Borderland Music as Symbolic Forms of Nationalisms: The Best of the Texas Tornados, Partners, and Viva Luckenbach!

In nationalism narratives females frequently function to justify, support, and frame the exploits of males, who "embody the essential virtues" of the national community.² Authors often script the female character into the patriarchal archetypes of virgin (La Virgen de Guadalupe) and whore (La Malinche).³ Constructed and reified in these archetypes of passive or proactive, respectively, the former can be seen as maintaining the established order while the later represents a perceived threat or an outside enemy.

Musical texts located in the borderlands area of northern Mexico and southern Texas are the focus of this paper. Borderland music is an expressive form affiliated with Anglo and Mexicano national identities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. As a critical feminist informed by an antiracist and anticlassist consciousness, I explore borderland music as a nexus for interpreting issues of Mexicano and Anglo identity formation.⁴ Although various borderland musical forms—e.g., corridos (Paredes 1994), conjunto (Peña 1985), orquestra (Peña 1985), Tejano (Peña 1999)—have been topics of serious scholarly inquiry, analysis of a specific form—in this case, conjunto—in relation to those more typically associated with Anglo artists—e.g., country-western music—are rare.⁵ In addition, many of those studies have failed to take into account the role of gender in reifying and complicating what these musical forms do. Consequently, I contribute to the scholarship of borderland music in two ways. First, by drawing on scholarship in borderland expressive culture, I show that conjunto and country-western music embrace ideologically encoded gender messages.⁶ Specifically, I focus on the ways in which borderland lyrics borrow these messages from images of the female character to promote, defend, and reaffirm a national group; she is the sign and the signified.⁷ Second, I briefly complicate these boundaries by demonstrating how artists voice lyrics in an ambiguous fashion, opening spaces to challenge and rearticulate gendered renderings of national identity. Readers might then opt to take a radical interpretation from the following discussion: consider if some male performers are creating their own form of feminist intervention.

Borderland narratives achieve semiotic cohesion—i.e., making the woman the sign and the signified—through a specific style of presentation.⁸ Action unfolds from the authoritative perspective of male narrators. For, as Bauman and Briggs argue, a performer demonstrates "authoritative" communicative competence by displaying "control over decentering and recentering" a text (1990, 77). Plot, direction, and tone are all creations of men who are the dynamic force, the author, and the authority. In borderland music, behind this textual authority is the art(ificial/fully) penetrating man. In other words, male characters penetrate other men through reified national bodily boundaries (figuratively penetrating women). This essay demonstrates such an occurrence in two phases. The songs "Guacamole," "Marina," "Eres un Encanto," ("You are Enchanting"), "¡Viva Luckenbach!" ("Luckenbach Lives!"), and "What I Like About Texas" express the distinct and hierarchical boundaries of both gender and national identity or of a gendered national identity.

The first part of this article looks at how Anglo and Mexicano nationalisms reproduce distinct identities through fetishizing and dividing the female body in three narrative forms of borderland music texts. The song texts, in turn, treat the gendered body in three distinct and interrelated ways. In "Marina" (Partners) as well as in "Eres un Encanto" (Partners), the body is an iconic site of devotion; while "Guacamole" (The Best of the Texas Tornados), "¡Viva Luckenbach!," and "What I Like About Texas" (¡Viva Luckenbach!) characterize the body as an ethnic consumable.

The second part analyzes two borderland texts, "Across the Borderland" (Partners) and "Una Más Cerveza" (The Best of the Texas Tornados), as paradoxical places where nationalism's hegemonies are both reinscribed and questioned. By focusing on gender...