Pachangas: Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics, and Transnational Marketing

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION A TA L E O F T W O D E M O C R A C I E S . . . A N D T H E I R S H A R E D C O N S T I T U T I O N Tale #1 Scissors in hand, I sat in my apartment gleaning the Corpus Christi CallerTimes for commentary on the 1998 political campaigns when a photograph made me pause. Rising out of a sea of sign-waving supporters, George W. Bush and Tejano music icon Emilio Navaira stood side by side with their hands clasped together high above their cowboy hats. The article explained that their visit to the hybrid restaurant Wok-a-Mole was part of Bush’s gubernatorial campaign sweep through South Texas. “Emilio” played a special rewritten version of his hit song “Mano a Mano” (Hand-in-Hand). Bush ultimately captured over one-third of the Hispanic vote in the state, the majority of those voters crossing party affiliation to vote for a Republican candidate. Given this community’s traditional affiliation with the Democratic Party, I wondered why a Tejano music star would align himself with a Republican politician. What kind of marketing was this? What does this mingling of a highly polished and commercially successful musician and a Republican politician mean for Mexicano expressive culture and democratic politics? I began researching how and where political campaigns, marketers, musicians, and corporations come into contact. In this case, one point of connection between these actors was Philip Morris. At the time of the campaign, Bush’s “top consultant ” (Van Natta 2000), Karl Rove, was also a paid consultant to Philip Morris. Miller Beer is a subsidiary of Philip Morris, and a series of live-music events, part of Miller’s “Livin’ Grande” marketing campaign of 1996, had featured Bush’s future supporter and then-Philip Morris performer, Navaira. These corporate, musical, and political affiliations suggested sites where transnational , national, and regional interests mingle for a particular purpose. Tale #2 Tape recorder on the table, I sat in Mauro Reyna’s law office in South Texas interviewing Reyna and his cousin, Cecilio Garza, about the 2000 district court race when a story made me pause. While in a Texas hospital having a baby,awomansangtheentirecampaignsongof JudgeEdwardAparicio.Garza explained that his daughter had shared a room in a maternity ward in Galveston , Texas, with a woman in labor who explained, “I have been singin’ this song, and I just can’t get it out of my mind.” Six months prior to this event and three hundred miles south of Galveston, Aparicio’s campaign had first aired “El Corrido del Juez” (“The Song of the Judge”) on radio and television stations across South Texas’s Hidalgo County. The song created a phenomenon across the county, particularly in poorer communities, where men, women, and children became animated about politics: children followed Aparicio singing the song, and adults warmly welcomed “el juez del corrido” (the judge from the song) into their homes. Aparicio ultimately captured approximately five thousand new voters, and in his victory, he symbolically defeated Hidalgo County’s political machine. Given Garza’s, Reyna’s, Aparicio’s, and others’ stories about the power of this song to elicit participatory engagement in politics, I wondered what caused this special song to arise. What kind of marketing created this song and disseminated it so widely? What does this mixture of traditionally styled borderlands music and grass-roots politics mean for transnational marketers and democratic politics? I explore these questions, crucially allied to music’s awesome capacity to produce democratic publics, in this text. These vignettes foreground a central facet of contemporary life: symbols saturate our surroundings, and political organizers use them toward various ends. Writing that shifts from the description to the interpretation of symbolic manipulation has long been the lifeblood of anthropology; hence, the discipline’s tools are well suited to provide a sophisticated illumination of our present condition. Music, politics, and personal relations, for example, remain very much a part of life, but the notions that students of society once held about politics, business, and culture as discrete entities no longer suffice. The intersections between these realms are increasingly seamless, and I present instances of this trend through explorations of one manifestation: the trans2 Pachangas formation of the political pachanga (a social gathering featuring music) into a spectacle for...