Dissonant Divas: The Limits of La Onda in Chicana Music by Deborah R. Vargas (review)

For decades, the key source for all things Tejano was largely left to Manuel Peña and Américo Paredes. Both Peña and Paredes offered a rich Texas lens with which to view musical genres, popular expressions, and borderland issues. Together, their writings spurred a canon of scholarship on border ballads, corridos, conjuntos, and more. The book Dissonant Divas begins with the premise that canonical histories should be revisited, relistened to, and queered for new, insightful meanings about gender and music. Dissonant Divas introduces scholars of music, sound, Tejana and Tejano, ethnic and queer studies to Deborah R. Vargas, the newest sheriff in town.

Within the past ten years, several texts have welcomed attention to Chicana- and Chicano-specific music and their relationship with Chicano listeners and communities (e.g., Habell-Pallan 2005; Kun 2005; Macias 2008; Johnson 2013). But Vargas makes sure to foreground Texas; the humongous “red” state most of us tend to “forget” when referencing coastal Latino states in discussions of Chicana music. Texas, Vargas reminds us, holds a distinct borderland history of conquest that surfaces in the musical trajectories of five Chicana singers.

Long overdue, Dissonant Divas represents the first book devoted entirely to Chicana singers who, according to Vargas, have been “literally and discursively unheard, misheard, or overheard” (ix). Rosita Fernández (San Antonio’s yellow-rose darling), Chelo Silva (known for singing in charro pants—gasp!), Eva Garza (Tejana queen of boleros), Selena Quintanilla Pérez (rest in peace), and Gloria Rios (forgotten Spanglish rocker) each represent an exciting instance of musical and performative nonconformity with the Tejano musical soundscape. Vargas positions each singer within the framework of dissonance, often characterized as chaos, disharmony, or commotion (xiv) to trouble heteronormative ideals about la onda or dominant ideals of the Chicano musical scene.

Across five chapters, Vargas makes clear that this book is not simply a recovery project meant to “add and stir” female perspectives into historiographies of music. Instead, Dissonant Divas refashions the Texas borderlands and its masculinist, nationalist narratives with a queer and feminist-of-color framework that works to dismantle ideas about history, the archive, and memory. Vargas assembles an organic archive composed of oral histories, fan testimonies, song lyrics, and memorabilia collected across Texas and three countries (United States, Mexico, and Cuba).

Readers will find themselves putting the book down as they YouTube song titles and concert performances cited by Vargas. Dissonant Divas makes these singers audible, legible, and worthy of our collective ear.