Musica Tejana: The Cultural Economy of Artistic Transformation.

Musica Tejana: The Cultural Economy of Artistic Transformation. By Manuel Pena. University of Houston Center in Mexican American Studies, No. 1. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xii, 239. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-89096-888-8; cloth, $27.95, ISBN 0-89096-877-2.)

Ethnomusicologist Manuel Pena shows us how the Texas Mexican community chose to solidify its identity, obligations, and goals through the use of Texas Mexican music or musica tejana. Different musical styles have been used, categorized, reinvented, and interconnected according to the social processes of race and class in the Southwest. But the musical styles of cancion, corrido, ranchero, conjunto, and tejano have also been swept to and fro in the marketplace, particularly since World War II. Pena examines an environment of deep cultural and economic transformation and argues that the process of symbolic power related to music, and its link to the commercial marketplace, fostered a collective identity in a society where most Mexicans occupied a position subordinate to that of the dominant capitalist system of Anglo Texans.

After introducing the concepts "use-value" and "exchange-value"-borrowed from the ideas of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Clifford Geertz, and others--Pena makes clear in a succinct "value" analysis how music as an organic cultural activity yielded both internally and externally to the pressures of music as commodity, that is, to music as a value of exchange. Chapters 1 and 2 provide an overview of Texas Mexican music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and describe the connection between capitalist transformation of the Southwest and subordination of Mexicans in the predominantly unskilled or semi-skilled work force. Chapters 3 through 5 examine how Texas Mexican music responded to the pressures of exchange-value yet retained intact its cultural identity and solidarity, particularly as artists began to strike out in new directions. Narciso Martinez, for example, concentrating on the melody and leaving accompaniment to the basso sexto, abandoned the German style of accordion traditions for a snappier, cleaner sound. Little Joe y la Familia would later adopt a bimusical ideology to their sound that emerged as la Onda Chicana.

Pena shows how the "Hispanic" marketplace did not emerge in a sociocultural vacuum; rather, culturally powerful styles of music were driven by their "value" as responses to powerful forces outside of the community. For Texas Mexicans those forces were represented by events like the Mexican American War, the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the subordination of the working class, the coming of the Great Depression and World Wars I and II, the rise of the Chicano movement, and the advent of today's pyrotechnical "sight over sound" MTV enterprises. Pena identifies major features of this musical transformation as taking place in Texas, where he sees the strongest clash between two disparate cultural economies and racial groups. As these groups and markets collided, Tejanos seized the historical moment to create cultural forms that mark them as leaders among their peers in the Southwest.

Pena is at his best when analyzing interethnic fissures within the Tejano community as upwardly mobile "Hispanics" began to distance themselves from the music and lifestyles of their working-class roots. What emerges is a music of the country (ranchero) and a music of the more sophisticated (jaiton) folks, or evolution of the orchestra tradition of the 1940s and 1950s. The birth of la Onda Chicana revolutionized the music, but it too would evolve into another style, with the internationalization of Tejano music. Pena has demonstrated convincingly that global capitalism triumphs once again. As long as greed and materialism can be counted upon to sway the marketplace, even the down home conjunto will be manipulated by the cash register.

ROBERTO MARIO SALMON University of Texas-Pan American