Producing an Other Nation: Autogestión, Zapatismo, and Tradition in Home Studio Music-Making in Mexico City

Abstract

This article traces the discourses of “nation” and “tradition” that emerged in the home studio practices of pro-Zapatista activist musicians in the peripheries of the Mexico City metropolitan area. It examines the ways that these practices related to notions of “autogestión” and “autonomy” linked to the contemporary Zapatista movement, which, in turn, were connected to musicians’ freedoms to “preserve” what they perceived as their cultural “roots.” Although these activities ostensibly harked back to ahistorical “tradition,” this article situates them within Mexico’s turn towards neoliberal economic policy since the 1980s, and the attempted reconfiguration of nationalism towards the private sphere that accompanied it.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Henry Stobart, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, and Simran Singh, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. See Manuel, and Walcott, for arguments connecting hip-hop musical practice with postmodernism.

2. James W. Carey, for instance, connects the popular acceptance of what he labels the “transmission view” of communication with the invention of the telegraph (“The telegraph...changed the fundamental ways in which communication was thought about. It provided a model for thinking about communication—a model I have called a transmission model,” 157). In particular, he emphasizes that this communication technology allowed for the conceptual separation of “communication” from “physical travel”—words that had previously been effectively used as synonyms.

3. Interview, Re Crew, 11 December 2012.

4. This is not an acronym.

5. Interview, Cienpies, 19 November 2012.

6. Interview, Cienpies, 2 May 2013.

7. Interview, Cienpies, 19 November 2012.

8. Lefebvre was originally writing in French, which is the reason that the o carries no accent here.

9. For instance, Laiko from Instituto del Habla told me that “the artist who goes out to sell” ends up changing his or her message (20 July 2013).

10. Interview, 27 November 2012.

11. Interview, Instituto del Habla, 27 November 2012.

12. Interview, 16 February 2013.

13. Interview, the Páramos, 7 July 2013.

14. Interview, the Páramos, 16 February 2013.

15. Interview, 16 February 2013.

16. Interview, 16 February 2013.

17. Interview, 16 February 2013.

18. As already highlighted in this article, in this context the Spanish word regional is often linked to Mexican cultural nationalism.

19. Interview, 21 July 2013.

20. Interview, 21 July 2013.

21. Interview, 21 July 2013.

22. Interview, 21 July 2013.

23. Interview, 16 February 2013.

24. Interview, 21 July 2013.

25. Interview, 21 July 2013.

26. Interview, 21 July 2013.

27. <http://theparamos.wix.com/oficial#!>(accessed 30 September 2014).

28. Interview, 16 February 2013.

29. On the band’s website, for instance, it was stated that “[t]he Páramos is a totally autogestive project [un proyecto totalmente autogestivo] with one objective: to express ourselves through music” (http://theparamos.wix.com/oficial#!historia, accessed 30 September 2014).

30. Interview, 21 July 2013.

31. Interview, 21 July 2013.

32. See an interesting article on the organilleros written by Kate Newman at http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/the-slow-demise-of-mexico-citys-organilleros/(accessed 28 September 2014).

33. Interview, 20 July 2013.

34. Interview, 27 November 2012.

35. Interview, 27 November 2012.

36. Interview, 20 July 2013.

37. Interview, 20 July 2013.

38. Interview, 20 July 2013.

39. Instituto del Habla has a page on music-streaming website SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/laiko-el-nigromante (accessed 14 October 2014). Their album Rap con sabor a México (2011) is available to download for free at http://4puntozcrew.over-blog.com/article-instituto-del-habla-rap-con-sabor-a-mexico-2011-104204941.html(accessed 14 October 2014).

40. Also see www.inegi.gob.mx/est/contenidos/espanol/proyectos/conteos/conteo2005/sintesis.pps(accessed 4 July 2015).

41. Albures are a common form of pun in Mexico, usually involving putting different words together to create a sentence with a sexual hidden meaning. A particularly common form of albur involves constructing a question that, if answered honestly, implicates the respondent in transgressive behavior. Since I was not a native speaker of Spanish, I was an easy target for albures.

42. Interview, Mario Caudillo, 23 June 2015.

43. In fact, Caudillo was no classical purist, but performed music in a wide variety of styles, including classical, rock, hip hop, and Mexican popular genres such as the bolero.

44. The phrase “open veins” (venas abiertas) recalls Eduardo Galeano’s dependency-theory classic Las venas abiertas de América Latina.

45. Notably, the ethical norms around sampling in this context were very distinct from those described by Schloss among hip-hop producers in the United States, where revealing another producer’s sources is frowned upon and samples ought to be manipulated in such a way that they are difficult to recognize (101–32). For Instituto del Habla, a large part of the value of sampling Mexican popular musics lay precisely in their being recognizable, on some level, to the listener.

46. The San Andrés Accords were the result of talks between the EZLN and the Mexican government in 1996 and sought to protect indigenous rights and autonomy. Although agreed to as a part of peace negotiations, they were never implemented by the government (Stahler-Sholk).