Navigating Audience
2011; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2011.0059
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoNavigating Audience Oscar Villalon (bio) The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. Edited by Ilan Stavans. Norton. http://books.wwnorton.com. 2,752 pages; cloth, $57.95. In an unremarkable room in the back of an upstairs office in a building not too far from the BART stop in El Cerrito, dozens upon dozens of songs are being digitized every day. The songs are Mexican and Mexican American, sung and recorded and produced by artists both in the US and Mexico. They're drawn from a pool of songs numbering in the tens of thousands, ranging over several decades and representing every conceivable form of Mexican song there is. Mariachi, norteño, rancheras, corridos. Everything. This is the work of Chris Strachwitz, the founder and owner of Arhoolie Records. Arhoolie puts out all kinds of American roots music—lots of Cajun and blues and zydeco music—but it's Strachwitz's mind-boggling collection of Mexican and Mexican American music (there's a temperature-controlled room downstairs holding it all) that is perhaps most remarkable. Nothing like this exists. As part of the work of the nonprofit Arhoolie Foundation, he and a board of directors including Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, and Billy Gibbons are committed to seeing that The Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings are maintained and available to the public. That's why all of the songs in the collection need to be digitized. Only a fraction of what the collection holds has been transmogrified into bytes. That's why not too long ago Los Tigres Del Norte gave a chunk of money to the foundation to help the work continue. The room where all the digitizing and cataloging happens is warming up. It's early afternoon on an unseasonably hot day. In the kitchen just outside, lunch is being made. Something is sizzling; cumin perfumes the place. Meanwhile, more music is played. There's a digital recording of what may very well be the first mariachi song ever pressed. Free of polish, the song is haunting and embodies the essence of the campo—plaintive, candid, and defiant. [End Page 7] Another song is played. Here's a woman singing from the point of view of a wronged man, agreeing mujeres can be ingrates, treacherous. At some point, it can't help but be spoken that when this collection is finally digitized, you will have here a trove for Mexican Americans to get lost in, to literally hear where they come from. All this artistry is waiting for an appreciative audience to absorb it, for perhaps even a few people to be possessed by it and drive them to create something new from it. Somewhere out there will be a mexicano Gram Parsons, a smart and talented kid at ease with his or her place in American society, comfortably middle-class, maybe, but for sure versed in high and low culture. And this Frontera Collection will be what sets him or her aflame. It can't help but be spoken. This music will be ready in time for a wide audience that doesn't exist yet, but it is coming. For whom do you write? What are you trying to do, trying to relate? At bottom, the role of the book critic is to be an explicator of texts, conveying to curious readers what an author is trying to do in a given story, or novel, or poem. You are not unlike a foreign correspondent trying to understand and relate how things work somewhere else, revealing the ideas behind why they do what they do in some other place. You are assuming, of course, that your audience knows very little of the land you are reporting from. There are people in that audience who are not ignorant about where you're writing from, but they are very few. Or perhaps, for other reasons, they don't matter as much. So you focus on writing for the mostly ignorant but (one hopes) hungry to be informed. Consider The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, whose general editor is Ilan Stavans, perhaps the closest thing this country has to a Mexican American public intellectual who is known...
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