Book Description

Mexico, with its elements of European and Indian cultures and diverse regional styles, has a vigorous musical tradition that influences popular music far beyond the country's borders. Since the 1920s, films and records have disseminated Mexican music throughout Latin America and the United States. This book examines the development of Mexico's popular and commercial music from the colonial period to the present. Through interviews with leading composers, promoters, and musicologists the author demonstrates how the mass entertainment media--radio, records, television, and films--influence and largely determine popular tastes in music. He shows how governmental actions and nationalism have affected Mexican music, before and since the Revolution of 1910. The author traces the complex international influences that shaped such major Mexican types of music as corridos and ranchera and norteña songs; mariachi, marimba, and norteño ensembles; and dances like the jarabe and the huapango. He finds the roots of Mexican music in Spanish folk songs and dances and European drawing-room dances, transformed by Indian traditions and African rhythms into a distinctive national style that emerged in the twentieth century. He discusses several foreign styles of music--such as the tango, the fox-trot, and the cha-cha--that have been popular in Mexico. An appendix written by Elizabeth H. Heist examines the recent emergence of Chicano music in the border area of the southwestern United States.