Conference Agenda

Academic discourse in Mexico and abroad characterizes the Salon compositions of nineteenth-century Mexican composers as outdated, conservative, and un-Mexican (Gutierrez 2024; Gaytan 2014; Behague 1979; Mayer-Serra 1941). According to this narrative, Salon music was “condemned to ostracism” in twentieth-century Mexico as modern nationalist schools of composition emerged (Meneses 2020). However, historiographic analysis reveals a different trajectory: Salon composition did not disappear after the Revolution. It found new life in popular spheres, expanding its audiences through new technologies, and experimenting with different ensemble instrumentations and aesthetics.

This project follows Alfonso Esparza Oteo (1894–1950), a prolific twentieth-century composer of Salon music, examining his career alongside (and in contrast to) dominant claims regarding Salon composition often repeated in musicological discourse. Drawing upon the historiographical interventions of Leonora Saavedra (1998, 2001), I explore the ways written perspectives by Mexican musical intellectuals became increasingly disconnected from lived musical practices, producing a distorted account of cultural life during and after the Revolution. Despite his work being framed as aesthetically and ideologically regressive, Esparza Oteo directly participated in revolutionary action, spearheaded advancements in Mexican publishing, radio, and recording industries, and deeply influenced Mexican popular music culture. By highlighting his contributions, this project challenges entrenched musicological narratives and reassesses Salon music’s place in twentieth-century Mexican cultural history.

In Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca (a town in Mexico’s Costa Chica), a group of elderly gentlemen known as Los Banqueros congregate at a park bench in the town square to share music, poetry, gossip, and cultural critique. Here, their performances of chilenas and versos evoke a social world understood as fading in the present. Although chilena is often framed as a mestizo genre, Los Banqueros conceptualize mestizaje in ways that differ from the Black-exclusionary logic of nationalist discourse. While debates over the correct way to play the chilena’s rhythmic accompaniment have been shaped by competing and often racially coded claims to authenticity, Los Banqueros take a more fluid approach that highlights the diversity of chilena performance. This flexibility resonates with what René Zavaleta describes as a motley society, in which diverse histories and temporalities coexist without being fully reconciled (Tapia Maella, 2022). At times, members of Los Banqueros strategically engage multicultural frameworks when doing so is beneficial, yet they do not focus on cultural rescue or heritage display. Instead, they perform chilena as a social practice oriented toward pleasure, critique, and nostalgic remembrance. Drawing on memory studies, the concept of motley society, and ethnographic engagement, this paper examines how social music-making and storytelling among Los Banqueros produce a counter-narrative to the etnogenesis model that frames Blackness as newly emerging through political recognition (Varela-Huerta, 2023). Rather, the gatherings of Los Banqueros reveal how Black presence is embedded within everyday local understandings of history, place, and social belonging.

Mexico City’s sonidos típicos (“typical” sounds) play a paradoxical role in the lives of city dwellers: from street cries to the warble of barrel organs, these sounds are, for many, powerful indices of the city itself, yet so integrated into quotidian routines that they are rarely considered a subject worthy of conversation much less cultural patrimony. In this paper, I trace unofficial histories of sonidos típicos through the interpretations of street vendors. I analyze these accounts with two theoretical frames that arose in these conversations: convivencia (co-existence), both perception and performance of cultural intimacy, key to the day-to-day activities and popular representations of street vendors; and the barrio (neighborhood) concept, a literal and figurative setting for convivencia in which traditional lifeways are thought to endure in the face of gentrification. I put these accounts in conversation with a fragmented official history and ambivalent public policy—from noise abatement to cultural patrimony—in which the subject of sonidos típicos and, by proxy, the sound makers themselves have been intermittently stigmatized, coopted, and omitted. I will argue that within the shared experience of convivencia lies the potential for what Rolando Vázquez dubs decolonial aesthesis, the possibility of reconstituting a history that has been appropriated or erased altogether. By focusing on how sounds perform histories to construct the present, I forgo a linear genealogy of Mexico City’s sonidos típicos for an engagement with the past that is both intersubjective and multitemporal, joining myth and popular culture with the material realities of urban life.