Why Study Chicano/a Music? By Frederick Luis Aldama

A Response to a Response:

Why Study Chicano/a Music?

Part I

After receiving an interesting, though not very constructive review of my essay, "Frontera Musicscapes: Grinding Up a Bad Edge in Borderland Studies", I take the opportunity to think about the purpose of studying music (borderland or otherwise). 

The reviewer opens his/her critique with some of the following comments:

•"the article doesn't display understanding of -- or even concern with Chicano/a Studies.  Instead, the author applies a pre-packaged (and decidedly uninformed) critique of all scholarship that sees political import in culture. 

•"The author claims that all music is by nature apolitical, that "techno" music in Tijuana is absolutely indistinguishable from techno music in Detroit or Germany, and that only language can have political affectivity, not music or dance."

My essay very honestly and openly discusses the aim of the scholarship: to see if theories of music that propose utopian solutions to social strife are in fact valid.  Here, however, as the reviewer presents no evidence for his/her contention, it is not my place to prove what is decidedly proven in my essay: my deep understanding of and concern with Chicano/a studies and music in general.

According to this reviewer, the essay claims that there is no "political import in culture". Is there any truth in this assertion?  I believe concepts should be defined and used carefully in a scholarly work. In the essay “culture” is used according to its meaning in anthropology, where it serves to characterize all products of human activity, as distinct from the effects of nature, and in this sense it includes such phenomena as literature, music, politics, economy, law, and  war, to name a few.  With this conception of culture clearly articulated in the essay, I explore attentively the phenomena of Nortec--and music as such--within its historical and socioeconomic contexts.  Moreover, the reviewer states that the essay represents music as "apolitical", missing altogether the central point of the essay:  that music always has the potential for being political (mostly at the level of content or lyrics) and can provide a glue for political action to take place. Many examples come readily to mind: drum beats and/or chants that can keep thousands of people unified in a marching protest or demonstration, or the singing of "The International" at certain political meetings, are among the most common.  Here, musicscapes and songs and rhymed slogans can serve as signs of identity or identification with such and such a collective's demands and even political worldview.  And, as the essay clearly proposes, although identification with music and songs can be political in this sense --and be effective in the sense I have just described--, music alone, independent of human political purpose and politically organized agency, has no political effectivity; it is not music as such (live or recorded) that changes the world in such and such political direction and it is not the singing of "The International" that forces the bosses to make concessions to the workers.  It is the worker's activity with their political parties and their unions that accomplish political and/or economic change.  It is never the music that these workers listen to or sing that effects social change. This is a fact observed both in the present and in history; it is also a fact that neuroscience and other empirical disciplines devoted to the study of the mind attest and cannot be simply brushed aside.

Asserting that  I apply a "pre-packaged (and decidedly uninformed) critique of all scholarship that sees political import in culture”, he/she is not only misreading the essay but is showing that his or her method is precisely the application of “a pre-packaged (and decidedly uninformed) critique”.

This reviewer not only misrepresents the nature of the issues, and not only applies a methodology that is foreign to all truly investigative endeavor, but also makes claims about facts without giving any empirical support to them or even indicating what kind of evidence could possibly be presented in their favor. The most common doxa is that music is politically effective (and implicitly, that such effectiveness can be favorable to a left-wing politics.) My contention is that this is simply a believe, and that facts show that it is a false believe.  Wagner's music, for example, has been used in all kinds of occasions and purposes within political contexts that range from Nazi's multitudinous meetings to attempts at terrorizing civil populations during war, as when US army helicopters were sowing death and destruction in Vietnam to the tune of The Ride of the Valkyries.  There are literally hundreds of radio stations in the United States broadcasting non-stop Christian music, a profitable musical genre in full expansion.  Has Wagner's music been the agent of change in the both instances I have just mentioned?  And has the expansion of the so called Christian music led to more converts?

These are factual questions, and they cannot be answered by appeals to faith (the present ideological fashion, the transient doxa) or by “prepackaged” self-proclaimed “theories”

As responsible scholars, it is our duty to examine things as objectively as possible and with the sharpest tools at our disposal.. History, sociology, economics, musicology, cognitive psychology, and yes, neurobiology are foremost among those tools.

The reviewer's critique continues:

•"The absence of Chicano Studies is accompanied in this article by a similar absence of actual Mexicanos. The "border" is described as an abject site populated only by miserable maquiladora workers.  All the struggles that are going on in Tijuana fueled by the new political, economic, and cultural realities are not discussed at all. The workers in Tijuana, this author assures us, need a revolution based on the author's mis-readings of Raymond Williams (who the author likes) and Michel Foucault (who the author doesn't like)"

Once again, the reviewer misrepresents the facts presented in the essay.  Nowhere in the article do I picture the border as an "abject site".  As is well known, there is in Tijuana a sizable amount of pimps, drug dealers, mercenaries and other parasites and criminals belonging to the lumpenproletariat.  It is also well known that this in no way constitutes the whole of Tijuana, much less the city's most important, decisive part.  In Tijuana, as in every other city in Mexico and in all other countries, the essential part of the population is the working class, the people who work for wages, and their families.  Without them, no city could exist.  How could I or anybody in his right mind consider Tijuana or any city in the world simply as an “abject site”. This assertion, put forward in the strident tone used by Reviewer 1 in every single paragraph o his or hers, is just another manifestation of anger and an obvious falsehood.  Also, the essay makes very clear that its focus is not to chart in detail "all the struggles that are going on in Tijuana fueled by the new political, economic, and cultural realities".  This would simply be another paper.  Again, the reviewer makes unsubstantiated observations--stating them as facts but with absolutely no evidence..

I ask, too, what does the reviewer mean by stating that the essay is marked by an "absence of actual Mexicanos"?  What does he or she mean by "actual”.  And what would a “presence” of “actual” Mexicans or Americans or any other people be in any piece of writing?  Does it mean interviewing “real” people of “real” Mexican nationality?  Is a presence marked by interview?  Is it marked by direct quotation?  Or is it marked by fingerprints, or by photographs, or perhaps by ethnographic research?  No constructive criticism is offered here.  So let me take up in more detail every substantive point in the reviewer's third paragraph, and try to make some sense out of it.  The reviewer begins by making two patently contradictory claims: (1) that the author of the essay has depicted the border "as an abject site populated only by miserable maquiladora workers", and, (2) that   "actual Mexicans" are absent in the article.

The reviewer cannot have it both ways. It is either one or the other. Or perhaps the reviewer considers that maquiladora workers are not “actual Mexicans”.  But beyond such logical contradictions that one could expect in irate states of mind, it may be useful to explain further the way I analyze the situation in Tijuana. It is quite evident that the "border" is populated by all sorts of people belonging to different groups and social classes.  For there to be maquiladora workers, there has to be private owners of the means of production and distribution and therefore a class of industrial proprietors.  There are also landless campesinos and landowners.  There are all sorts of people working in commercial activities; there is a large range of managers and supervisors of all ranks.  Of course, as I mentioned before, there is also a quite extensive lumpenproletariat that includes people involved in the highly lucrative, exploitative and “abject” trafficking of drugs and young people, the owners of nightclubs, hotels, bars, and so on.  This reality is readily apparent to even the most casual eye.  However, this is not in the least the subject of my article.  And my article is not meant either to focus on the "actual Mexicanos" or "maquiladora workers" or any other sort of workers and campesinos, and its purview does not include their specific struggles in the border area--and particularly Tijuana.  I did not write a political article on the political situation in Tijuana, as the reviewer seems to hold me to.

Finally, I don't think workers in Tijuana--nor for that matter anywhere else in the world--could find in the writings of Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault (accurately read or misread, it makes no difference here) anything that may contribute in any way to the building of the organizations they need in their struggle for their emancipation from capitalist exploitation and oppression.   Fortunately for them, workers in Tijuana and everywhere else in the world resist exploitation and seek emancipation without having first to become good readers of Williams and Foucault, or of any author.  Fortunately, for the future of humanity, workers worldwide can completely ignore not only the writings but also the sheer existence of Williams and Foucault and still be able to continue their everyday struggle against capitalist oppression and exploitation.

The reviewer's critique continues:

•"The literature consulted is completely inadequate for the argument presented. The author seems to think that s/he is the first person to notice that culture is commodified, that one can dismiss the oppositional content of any practice complicit with the dominant historical bloc. The "infrapolitics" that Vicki Ruiz, Jose David Saldivar, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Yvonne-Broyles-Gonzalez, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Steven Loza, Tiffany Lopez, Rafael Perez-Torres, Robin Kelley, and James Scott, and (among others) discuss so brilliantly is caricatured rather than engaged here in favor of an oppositional politics that presumably would have no engagement with a capitalist economy, the state, or any of their institutions. But even guns and dynamite and revolutionary pamphlets are ALSO commodities! Like culture, they are revolutionary only when used in the right ways. Perhaps a good history of the Chicano movement would be useful to this author, followed by reading Americo Paredes and Maria Herrera-Sobek on corridos."

Here, I think it is important to re-state the obvious.  First, it is quite well-known that almost all major products of human activity in our society (not all) are made as commodities or become commodified by the simple fact of their being manufactured by wage workers or by their de facto existence within capitalist relations of production. (Important exceptions to this rule are activities not directly linked to the wage system--cutting one's grass at home, keeping one's house tidy and other activities where one isn't selling one's labor power.)  The reviewer is quite off the mark when he/she tries to remind us that "even guns and dynamite and revolutionary pamphlets are also commodities".  Let us take the case of pamphlets. Surely enough, they can be commodities, a fact that is not determined at all by their contents, which can be revolutionary or counter-revolutionary or anything else.  The paper, the ink and the printing machinery used to produce the pamphlets can be (and usually are) the objects of commerce.  Now, what about the writing contained in the pamphlet?  Let us assume that the pamphlet concerns a strike and that it is a communiqué of the striking committee. Perhaps its author receives some kind of payment or, on the contrary, might simply be applying his/her work force in the writing as a contribution to the strike that the workers are launching.  In our society, almost everything is a commodity, but not everything is automatically one.  A Nortec performance is usually a commodity (in fact, it is a long list of commodities that includes such disparate things as the renting of the place where it takes place, the payment of electricity and other utilities, the buying of food and beverages, etc.), but in theory it can be a non-commodity, a performance where there is no economic transaction involved.  In any case, it is not the presence or the absence of a commodified object (or of a non-commodified product or performance) that has the potential to be revolutionary; it is only human agency that has the potential, and such potential can only become effective if the working class builds its own, separate, exclusive organizations (political parties and trade unions) in the course of its quotidian resistance and struggles.

The reviewer's critique continues:

"The author's argumentation proceeds by inflating and distorting the claims of others, and then trashing the very straw person arguments the author created in the first place. The author's approach assumes that what Nortec's fans need is the author's reminder that people in Tijuana are suffering and that they need a revolution to change that. Of course who organizes that revolution, and how, how people throw off what Marx called "the muck of the ages" might be important questions if this were a serious argument. But it is not. Revolution is simply invoked here as a way to substitute moral affirmation for actual investigation and critique, as a trope so that -- from a safe distance -- the author can feel superior to others. The piece is filled with claims unsupported by evidence, by mean-spirited mis-characterizations of the ideas of others, by a reductionist, ahistorical, and pathetically under-theorized approach to culture, by complete ignorance about the role of culture in social movements, and by allegiance to a caricature of materialist Marxism that would embarrass even the Second International"

•"I could go through additional errors of fact and of interpretation, the mis-spelling of key names, and analysis of the condescending ethno-pity that the author deploys against Tijuana's residents in order to make them appropriate cannon fodder for the "revolution" the author favors (albeit at a safe distance) but what would be the point? Anyone who dislikes other people so much, who is so sure that everyone else must be stupid, is not likely to be persuaded by conversation with colleagues."

It is obvious that the reviewer's cri du coeur has patently impeded him or her from mentioning one single example that would even remotely sustain his or her claims about me or about the essay I submitted for consideration.  The reviewer attributes to me and my essay unscholarly--and even worse, dishonest procedures such as: "inflating and distorting the claims of others"; "mean spirited mis-characterizations of the ideas of others"; using a "reductionist, a-historical, and pathetically under-theorized approach to culture"; being in "complete ignorance of culture in social movements"; and adhering to "a caricature of materialist Marxism that would embarrass even the Second International".  Here, rather than present constructive criticism, the reviewer provides a laundry list of accusations without evidence or argument..  I might add it comes with surprise that a reviewer would try to establish my psychological and behavioral profile through a reading of an essay submitted for consideration.  Here, the reviewer claims that I feel "a condescending ethno-pity against Tijuana's residents", that I "dislike other people very much", and that I am very sure that "everyone else must be stupid".  As an academic I was not trained to do this type of psychological profiling and ad hominem argumentation when reviewing an essay or manuscript.

Does one have to stoop to answer to such accusations?  I don't believe we have to.

Part II

So what is my essay aiming to do?  Many objections I formulate in my essay concern the claim that music and other cultural phenomena are in themselves and by themselves agents of social change.  As such, the central hypothesis that I seek to test in the essay is the formulation that music has political agency.  To test, revise, and rebuild conceptions of music and its place within Chicano/a Studies--and culture generally--the essay asks, What is music's place in the world and what can music do to help shape our future?  Here, I begin to critique the position that posits that music can be in itself revolutionary by questioning the claim that music "constitutes political movement building" as the reviewer so nicely states.

So let us proceed step by step. There is evidence in history and in every single culture, past or present, that music is truly a universal phenomenon.  Music as a cultural artifact--contrary to writing or parliamentary democracy, say--has manifestations everywhere and in all recorded history (even earlier, in the late Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods.)  So it is safe to assume that music is an activity linked to the human species as such.  And it is scientifically sound to posit therefore that music has a biological basis, the same way human language does.  As specialists in this field of study have repeatedly remarked, there is still much research to be done and much to learn about the way making and listening to music affects the neural and motor systems of the human body.  Also, little is known of the value of music from the point of view of the evolution of humankind.  Yet, all evidence collected by present-day scientists indicates that music plays a double neuro-dynamical role: "to create pleasure and to dissipate anxiety" (as William Benzon puts it in his book, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture), and to incite movement.   Music ranges from the soothing lullaby to the hyperkinetic rock 'n roll.  Also, music very frequently has the function of galvanizing individuals in the making of a collective (in work, in stadiums, in demonstrations, in war, in healing, etc.).   In all cases--registered or analyzed--what people do when they make music is utilize all or some of these three basic functions it has: create pleasure and incite movement, dissipate anxiety and incite rest, and bring people together and form collectives.  For all these reasons, it is important to make at least a minimal reference to the neurobiological basis of music; it is the only way to begin to give a response to the question: What does music do? And, also importantly, to ask, What can music not do? In my essay, I not only show what music can accomplish (taking into account what the neurosciences can tell us today about its effect on human beings) but also how, from a social, collective point of view,  a specific musicscape, such as Nortec, is only ever an accompaniment to human agency and action.

These points are important precisely to be able to determine what music is capable of doing and not doing.  And, in order for his or her students to hear the specificity of the Nortec music, and therefore to perceive the difference between this music and other "global techno products that mined folkloric sounds, retro sounds, local sounds and noise to form an electronic music collage", the said students need to be put in touch with extra-musical products of the Nortec performances, such as "video and slide shows".  Namely, even if in teaching music in the classroom we witness student's neuro-motor responses, what is not entirely explained in a satisfactory manner is why they do not as readily perceive the social, amalgamating effects of that music. If the analysis of music as such is lacking, we cannot fully see why the students have to be presented with cultural products of a different nature than music--pamphlets, videos, slideshows--that obey completely different  material and organizational principles (sentences with chirographic texts, color and light with visual shapes, for example), in order to experience the collective-making effect of a Nortec performance or, for that matter, of any public display or social use of music.  Music is limited both in its content and its effectiveness; that music, by itself, cannot do what the printed word, filmic/photographic image, political speeches, rhymed slogans or other statements or forms of artistic performance can do to convey meaning.

And that, I should say, is the point of my essay: that music by itself has no political effectivity.  We live in a very complex world, where everything seems connected to everything else.  Some connections are essential because they have a cause-effect function. Others are less important and others still can be entirely neglected because they have or appear to have no causal role to play in such and such phenomenon.  Only an objective stand and a scientific outlook can allow us to make progress in our understanding of the basic, essential features of a phenomenon, be it cultural or natural.  An analysis of music, coupled with the knowledge provided by several disciplines (notable history, sociology, economics, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience), shows that it is not music that leads to political action, that it is not music that is or can be revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary, for that matter), that it is the actual resistance to exploitation and oppression, along with the autonomous organization of workers using among other things the printed word, music, speeches, performances, etc., that constitutes the agency of change. 

The conclusion that I obtain from this fact is that it is not true that Nortec's music and performances in themselves accomplish a revolutionary roll in society.  If we are to make cultural studies in general and Chicano studies in particular move forward, on sound foundations, we must at least acknowledge the facts, recognize the existence of the data which a theory developed by such disciplines is supposed to explain. Speculating in the void will not do the job. We are scholars. Our engagement is to the investigation of what is, no to the wishful thinking.. In our society, the revolutionary role can only be accomplished by the activity of the labor population organizing itself, expanding its organization, resisting the assaults of the private owners of the means of production and distribution.  As citizens and intellectual workers we may choose to join this activity.  It is an option that, in my opinion, can and should be kept separate from our scholarly pursuits (as Noam Chomsky has done all along his distinguished academic career as a scientist in the field of linguistics and as a well-known activist in the political sphere.)

From all this stated, I imagine it should be clear that the proposed essay is in no way antagonistic to Chicano/a and Cultural Studies.  On the contrary, what the essay seeks to do is to indicate which theoretical options lead toward a dead-end and which ones offer more solid, scientifically based (and interdisciplinary) opportunities to strengthen scholarly method and knowledge in Chicano/a and Cultural Studies.  In today's comprehension of socio-historical matters it does not suffice to make more or less exaggerated claims about the political efficiency of such and such a cultural product of human activity in general and/or in such and such local circumstances (Nortec in Tijuana, for example).  For Chicano/a and Cultural Studies to make progress in the path toward real knowledge--and not simply to rehash stated opinion--it is necessary to use sound and reasoned methods that employ advances made in post-Saussurean linguistics, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, anthropology and psychology, history, sociology, and neuroscience.

Finally, I conclude this meta-response by restateing that I do not seek only to be polemical.  The essay on borderland music aims to help further our understanding of cultural phenomena with the aim of eventually finding more solid foundations for understanding our everyday reality.  The submission of this essay to a Chicano/a studies journal (and its rejection) evinces my concern with the furthering of our comprehension of cultural phenomenon vis-a-vis the present predicament of Chicanos/Chicanas.