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Contents

Music of Latin America: Mexico and the Caribbean

By Steven Loza

1

Latin America, the Globe, Mestizaje, and the Myth of Development

By Steven Loza

7

Aztec Music At Contact: A Survey Of Existing Literature

By Robert Stevenson

15

Popular Mexican Musical Traditions: The Mariachi of West Mexico and the Conjunto Jarocho of Veracruz 

By Daniel Sheehy

141

El Hijo del Pueblo: José Alfredo Jiménez and the Mexican Canción Ranchera

By William Gradante

207

The Bolero Romantico: From Cuban Dance to International Popular Song

By George Torres

241

Quest for the Local: Building Musical Ties between Mexico and the United States

By Helena Simonett

275

The Twentieth Century: Mexico and the Caribbean

301

The Origins of the Cuban Son

355

Bumbun and the Beginnings of La Plena

377

By Gerard Béhague By Steven Loza By Juan Flores

RockIn’ la Frontera: Mexican Rock, Globalization, and National Identity

By Greg Schelonka

389

Music of Latin America Mexico and the Caribbean By Steven Loza

T

Introduction to the Text

his book is composed of a set of readings that I have chosen through the years for teaching classes on the musical cultures of what we might refer to as the “northern sphere” of Latin America, specifically that of Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and parts of Central America. Perhaps the overriding theme of these courses is the concept of mestizaje, which can be interpreted as the mixing of race and culture. Mestizaje has emerged as one of the major cultural experiences throughout Latin America and refers to the manners in which the cultures of Africa, Europe, and Native America have interfaced and created musical expression through the past five centuries. The first reading of this anthology (Loza 2003) explores this concept in addition to addressing other issues of Latin American culture. As a way to reflect on the indigenous musical cultures of Mesoamerica, I have always used a chapter excerpt from one

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of eminent scholar Robert Stevenson’s classic and unparalleled books, Music in Aztec and Inca Territory. The section included here reviews the substantial body of literature, artifacts, and other resources that have been recovered and examined by scholars and through various studies. However, this essay is most essentially a lesson in how so much information can be organized in a meaningful and informative way. Stevenson offers us invaluable insight related to Aztec music and thought, the emergence of the twentieth-century “Aztec Renaissance,” the explanation of three methods used by scholars in the study of preconquest music, extensive explications and detailed description of Aztec musical instruments, including information as to how they have been detected, and finally, a list of conclusions drawn from Spanish chroniclers’ accounts of Aztec life. As my classes also focus on folk and popular styles of music in Mexico, I have included readings by Daniel Sheehy, William Gradante, and George Torres. Sheehy traces musical events and developments from the sixteenth century to present contexts, making clear analytical points related to musical mestizaje in terms of Amerindian cultures, Europe, and Africa. He thus provides a well-organized and detailed overview of various popular Mexican regional folk musical styles, focusing especially on two dynamic traditions: those of música de mariachi and música jarocha. Gradante offers a unique historical critique on the canción mexicana and its evolution into the ranchera, focusing on the legendary work and life of songwriter and performer José Alfredo Jiménez. Torres’s essay on the bolero is an excellent mix of historical and musical data and analysis on the development of this form, originating in Cuba but highly popularized in Mexico and throughout Latin America and globally, especially through the emergence of the trío romantic style personified by the iconic Trío Los Panchos.

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Other essential topics that I have always incorporated into my courses on Latin American music is that of music composed during the colonial period for ecclesiastic contexts, the development of opera, and the emergence of a “nationalist” and contemporary chamber and symphonic musical culture. Relative to the latter area is a chapter excerpt by Gerard Béhague from his highly acclaimed book Music in Latin America: An Introduction. In this section, Béhague critiques the nationalist landscape and creativity of Mexican and Caribbean composers, ranging from the folkloric perspectives of Manuel M. Ponce to the Aztec motives and musical philosophy of Carlos Chávez, one of the primary movers of twentieth-century musical exploration in Latin America. Also examined in this rich essay is the compositional styles of vanguardists of the 1920s through 1950s, including the Mexicans Silvestre Revueltas and the Grupo de los Cuatro, in addition to Cuban composers reflecting the artistic and intellectual movements of the “Grupo Minorista” (1923) and Afrocubanismo, the latter of which Béhague refers to as the “rediscovery of Afro-Cuban culture” and “the most suitable source of national expression for the outstanding representatives of music nationalism in Cuba: Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla.” Béhague also makes note of Puerto Rican composer Hector Campos-Parsi, who also engaged substantially with musical nationalism, e.g., his incorporation of the plena folk music-dance genre of AfroPuerto Rican tradition. One of my prime areas of research has been that of Cuba, especially the Afro-Cuban musical tradition. I have thus included in the volume an essay that I originally wrote as a chapter in my master’s thesis in 1979 and that was eventually published in Aztlán in 1985. The article traces the origins of the Cuban son musical form and tradition, which eventually served as the musical basis in the development and evolution

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of what we presently refer to as “salsa” and “Latin jazz.” As in the case of Mexico, the intersection of race and culture, or mestizaje, plays a great role in the historical, musical, and literary aspects of Cuban music and culture. The plena, along with bomba and música jibara, is one of the major examples of the mestizo, folkloric musical culture of Puerto Rico, and by extension, of Puerto Ricans in U. S. cities such as New York. In his essay on this music-dance genre, Juan Flores indicates to us the influential and innovative role of Bumbún Oppenheimer in the early development of the plena, and its immense social popularization through artists such as Canario, César Concepción, Mon Rivera, Rafael Cortijo, and Ismael Rivera. (An excellent corollary to Flores’s article is the documentary Plena Is Work, Plena Is Song, produced by the National Latino Communications Center and the Public Broadcasting Service.) Completing this volume are two essays focusing on contemporary musical movements in Mexico and their interaction with U. S. culture, especially as related to migration, globalization, and daily life. Both pieces are published in Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario, edited by Ignacio Corona and Alejandro L. Madrid. In her essay, Helena Simonett explores the relationship “between place, music, and cultural identity” in a globalizing world where she perceives that “the local” gives credibility to music. She proceeds to assess such issues with a focus on a number of musical styles including banda, technobanda, el pasito duranguense, sonido, and norteña. Simonett concepts her arguments on recent social, technological, media, and industrial practices related to globalization, transnationalization, NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), and transregionalism, on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border. In his essay on Mexican rock, Greg Schelonka reflects

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on issues such as nostalgia for the traditional ranchera and the changing musical culture of Mexico, specifically that related to rock music. But Schelonka senses that rock “posits Mexicanness as something that cannot be erased,” and that “to a great extent … rock replaces the ranchera by being the ranchera of the city.” The two essays included here by Simonett and Schelonka are important reminders to us that tradition, change, and innovation are all interrelated experiences that habitually occur through time, space, and spirit, and that artistic expression is constantly changing and adapting. In the case of Latin American musical culture, this phenomenon has been transpiring rapidly and intensely through over five hundred years of various and diverse contexts of the mestizo experience. The Larger Picture The readings included here do not cover the whole reality of our topic, nor is that the purpose of the volume. However, I do feel strongly that these sources provide us with some very important and unique perspectives on the culture and history of a large segment of Latin America through its music. Some of these writings are newer, and some are exquisite classics; but they all give us a very rich glimpse into the richness of Latin American musical culture and philosophy. I hope you enjoy the experience.

5

Latin America, the Globe, Mestizaje, and the Myth of Development By Steven Loza

The various races of the earth tend to intermix at a gradually increasing pace, and eventually will give rise to a new human type, composed of selections from each of the races already in existence. … In short, present world conditions favor the development of interracial sexual unions, a fact which lends unexpected support to the thesis which, for lack of a better name, I entitled: The Future Cosmic Race. —José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race

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n contemporary civilization, Latin American countries have often been referred to as part of the “Third World,” among the world’s “developing nations” or part of the “under­developed” world. Many “First World” government agencies, corporations, private foun­dations, media companies, and, unfortunately, scholars have used such prejudicial

Steven Loza, “Latin America, the Globe, Mestizaje, and the Myth of Development,” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, vol. 11: Musical Cultures of Latin America: Global Effects, Past and Present, pp. 3, 5–7, 13, 15–16. Copyright © 2003 by Department of Ethnomusicology and Systematic Musicology, UCLA. Reprinted with permission. Latin America, the Globe, Mestizaje, and the Myth of Development | 7

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terms to describe an area of the world that is also known as one of the richest in areas unrelated to economic, industrial, or political “development,” namely, in music, the visual arts, liter­ature, religion, cuisine, family structure, and even the expressions of passion and what some literature critics have labeled “magic realism.” Other parts of the globe that have been assigned Third World status include Africa and most of Asia. A group called the “G Eight” meets periodically to discuss global economic and geopolitical issues. This group includes the United States, Japan, France, Germany Britain, Italy, Russia, and Canada, considered to be among the leading developed nations. I suppose they meet to keep up with each other, and to remind the rest of the world that they are the major industrial powers and that they will assist the “developing nations” to develop somewhat, like them. The civil insurrections in Seattle during the meeting of the World Trade Organization (December 1999), organized protests against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. (April 2000), and the demonstrations during the G Eight meeting in Genoa (July 2001) confirm that many North Americans and Europeans oppose what they perceive as industrial globalization linked with the corporate abuse of workers around the world. On the other side of the issue is the view that worldwide industrialization will enable “developing” or “Third World” countries to participate in global economic development. The fundamental question in this debate is “Why should we assume that the rest of the world even wants this kind of ‘development’?” But there is another factor at work here, related specifically to Latin American devel­opment, and that is mestizaje, the mixing of race and culture in Latin America, a term used in varying degrees in Mexico, the Spanish speaking Caribbean,

Latin America, the Globe, Mestizaje, and the Myth of Development | 

and South America (including Portuguese-speaking Brazil). One can argue that Latin America is a very developed region, perhaps much more so than the United States or the other G Eight nations in terms of general cultural development and, more specifically, in the arts and humanities. A strong argument can also be made that Latin America represents a more integrated convergence of cultures and continent (Americas, Africa, Europe) in a more rapid span of time than any other cultural area in history. So what is my point? Sour grapes? Perhaps some. The point is that we in the north have much to learn from our sibling American cultures to the south. An imaginary border still molds our thinking and conditions our attitudes from a very early age, enculturating us on a daily basis in cities such as Los Angeles and in universities such as UCLA, where the themes and realities of immigration, ethnicity, and race inhabit our consciousness in a very different and peculiar manner. The Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (1925) essentially predicted, in the 1920s, that the globe would follow the path of Latin America in terms of mestizaje, and that ultimately the world would interdevelop racially and culturally. In places as distant from one another as California, New York, Paris, and London, such “development” has begun according to a different model of “developing nations.” Terms dating from sixteenth-century Latin America and represented in paintings of the colonial period (cover illustration and frontispiece), such as mestizo, mulato, zambo, escuro, moreno, coyote, preto, prieto, chino, lobo, caboverde, and “no te entiendo,” now apply to the emerging hybridities of race and culture. The term “intercultural” is not only more popular in these cities and nations, but more appropriate than ever. The history of the intense cultural processes of hybridity, innovation, and renewal took a different course in the British

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settlement of North America compared with its Iberian equivalent in Latin America. Spain was more diversely intercultural than England during the sixteenth century. The English and other Western Europeans tended to migrate to America with their families, while the Spanish migration consisted mostly of unaccompanied men who formed unions with indigenous and African women. England was predominately Protestant, Spain and Portugal predominately Catholic. Their systems of slavery were quite different, as were the indigenous populations, which were larger in Latin America. African and indigenous religions in Latin America interdeveloped with Catholicism in various ways, while such syncretic developments were not the norm in what is now the United States and Canada, with the possible exception of the U.S. southwest, Louisiana, and Quebec. Thus, the history and degree of racial and cultural mix, or mestizaje, differed in the northern and southern hemispheres of the Americas. Today, however, in the United States and Canada, mestizaje is following a pattern not … also resemble them physically. These are the mestizos of the third millennium. José Vasconcelos’s forecast has perhaps begun with another storm in another geo-cultural domain. As the dust settles on this experience in Latin America, the process starts anew in a similar way in the north. Whereas the phenomenon may stabilize in the south, it may begin to destabilize in the north. As mestizaje reaches a more “developed” state in the south, the north may find itself catching up, “developing,” so to speak, for the process is a relatively long one. The south may be the mentor this time—not the economic mentor, but the philosophical and political one. The cultures will emerge more similar than differ­ent this time. The border drawn on the map will finally be erased (possibly by the artist Gronk, who accomplished this locally some years ago as a member of the performance art group

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ASCO; this time the erasure may have a more global effect). The void, or at least disappearance of cultural borders, will have produced this symbolic, legal act, yet politi­cal, economic, and cultural metaphor. Contemporary Musical Cultures in the Americas In large part, we live in a cynical society marked by a music industry that has its good and bad moments, most perhaps falling in between, in my judgment. I defend my assessment, though, because I have witnessed much from within academia and as a pro­fessional musician and member of various committees of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences. Something quite interesting occurred at the 1999 Grammy Awards show. Carlos Santana, having produced another album of his now classic mestizaje concept of Latin rock, received an unprecedented nine Grammy Awards by the voting members of the Recording Academy. Tito Puente, the highly acclaimed king of Latin music and a histori­cal legacy of virtuosity and musical mestizaje, was awarded his fifth Grammy during the same show, only a few months before his untimely death on June 1, 2000. Poncho Sanchez, the Chicano stylist of Afro-Cuban music and Latin jazz, finally won his first Grammy after several nominations. Christina Aguilera, a young R&B singer of mixed Ecuadorian and Irish American heritage from Pittsburgh, received the Best New Artist Grammy. A revolution has occurred in the U.S. music industry. Latin American-derived music of hybrid indigenous, African, and European origins and philosophies is perhaps beginning to lead the artistic, social, and economic movement of an emerging world cul­ture. “World music” itself no less of an emerging phenomenon in this industry, has become a topic of current critical and ethnomusicological

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discourse. The concept of mes­tizaje, consciously or not, runs throughout most of this movement. As music, race, and culture continue to mix in time and space, they proceed to represent and to embody, cognitively or not, the ultimate spread and evolution of a world mestizaje. Vasconcelos would not only be excited by the present, but would love to have been here now. But I am sure he is. A Changing Globe and a Time for Change: Mestizaje and Infinity The September 2000 issue of Quo contains a feature article on mestizaje, and a 1993 issue of Time magazine shows a computer-generated image of a woman, a visual and racial prediction of a globally hybrid face of the future. Erroneously presented as a representation of the United States as the world’s first multicultural soci­ety, the Time image could easily pass for a Mexican, Cuban, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, Chilean, or any other Latin American. She is not new, nor is she the future. She is a mestiza. Mestizaje has taught us so much of value. In the confusion and the horror of col­onization in Latin America, one of the paradoxes that survived as an anecdote of beauty was musical culture. This music, in its most collective extension, has in its most inspired moments represented the abstract Utopia of no borders, no colors, and the convergence of contradiction. Thus, as no musical time signature became incompatible, the consolida­tion of former conflicts blended into new forms and new ideas. It has not been a perfect experiment, but the advantages have outweighed the disadvantages, for we have realized, through art, that there can be no line between black and white; that between these two visual, geometric perceptions lies an infinite spectrum of color and of life.

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REFERENCES Aguirre Beltran, Gonzalo 1970 “Bailes de Negros.” Revista de la Universidad de México 25(2):2–5. 1972 La población negra en México. Mexico, D.F: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Andrade, Mario de 1928 Ensaio sôbre Música brasileira. Sao Paulo: I. Chiarato & Cia. Andrade, Oswald de 1928 ‘‘Manifesto Antropofagico.” Revista de Antropafagia 1(1). Benítez Rojo, Antonio 1989 La isla que se repite: el Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna. Hanover: Ediciones del Norte. Caso, Antonio 1925 Principios de estética. México, D.F.: Publicaciones de la Secretary de Educacion, 1971 Obras completas. Vol. 5, Estética. Nueva Biblioteca Mexicana. México, D.F.: Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, Direción General de Publicaciones. Hosokawa, Shuhei N.d. “Salsa no tiene frontera: Orquesta de La Luz or the Globalization and Japanization of Afro-Caribbean Music.” Manuscript. Loza, Steven 1998 “Latin American Popular Music in Japan and the Issue of International Aesthet­ ics,” In Toru Mitsu, ed., Popular Music International Interpretations. Proceed­ings of the Ninth International Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. August 1998, Kanazawa, Japan. Ortiz, Fernando 1940 Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar. La Habana: J. Monteiro, (English translation by Harriet de Onís. New York: A. A. Knopf 1947.) Quo Magazine

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2000 “En que nos beneficial el mestizaje.” No. 35. México: Editorial Televisa México. Spitta, Silvia 1997 “Transculturation, the Caribbean, and the Cuban-American Imaginary.” In Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman, eds., Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Time Magazine 1993 Special Issue: “The New Face of America: How Immigrants Are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society.” New York: Time Life Publications.