This is the fourth blog post in a new series featuring behind-the-scenes discoveries from the Ethnomusicology Archive & Lab at UT Austin’s Butler School of Music.
BY DIMITRIS GKOULIMARIS, PHD STUDENT
Our humble archive is host to an impressive amount of material. The small room’s shelves are stacked to the brim with tapes, containing field recordings from far and wide. Luckily, previous archivists have made it easier for us to access these recordings by digitizing their audio and transcribing it onto compact discs — CDs. Most of these CDs are placed in three shelves towards the back of the room.
In this post, I discuss a particular collection of tapes-turned-CDs: Mexican Songs. The title appeared vague to me; after all, Mexico is a large and diverse country. As I browsed through the collection, I soon realized that, for the most part, these recordings feature Mexican American songs.
I found 59 CDs that bear the title Mexican Songs, in addition to a few items called “Mexican corridos” or “Mexican American songs.” 43 out of those 59 CDs are attributed to the work of a single individual: Américo Paredes. Paredes was a writer and folklorist from Brownsville, a border city in the Rio Grande Valley. In 1956, Paredes became the first Mexican American to receive a PhD from the English department at the University of Texas at Austin.
Only two years later, Paredes was hired to teach at UT. In 1967, he helped found UT’s Center for Folklore Studies, which used to be home to all ethnographic field recordings donated to the school, before the ethnomusicology program and its archive were founded in the 1980s.
Paredes was also actively involved in the Chicano movement. At UT, he was one of the co-founders of the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS). His work as a folklorist foregrounded the richness of a distinct Mexican American culture, and more specifically a Tejano culture. Given his investment in studying and representing Chicano, Mexican American, and Tejano cultural expression, it may seem reductive for his collection of recordings to be titled “Mexican Songs.” It is unclear who gave the collection its title.
I decided to consult a Tejano friend, one whose family has lived around the Texas-Mexico border for many generations. I asked him whether Tejanos “feel Mexican.” His answer was, in short, yes. He explained that many Tejanos (though not all) tend to follow similar customs, traditions, and cultural expressive forms as their neighbors south of the border, while many also retain pride in their Mexican-ness. In addition, he claimed Northeast Mexican culture is surprisingly similar to the Tejano culture of south Texas, citing the prevalence of “Spanglish” across both regions. This conversation made me feel that “Mexican Songs” may not be as reductive a title as I had initially thought — just a vague one.
The cross-border continuity in cultural expression is audible in Paredes’s collection. I found evidence for this continuity in a CD with songs performed by the father-son duo Alberto and Fernando Garza from Brownsville. The Garzas mostly perform corridos (narrative ballads) of local relevance, with lyrical references to Texas placenames like El Paso and San Antonio.But, they also perform popular Mexican songs, as well as folksongs from regions south of the border. For example, “La Celosa” is a huapango tamaulipeco — a huapango from Tamaulipas.
While Tamaulipas shares its northern border with Texas, its southern tip is considered part of a cultural region known as La Huasteca, a region that spans seven states in eastern Mexico. Huapangos are a definitive element of the tradition of La Huasteca, and are not part of the norteño or tejano tradition. Nevertheless, these musicians from the valley chose to learn and perform huapangos, as another Mexican style that they consider part of their musical culture. Indeed, conjunto groups in Texas routinely perform a variety of regional Mexican dance styles, adapted for the local instrumentation.
Another fascinating piece performed by the Garzas is “El Corrido de Brownsville,” a corrido that was co-authored by Alberto Garza. According to the collector’s notes, it was modelled on “El Corrido de Laredo” — Laredo being another major border town. This piece intrigues me as it showcases some important aspects of the process of folk music creation. Folk songs are thought of as anonymous creations, but eponymous individuals do contribute to their composition — such as, in this case, Alberto Garza.
However, over time, folksongs eventually become subsumed under an understanding of collective authorship. The example of “El Corrido de Brownsville” also demonstrates how new songs are often made through the re-working of existing material. This type of creative process differs significantly from what we see in popular music or art music. Thus, this recording of the Garzas is great evidence of folk music creation in real time.
In my next blog post, I will dive deeper into the issue of Mexican identity in Texas, exploring historical corridos from Paredes’s collection. Stay tuned!
