Search - Nonesuch Explorer Series :: Explorer: Mexico - Real Mexico in Music & Song

A Mexico Already Lost

Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 10/04/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a remastered enthographic field recording of market-place music loooong before the cultural disaster of NAFTA depopulated the villages where it was made. The new title is totally inappropriate; this is not music of any tourist's "real Mexico" but rather music of one state, Michoacan. The pre-Conquest people of Michoacan were the Purapecha, known to the Spanish as the Tarascans. They were missionized but never truly conquered militarily, and thus preserved a lot more of their cultural distinctness than peoples in most other states of Los Estados Unidos de Mexico. On this CD, you will hear singing in two languages, Spanish and Purapecha, and sometimes the two mixed together. The male singer on the first track is singing a 'corrida' in Spanish, a kind of satirical ballad. The two young women who sing several tracks in unusual parallel harmonies are singing in Purapecha; their style is possibly the purest relic of pre-Conquest music in all of Latin America.



The instruments played on this CD are all Spanish in origin - guitars, mandolin-like instruments, and harp - played in styles that have evolved in Michoacan from Spanish sources. The earliest Christian missionaries to Michoacan attempted to protect "their Indians" from enslavement in the mines by teaching them Spanish Renaissance crafts of copper-smithing and instrument-building, as well as introducing new technologies of ceramics, weaving, and wood-working. Michoacanians of modern times have partially forgotten the Spanish roots of their folk arts and tend to consider them "indigenous." Until cheap NAFTA guitars from who knows where destroyed the local market, one village in Michoacan was totally devoted to the making of acoustic guitars based on European renaissance models.



As I said before, this is music of the market place, especially the old open plazas of the city of Uruapan, where today all too many people shop in supermarkets. You'll have to imagine the performers as barefoot and utterly unaware of their "place" in the musical cosmos. Nevertheless, this is a recording of beautiful, spirited, artful music. The Michoacan harp was particularly a virtuoso's instrument, played in a unique style. The 'drumming' you hear on some tracks is the sound of a second musician, often a boy, playing with his hands on the sound box of the harp. The last time I visited Michoacan, in 1998, I couldn't find a single harper anywhere. Such is the cost of globalization of everything."