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Pachanga Moves F I V E A Local Republican and a National Democratic Gathering Events run the risk of decreasing the velocity of objects in motion, and one of the more obvious ways in which they do this is through not connecting with other channels, sizes, scales, and event forms—by lacking intertextuality . My discussion of pachangas started with Letty Lopez’s dance, an event form that is most clearly in response to (and contact with) the traditional, exclusively male pachanga of the country. In this chapter, I discuss two pachangas less connected to this form: one held to publicize the Aliseda campaign and one organized by the Democratic National Committee. I explain that both failed to produce new voting publics in South Texas in part because they in no way reflected or invoked the traditional pachanga. Pachangas and the discourse their sponsors hope to bind to these events keep the risk of subject distance at bay through challenging South Texans as citizens operating in relation to the mechanism of heroic citizenship. If, like the corrido, pachangas prompt and articulate an arena for South Texans to emerge as players, implicated by and as participants in a fight, then they also attract people. A way in which pachangas excite this sensibility of challenge is through gifting: the party is a gift to the participants. Another means is through setting the pachanga in the foreground of masculine honor: they cue a sense of “heroic citizenship,” implicitly reminding Mexicanos of their role in an epic struggle as United States citizens. As previously mentioned, Hidalgo County’s political pachanga—as an event—emerged when the World War II generation returned to the United States after fighting for freedom and democracy abroad—only to find a Jim Crow social and political system that excluded them. For these veterans, the pachanga was a place to plan acts of resistance to the dominant institutionalized system. Now such stylized political events index their Civil Rights struggle. Moreover, to a certain extent, those individuals who organize and host events in a hybrid economy of the gift—events located on the margins (i.e., in the country) of border cities and free-trade zones—subtly resist contemporary capitalism. Encompassing a resistant stance to an imperialist, and often racist, capitalist economy, participants in these old-style, out-in-the-country pachangas offer an alternative version of a global public sphere. On the other hand, events like Ernie Aliseda’s dance point to corporate political marketers’ initial attempts at co-opting and transforming such an attitude . They attempt to rechannel the force of live-music events into a brand of transnational marketing (or live-music event ethnic marketing). In the discussions in Chapters 2 and 3, I presented instances of this: that is, of the pachanga ’s transformation into a spectacle for the purpose of selling product— Budweiser. The power of the pachanga form and participants’ interactive roles are channeled to another goal. Corporate marketers working for Univision and Budweiser, for instance, co-opt and shift the political pachanga to their own ends of declaring their authority. Such work rechannels the pachanga’s challenge into an arena of safe competition controlled by the companies. Risk exists, primarily in advance of the party (in the invitation, creating buzz before the event), but is not inherent to it. In their events, corporate marketers tightly control the power of the image. These actors handle the pachanga form’s indexical attitude of resistance. They are also aware of the capacity of channels (e.g., the overlap and interaction of word-of-mouth discussion produced at the event and of the televised film clip of the event) to magnify and snowball discourse and thus actively work to produce specific images and sentiment at the event. Compared to Univision/Budweiser’s awareness of the power of both intimate and large pachangas to elicit participatory engagement and clever event manipulation, local and national political marketers clumsily handle this power. A T R A N S N AT I O N A L - L I K E PA C H A N G A : A LO C A L , B I G , D I R E C T L I V E - M U S I C E V E N T After Lopez’s Event—Thursday,October 19,2000 One of the most exciting moments of my fieldwork awaited at Greg’s Ballroom . As I drove west on U.S. Highway 83, a patch of construction forced...

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