Between Aspiration and Apathy: Shifting Scale and the “Worlding” of Indigenous Day of the Dead Music

Abstract

This article examines Mazatec Day of the Dead music, a popular musical form featuring lyrics in the indigenous Mexican language Mazatec, which has become popular online and off, with some practitioners even dreaming of global prominence. I use the tension between musical aspirations and apathy to illuminate how the creation of “world musics” and other popular forms depends on unstable recalibrations of scale, including “shrinking” tendencies when aimed at particular local audiences. Ultimately, I suggest the shifting dynamics of scale is a key vehicle through which competing frames of belonging become expressed.

Notes

1. It would be impossible to cite this literature in its entirety but key texts include Feld (“Notes,” “A Sweet Lullaby”), Frith (“Discourse,” World Music), Marcus, Mitchell, and Taylor (Global Pop, Beyond Exoticism). In addition, Stokes provides a fairly recent overview.

2. I conducted 36 months of field research between 2000 and 2003 and have made yearly trips to Oaxaca since then, mostly for summers but also for longer stays, including the calendar year of 2011 and most of the calendar year of 2015.

3. YouTube posters’ screen names appear in bold; my translations of the original entries appear in italics. In representing original postings, I have preserved speakers’ orthographic choices, including punctuation and spelling. In providing English translations, I correct spelling and add punctuation as needed for clarity. Note as well that in these comments and those below, three roughly synonymous terms are used to designate dancers and musicians who sing to and embody the dead: the Nahuatl loan huehuentones and the Mazatec words chajma and cha xo’o.

4. Currently, the most widely viewed video on YouTube features music by the Huautla group Chajma Yakoan (Jona G C.).

5. These dimensions of Mazatec Muertos music resonate with work in ethnomusicology and sound studies on how sound technologies can foster new kinds of engagement with the dead, whether in the foundational era of sound recording (Sterne) or present-day “late capitalism” (Stanyek and Piekut).

6. For a more detailed discussion of liberation theology in Mexico, see Norget.

7. Due to the limits in the historical record, I cannot assess the validity of the claim made by many musicians and composers I have interviewed that the contest recovered a “lost tradition” of singing, i.e. that, before the influence of state and church policies marginalizing the use of Mazatec, songs for Muertos were primarily sung. Nor can I can say anything definitive about how much the music itself might have changed as a result of the (re?)-introduction of sung lyrics. Rather, my analysis is based on examining the competing value judgments people make in the present when assessing particular songs and groups.

8. The various types of son played in Mexican folk music are generally performed by small groups and feature instrumental passages alternating with sung verses. Corridos, a type of ballad very popular in Mexico, are narrative songs with introductory and intervening instrumental passages between stanzas. Rancheras date from the Mexican Revolution; they later became associated with mariachi and norteño bands from northwestern Mexico, linkages that often cast rancheras as non-local for people from the Sierra. This “otherness” is highlighted by their instrumentation, which generally includes such instruments as accordions and trumpets rarely used in music generally received as originating from the region. Cumbias are a form of tropical dance music that originated in Colombia; despite being a musical style practiced in Mexico since the middle of the 20th century, they retain—certainly for people in the Sierra—a clear foreign identity.

9. Both scholarship on the holiday nationally and local narratives about the fiesta view it as syncretic: ostensibly Catholic, the fiesta also has numerous elements marked as “indigenous.” For this reason, many Protestants do not participate in the holiday at all; chajma groups, for example, are well acquainted with which houses are occupied by Protestants and avoid them on their nightly visits, knowing they will not be invited in. It is worth noting, however, that the song contest is one of the few events from the fiesta in which Protestants regularly participate. As I have argued elsewhere, this is but one of several aspects of the contest and the revitalization project it anchored that have allowed it to be perceived as largely free of political interest.