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The Music of the Accordion and Bajo Sexto : Cultural Heritage at the U.S.–Mexico Border

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19452349.40.4.10

1945-2349

Luis Díaz-Santana Garza,

Youth Culture and Social Dynamics

In any discussion of borders and transnational mobility, music should be acknowledged as a fundamental part of migrants’ cultural capital. Music acts as a counterweight to political and media power, an outlet for anger and frustration, and an aid to mitigating conflict. It is also cathartic, and it links individuals both to the communities they have left behind and to other migrants in their new location. The United States has a long tradition of studies in this field, but in Mexico, popular music has rarely been examined as a generator of identity, a motor for collective social action, a creator of cultural regions, or an intangible cultural heritage—despite the fact that it is one of Mexican society's most visible cultural manifestations. In recent years, books and articles analyzing the lyrics of songs and corridos have proliferated, but without taking into account the music that accompanies those texts, the polysemy between textual discourse and musical discourse, or the performative contexts in which such heterogeneous meanings are positioned to form new signs.On the one hand, when some social scientists approach music, they are intimidated by the complexity of the symbolic levels involved, believing that only a specialist can glimpse the secrets that any given sound tradition holds. On the other hand, there are professional musicians who do not realize the importance of researching the context in which harmonic sounds are produced. In fact, practically all Mexican urban musical genres suffer from this lack of investigation, because musicologists focus largely on early music, while ethnomusicologists choose to work in small, highly marginalized indigenous communities. Thus, not only do we know little about the music of ethnic minorities and rural communities, but we also exclude from the academy widely known and discussed urban popular music, such as the corridos performed by conjunto norteño (also known as music of accordion and bajo sexto, música norteña, or traditional Fara-fara music) or conjunto tejano (also called Tex-Mex conjunto, or simply conjunto).I had previously proposed that the Mexican public's relative ignorance of many popular genres was probably the result of both differences in social class and an inferiority complex, as, in general, we tend to exalt the work of foreign singers and musical groups, while underestimating the output of soloists and local or regional groups of broad experience.1 As far as researchers are concerned, we see that even today some retain prejudices about popular music, which they still consider a frivolous subject of study.Fortunately, some voices are critical of these positions, such as that of the Mexican ethnomusicologist Gonzalo Camacho, who asserts that the Mexican state's old strategies of safeguarding and cultural promotion are insufficient to encompass the complexity and plurality of our nation's musical cultures: “In the field of cultural policy in Mexico, the discourse and efforts around musical heritage are conducted from the perspective of a hegemonic conceptual model of music, whose logic and peculiarity cannot be applied to the diversity of musical cultures currently in our country.”2 Camacho also highlights the fact that cultural policies give weight to musical objects—recordings and scores—while assigning very little importance to those who perform music, forgetting that, in musical traditions based in orality, the performers are often the music's creators. And even if the performers do not compose the lyrics and melody, they are still cocreators, because every time they play a piece, they interpret it with subtle variations that make it different from performance to performance. Moreover, they are carriers of historical, pedagogical, and musical knowledge that makes them stand out in their communities.I propose that, using the model of regional configurations3—with a music-as-cultural-heritage perspective—we can compensate for the lack of studies on popular music by giving an account of an area encompassing the northeastern border of Mexico and the south of Texas, which shares a cultural identity formed through musical tradition, taking the case of conjunto norteño and conjunto tejano as a reference point. This is a very rare regional configuration, as the genre spans two countries. My first English-language book on the subject was published in the summer of 2021.4We need to reevaluate Norteño and Tejano as an important part of regional urban music overall, and to highlight the importance of the border zone and migrants in the development of this music. As the genre is currently ubiquitous in mass media, it may surprise many to learn that “lyrical” musicians, who supplemented their meager incomes by working in the fields, originally spread Mexican Norteño throughout rural areas of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. Saxophonist Guadalupe Quezada, a Norteño pioneer, notes that, at first, it was rejected as a genre: “They didn't want it, even for free. They wouldn't so much as let the musicians into the cantinas.”5 This situation began to change in the late 1930s, when the Unión Filarmónica de Linares (Philharmonic Union of Linares) started to require that owners of dance halls located in the city's red-light district give orchestra musicians one day off a week. Union members did not want to lose their jobs to better-skilled substitutes, so they proposed that on Mondays—their day off—they be replaced by the unpopular music of the accordion and bajo sexto. They soon realized their mistake, however: three or four weeks after this initiative started, Mondays had become the busiest days for these businesses, whose owners quickly contracted these cheap, novel duos to perform daily.6Thanks to migrants, this music was redefined and adapted in southern Texas. During this period, winters in Nuevo León were very harsh, with a consequent loss of crops, triggering an exodus of thousands of agricultural workers to the United States. When returning to their hometowns, these workers liked to squander their money in bars and clubs that featured their favorite music.7 In this way, a traditional music circuit was established, a loop encompassing the states of northeastern Mexico and South Texas, which over time was extended to include, today, the entire American continent, and practically any corner where there are migrants who identify with this regional configuration.Many performers from Nuevo León and Tamaulipas enriched the musical life of Texas in those early years, spreading the accordion and bajo sexto. Among them was Lolo Cavazos, who was born in 1906 in Matamoros and later settled in Alice; Pedro Ayala, the accordionist from General Terán, who was born in 1911 and settled in the town of Donna; and Agapito Zúñiga de la Garza, from Burgos, later called the Scorpion of Corpus, who spent much of his career in Corpus Christi. Among these largely forgotten musicians from the northeast, one stands out for his contribution to Texan music: Narciso Martínez, considered the father of Tejano. The accordionist, born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, on October 29, 1911, was one of the first conjunto musicians to travel outside of Texas, and to occasionally be able to make a living from music. At first, all these accordionists played alone, and then were accompanied by guitar; the guitar was then replaced by the bajo sexto, and, eventually, they would be joined by electric bass and drums.Between 1942 and 1964, the U.S. and Mexican governments promoted the Bracero program, thanks to which some five million Mexicans were able to work legally in the United States. For Norteño and Tejano music, these migratory comings and goings translated into greater sources of employment, as well as constant exchanges between the two traditions. An example of this exchange is the saxophone. It was initially used in northeastern Mexico to imitate recordings made in South Texas by Narciso Martínez and Beto Villa. Texans then adopted the Norteño playing style, making the instrument “cry and groan.” Norteño groups such as Los rancheritos del Topo Chico also toured the United States, often for months at a time; this group, and many others, appropriated Tejano musical styles and passed on their own, frequently alternating performances with famous American groups, such as when El palomo y el gorrión played with Conjunto Bernal.Migration has played a central role in the development and merging of these styles of music, which is visible not only in the costumes or the use of technological resources, but also in symbolic exchanges and the way in which musical traditions have been enriched on both sides of the border. The importance of studying urban popular music is plain: If Norteño began its days as a patrimony of the marginalized, it is now promoted in and has contributed to the establishment of the current process of Mexico's norteñización (northernization). It has helped to consolidate a cultural region, not only in the place where it arose, but also throughout the United States wherever the Mexican and Latin American diaspora has spread. Norteño and Tejano music have retained their essence, despite having assimilated influences from other popular music, and remain an intangible heritage of millions of people in Mexico and the United States.The corridos interpreted by Norteño and Tejano groups developed on the margins but remain vibrant and immediate in the third decade of the twenty-first century, especially on the border between the United States and Mexico, thanks to the narcocorrido and corridos about the migrant experience. In the coming years, this music will continue to be significant to millions of people in the region. This musical habitus is a fundamental element of the negotiation of identity in which border-dwellers engage daily to survive the powerful cultural influence of two nations.Even today, Norteño and Tejano groups, as well as rural singers and ordinary citizens, continue to enrich the cultural capital of the border with those cultural artifacts known as corridos, which have greater credibility with their listeners than any newspaper. They are key to maintaining and extending the networks of sociability that migrants and Chicanos deploy along the liminal “glass frontier,” a political border that, despite its militarization and any walls that may be erected, will never be a cultural border, and will continue to be permeable to exchanges of tradition in both directions.A few years ago, an ethnomusicology conference rejected my proposal for a paper on the music we are talking about here, stating that two Texan researchers had already addressed the subject, as if research on a musical genre could be exhausted by just two people. Of course, that is not the case, and fortunately the pandemic has brought us new books and articles on the subject, but we still have a long way to go toward understanding border music. Among other things, we need to understand: Under what circumstances can we consider this music a valid and worthy historical source? How does the past act on the present? What place does the musical heritage of migrants and Chicanos occupy in cultural capital? How have popular musicians acted as a counterweight to power? And what are the mechanisms by which their songs have had such influence on the lives of millions of people and in many fields of public opinion?