The Musicology/Ethnomusicology Division, with the assistance of the BSOM Center for American Music, is delighted to host conversations with and presentations by Nadine Hubbs (the University of Michigan) and Andrés Amado (UT Rio Grande Valley) on perspectives on transnational exchange in music and performance, theories of border culture, and queer engagements with Mexican American musicians and other figures in the Latina/o/x scene:
Nadine Hubbs: Rancheros, Queer Vaqueros, and Country as Mexican Music
Country music has been called "quintessentially American” and has long been associated with whiteness, but country lovers are not all Anglo or native born. Fandom is booming among Latina/o/xs, and the country engagements of these mostly Mexican American fans raise crucial questions in our racist, anti-immigration moment. My fieldwork with Mexican American country fans and at queer vaquero events, in Texas and elsewhere, does not suggest that Mexican Americans seek assimilation or belonging through country engagements so much as it points to how country music, past and present, belongs to people of Mexican descent. Examining the long-unexamined history of Mexican influence on this music, I argue that country is even more quintessentially American than has been imagined.
Andrés Amado: Drag in the Rio Grande Valley: Performing Queerness and Latinidad in the Texas-Mexico Border
In recent years, the Latinx LGBTQ community in the United States has attained new levels of media representation. Whether through tragic events like the Orlando Pulse club massacre in 2016 or through the participation of Latinxs in the reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, the LGBTQ Latinx visibility continues to rise. While on the whole such visibility ostensibly helps advance the civil rights agenda of equity and inclusion, it may also be theorized as occupying a problematic interstitial space between identity politics and social constructivism, where the fine lines between essentialism, performativity, assimilation, and liberation are constantly blurred and negotiated in multiple intersectional ways involving gendered, racialized, and ethnic identities. Based on personal observations of drag events in the Rio Grande Valley in the cities of McAllen and Brownsville, and through informal conversations with performers since 2013, this paper explores the tensions evidenced in the representations of intersectional identities through Latinx drag, interrogating the extent to which they may perpetuate stereotypes and appropriate Latin American cultures to fit essentialist notions of multiculturalism. Against the grain of scholarship that condemns the application of identity theories developed in First-World contexts to non-heteronormative cultures in Latin America, I propose that Latinx drag in the Rio Grande Valley foregrounds significant transnational connections between queer U.S. minorities and their and Latinx and Latin American counterparts, who may at times find the identity politics from the Global North empowering.
Biographies
Nadine Hubbs is a musicologist, historian, and theorist and a professor of women’s studies and music and faculty affiliate in American culture at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative. She is the author of two award-winning books, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound and Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, and many articles recasting understandings of music and social groups marked by sexuality and gender, class, race, and migration. Hubbs's public-facing scholarship has been featured by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, NPR, Pacifica, BBC Radio and many other outlets. Her current book project is titled Country Mexicans: Sounding Mexican American Life, Love, and Belonging in Country Music.
Media:
N. Hubbs in the “Jolene” episode of Dolly Parton’s America (podcast)
“Country Music Is Also Mexican Music”: L. Hurtado with N. Hubbs in The Nation
Andrés R. Amado specializes in the study of traditional, popular, and art music in Latin America and among U.S. Latinx. He has published academic articles, dictionary and encyclopedia entries, and book chapters as author, co-author, and translator and presented research at regional, national, and international conferences of musicology, ethnomusicology, and cultural studies. He holds a music doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin and currently works as Assistant Professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where he is also a faculty affiliate in Mexican American Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Religious Studies. He also serves in the executive board of UTRGV's Center for Latin American Arts.