Publications

Twentieth-Century Music

Mariachi Accompaniment: Cultural Bearers for Communal Conviviality

Utilizing the ideas of convivencia (convivial interaction) and Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz’s framework of ‘accompaniment’, I suggest that the‘modern-urban’ mariachi, often characterized as an expression of standardization and commodification, has established a capacity for facilitating culture that contributes to the development of convivial communal spaces. In the midst of marginalization and systemic oppression, migrant and aggrieved communities throughout Greater Mexico engage in cultural practices and actions to reaffirm a sense of belonging, to which mariachi musicians have contributed and at times served as cultural bearers. I examine mariachi practices of apprenticeship learning and chambas (contractual gigs), the emergence of the Misa Panamericana (the mariachi mass) in Cuernavaca, and the integration of Mexican cultural expressions in San José, California to illuminate the convergence of political, cultural, and religious action and how the mariachi expression has played a role in these intersections.

Rodriguez, Russell C. “Mariachi Accompaniment: Cultural Bearers for Communal Conviviality.” Twentieth-Century Music 21, no. 2 (2024): 180-208.

Kalfou: A Journal Of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies

Ramón ‘Chunky’ Sánchez— ¡PRESENTE!

On November 5, 2016, hundreds of people convened at the historical landmark of Chicano Park in Barrio Logan, San Diego, to celebrate the life of one of the community’s most revered elders, Ramón “Chunky” Moroyoqui Sánchez. Nuestro querido maestro falleció el día 28 de octubre de 2016. Sánchez, endearingly known as Chunky, was synonymous with Barrio Logan, Chicano Park, Chicano/a music, and San Diego in general. In this city, an auditorium is named in his honor. His image is incorporated in murals. The Chicano comedy troupe Culture Clash developed a vignette about Chunky, and upon his passing the San Diego Chargers’ website featured him in a blog post that included a photo of him with players and cheerleaders. Chunky was also well known beyond the Imperial Valley. The music of Los Alacranes Mojados (the group he started with his brother, Ricardo Sánchez) continues to be embraced in Mexicano/a and Chicano/a communities throughout California and the Southwest. The news of Sánchez’s passing reverberated throughout California like the violent ripples of a pond into which a boulder has been dropped. Ese vato will be missed.

Rodríguez, Russell C. “Ramón ‘Chunky’ Sánchez—¡PRESENTE!“ Kalfou 4, no. 1 (2017): 118-122.

Journal of American Folklore: A Gloral Quarterly

Turning Hegemony on Its Head: The Insurgent Knowledge of Américo Paredes

We argue that Paredes pioneered a new approach to intellectual work through his labors as a scholar-activist, especially through his deployment of what Michel Foucault would subsequently call insurgent knowledge. He explored the dynamics of domination and resistance as they actually happen in history: in particular places and particular times in particular contexts. Paredes recognized the politi- cal significance of the dialogic dimensions of expressive culture; the power of discourse and ideology in social relations; the subversive potential of humor; and the composite, conflicted, and contradictory nature of social identities. Perhaps most important, his work illuminates the richly generative scholarly significance of local vernacular knowledge. Paredes showed how the experiences, injuries, and aspirations of aggrieved communities can become encoded in seemingly simple and ordinary stories and songs. He demonstrated how folklore functions as a social and political force, as a repository of collective memory, a site of moral instruction, and a mechanism for bringing communities into being through performance. Paredes drew upon the survival strategies of one aggrieved people to fashion epistemological grounding for important new forms of critical and activist scholarship.

Lipsitz, George, and Russell Rodríguez. “Turning Hegemony on Its Head: The Insurgent Knowledge of Américo Paredes.” The Journal of American Folklore 125, no. 495 (2012): 111–25.

Inside the Latin@ Experience: A Latin@ Studies Reader

Politics of Aesthetics: Mariachi Music in the United States

The western hemisphere has historically produced iconic musical expressions that represent territorial and national identities. Puerto Rico has contributed the wonderful rhythmic expressions of bomba and plena, Cuba the rumba and son, Colombia and Venezuela versions of cumbias and vallenatos, Argentina the tango, Brazil the famous samba, and the United States jazz and our beloved rock and roll. A vast array of musical expressions have emerged from Mexico in which people illustrate pride for their regions and states, but no other expression has enjoyed
international recognition to the extent of the mariachi.

Mariachi music has stood and continues to stand as a symbol of the Mexican nation, people, and identity. For the Mexican community resid­ ing outside the nation of Mexico, to which America Paredes referred to as Mexico de afuera,2 the mariachi categorized as a “traditional” cultural expression similar to the “ballet folklórico has become extremely influential in shaping the cultural imaginary of Mexican national identity”; it is a strong signifier of Mexicanidad. The transnational movement of this musi­cal expression into the United States and to other countries and territories has ushered mariachi music into the international realm of popular culture. In this chapter I propose a discussion about mariachi that examines its historical, recent, and emerging dynamics as a transnational expression, while recognizing that mariachi music is simultaneously located within the categories of popular, commercial, contemporary, and traditional music.

Rodríguez, Russell C. “Politics of Aesthetics: Mariachi Music in the United States.” In Inside the Latin@ Experience: A Latin@ Studies Reader. Ed. Norma E. Cantú and María E. Fráquiz  pp. 193-209. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2010.

Dancing Across Borders

Folklórico in the United States: Cultural Preservation and Disillusion

This chapter is intended to open a serious dialogue concerning the practice and performance of folklórico by Chicanos in the United States. I argue that the folklórico movement in the United States proliferated from the momentum of the Chicano social and artistic movement. Within this expression, ethnic Mexican dancers focused much attention on collecting, promoting, and preserving dances within a frame of Mexicanidad. Folklórico dancers were rarely concerned with creating dance that would tell the stories of the Chicano experience (a U.S. experience), contextualized in the communities in which many of these dancers lived, which could be received and critiqued by the community, as Zamarripa suggests above. I compare this to other cultural expressions–also inspired by Mexican practices–that came out of the Chicano movement, such as mural painting, teatro, (theater), film, poetry, and music.

Rodríguez, Russell. “Folklórico in the United States: Cultural Preservation and Disillusion,” in Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos. Ed. Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Norma Cantu, and Brenda Romero, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the practice, performance and transmission of mariachi music in the United States.  Through historical narratives and ethnographic research I explicate the developments and transformations this musical form has endured due to its presence in new public spaces and the participation of new practitioners who diverge from the Mexicano working-class masculinity that signifies the “traditional” mariachi musician.  As a result of these shifts I argue that mariachi music has become a terrain of new understandings of aesthetics in which new repertoire, practice and authority emerge, which are in turn affirmed, appropriated and challenged.  I propose the concept of the “politics of aesthetics,” to examine the intersection of race, gender, class, and culture as integrated in an understanding of practice, performance, and aesthetics to clarify the dynamic of the developing mariachi space.  What has emerged through the study is evidence of how this cultural expression is utilized by US ethnic Mexican communities that demonstrate a desire of legitimation for their contributions to the cultural fabric of the United States via the mariachi.  In response, competing discourses have surfaced challenging the process of legitimation.

Rodríguez, Russell C. “Cultural Production, Legitimation, and the Politics of Aesthetics : Mariachi Transmission, Practice, and Performance in the United States.” University of California, Santa Cruz, 2006.