Banda: Mexican Musical Life across Borders (review)

Technobanda music is loud and brassy, and anyone who watches Mexican television or has lived in the borderlands region would recognize its distinctive sound and signature dance style, the quebradita. Its roots lie in the banda music of rural Sinaloa in northwestern Mexico, updated in the 1990s with electric amplification and synthesizers, a bold attitude, flashy clothes, and heavy marketing. In the early 1990s, technobanda exploded onto the scene in Los Angeles. Ethnomusicologist Helen Simonett's Banda offers an engaging and insightful analysis of this music and dance craze. She argues that the music offered working-class Mexican Americans and Mexican migrants more than an opportunity to catapult their favorite a radio station to number one in Los Angeles; it empowered them with an entire lifestyle that included new dance steps, vaquero outfits, and a connection to their Mexican heritage.

To understand the craze, Simonett argues, one must confront it as a peripheral musical form and in light of anti-immigrant politics that swept California in the 1990s. By peripheral, she refers to the cultural status and the geography of banda music and its fans. Neither banda nor technobanda ever achieved the status of national symbol in the way that mariachi did. Nor was it ever accepted into polite society, as evidenced by the fact that Mexican and Chicano scholars have ignored the genre. The fame of banda and technobanda was confined to the working classes in northwest Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican border, far from the cultural centers of Mexico City or New York. In terms of politics, Simonett argues that in the midst of California's xenophobic hysteria, technobanda encouraged disaffected Mexican Americans to declare newfound pride in their cultural heritage. To fans, it symbolized their Mexican cultural inheritance, but, unlike mariachi music, it integrated a rural regional peculiarity with innovation, modernity, and urbanity. Simonett is careful to note that banda music was never overtly political. But by listening to banda, by frequenting technobanda clubs, and by adopting the vaquero lifestyle, fans flouted assimilation. Instead of quietly keeping to themselves or bowing to mainstream pressures, banda fans declared their cultural autonomy from assimilationist pressures.

Drawing upon interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles and Sinaloa, the first part of the book masterfully unveils the ways fans used music to shape their identities. This is by far the best part of Simonett's book. The next part draws on similar sources, augmented by historical documents, to ask why mariachi gained widespread acceptance while banda remained on the margins of Mexican national and polite society. Simonett offers a fascinating and often insightful analysis of the divergent histories of the two genres, but her explanation for why mariachi, rather than banda, became the national music of Mexico is unconvincing. Rather than trace why and how mariachi became canonized, she reverts to a geographical explanation, asserting that because Jalisco (the birthplace of mariachi music) was closer to Mexico City, its music became dominant. Her explanation would have been enriched by discussion of the postrevolutionary promoters of Mexican national culture, many of whom originated from Jalisco, the Bajío, Michoacán, and Oaxaca. Perhaps they put more effort into studying, documenting, and promoting the sounds of their youth and took little interest in the alien music of Sinaloa. This second part of the book ends with an oddly placed collection of personal stories of technobanda promoters that does not contribute much to the book as a whole. The third part of the book is a discussion of corridos and the mythologization of narco-culture in the borderland. While this is a fascinating topic, it is not clear how it is connected with the rest of the book, nor are her arguments in this section particularly compelling.

The book's well-done conclusion redraws the author's arguments about banda as...