Whistling, Gender, and the Aesthetic Turn in Mexico City

Abstract

Among certain communities of rural Mexico, whistles are used to mimic the melody of spoken words in order to facilitate long-distance communication. In Mexico City, rural-urban migration has produced an aesthetic turn—there whistles endure but decoupled from their paralinguistic function, reflecting a fluid lexicon of symbolic performance in which imaginaries of gender and social class are key to their deciphering. This article proposes that a focused examination of urban whistles from a sociocultural perspective is essential in understanding precisely how these rapid social transformations are experienced and understood at the intersubjective level.