Negotiating Conflicting Rhetorics: Rancheras and Documentary in the Classroom

I remember sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car as a young teenager, rolling my eyes at the noise coming from the radio speakers. On the airwaves being sent directly from Texas and Florida, and behind the overbearing static sound, I could make out the TAN, TAN of the ending of the ranchera song to which my father was happily singing along.¹ My mother would be next to him singing and whistling, too, ignoring the static that was louder than the music and that would invariably give my teenage self a headache.² My sister and I, two teenagers growing up in a small town in Eastern Oregon and adoring European bands like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, and The Cure, would complain, or should I say whine, about the “music” our parents were so willing to hold on to even through the static.

Ironically, even after all my attempts to get my parents to change the station from their static rancheras to 92 KISS FM, today I find myself nostalgically searching the radio channels for Mexican music or Spanish-speaking stations. Fortunately, I don’t have to search that long, as Latino music is now on the FM and digital air-waves in the most rural parts of the United States, making it accessible to Latino/a populations in even the smallest of towns. My experiences have made me realize that this music is a text connected to individuals on many levels, superseding just plain nostalgia. The fact is that today, after many years of making it through new musical genres and trends, rancheras are not only about the appreciation of music, but also about the sociocultural issues present within the individual listening to this music. Whether it be the person who is driving down the street with the radio blaring and the car thumpin’, the father who sits in his home with headphones on so as not to disturb his teenage daughters’ assimilation tendencies, or the college professor who theorizes about the social and political significance of this music, these listeners are ascribing cultural and gendered meaning to this music.

My resistance to ranchera music as a teenager growing up in a northern state was more than adolescent rebellion to my parents’ music, making this cultural crux an important site of reflection for educators. My resistance involved not wanting to be seen as that kind of Mexican, which in my mind at the time was of the migrant-working, labor class of which I was a member. Although the statement often angered me, I naively believed in that harmful phrase that deems one more important than their community: “Oh, [enter first name], you’re different than them.” I now focus on the word difference as that which causes so much frustration for many of the students who come into my classroom on a daily basis. My resistance to rancheras involved a great misunderstanding of my own culture, and most unfortunately, it involved giving in to the structure of dominance the “American” culture has acquired; thus it also involved a great (mis) understanding of United States culture.

My own narrative made me realize that individual experience with music is not separate from our classrooms. In fact, music is the everyday, thus giving educators access to a site where critical thinking about our social atmosphere is set to happen through writing, reading, and listening. This essay offers an alternative literacy both to students and educators unfamiliar with this patriarchal and cultural music and to those who are immersed in it and who constantly negotiate conflicting cultural narratives. By analyzing ranchera music through a feminist lens and by incorporating the aural, visual, and written rhetoric that it encompasses, this essay offers alternative ways of engaging texts that work through colonialism and the rhetorical map that travels south to north. This analysis also offers those who live north of “up North” a way to theorize about the homeland and the borderlands that exist and that, as a consequence of anti-Mexican legislation, are becoming more delineated daily.

Through music we can see that song...