Traditional Music and Community in Mexico at the Turn of the 21st Century

press release: Please join UW Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program for the LACIS Lunchtime Lecture, Tuesdays at noon. The events are free and open to the public.

Presented by: Dr. Raquel Paraiso, researcher, musician, and educator. 

About the presentation: Since the mid 1980s, researchers, musicians, and cultural promoters have organized music festivals and cultural projects as vehicles for the sharing and revitalization of Mexico’s traditional music cultures. These initiatives respond to a perceived scarcity of traditional cultural expression resulting from the deterioration of social spaces for traditional music in Mexico’s cities and countryside alike. Many young musicians have thus turned to traditional musical forms, such as Mexican son, as a way of exploring their own identities and cultivating a sense of belonging. Today, vibrant music scenes, cultural centers, and festivals of son flourish across Mexico, its various cultural regions. Many of these events and institutions are led by and for young musicians and community organizers. For them, musicking means community building. The sonic and affective landscapes of son open up a new sense of identity and inclusion that transverses time, place, and geopolitical borders. I explore these issues across Mexican regions and consider the role of revival movements in perpetuating and transforming the cultural knowledge held within traditional musical practice.

About the presenter: Raquel Paraíso, a researcher, musician, and educator earned a B.A. in violin performance from the Conservatory of Music in Salamanca, Spain. She holds a Master’s in Violin Performance, a Master’s in Ethnomusicology, and a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her areas of interest focus on cultural politics of music and music production of place, identity, and ethnicity in Latin American music at large and Mexican music in particular. Her current research in traditional music from the Mexican Huasteca region examines issues of rituality, symbolism, embodiment, and sound in contemporary gendered, globalized, and transnational scenarios. Her research and field recordings have been published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge Scholars, and Penguin Random House, as well as El Colegio de Michoacán, the National Institute of Anthropology (INAH) and Revista de Literaturas Populares (UNAM). She has presented her work at numerous national and international academic conferences for both academic audience and the general public. In her serie of podcast Músicos tradicionales de México/Traditional musicians from México (Spotify & Raquel’s YouTube channel), Raquel explores new ways to talk about music and musicians while experimenting with expressive ways to write about the topic. Versatile as a musician and scholar, she teaches at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla and is actively involved with the practice and performance of Latin American music with the group Sotavento.