Huapango Arribeño: A Mexican Musico-Poetic Tradition at the Interstices of Postmodernity (1968–1982)

Abstract

Attending to the complex social circumstances that shape vernacular expressive forms over time entails careful consideration of tradition as an embodied aesthetic practice that is maintained as a situated space of quotidian expression while also actuating a cardinal momentum capable of mapping the most present vicissitudes of everyday life. With this in mind, this article ethnographically renders the transformations and circulations of Mexican huapango arribeño—an under-studied musico-poetic tradition—across an emergent postmodern topography of lived life in Mexico from 1968–1982. By providing historiography, alongside transcriptions and practitioners' accounts, a case is made for huapango arribeño as a creative poesis of telluric ways of self-knowing and place-making amidst the political-economic enclosures and officialized cartographies of governmentality during that time.