Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: On most any given weekend, in some dance hall, ice house or music festival in “Any town, Mexican America,” the first riffs of an accordion sound. Forming a sonic compass of movement and rhythm, the accordion sound orchestrates dancers and beckons listeners to re-affirm the gender parameters of Chicano nation formation. Chicano music historiography, video documentary, and gendered discourses of instrumentation have established a musical logic of Tex Mex and Norteño accordion sound that sets in motion heteronormative constructions of historical memory, desire, and gender. Video documentaries such as “Accordion Dreams” and “Songs of the Homeland” have reinscribed heteronormative masculine discourses of nation through feminized references to the instrument, as “keeper of tradition” and as “the heartbeat of a people.” Following Richard Leppert’s (1993) prompt that we not underestimate how “the body sounds and is audible,” I explore how listeners and dancers of TexMex and Norteño accordion music represent public ears that not only hear what they hear but also hear what they see. The body of accordion musician is simultaneously a site and an object of sight in the process of musical sound. The sight of the body—not merely the instrumental mechanics—merging with instrument also produces musical sound.

Tex Mex and Norteño music accordion players have been overwhelmingly men, so much so that body, instrument, and gender representation become solidified through sound. As such, heteronormative masculinity is sounded through the accordion as much as the accordion sounds a masculine temporal scape, setting in motion heteronormative sensibilities of desire and gender formation. In this presentation I focus on discourses of body merging with musical instrument as this pertains to women accordionists. I consider notions of sound as not merely heard but seen, emanating from the merging of female body with accordion in producing queer undertones that have gone under articulated. This presentation will focus on the musical performance and experiential details shared by accordionist Eva Ybarra. My analysis reads against simplified arguments by music historians that reduce the lack of Mexicana (Mexican-origin women) accordionists to the music industry’s sexism or patrilineal traditions of accordion training. Rather than be concerned with how to overcome the lack of women accordionists, I am more compelled by what occurs to norms of sexuality and gender when women such as Ybarra clutch the instrument to their chest and what is sounded in this moment, literally and discursively. I argue that Ybarra is a queer “mis-fit,” an incompatible body to the musical logic of heteronormative nation formation. Ybarra’s descriptions of "feeling funny" — as if her body was committing a sinful pleasure — the first time she played the accordion along with the ever-present pressure from family to not play the instrument in public are just a few examples of discourses that, I contend, equate a female accordion playing body to a queer public act. A queer reverberation in sound, in this case, is produced when the female body of Ybarra merges with the accordion instrument.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Mexican food restaurants are a discursive space for economic, social, political, and cultural representation for Mexican Americans. As a discursive constraint, San Antonio has been interpreted as the Tex-Mex capital of the world. This paper examines Mexican food restaurateurs’ self-representations that counter hegemonic interpretations and ideological notions of authenticity. Considering the historical, social, and cultural conditions of segregation and contemporary effects of gentrification and displacement, Mexican food restaurateurs are negotiating aspects of identity such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Using a comparative analysis method, I explore Mexican food restaurants in two contextualized Mexican American enclaves, the west and south sides of San Antonio, that cater to locals not the tourists. The menu, décor, and aesthetics of the restaurants are analyzed as performances of identity. Through resistance and subversion to commodification and cultural homogenization, Mexican restaurateurs are empowered to challenge power relations in the space of the restaurant.

This current ethnographic study on the meaning of food production builds on my research on the colonial discursive practices in restaurant reviews that represent Mexicans and Mexican Americans using racist metaphors and metonymy.