This paper examines how Highland bagpipers in Texas construct individual and collective identities through participation in a diasporic heritage music practice. Drawing on qualitative survey data from pipers across the state and informed by scholarship on music and identity (Stokes 1994; Turino 2008; Frith 1996), it argues that piping functions not merely as musical performance but as a socially embedded process of elective cultural affiliation and self-fashioning. The analysis demonstrates that participants engage the Great Highland Bagpipe as a symbolically charged instrument through which belonging, authenticity, and personal transformation are negotiated, often independent of direct Scottish ancestry. While prior research has explored musical identity in diasporic and subcultural contexts, Highland piping in the American South remains underexamined. Findings show that pipers mobilize tradition, competition structures, and band participation to construct layered identities that are simultaneously heritage-oriented and locally situated. The study further reveals that musical self-concept and community participation operate in a recursive feedback loop, reinforcing commitment and social cohesion. These results contribute to ethnomusicological debates on elective ethnicity, participatory music-making, and the adaptive life of heritage traditions, suggesting that Highland piping in Texas represents a dynamic site where global symbols are recontextualized within regional cultural ecologies.

In the Northern California Bay Area, the band Terga creates a site for connection for several North African diasporic communities, most notably the sizable Amazigh diaspora, a broad term encompassing North African indigenous groups. Choosing most of their repertoire from traditional songs and the music of prominent North African artists, the band’s interpretations of these pieces both connect the members of the diaspora with the idea of home(land) and generate structures of cultural emplacement specific to this community. Scholars in ethnomusicology have located the idea of diasporic community maintenance within musical scenes (Fuarros 2013, Goli 2019) while Amazigh studies has primarily focused on the importance of linguistic, cultural, and legal recognition of the Amazigh people within North African countries. (El Guabli 2023, Lazhar 2017) Grounded in these fields, in this paper, I expand the discussion surrounding diasporic music communities to the context of indigenous groups outside of the United States (Shah 2010) and their patterns of movement in relation to the postcolony. (Mbembe 2001) Drawing on several months of fieldwork in the Bay Area, I situate Terga’s performances and performance practice within this framework to show the complex interplay between sites of cultural articulation in the creation of homelands (and the associated imaginaries) and the work inherent to establishing an Amazigh diasporic presence. Doing so, I trace my interlocutor’s modes of engagement to understand the work of recontextualizing the idea of self and homeland within the context of diaspora.

Recent demographic estimates suggest approximately 6,500 Brazilian residents in the state of Colorado. Within Brazilian diasporic communities in Colorado, many people engage actively in Brazilian social networks and transnational media to learn about cultural events and services and to create ties with other Brazilians. Some members of this diaspora have been especially active in promoting Brazilian cultural events along Colorado’s Front Range. Scholarship on Brazilians in the United States has focused largely on major metropolitan areas and coastal states. Consequently, the musical lives and community-building practices of Brazilians in the Mountain West have remained underexplored. I argue that, in many of these events, Brazilian music functions as a key medium for building ties and negotiating belonging in the United States. This paper investigates how Brazilian migrants in Colorado integrate Brazilian events into their daily lives and what functions this integration serves, as well as how these events become sites for experiencing and expressing saudade. It also traces the history of Brazilian communities along Colorado’s Front Range through Brazilian cultural organizations and their events. I treat saudade as a lens for understanding how these migrants negotiate community, belonging, and identity in Colorado. Focusing on the northern and central areas of Colorado’s Front Range, particularly Denver and Boulder, I examine Brazilian pop-up markets with live music, Carnival celebrations, and Brazilian music shows at the St. Julien Hotel through participant observation, interviews, and media analysis of social media, websites, and promotional materials from Brazilian cultural organizations in Colorado.