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Ragland, Cathy. Música Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation between Nations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. xvi, 251 pp., photographs, maps, musical examples, glossary, bibliographical references, discography, interviews, and index.
Folklorists, anthropologists, and Chicano Studies scholars have dominated much of the literature on Mexican-American border music for the past eighty years. In Música Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation between Nations, Cathy Ragland brings an ethnomusicological focus to a music culture that is tremendously popular, yet relatively ignored by music scholars. Certainly much has been written about the corrido, the text-driven ballad that dominates the region and continues to reflect modern border society as it has since before the Mexican Revolution of 1910. But texts alone tell only part of the story of norteña music and in this wonderfully rich book, Ragland brings together social and musical analysis to provide the fullest picture to date of this important Mexican music culture.
Ragland effectively argues that in the geographically dispersed yet technologically connected US Mexican immigrant community, where history and experience take precedence over place, norteña music provides a sense of community and cohesion. In the first chapter she discusses the corrido, its unique role in reflecting border culture, and the idea that "more than any other traditional, regional, or popular music genre, norteño embodies an immigrant notion of mexicanidad [Mexicanness] and, by extension, the new Mexican global nation" (p. 19).
In chapters 2 and 3, Ragland reviews the musical evolution of the border region, the development of the Texan-Mexican border radio and recording industries, and the various historical and social forces that led to the development of two distinct...