In 1987 Linda Ronstadt diverged from her successes in rock and other genres to record the album, Canciones de mi Padre. In it, she revived nostalgic Mexican mariachi music to honor her father and Mexican American heritage. Record industry insiders doubted a Spanish-language album featuring decades-old songs could succeed in the mainstream market. Nevertheless, the album reached 42 on the Billboard 200, sold over 2.5 million copies, won a Grammy for best Mexican/Mexican American performance, and became the bestselling non-English music album in U.S. history. This presentation analyzes Canciones in dialogue with interviews with musicians and fans of the album. It contributes to ethnomusicology by understanding music as a political action that mediates affect and emotion (e.g., Chávez 2017; Desai-Stephens & Reisnour 2020; Garland 2020; Gray Kun 2016; Sakakeeny 2024). Specifically, it asks: what are the political implications and effects of the love the album conveys? While romantic love is thematically relevant in many of the album’s songs, I argue Canciones constructs and prioritizes a love for family, community, and Mexican Americanness. Although Ronstadt did not intend to record a political album, this love is political. In 1987 and still today, Canciones challenges the stigmatization of Mexican American people while also contributing to the construction of what scholars call a “third space” beyond the U.S./Mexico binary (Anzaldúa 1987; Licona 2005; Sandoval 2013).

Since the beginning of her career in the mid 1990s, singer and songwriter Lila Downs (b. 1968) has weaved themes of Indigeneity and migration in her songs. Inspired by her Mixtec Indigenous, Mexican, and U.S. American heritage, Downs blends a variety of languages (Spanish, English, Mixtec, Zapotec) and musical styles (Mexican sones, rancheras, corridos, cumbia, jazz). Taken together, her heritage and musical fusions allowed Downs to consolidate her career as a “World Music” artist at a time of deep transformation in Mexico, with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Zapatista uprising of the same year, and later, the power transition after the 2000 Mexican presidential elections. Building on scholarship that explores the intersection of musical activities, migration, globalization, and the U.S.-Mexico border (Ragland 2009; Madrid 2011; Ramos-Kittrell 2020; Días Santana-Garza 2021), in this presentation I analyze Downs’s representation of the post-NAFTA border condition in her 2001 album Border/La Línea for Mexican and international audiences. Through musical and lyrical analysis, I examine two songs: “La Niña” (“The girl”) and “La Línea” (“The line”), in which Downs portrays themes related to neoliberalism, NAFTA, and the border, with references to the maquiladora factories, childhood, and labor. I argue that while Downs’s songs illuminate the conditions of vulnerable groups at the border, they also exhibit a “strategic exoticism” (Saavedra 2012; Guldin 2021) in line with “World Music” aesthetics. Ultimately, this paper contributes to conversations about popular music and neoliberalism in Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Starting in the early 21st century, Mexican bandas have increasingly adopted a distinct variant of the cumbia norteña featuring faster tempi, licentious lyrics, and nonnormative masculine expressions: ranging from hypersexualized machos preying on women in party contexts, submissive men dominated by their wives, or queer behavior. This banda cumbia—increasingly popular among U.S-based Mexican audiences—thus provides a valuable opportunity to explore what sociologist Raewynn Connell identifies as the “many local instabilities of gender” resulting from the establishment of a world gender order dominated by Western conceptualizations of masculinity (1998, 16); a reality intimately felt by many migrant Mexican men who feel feminized by authoritative U.S. social structures that submit them to lower-class, supervised jobs while also granting their spouses more autonomy and rights (Rouse 1992, 38). I argue that the sound of the banda cumbia, which most often appears late at night during Mexican parties, creates a cathartic space of masculine possibility that enables men to subvert U.S. and Mexican gender orders: be it via hypermasculine behavior, or the assertion of queer identities. Along with an analysis of the banda cumbia’s unique sonic properties, its ambiguous yet transgressive lyrics, and the de-coupled circle dance that accompanies it; I draw from my time performing with the Banda Poderosa de Jalisco in the Dallas-Fort Worth area (2018 – 2022) and interviews with affiliated banda musicians and listeners to demonstrate how the banda cumbia expands the banda ensemble’s capacity to represent and celebrate a myriad of transnational masculinities.