The Cherry on Top:
An Overview of the Social, Musical, and Poetic Practice of Son Jarocho in Veracruz, Mexico

I always thought this fragment of a poem from the son jarocho (ha-RO-cho) practice reflected the common theme of tying human fate to natural phenomena, a trope often found in Mexican boleros, corridos, and rancheras. But when I arrived in the village of Boca de San Miguel in southern Veracruz, with temperatures rising over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, I understood the inspiration behind this verse in particular, and of son jarocho poetry in general. As I physically experienced the relief of shade—the subject of this poem—I understood that references connecting natural phenomena to human life in son jarocho poetry unveil a much deeper connection between this practice and the environment. These connections indicate the profoundly complex networks between nature and ways of being in it for jaraneros, the practitioners of son jarocho.

Jaraneros are found all over the world. Even though son jarocho developed in the Mexican Sotavento region, son jarocho ensembles and collectives are found everywhere: in Mexico City, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Barcelona, and even Tokyo. This genre depends on collective music-making rather than professional, on-stage performances. In other words, son jarocho is a musical genre that relies on the participation of its audience to make music rather than performing it for a listening audience, the way most of us experience music. Of course, there are son jarocho concerts by professional ensembles, but these frequently give way to a fandango, the main musical event for collective son jarocho performance.

A Veracruzan fandango

A Brief History of Son Jarocho

Son jarocho refers to the musical practice of the jarocho people native to the Sotavento region in Mexico. The area comprises Southern Veracruz, Northern Tabasco, and North-Eastern Oaxaca, where this music flourished in the seventeenth century (García de León 2006, 2016). Plucked string instruments known as jaranas (accompanying strummed instruments) and requintos (plucked melodic instruments) are the most commonly used instruments in fandangos or huapangos, which are community gatherings for food, drinks, and collective musicmaking.¹ Fandangos also feature zapateado, a style of percussive dance on a wooden platform (tarima), and versada, referring to sung poems that are either improvised or prepared. The term son, however, is found throughout Latin America. It denotes musical practices seemingly different from one another but with some similar characteristics, such as an instrumental introduction that later repeats as an instrumental interlude and sung poems followed by refrains (estribillos). The umbrella term "son" denotes literary forms present in the music, particularly coplas (short poems) characterized by eight-syllable lines of different rhyming structures. Some son genres are danced on a wooden platform (tarima or tablado) with steps and moves functioning both as a percussion instrument and “the heartbeat” of the music (Chavez 2015).

Son jarocho developed alongside the expansion of colonial societies in seventeenth-century Mexico. Settlers travelled through different waterways from the Gulf of Mexico to find more pasture for cattle and terrain to develop agricultural systems (García de León 2006, 2011, 2016). These settlements developed under the Spanish racial classification system that predetermined an individual’s socio-economic future, making race a central issue in the demographic development of the Sotavento region and shaping with it the history of son jarocho.

Race and Music in Colonial Mexico

Music played a fascinating role in people's attempts to navigate the Spanish racial system established and enforced in the colonies between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries—and whose consequences are still acutely felt by Black and Indigenous groups in Latin America. The profession of musician directly intersected with this racial system, particularly in the Catholic church, the most powerful institution of the Western world at the time. Making a dignified living as a musician was only possible through the employment of the church. This institution vetted and hired musicians who could demonstrate some degree of Spanish ancestry, irrespective of what they looked like.² The relationship between institutions and race, and the ability to demonstrate one’s ancestry to access benefits, was known as pureza de sangre, a system that allowed individuals to prove genealogical lineage of "racial purity" before a jury to improve their economic and social prospects in the form of rightful employment (Ramos-Kittrell 2016). To demonstrate an individual’s ancestry, testimony by bona fide individuals who could speak to an aspiring professional musician's cualidades (virtuous actions) was the most important component to the result of each case. Mixed-race musicians who could demonstrate Spanish lineage through testimony, who often played the system by asking friends or acquaintances, could therefore participate as employees of colonial institutions and earn a living making music in the church. This employment often resulted in extra work on the side in official and private events. Music, therefore, served as a modest platform of resistance to oppressive racial structures, even if at an individual scale.

Musical practices that fell outside of institutional favor, like son jarocho, did not afford any opportunities for musicians to secure official employment, foreclosing the possibility of making music a profession. But vernacular music always finds its ways, especially when it is paired with dance, food, drink, and the social dynamics that emerge in this combination. Practiced by marginalized social groups, son jarocho opened a social space of cultural exchange best exemplified in the fandango, a space where the motley crew of enslaved and free Blacks, Indigenous people, Jews, Muslims, and destitute Spaniards intermingled and made music.

It is impossible to accurately determine what the racial dynamics of the fandango were, but there is certainty in the popularity of “New World” musics in Europe: they are commonly represented in the seventeenth-century Western music canon. For example, popular Western European genres like the chaconne or pasacalle feature a two-measure chordal cycle with intricate rhythmic patterns—a musical element not previously found in any other Western genre before Spain’s colonial enterprise. These rhythmo-harmonic features took shape via the creolization processes endured by Indigenous and Black populations in Latin America and traveled back to Western Europe, becoming staples in seventeenth-century music there. These genres enjoyed such popularity that they appeared in instrumental suites, operas, and ensemble music. Some of the most salient examples of the establishment of creolized music in Europe during the late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries are the presence of harmonic ostinatos in Monteverdi’s madrigals; musical pieces called fandango³ or cumbé (two words of African origin denoting a musical genre) in Santiago de Murcia's 1730 manuscript for the baroque guitar; J.S. Bach’s chaconne movement from his violin Partita No. 2 BWV 1004; and, most interestingly, a scene in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro where the common folk dance is a fandango closing the opera’s third act (Russell 2015).

The accompanying video for this section is my performance of Santiago de Murcia’s Fandango, found in a compilation of manuscripts from the first half of the eighteenth century and attributed to Murcia (Vera 2008). The manuscript was discovered in Guanajuato, México in 1943 by the Mexican musicologist Gabriel Saldívar and it has since been known as Códice Saldívar No. 4. Written in the 3/4-6/8 polyrhythm, this fandango features a two-measure harmonic ostinato (|Dm C Bb| A7 |) over which elaborate melodic variations (diferencias) showcase the harmonic and melodic possibilities of the baroque guitar. Dancing to the music is a modern representation of son jarocho’s zapateado that would not have been present during eighteenth-century performances of stylized fandangos (though Murcia’s rendition of this genre is provocatively similar to contemporary son jarocho and thus an inspiration for creative license).

Video: Carlos Cuestas Performs Fandango with Julia del Palacio

The intercontinental voyage of creolized genres from Latin America and the subsequent establishment of colonial vernacular musics in the Western classical music canon could be seen as a triumphant trajectory that justifies the study of popular music. Indeed, mainstream classical musicians like Jordi Savall and ensembles such as L’Arpeggiatta have recorded and produced programs exploring the ties between colonial vernacular repertoires and so-called classical ones. I suggest, however, that understanding the Western canon's standard of quality is a distraction from the socio-cultural analysis grounded in this survey of son jarocho. To this end, I direct our attention to the compartmentalized, fragmented, and almost mosaic-like narrative of the early stages of a musical practice that developed at the colonial frontier of the Sotavento. In these lands, enslaved and free Africans traveled to the hinterlands with wealthy and disaffected Spaniards colonizing Indigenous territories. The Spanish colonial project also gave way to runaway Spanish Jews and Muslims fleeing persecution from the kingdom’s mainland, passing as white Spaniards in the colonies (García de León 2006). The occupation of land and the development of local economies opened the space for the new musical practice we now call son jarocho. It emerged with a penchant for polyrhythms, poetic improvisation, and the intricate zapateado. While bailadores/as (dancers) provide distinct percussion patterns on a wooden platform (tarima), poets, singers, and musicians sing and play at the fandango.

Son Jarocho in Twentieth-Century Mexico

The revolutionary war in the late nineteenth century, the famine that followed, and the advent of modernity under the guise of progress brought to the Sotavento mining technologies, agricultural advances, and a migrant population that would undertake son jarocho practice in the early twentieth century (del Palacio 2015). Modernity also brought technologies like the radio, record players, and recordings of música tropical (mainstream Latin music) in the 1930s and 40s. These phenomena slowly but systematically replaced the musical soundscapes of Veracruzan social gatherings. The rustic jarana and energetic singing gave way to the chic guitar riffs of boleros and its crooners. Farm labor fell out of fashion and became almost unsustainable. Local economies were replaced by employment in factories and economic migration. All of these factors were to son jarocho’s detriment. Furthermore, ideas of citizenship and belonging to a more extensive and modern Mexican national identity contradicted rural ways of living, seriously reducing the practice and presence of son jarocho in Veracruz in the first half of the twentieth century.

Things started to turn around during the candidacy of future Mexican president Miguel Alemán Valdéz in 1946, who famously used the son “La bamba" as his campaign theme. This political soundscape established son jarocho in the mainstream of Mexican thought, progressive national identity, and the mass-media cinematic productions of Mexican filmmaking's Golden Age, bolstering the genre’s reputation for the time to come.

Despite the national recognition of son jarocho in Mexico, its practice in Veracruz was still declining in the second half of the twentieth century until a group of young and enthusiastic jaraneros started a movement to rekindle it. Headed by Gilberto Gutiérrez—the leader of Mono Blanco, one of the most influential son jarocho groups to date—these groups traveled around the region to identify and learn music from Veracruzan elders, their traditional ways of playing son, different tuning systems, and techniques of instrument making. These young researchers also documented an array of local poems (versos) and uplifted poets in recordings and anthologies who not only composed poetry but also improvised different forms of poems extemporaneously. As a result, the first studio recordings of son jarocho featured intergenerational ensembles of urban and rural musicians, launching the movimiento jaranero that has informed how son jarocho is played, produced, and consumed to this day (Figueroa Hernández 2006).

The movimiento’s success took its founders to Mexico City and, from there, it became a global phenomenon. Jaraneros who self-identify as part of this movement have developed their own interpretation of son jarocho practices in locales as different as Barcelona, Paris, Buenos Aires, California, New York, and Tokyo. These seemingly isolated scenes connect through a complex network of collaboration that goes back to the Sotavento region: practitioners travel to perform, teach workshops, and tour throughout the world via the connections of this international channel. In their travels, musicians bring commissioned instruments, merchandise, recordings, and their unique interpretation of son jarocho for an eager and diverse audience. In turn, a significant number of international jaraneros travel back to Veracruz for week-long workshops and son jarocho festivals at certain times of the year. Such reciprocity has been a cornerstone of the advancement of this musical practice internationally. It has also left some jaraneros in the region wondering whether the fetishization of son jarocho as a musical practice severed from community values of care has depoliticized it. As an interlocutor once told me, son jarocho is the “cherry on top of living and working in a community who cares for each other and its environment.”

Nature and Poetry in Son Jarocho

I experienced fandangos and son jarocho in the United States before my fieldwork, sung its poems, and danced its rhythms. Still, I had not experienced the deep connections between poetry and the natural environments of the Sotavento. As I traveled through the region, I encountered farmers reciting poems about meat by memory while butchering a pig for the town’s party. I also witnessed master poets and jaraneros improvising décimas (a ten-line poetic form) on their local histories. Moving through the region, I spoke to young jaraneros who capitalize on son jarocho's collectivity to generate political activism around the climate crisis. Intergenerational collectives welcomed me, and I witnessed how children learn to interact with nature and their elders through singing, playing, and dancing son jarocho.

The natural environment of the Sotavento has been subject to industrial exploitation since the start of the colony. Veracruz sits on a strategic geographic location on the Caribbean Sea, making it the first mainland port for slave trading. It was also the site of the first sugar plantation on the continent, developed by Hernán Cortéz in the late 1500s (García de León 2011, 188-190), which unleashed the most powerful industry that shaped the modern world. Sugar cane crops gave way to cattle-raising for dairy, leather, and meat production in the eighteenth century, which meant the razing of forests for pastures. In the twentieth century, these lands gave way to industrial exploitation of crude oil and minerals such as salt and sulfur.

Today, two mega-projects that would threaten the ecology and societies of Southern Veracruz and the Sotavento region in general are under development. The construction of the Interoceanic Corridor of the Tehuantepec Isthmus (corredor interoceánico del istmo de Tehuantepec) and the Mayan Train (tren Maya) would drastically impact an already vulnerable ecosystem. Aside from presenting an environmental threat, these projects endanger archeological sites and have the potential to worsen the violence related to drug cartels (Radio Altepee 2020). In short, as experienced and understood by locals in Veracruz, nature is under significant pressure by the never-ending threat of unfettered capitalist exploitation.

Si se extinguen las guacamayas, a quién le vamos a cantar?("To whom will we sing if macaws go extinct?") asked son jarocho performer and producer Ricardo Perry in an interview (Rodriguez 2019). Jaraneros in the Veracruzan region are directly bearing the destructive consequences of extractivist projects that threaten the environment. The natural resources abused by industrial exploitation are the same ones from which son jarocho poetry has drawn its inspiration, giving its poetry an unprecedented sense of urgency. How the giver of life and source of wonder that is nature also inspires those behind its destruction in the name of progress is a question that young jaraneros are addressing in their poetry and practice. Son jarocho’s affective repertoire is the nexus between humans and non-humans, which sits at the center of our climate crisis.

Son Jarocho Lyrics and Poetics of Nature

The corpus of sones originates from oral tradition, with the increasing presence of original pieces. The themes of these two strands of repertoire derive poetic meaning from a poet’s relationship to nature: from how they feel, interact, perceive, and understand nature in the jarocho environment. A starting point to find these poetics of nature is found in the names of most sones. For example, some are named after domesticated animals: Los pollos (the chickens) or El perro (the dog). Others are named after birds, of which Veracruz boasts of immense diversity: La Guacamaya (the macaw), El Pájaro Carpintero (the woodpecker), El Pájaro Cú (the cú bird), etc. Reptiles also appear in the repertoire, as in La iguana and El cascabel (the rattlesnake, but also the jingle bell). Finally, some sones reference natural phenomena directly, such as Las olas del mar (ocean waves), El aguacero (the storm), or El aguanieve (sleet). Beyond the common theme of nature in these sones, many verses across the repertoire reference animals' feelings and character (the perception of the strength of the rattlesnake, for example).⁴ Sometimes, singers insert themselves in the narrative of their verse as the animal, taking its physical form to fulfill a mission or describe his or her feelings:

For jarochos, then, poetry and singing unveil an understanding of nature beyond the descriptive or the metaphorical. Instead, they reveal an interconnected world where humans and non-humans enact complex relationships beyond the traditional Western understanding of humans and nature as separate entities. Therefore, industrial mega-projects threaten not only jarochos' ecosystems but also the natural world that allows them to understand their cosmological existence.

Son Jarocho Music and Instruments

The following video takes a deep dive into how jarochos understand the relationships between music, community, and nature:

Música de Cuerdas (String Music): A Short Documentary by Colectivo Altepee

Instruments

Jarana (ha-RA -na): considered the rhythm guitar, the jarana is a four or five double-course plucked instrument. It is built in different sizes to offer an array of sounds and roles during the fandango.

Guitarra de son or requinto (re-KEEN-toh): considered the lead guitar, the requinto introduces each of the sones played in a fandango. Its rhythmic figures are also closely associated with the percussive dancing known as zapateado.

The zapateado (sa-pah-te-AH-do), or foot-stomping dancing: occupies a central role in the instruments of son jarocho. This dance is done on the tarima, a wooden platform for dancers to produce rhythmic figures that in turn encourage the musicians around the dancers to continue with the music. The zapateado is considered the heartbeat of the music, and fandangos do not occur without dancers.

Marimbol (mah-reem-BOL): Perhaps the most direct legacy of African-descent instruments. The marimbol (or marimbula) is a large-scale thumb piano (lamellophone) fulfilling the role of the bass in son jarocho. It is also found throughout the Caribbean (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Colombia).

Zapateado (Son Jarocho Dance)

Sin zapateado no hay fandango. ("Without dancing, there’s no party.")

I have heard this expression since I started practicing son jarocho. Zapateado is perhaps its most valued feature of the genre, as it is believed (and experienced) to be the heartbeat of the fandango and its main attraction. Poets and instrumentalists play for, respond to, and incorporate the highly intricate foot percussion produced by dancers on the tarima (wooden platform).

The dynamics of dancing in a fandango are dictated by normative gender organization and are split into two kinds of sones.⁶ The first one is known as sones de montón (songs for a group) where women take over the length of the tarima, which is organized by couples facing each other.⁷ These sones are typically in a 6/8-3/4 polyrhythm. The basic footwork pattern is called café con pan (which will be described in the next section) and the music features what jaraneros call cadencia (a subjective rocking feeling of the music, like on a boat).

The second type of son is known as sones de pareja (couple’s songs). Unlike sones de montón, this second type is danced by one couple (a man and a woman) at a time, where the entire ength of the tarima is at their disposal. Musically, sones de pareja are either in ternary polyrhythm (3/4-6/8) or simple binary (2/4). The simple binary sones feature a basic footwork pattern called café café, while the polyrhythmic sones have a pattern called chocolate (see next section).

Couples' dancing lies at the center of a fandango. This celebration typically starts in the late evening and can last until the next morning. As the energy of the fandango increases, sones de pareja indicate the climax in the celebration, where the music is the strongest, the voices are loudest, and the zapateado is the most energetic. Sones like the El buscapiés, believed to have been danced by the devil, or El toro zacamandú, where the male dancer becomes a bull and the female a bullfighter, mark the peak of a fandango and demand of its participants their best and most spirited performance.

Son Jarocho Meter

Most of son jarocho’s repertoire rests on the relationship between simple triple and compound binary meters—the 3/4-6/8 polyrhythm. A few exceptions, including sones like La bamba, El Colás, or La gallina, outline a simple binary 2/4 meter.

Son jarocho workshops, held all over the world, present the most accessible learning opportunity. The most basic pedagogy of this practice relies on three mnemonic strategies to teach sones de montón and sones de pareja. Sones de montón are divided into two groups: sones por derecho (loosely, straight songs), and sones atravesados (loosely, “in the way” songs). Sones por derecho accentuate the third and first beat of the pulse in the zapateado. The following graphic illustrates two measures of a son por derecho. Each box represents one eighth-note. The phrase café con pan is used to learn these accents:

Radio Jarocho (El balajú)

Sones atravesados, in turn, emphasize the first and second beat of the measure. Here, the mnemonic device is the word chocolate, with the accent of the word in Spanish coinciding with the downbeat of the measure:

Yacatecuhtli (El cascabel/The Rattle Snake)

Finally, for sones de pareja in 2/4, the mnemonic device is a triple repetition of the word café over a two-measure cycle. Each syllable represents one eighth-note. The end of the repetition on the accented syllable fé coincides with the downbeat at the end of each cycle:

Radio Jarocho (El Colás)

It is worth noting that the sones por derecho and the sones atravesados respectively coincide with the accents in música llanera’s golpes por derecho and corrido from the Colombo-Venezuelan plains. This alignment invites the further investigation of possible musical connections between these genres for students interested in the subject.

This short descriptive analysis of son jarocho is by no means exhaustive or representative of the full musical picture. However, it serves as a surface-level introduction to the musical complexities present in this genre, so that students may seek out son jarocho scenes in their communities and learn firsthand about its poetry, instruments, dancing, and its vibrant global networks.

Now that you are familiar with the rhythmic accents in son jarocho, see if you can identify the meter and category of the following sones:

El palomo

El pájaro cú

El buscapiés

Son Jarocho’s power also rests outside its infectious music and emphasizes the communal aspects of music-making. As you prepare to discuss this unit, think about the following questions:

1. Can you think of a different musical genre that depends on communal music-making?
2. How might the history of son jarocho help you better understand the complexity of European colonial history in Latin America?
3. How can poetry and music help us understand and act toward mitigating the effects of climate change?
4. How does knowing about son jarocho help you better understand contemporary relationships between humans and nature?

For music majors:

1. What is the harmonic progression of the son Los chiles verdes? Which baroque dance is it reminiscent of?
2. What are some of the characteristics of cadencing in son jarocho singing? What is the tendency for the melodic contour at the end of each phrase?
3. In a triple-meter son, on which instruments (zapateado included) is the 3/4 accent highlighted? What about the 6/8?
4. If you were to transcribe the introduction to El siquisirí, would you choose a 6/4 or a 3/4 meter? Why?

References