Workshopping Música de Cuerdas in Radical Collectivities
Carlos Cuestas*
“Pero se te escapa decirle son jarocho” [you still call it son jarocho, though] Sael told me after Lehman College’s event called “From Son Jarocho to música de cuerdas” in 2025, which I chaired with the support of the Hitchcock Institute of Studies in American Music. The event featured the community work and environmental consciousness of two youth collectives, the Jarochicanos from Chicago and the Altepee from Veracruz, Mexico (Sael is a senior member of the Colectivo Altepee). These youth collectives apply a radical community-oriented approach to the musical practice known as son jarocho[1] but who see in the naming of this genre the negation of the work they are trying to do with music as a tool for communal and environmental consciousness. They prefer to call this practice “música de cuerdas,” after local Veracruzan parlance. Though the music in música de cuerdas is exactly the same as son jarocho, the former incorporates an ethical, political, and epistemological component that, they argue, lacks in the latter. My usage of son jarocho to describe their work, therefore, misrepresented their approach to community and the environment through music, framing it as part of the music market and its quest for profit and individualism. This is precisely the worldview my interlocutors actively try to dismantle.
By pitting música de cuerdas and son jarocho against one another, this article investigates how the self-awareness practice of música de cuerdas by the Jarochicanos and Altepee collectives seeks to detonate the possibilities of this practice in developing an alternative political consciousness in its practitioners. Such consciousness, my interlocutors argue, focuses on the intrinsic relationships of music and the collectives’ continuous understanding of the environment, be it natural or urban. It also stems from a fashioning of the world that renders it affective by punctuating communal work with a musical praxis that brings people together to resonate with one another. Finally, this article traces some of the strategies in which these collectives invite música de cuerdas practitioners to develop a political consciousness around an all-encompassing environment that directly criticizes musical practice in late capitalism.
A Brief History of Son Jarocho (and música de cuerdas)
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). String plucked instruments known as jaranas (accompanying strummed instrument) and requintos (plucked melodic instruments) are the most common in fandangos or huapangos, community gatherings for food, drinks, and collective musicmaking[2]. 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.
Son jarocho developed alongside the expansion of colonial societies in seventeenth-century Mexico. Settlers travelled upstream 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). There, the settler population, comprised by the tableau of Spaniards that included Jews and Muslims, freed and enslaved Africans, encountered the indigenous populations of southern Veracruz, forming a new cultural dynamic in the region. The development of farming, particularly cattle raising, brought another wave of migrant labor in the postrevolutionary period (Del Palacio 2015) whose fortunes changed during and after the revolution. As Veracruz’s economic troubles worsened in the change of the century, its population left for the cities where son jarocho appeared in the Mexican popular imagination during the 1950s filmmaking boom (Sheehy 1979).
Economic migration and the advent of a modernizing economy severely impacted son jarocho practice in the second half of the twentieth century in Veracruz. However, the zeal of a few academics from the region who sought higher education in Mexico City encouraged a movement to salvage this music, thus creating the movimiento jaranero and, with it, its entry into the global music market (Miranda Nieto 2016).
Historiographical Representations
The brief history of son jarocho just presented summarizes the accepted narratives of the practice as circulated in academia, both produced in the US and Mexico. It is based on musicological research (Sheehy 1979, Figueroa Hernández 2007, 2015) as well as the historical materialist approach of García de León (2006, 2011, 2016). These works, together, constitute the foundation of son jarocho’s history.
The drama of son jarocho’s disappearance in the 1970s holds a lot of truth, as I have found in literature and my own experience with practitioners. However, the methodological approach of its foundational history was very much on par with a strain of salvage anthropology itself based on 1970s understanding of cultural equity in times of globalization. Thus, the scholars who diagnosed that son jarocho was indeed fading from Veracruz concluded, logically, that their efforts needed to focus on recording the repertoire. Also logically, by singling out the repertoire (and individual figures such as Arcadio Hidalgo), any reproduction of son jarocho outside of its region had to focus on the reproduction of the music first, and whatever social values second—if at all.
The mindset of preserving repertoire became synecdoche of the practice of son jarocho, superseding ethnographic works focused on the cultural practices of southern Veracruz. From the 1970s, Guido Münch Galindo’s Etnología del Istmo Veracruzano stands almost solitary as an ethnography of the region. By focusing on son jarocho as an object of study, therefore, the Veracruzan community was ignored. This epistemic erasure eradicated their value systems toward their music at the same time as the history of son jarocho was being written, leaving a void that was eventually filled with the logics of the music market. It must be recognized, therefore, that the discourses around community and the value systems circulating around son jarocho today are a product of its reproduction within capitalism that idealize a sense of community missing from its foundational historiography. Thus, the practice that circulates as son jarocho does so within a community’s regimes of value that are inherently capitalistic in its consciousness (son jarocho is a scene to enter and leave, the accumulation of songs and dance steps, buying access to education). These regimes of value take over localized approaches to son jarocho in Veracruzan communities, oftentimes putting local and global practitioners at odds. Finally, a music-first approach co-opts the social cohesion capabilities of son jarocho as practiced by my interlocutors. Music first is not the same as community first. And, in the words of the Altepee, “community is hard.”
Community, Territorio[3], and música de cuerdas
La palabra y el territorio (“Word and territory” 2018), Altepee’s self-published book, records and distributes their worldview to their community. The Altepee explain their understanding of territorio as “a space where life is established, water flows, the wind blows, trees grow, houses are built, people (el pueblo) organize, and time unfolds (10).” The relationship between the human and the non-human is evident from the start. There is no territorio without human intervention—as opposed to nature, or a desire to leave nature alone from a preservationist perspective.
The relationship between human and nature, resulting in the realization of territorio, has come to an impasse in the Altepee understanding. Within their definition of territorio, they add:
Lately, our grandparents, with their labor and ways of life, have taken [the territorio] to different paths. Some have learned to collaborate alongside mountains and rivers, to take care of each and respect each other, to treat each other as equals (my emphasis). There are others who don’t understand (comprenden) this connection with nature (10).
A tension between human action in nature is located in the generation of their grandparents (abuelos)—and tellingly not their parents. The grandparents’ generation is seen as the last one fully embedded in living out the territorio before the advent of progress ideology of the 1970s, as has been documented elsewhere (Sheehy 1979, Figuero Hernandez 2007). In the eyes of the Altepee, their grandparents were the last ones whose practices included harvesting, traditional medicine, and a long calendar of festivities that greased the engine of organizing and collaboration. As the equivalent of the Boomer generation in Mexico came of age, the dwindling of son jarocho practice came hand in hand with the decline of rural life. But this decline exceeds material and economic history. It is the decline of a worldview from which, as the Altepee always remind me, música de cuerdas results. A consequence of communal life expressed in a musical practice. The Altepee mission, therefore, is not so much to recover repertoire, poetry[4], or traditional tunings, but to reclaim, repair, rebuild, and reinterpret the conditions from which these sprung.
Música de cuerdas history, in this context, is the microhistory of a region. The Altepee’s grandparents’ generation was simultaneously the last recipient of tradition and that which pivoted towards the ideology of progress. As they said, some learned to “collaborate” with nature, while others didn’t.
Altepees and Jarochicanos: From Son Jarocho to música de cuerdas
The shift from music-learning in the shape of son jarocho to an ethical praxis framed through relationships with the natural world challenges the understanding of community in the global practice of son jarocho. As my interlocutors see it, community building discourses within and around son jarocho have the potential to coopt organizing efforts stemming from more radical stances than the desire to participate in a nominally anti-capitalist music scene. Such is the view of the Colectivo Altepee and Jarochicanos.
My use of the phrase “radical collectivities” is an effort to describe an approach to community-building that fully commits the life of individuals to work as a collective for the betterment of their community. Radical collectivities employ art as an affective tool to gain the trust of the community they serve. Therefore, they use every tool at their disposal, including son jarocho’s communal music making feature, as a gateway to awaken a life-challenging political consciousnesses of its members and those willing to listen.
The Altepee and Jarochicanos practice deploys the political potential of música de cuerdas in several substantial ways. In what follows, I want to offer two examples of their strategies to sever the cooptation of community from the music genre of son jarocho. Their actions are centered on a clear understanding that son jarocho practice does not represent their approach to the music and have opted for eschewing the name altogether to describe their work with and around music. By doing so, these collectives are detaching themselves from what could be called an ideology of son jarocho into a practice of música de cuerdas.
The two examples that follow are ethnographic vignettes that speak to how radical collectivities practice community. The first is an interview with a freshmen Altepee member whose multigenerational approach in learning son jarocho reconstructs its history where community takes center stage, and whose contact with the collective awakened in him a politics of resistance. The second example comes via Chicago and how the foundational history of the Jarochicanos serves as an example of the political potentials of son jarocho.
Chirro and Tapalewi as Ethos for música de cuerdas
Tapalewi is Nahuatl for “the act of mutual aid.” Chirro described this photograph on his Instagram page as “Men from the community working on a clay house’s roof. They say that mutual aid and teamwork are necessary for a good life (para vivir bien).” This photograph captures much of what Chirro sees as the true lifestyle of son jarocho, or rather, the ethos that informs it. Tapalewi for a good life. This concept constitutes the core of música de cuerdas practice. The act of mutual aid is all encompassing. It’s putting on a thatched roof, organizing for a fandango, conflict resolution. Tapalewi for a good life, tapalewi in the fandango, tapalewi in the workshop. Tapalewi is central to the praxis of música de cuerdas and the reason why it is different from son jarocho practice. For the act of mutual aid cannot be constrained within musical contexts but rather forces practitioners to see music as a part of a bigger whole. Thus, being a musician is not enough. The musician, within tapalewi, cannot exist on her own. So, the category of músico comunitario (communitarian musician) surfaces and sometimes forces the practitioner to lay down her instrument and be of service to the community. Or, rather, to bring it with her. For music is also tapalewi.
Figure 1. “Tapalewi” Juan Kristofer “Chirro.”
Chirro’s photographic work has been influenced by his connections with Altepee. During many challenging pláticas with the collective, the purpose of Chirro’s work and his intended audience shifted. Photographs of elders, of traditions, of difference, were no longer, in his words, to document, tell a story, and salvage. Instead, they contribute to an ever-growing archival project for the community by the community.
It’s crucial to know how to work a camera, a sound recorder. Those are the tools to tell stories that few people want to tell. And I didn’t want to tell the same stories you see everywhere in marketing campaigns, for example. I wanted to go to the Sierra and photograph how people sow, treat, and collect corn and how that’s different from Oteapan. I learned things that are not available here [in Oteapan] to tell the stories that were happening locally. Working locally but with a global perspective.
I was curious to find out how Chirro found his footing to change the purpose of his work.
I approached Sael during a fandango and we started talking about the Corredor Interoceánico (Interoceanic pipeline). We discussed all of what is to come here in the Isthmus, how it could change the environment but also people’s lifestyles. So I told him about my work, that I was working with a magazine, and doing my own projects, giving pictures away. And he told me, ‘yeah, that’s cool and all, but why do you do it? For whom?’ and I thought to myself ‘yeah, he’s right.’ So I told him that I was taking these pictures as proof that these activities happened before they disappeared. But he was like, ‘no. You’re wrong. Why wait for these things to disappear if we can use our work to protect it, to transmit it.’ I am still thankful for that conversation. It changed how I see things.
The Altepee’s encounter with Chirro wasted no time in questioning the purposes of his approach to his community. This is a common strategy in the Altepee’s sociality: ask uncomfortable questions no matter how inopportune the context. Chirro was just hanging out. Then he got questioned about his purpose. Like Daniel Sheehy reminds us, “jarochos have long been known for their frankness” (1979, 48).
The interaction between the Altepee collective and Chirro also reveal the intellectual underpinnings of the collective. In this instance, and countless others, I have witnessed how their understanding of what son jarocho goes completely against that which música de cuerdas stands for: people first, everything else second, including music. Their own learning of música de cuerdas reveal an organic understanding of son jarocho’s capitalist mindset. In Sael’s words, “when I was learning from the old folk, I just couldn’t ignore their context. That this music developed in their community, that it talks about nature, their world. That it is tied to territorio, to their community.” For Sael, learning son jarocho went beyond learning chords, poems, and dance steps. It was a gateway to understanding how a music depends on people’s values to be meaningful. Values worth fighting for. Those values operate outside a capitalist consciousness.
Jarochicanos, Workshops, and the Change of Priorities
2012 proved a pivotal year for Jarochicanos. By that time, the talleres (music workshops) had moved from the banqueta (sidewalk) into their salas (living rooms). It was the year when the fruits of musical prowess were ripe and demanded more time from them: more concerts, more events, more public performances. The more demands they had professionally, the less time they had in the salas, spaces where three generations would constantly interact. The more music they played for profit, the less music they taught to other kids in the neighborhood interested in learning. A crossroads materialized. Either they met the demands of their success or the responsibilities of collectivity. To be sure, these responsibilities are not mutually exclusive. But the ethos, I argue, is different. To approach music from a commodity perspective requires a different mindset than making music with and for the community.
The benefit of hindsight provides Maya with an insight that, back in 2012, was a feeling of suspicion regarding the conventional routes for artistic pursuit.
We were automatically falling into the structures for art in this country, in this world. It automatically gets pushed into this capitalist route of art, the commodification of art, of artistic practices. That’s just what society knows and understands.
Responding to the demands of the market, local as it was, was to accommodate their music making to the ethos of the market. They were invited to play for events, to be put on stage, usually with exchange for money. It follows that the ethos of their work revolved around the staging of a performance. “You fall into that dichotomy of performers and musicians in those roles. And that just kept happening, more and more.” In fact, their new positionality as successful musicians, ironically, drove them away from their community.
Internally, our interactions forced us to confront feelings of worth that money brings with it. Because you have to sound a certain way, you have to be tight, or else you won’t get paid. Or, rather, because there’s a dollar sign then you have to deliver. So, our time shared together started to become band practice because we got these shows going on. We had to choose sones and come up with arrangements. So when new people will come to learn from us they couldn’t relate. Because they’re like ‘we just wanted to learn basic things, we aren’t gonna learn arrangements or this or that. It’s like we don’t even know what Do (C major) is!’
To want to be around for those who don’t know what Do is. To shift your work in your community for your community. These are some examples of how música de cuerdas contains the potential to imbue its practitioners with a political consciousness. It’s not a return to basics. It is, rather, to understand that the capitalist consciousness is not inescapable, capitalism notwithstanding. And I want to highlight that these are not unique efforts, just the ones I am intimately familiar. California (Zamudio 2014, Torres García 2015, Hernández León 2019, Gonzales 2020), Wisconsin, North Carolina, Bogota. I know there are scenes who operate similarly to the Altepee and Jarochicanos, sometimes even working with them and I am hope that this will be a line of inquiry for future música de cuerdas scholars.
Conclusion
The dichotomy of son jarocho and música de cuerdas is not at all mutually exclusive. The Altepee and the Jarochicanos both participate and benefit from the son jarocho scene and there are plenty of son jarocho practitioners who, whether consciously or not, integrate the ethos of my interlocutors in their work. However, I would argue that, insofar there is a distinction between son jarocho and música de cuerdas, it has to do with the explicitness of the Altepee and Jarochicano project. While the goals are uncertain (for example, Sael wants to make a better world, Maya wants healing in community), música de cuerdas is seen as a pathway towards strengthening communal bonds, generate activist strategies to protect the environment, support local youth, interact with elders, and generate a politics of liberation parallel to capitalist constraints. The Altepee and the Jarochicanos tirelessly work towards these goals through workshops, video production, logistical support in organizing, childcare, among myriad other examples. Yet, time and again, there are jaranas, dancers, poetry, and fandangos. Community is hard, but música de cuerdas makes it a little easier.
References
Altepee. 2018. La palabra y el territorio. Mexico: D.gk.
Camastra, Caterina. 2006. “La poesía popular jarocho: formas e imaginario.” M.A. Thesis. Universidad Veracruzana.
Del Palacio Langer, Ana Julia. 2015. “Agrarian Reform, Oil Expropriation, and the Making of National Property in Postrevolutionary Mexico.” PhD diss. Columbia University.
Figueroa Hernández, Rafael. 2007. Son jarocho: Guía histórico-musical. Mexico: CONACULTA-FONCA.
———. 2015. “Yo no soy marinero, soy capitán: Usos sociopolíticos contemporáneos del fandango y del son jarocho.” Música Oral del Sur 12: 309-322.
García de León, Antonio, Liza Rumazo. 2006. Fandango: el ritual del mundo jarocho a través de los siglos. Mexico: Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura
———. 2011. Tierra adentro mar en fuera: El Puerto de Veracruz y su litoral a Sotavento, 1519-1821. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
———. 2016. El mar de los deseos: El Caribe afroandaluz, historia y contrapunto. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Gonzales, Martha. 2020. “Fandango Jarocho as a Decolonial Tool.” In Chican@ Artivistas: Music, Community, and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Hernández, Alexandro David. 2014. “The Son Jarocho and Fandango Amidst Struggle and Social Movements: Migratory Transformation and Reinterpretation of Son Jarocho in La Nueva España, Mexico, and the United States.” PhD Diss. University of California, Los Angeles.
Hernández-León, Rubén. 2019. “How Did Son Jarocho Become a Music for the Immigrant Rights Movement?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (6): 975–93.
Macías Sánchez, Clara. 2016. “La explosión del son y el fandango jarocho: Músicas, versos y bailes para el ritual.” PhD Diss. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México.
Miranda Nieto, Alejandro. 2016. Musical Mobilities: Son Jarocho and the Circulation of Tradition Across Mexico and the United States. New York: Routledge.
Sacolick, Robin. 2016. “Transcendence and Son Jarocho as Practiced in the San Francisco Bay Area.” PhD Diss. University of California, Santa Cruz.
Sheehy, Daniel Edward. 1979. “The Son Jarocho: The History, Style, and Repertory of a Changing Mexican Musical Tradition.” PhD diss. University of California, Los Angeles.
Torres García, David Humberto. 2015. “Música en Resistencia: El discurso de Quetzal, Las Cafeteras, Cambalache y Chicano Son a través del son jarocho.” M.A. Thesis. Universidad Veracruzana.
Zamudio Serrano, Cecilia del Mar. 2014. “Dos tarimas un fandango. Dinámicas y relaciones transfronterizas entre los jaraneros de Tijuana, México-San Diego, EUA: Un análisis desde el lado sur de la frontera.” M.A. Thesis. Universidad Veracruzana.
Footnotes
- For an introduction to the Veracruzan practice of son jarocho see Carlos Cuestas 2022. “Son jarocho: A Multilayered Practice.” Sounding 365: A Multimodal Textbook, New York: Manifold. ↑
- Though the terms fandango and huapango are interchangeable in Veracruz, fandango is the most used outside the region and I will use it throughout the article. ↑
- The Spanish term “territorio,” as used by my interlocutors, conveys a sense of place-making difficult to convey in the English word “territory.” For this reason, I will use “territorio” throughout the rest of the article. ↑
- For an analysis of son jarocho’s poetry and nature see Camastra 2006 ↑
*Carlos Cuestas is an active musician and scholar based in New York City. He has performed in the United States, Mexico, Colombia, and Ireland as a soloist and in chamber, orchestral, and traditional music ensembles. Carlos has participated in numerous early music projects including opera and oratorio productions in New York City, New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco. His performance practice interests extend to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century guitar repertoire and the art of improvisation in the style of the early Romantic period. As a scholar, Carlos researches the centuries-old son jarocho tradition from Veracruz, Mexico, playing a consort of traditional instruments, and was a member of the New York City ensemble Radio Jarocho. Carlos, a Colombian national, is a PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the City University of New York, The Graduate Center focusing on the intersection of activism between youth collectives and son jarocho practice in Veracruz and Chicago.