cobos Collection (Colorado College), shaped by pedagogical and linguistic concerns, foregrounds dialect speech, oral transmission, and socially embedded performance, emphasizing women’s central role in devotional networks (Levine & Chace 1999). Building on scholarship that understands archives as historically situated mediating structures (Derrida 1996; Sterne 2003; Stoler 2009), I argue that these projects reframed Ralliere’s repertory through distinct epistemic logics that articulated competing models of tradition.

Throughout the twentieth century, major archives were created to document U.S. Southwest Hispanic and Indigenous musics at a moment when Spanish and Native languages were being displaced by English. Early collectors framed their work as an urgent effort to preserve Indo-Hispano, Native, and Genízaro repertories as part of both regional heritage and U.S. national culture. This paper argues that such archival practices did more than safeguard musical traditions: they actively shaped “whose memory” was preserved and structured how Southwestern musics entered ethnomusicological discourse. Focusing on the John Donald Robb Archive of Southwestern Music—one of the largest repositories of U.S. Hispanic and Indigenous music, comprising roughly three thousand field recordings—my paper examines the institutional and intellectual forces behind its formation. John Robb (1892–1989), Harvard-trained in law before joining the University of New Mexico at forty-nine, served as collector, archivist, cellist, conductor, composer, and dean of the College of Fine Arts (1942–1957) (Rivera 2015). Approaching the repertories not as a formally trained musicologist but as a composer and administrator, Robb’s professional profile shaped the archive’s scope and interpretive framing. A key intervention came in 1945, when he invited Mexican musicologist Vicente T. Mendoza and Virginia R. Mendoza to UNM, addressing an epistemic gap and leading to influential publications based on the collections (Robb 1980; Mendoza & Mendoza 1986). Situating these archives within a critical, decolonial, and “Greater Mexican” framework (Paredes 1958; Limón 1998), the paper analyzes how institutional authority structured the production and circulation of Southwestern musical knowledge.