Con Machaca y Mitote: NAFTA, Music and Texas as a Narrative of Self

Abstract

Established critiques against discourses on the omnivorous power and sweeping presence of capitalism have stressed the ambiguity, uncertainty and subtlety imbedded in a social capacity of cultural response. In these terms, the urban constellation emerges as a space for negotiation framing modem musical and cultural senses where inherited concepts o f tradition are interrogated. Indeed, urban cultures have become the primordial arena for historical hybridities.

Struggles over musical property are themselves political struggles over whose music, whose images of pleasure or beauty, whose rules of order shall prevail. This struggle in itself has become a basic principle not to denote a weakening of domestic identity, but rather, to re-iterate the historical question of the making home in modernity. The advent of an open-market economy in Mexico triggered an immediate social response encompassing a series of concerns and desires that underscored an unyielding economic anxiety in society at large. 

Its musical hybridity is a prime representation of a prevailing social tension between hegemonic and subaltern forces.