Transnational encounters: Music and performance at the US-Mexico border edited by Alejandro L. Madrid
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Transnational encounters: Music and per f o r m a nce a t the US-Me x ic o bord e r Alejandro L. Madrid (ed.) Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, 424pp., $35.00, ISBN: 978-0199735938 (paperback) Latino Studies (2013) 11, 610–612. doi:10.1057/lst.2013.41
On 11 June 2013, amid the excitement of Game 3 of the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals, 11-year-old Sebastien De La Cruz, nicknamed El Charro de Oro, stepped up to the microphone located at mid court as the San Antonio Spurs’ announcer introduced Sebastien and his place of birth to the sold-out crowd at the AT&T Center in San Antonio, Texas. Millions of viewers across the United States and the world watched Sebastien, dressed in a grey charro trimmed in black – a clear gesture of both his allegiance to his hometown’s NBA team and pride in a musical genre whose history is rooted as much in the United States as it is in Mexico – as he raised the microphone to sing the national anthem of his country, the United States of America. It could not have been more than seconds later that the Twitter universe put on display what marginalized and despised citizens as well as noncitizens of the US-Mexican border experience on a daily basis, the vitriol and ignorance of morally bankrupt xenophobes. White Americans, African Americans and even Latin@s tweeted their racist tirades: “This lil Mexican snuck in the country like 4 hours ago now he singing the anthem” (François@A2daO); “It’s ironic how a little Mexican boy is singing the national
anthem of AMERICA” (Danny Ramos@ DuhManDan); “Why was the kid singing the national anthem wearing a mariachi band outfit? We ain’t Mexican” (Thomas DeStefano@ ThomasDeStefano). De La Cruz’s performance and its reception (both racist and supportive) embody the kinds of power struggles over meanings of music and identity that the contributors to Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the US-Mexico Border analyze in the sounds and spatial practices of those living in and experiencing the post-North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), transnational and heteronormative borderlands of the United States and Mexico. The editor, Alejandro L. Madrid, has compiled a timely volume of essays that analyze many of the most vibrant and historically significant musical scenes inhabiting these borderlands, all informed by theoretical models critical to understanding the kinds of ideological, political and historical energies that conditioned the reception of De La Cruz’s performance of the national anthem. The volume focuses on the expressive responses in music, dance and film by people living in and around the Mexican-United States border to an overwhelming array of pressures ranging from the passage of NAFTA, the emergence of
© 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Vol. 11, 4, 610–612
Book Review
the internet, the drug trade, 9/11 and the wars on terrorism, and debates concerning immigration to the discourses of tradition, modernity, cosmopolitanism, and national and ethnic identi
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