Musical Ritual in Mexico City: From the Aztec to NAFTA

Abstract

This comparative study combines historical and ethnographic evidence to describe the uses of music and the shifting meanings of musical traditions across almost seven centuries of Mexican history (especially in Mexico City). Despite this colossal scope, Pedelty does not attempt to write a comprehensive history of Mexico through musical practices; in fact, his study is even more ambitious. Rather than providing a plain historical narrative, Pedelty seeks to explain the role of musical rituals as performances that emerge from specific historical, cultural, and political circumstances but are also agents of social change, cultural identification, and political resistance. His comparative approach emphasizes the contemporary coexistence of many of these musical traditions and the ways in which Mexicans have resignifed them according to their current political and social circumstances.Pedelty divides Mexican history into six large periods: the Aztec Empire, New Spain, the nineteenth century, the 1910 revolution, the modern period (1921 – 68), and the contemporary period (1968 – 2002). The book’s structure, alternating chapters of history and comparative ethnography, is conducive to Pedelty’s interdisciplinary goals. His intent is to first describe a particular music tradition historically and then explore its contemporary resonances ethnographically. He explains his theoretical apparatus in a separate appendix, allowing him to maintain a clear and concise prose throughout the main body of his text and scrupulously avoid jargon.Pedelty presents his argument most effectively in the sections devoted to the Aztec period and modern Mexico. The first interprets contemporary Conchero and Mexica dancers as metaphors of indigenous people’s needs to produce a sense of inclusion or autonomy, respectively, in a racially discriminatory society. The section on modern Mexico focuses on the urban success of bolero and danzón and their role in “gaining cultural citizenship in modernizing Mexico” (p. 149). His interesting discussion of bolero is momentarily disturbed by the sloppy selection of some of his musical examples (Agustín Lara’s “Noche de ronda” and “Farolito” are not boleros but stylized triple-meter waltzes and therefore articulate a different history than boleros). But Pedelty’s argument about cabaretera movies in relation to bolero, gender construction, and legendary feminine icons in Mexican popular culture (Coyolxauhqui, La Malinche, La Vírgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, and La Adelita) is particularly appealing and informative.Most problematic is Pedelty’s treatment of colonial musical practices, nineteenth-century musics, and twentieth-century art music. Although he constructs a complex mosaic of colonial Mexican music by addressing a large variety of secondary sources, he fails to acknowledge some of the most attractive current work on the relationship between contemporary Mexican folk music and European baroque musical practices. His reliance on classic music scholarship to the expense of more recent work prevents him from articulating some of the scholarly discussions that might have better supported his goals. If he had engaged this scholarship (Antonio Corona, Eloy Cruz), he might have been able to illustrate the current life of colonial secular music in the instrumental and vocal techniques of the huapango or son jarocho traditions instead of relying on a single government-supported concert by the Hinojosa-Villey Duo. The survey of nineteenth-century Mexican music in part 3 lacks substance and is marred by a few factual errors. Antonio Gomezanda was not “a precursor of 20th-century nationalist composers” (p. 105), as Pedelty argues, but rather a nationalist composer (only a conservative, less modernistic one) active during the first part of the twentieth century. Nor was Cenobio Paniagua’s Catalina de Guisa (1859) the first Mexican opera (p. 105): Manuel Covarrubias composed Reinaldo y Elina o La sacerdotisa peruana more than ten years earlier, and Manuel de Sumaya’s La Parténope premiered in 1711, more than two centuries before Paniagua’s first opera. The discussion of Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas in chapter 12 is also problematic, as it reproduces a series of myths (Chávez as a nationalist/indigenista composer or the dichotomy of “sophisticated urban Chávez” versus “straightforward rural Revueltas”) that have been challenged by recent scholarship (Eduardo Contreras Soto, Alejandro L. Madrid, and Leonora Saavedra). Some of these weaknesses might be attributed to the lack of engagement with more up-to-date scholarship, but others are clearly the result of a careless reading of sources.Regardless of its shortcomings, Pedelty’s interdisciplinary effort should be noted. It would be interesting to read more texts combining ethnography and history as part of larger interpretative projects. This out-of-the-ordinary contribution to the study of musical cultures in Mexico would make an interesting reading for those concerned with Mexican music, culture, and history.