Ni aqui ni alla (neither here nor there): Musica nortena and the Mexican working -class diaspora.
Item
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Title
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Ni aqui ni alla (neither here nor there): Musica nortena and the Mexican working -class diaspora.
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Identifier
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AAI3287104
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identifier
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3287104
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Creator
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Ragland, Catherine Ann.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Peter Manuel
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | Anthropology, Cultural | Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies | Hispanic American Studies
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Abstract
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The continued migration of Mexican laborers beginning in the late nineteenth century and accelerating to massive proportions over the past four decades has greatly influenced U.S. economic growth and popular culture. It is in this environment of mass migration, isolation, and exploitation that a new Mexican American community has evolved, transforming an already volatile "border culture," a middle-class Chicano identity, and a simultaneously exoticized and marginalized Mexican cultural presence in this country. This dissertation follows the stylistic and socio-political evolution and transformation of musica nortena from its roots as a regional folk genre of northeastern Mexico and the Texas-Mexican border to the popular music associated with working-class immigrants traveling from all regions of Mexico, particularly those whose status is undocumented in the U.S. This work also considers the transnational nature of the music's reach as it has emerged in the last decade as one of the most commercially popular "Latino" genres in the U.S. and Mexico.;Musica nortena (literally translated as "music of the north") has traveled along the same migrant routes and survived as a veritable "soundtrack" of the circular, back and forth migratory experiences of the Mexican laborer community. It has constituted a way of effectively uniting these scattered, yet in other ways, cohesive communities which range from the border to the Hispanic Southwest to reviving and reconstructing rural agricultural communities in places like Washington's Yakima Valley, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan, to service-industry networks in urban centers like New York City, Las Vegas, Chicago and Denver. The transnational popularity of this music---and the narrative corrido song form in particular---has enabled listeners to reaffirm and reconstitute a Mexican diasporic identity that is separate and distinct from the Chicano and/or Tejano of the Southwest. It is an identity based on a redefined notion of Mexican nationalism (or mexicanidad) that includes references to the Mexican Revolution, indigenous ancestry, border-crossing and border conflict, illegal status, resistance to North American assimilation and acculturation, and the maintenance of a "Mexican imagination" by way of cross-cultural economic and social networks.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.