The Pedagogy of Intangible Heritage: Los Cenzontles and Mexican Folk Music

Son de Madera, 2003

Speaking to a UNESCO assembly in 2001, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo commented upon the attitudes that hinder a deeper understanding of folk and traditional cultures in the contemporary world.[1] While societies are “anxious for instruction” about the past, he said, a mistaken perception about traditional knowledge as frozen in time and ruled by “competitive norms” of authenticity prevent many from grasping the relevance of folk knowledge in all its multiple dimensions. One case in point that interested Goytisolo particularly was the halakis (storytellers) that gather everyday on the Square in the city of Marrakech, North Africa. Goytisolo noticed how the local performers accompanied the recitation of their texts with repertoires of grimaces, gestures, pauses, body movements, laughter and sorrow. These ephemeral processes linked to the public performances, he realized, and not the plot of the stories themselves, were the cultural thing in urgent need of protection. Moreover, they represented but a small sample of how tradition bearers in many other places around the world improvise, parody, borrow from, make fun, invent and comment upon contemporary culture all the while retaining certain patterns and stylistic arrangements passed down from older generations. This dynamic, Goytisolo reasoned, that allows cultural wisdom to be recurrent but also adaptive, constitutes an “intangible art” that must be protected.

On the broader scale of artistic practices in the United States, Goytisolo’s discovery sounds an important alarm: Folk culture must be recognized and foregrounded as part and parcel of the artistic production of our time. But the lesson the world-renowned writer wishes to impress upon us is also textured in favor of a more complicated understanding of folk practices than has been commonly invoked in popular discourses generally. Yes, folklore matters, and not because it takes us away in a flight of imagination to a place or time allegedly better than our own, but because the forms of folklore — music, stories, foods, objects, jokes, etc. — are dynamic and versatile. As a point of departure, they give us a sense of connection to whatever community or legacy we happened to hail from; but they also afford us the chance to comment inventively upon the multiple contradictions, tensions and fears of our existence as presently constituted.

While recognizing the value of traditional cultures can interest humanists everywhere, working artistically with the materials derived from such practices, on the other hand, can be a towering proposition. In an insightful essay on the relationship between the distinct fields of community and folk arts in the United States, cultural critic James Bau Graves noted that for the most part the “systems and institutional ecology supporting these two wings of public culture — the contemporary and the traditional — are so disconnected that the zones of overlap are all but nonexistent.”[2] While awareness can be accomplished discursively, folk-based artistic practice demands an operational familiarity with tools of research and execution not always within the reach of community art organizations. There is, furthermore, one aspect of folklore that presents folk-friendly cultural practitioners with a formidable challenge: Most of its expressions occur in unsuspecting places, by the most unassuming cultural practitioners, through the most ordinary and commonplace tasks, daily rituals and conversations. To get at the rich yet subtle deposits of this kind of knowledge requires a sort of anthropological maneuver — a pedagogy that can mediate a vernacular system of logic with another that often proclaims itself superior; one open-ended mode of learning and teaching in tandem with another embedded in rules of inclusion and exclusion.

A Local Model

Group recital at Los Cenzontles School of the Arts

Since 1994, the cultural project/organization Los Cenzontles (The Mockingbirds), based in San Pablo, California, has been exploring questions of tradition and intangible heritage in relationship to Mexican folk music and dance. In a little more than a decade of existence as an incorporated nonprofit arts organization, they have managed to institutionalize a very carefully tailored set of programs and products. Each one of these programs has been designed to meet the specific objective of reintroducing Chicano and migrant Mexican youth in California to the traditions of their ancestors while at the same time not accepting, lock stock and barrel, what has been previously deemed the “folk” canon. A central drive of Cenzontles’ approach to folk music is the search for alternative root sources, which they accomplish through exhaustive fieldwork with traditional teachers they work tirelessly to locate both in Mexico and in California. Over the last few years, they have been working with three main cultural areas: (a) a long-forgotten repertoire of rural mariachi music from Jalisco; (b) the African-influenced music and social dance of Veracruz known as son jarocho and fandango; and (c) the common struggles over language and cultural assimilation faced by the indigenous Purepechas of Michoacan and by migrant families from Michoacan living in California. Each one of these projects is accompanied by a comprehensive methodology of folklore learning and teaching that I will attempt to explore in greater detail in this essay.

Cenzontles’ core programming is made up of three parts: a community school for traditional Mexican music and dance that serves close to 300 students every week; a 15-member touring musical youth group that has recorded 15 CDs to date; and a research and documentation initiative known as “Cultures of Mexico in California,” which is producing three documentary films about the changing role of traditional music across the U.S. and Mexico. Their first documentary, "Pasajero," about how a group of young people accompany their elderly mariachi maestro on his return to Mexico and together discover and learn roots mariachi music in Jalisco (the son abajeño), showed successfully throughout PBS stations in 2005 and 2006. The group’s reputation has been solidly established for years, gaining visibility from collaborations with Los Lobos and Los Tigres del Norte, and participating in myriad other musical projects that seek to understand how Mexican folk music relates to other genres ranging from Appalachian music to jazz to Caribbean steel drums and even medieval Spanish melodies.

Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center at Dias Plaza in San Pablo, Calif.

True to its grassroots form, the Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center is located in a storefront tucked away on a strip mall in northern California. Despite the stigma sometimes attached to this kind of urban setting, Cenzontles’ founder and artistic director Eugene Rodriguez calls this space “a wellness village.” This description is backed up by a history of substantial involvement in the dynamics of the local community, which, at the time Cenzontles set up shop, was mired in youth violence and school underachievement, political neglect and, to boot, one of the largest group of people living at or below poverty level of any California city. Dealing with structural problems of this nature is never easy for arts organizations. After all, the prevalent models of “outreach” to underserved populations utilized by most mainstream art agencies in the United States hold firmly in place the distance between “us” (the artistically gifted and enlightened) and “them” (the empty vessels in need of cultural filling.) Community arts projects, as it has been amply documented, provide alternatives to this sender-receiver scheme of arts participation; but even when successful, many projects can only afford short-lived interventions. While many art organizations have turned to urban cultural forms (i.e., graffiti and hip-hop) to reach out to inner-city youth, Cenzontles embarked on the same venture, but focusing instead on traditional folk music.

Although there is a well established field of folk and traditional arts in the United States, in many cases what defines a program as folkloric depend less on disciplinary or organizational nomenclatures and more on the use of specific methods and resources (i.e., oral histories, use of archives, work with artifacts, art produced by informally trained artists, intergenerational conversations, etc.). In other words, given the right choice of methodology and thematic focus, any arts or educational organization can propose and launch a “folk arts” project, regardless of disciplinary boundaries. But it is precisely Cenzontles' understanding, articulation and use of the “folk” element in their artistic practices that intrigues. Not content with viewing art simply as a utilitarian mechanism for heritage education that can be passed on to youngsters in a formula, Cenzontles has also embarked on an organic intellectual effort to theorize from the bottom up the existing paradigms of cultural transmission.

“We see ourselves primarily as a conduit between elder maestros and the children,” said Eugene Rodriguez in a recent interview.[3] “In terms of learning,” he added, “it is hard to recreate [in urban areas in the United States] the vernacular settings of folk music, where songs were learned through hours and hours of practice in a relatively predictable social context, sometimes just by watching the elders play.” Here, as it turns out, new frameworks of cultural contact must be invented to “try to fit that vernacular approach,” Rodriguez adds. A fundamental part of this process is finding the maestros who can connect youth to a range of experiences and knowledge outside their regular comfort zones. Sometimes, as in the case of the mariachi master Julian Gonzalez, the “cultural treasure” one searches for is sitting in an apartment in suburban Belmont, California, waiting to be engaged by somebody. Other times, a trip to Mexico is necessary to expose the young people to a cultural environment beyond that conveyed by the mass media; still, on some occasions, it is the Mexican folk musicians who call upon the “paisanos” up North, because once away from “home,” as the revival of son jarocho among youth in Mexico and the United States demonstrated, the very idea of “home-grown music” can be reinvented.

In either case, the dynamics of these cross-cultural exchanges always require excruciating amounts of work and open-mindedness. Once found, it is up to Cenzontles to devise a learning mechanism to make sense of the knowledge the maestros posses. Julian, for example, was a farm hand who only began calling himself a musician after he turned 40; he carried with him, however, a vast inventory of traditional songs that he “just remembered” his father playing since the beginning of the 20th century. When he introduced Cenzontles to the song “Pasajero” and began demonstrating the guitarron lines as up-beats (and not the conventional mariachi down-beats), Eugene seriously questioned for a brief moment the old man’s sanity. Then he heard an Arhoolie recording by Mariachi Tapation from the 1930s and the song was played exactly as Don Julian had demonstrated. Another kind of counter-intuitive learning moment took place when Lucina Rodriguez, one of the group’s lead singers and dancers, traveled to Jalisco and realized how the labels of identity we use so casually can turn out to be misleading. In Mexico, she said, “you realize [coming from the U.S.] that you are not ‘Mexican’ the way they are ‘Mexican’ over there, but at the same time you also learn that you are not ‘American’ the way they are ‘American’; in Guadalajara, for instance, the youth listened to music and dressed and talked and thought about the world in ways more ‘Americanized’ than I am, even though I live in the United States.”

Members of Los Cenzontles Touring Youth Group

This dissonance between folk contexts — the community of origins where “folk” traditions are conceived and the new settings into which they are cast by border-crossing circumstances — constitutes in the Cenzontles mandate a new foundation from which to rethink the folklore idea altogether. In other words, it transforms the mission of the organization (and the conceptual/philosophical terms under which it works) into one primarily focused on a theory of mediation and translation. Cenzontles’ definition of folklore stresses three elements. Firstly, the evolving nature of cultural identity (instead of its boundedness in a fixed location); secondly, the merging of traditional and popular music, especially as these infiltrate youth culture; and lastly, a meticulous use of folkloristic techniques of documentation, preservation and dissemination inserted within a model of native-anthropology (a group’s study of its own practices). At the center of their organizational matrix are sequences of strategies: research, document, learn and teach. The core members of the ensemble, which also doubles as the organization’s administrative staff, learn directly from the master teachers and then codify the learning into lesson plans to teach the children who attend the Cenzontles’ school. In spite of being the element for which they are most widely recognized, in the Cenzontles universe public performances are barely the tip of the iceberg of a larger and deeper intervention in social memory. Perhaps the most provocative element of Cenzontles’ submerged cultural production is their insistence on learning from root sources while at the same time, paradoxically, rejecting any claims of purity or orthodoxy in their approach to folk materials. How can these seemingly opposite tendencies be reconciled?

Cenzontles’ comprehensive grassroots model linking cultural transmission, arts education and youth empowerment offers a way out of the wooden dichotomies that all too often tend to hold the folk arts hostage between “quaintness” and “erudition.” According to Rodriguez, “something got lost in the process of codifying folk music.” That “something,” one learns quickly upon coming in contact with the youth who run, under Rodriguez’ mentorship, this remarkable organization, is the connection of music to its social and cultural context. “We want to play, perform and have a good time,” said Lucina, “but we also want to go deeper, to figure out how music relates to its environment.” In the Mexican and Chicano barrios of northern California’s East Bay, the “environment” is both remarkably different yet uncannily similar to the rural settings from which Mexican “traditional music” emerges. That is, in both locales one finds people longing for connections that can go beyond the romanticized and prepackaged versions of folklore frequently endorsed by elites. “The beautiful thing about folk music,” Eugene Rodriguez told me sitting at Cenzontles’ “living room” one rainy morning last February, “is that, to some degree, its aesthetic is neutral, and everybody can own a piece of it in their own way.” For example, Eugene explained, “if you are singing a verse about a bird who is looking lovely for its mate, a child can sing that verse thinking of a bird; a young person thinks about a lover; an older person thinks about their youth or home. It is ‘neutral’ in the sense that it can become a conduit for universal emotion.”

Thus, Cenzontles has determined to create, off a busy California freeway, a symbolic “Mexican pueblo” where cultural “nomads,” as the Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsivais has written, can dream a dream rooted in new bonds of affection. “In foreign lands…,” Monsivais tells us, “the family is more family, the fellow countrymen more countrymen, the reconstruction of the familiar more devotional.” (Emphasis added).[4]

Who owns Folklore?

As a Mexican-American child growing up in Southern California, Eugene Rodriguez received mixed messages about his musical heritage: On the one hand, Mexican songs, mostly Mariachi style, were everywhere. Even if one wanted to escape it, the sounds, lyrics and the erect posture and regal gestures of the players followed you at every turn — baptisms, weddings, birthday parties, funerals, the radio, movies and even Sunday backyard barbacoas. On the other hand, when Rodriguez finally acquiesced to his cultural surroundings and became interested in playing the old songs himself, his uncles frequently made fun of his academic training (he studied music at a prestigious conservatory) and American stylizations.

This anecdote highlights one of the cornerstone principles of the Cenzontles’ pedagogy: It takes a certain emotional dislocation to understand folk music as more than an academic exercise. For most of the 20th century and to the present, Mexican folk music has been represented either as spectacle or as the esoteric domain of a few experts. The trajectory of musical genres like mariachi, from folk roots to huge commercial success to heritage education projects, has resulted in highly stylized versions of the musical form suitable for nationalistic agendas that may or may not, at various historical junctures, coincide with the grassroots sensibilities and needs of the Mexican working classes.[5] But it is precisely in these clashes over “authenticity” — whether Chicanos are deemed incapable of “getting” Mexico “right” or whether Mexicans can sing anything beyond the half dozen ranchera songs everyone knows — where the methodology enacted by Cenzontles is best apprehended. Namely, their method centers on the creation of a dialectical circle where an originary folk music (the thesis) confronts a disruption in musical technique or style usually brought about by migration or historical neglect or social derision (antithesis), which is eventually reshaped into a synthesis (a new reinvigorated traditional music project).

In Veracruz, 1991

The paradox in this pedagogical operation, however, is that much of this synthesis could not be accomplished without beginning from a beginning — from forging a link with a site of origin in Mexican soil. However, as some of the latest Mexican musical crazes, Quebradita and Pasito Duranguense, demonstrate, such originary locations need not be physically in Mexico (for in fact they are crafted in California and Illinois respectively), but must be nurtured, nonetheless, by a large inventory of symbolic connections, signs and aesthetic forms to that country and specifically to various regional imaginaries within it.[6] In the late 1980s, Cenzontles found a connection to Mexico that would alter forever their thinking about folk music. It was by meeting and working with Gilberto Gutierrez, from the group Mono Blanco in Veracruz that Eugene Rodriguez was able to see, for the first time, music and dance connected to a participatory culture like he had not experienced before.

The timing was auspicious, for by the time Eugene crossed their path, Mono Blanco was riding the cusp of a veritable revival of rural Veracruz musical tradition that had begun in the 1970s and had caught on as a youth movement in Mexico and the United States.[7] Cenzontles appeared at the right time at the right place to help complete the last wave of this revival by offering Mono Blanco a California connection that the Veracruz-based group had long been searching for. Eventually, one of Mexico’s cutting-edge rock bands, Molotov, would cover the title track of one of Cenzontles' and Mono Blanco’s recordings “El mundo se va a acabar.” Soon after, Mono Blanco began appearing as the opening act on many large rock concerts in Mexico and internationally. In 1991, Rodriguez took a group of Chicano youngsters from inner-city San Pablo who did not speak Spanish to Veracruz to meet the master folk teachers behind the “jarocho phenomenon.”

By working with source material among maestros in Mexico, Cenzontles hit upon the key that would eventually become their signature methodology. In those rural contexts, Eugene Rodriguez told me, he learned something about vernacular music that surprised him: While “academic” folklorists would repeat a line or verse exactly the same way in every recording and every performance — as a seal of authenticity — the down-home rural musicians exhibited a refreshing fluidity. “It is a twisted logic,” Rodriguez tells me, referring to what he calls the “archive version” of folk music. “Authenticity understood in a purely academic sense suffocates practice," says Rodriguez impatiently, “and then, as we saw with rural mariachi or son jarocho, without practice, the art form dies.”

Fandango, 2003

Despite the popularity of Mexican musical genres like mariachi as a social emblem of identity, too much of the mariachi music Rodriguez heard everywhere relied on formulas and predictable melodic patterns. In the traditional formats he eventually learned from maestros like Don Julian, the emphasis was, instead, on a basic repertoire of rhythms upon which players improvised. A form of artistic improvisation, as it turned out, had also seeped into the commercial popular music craze of “quebradita” among Mexican-American youth in California, and Rodriguez used this alleged “contamination” with popular music among the youth in San Pablo to establish a bridge toward folk music. “What we were trying to do on our little folk-music level,” Rodriguez said, “was already happening on a massive scale; the approach the youth who danced quebradita had to music was perfect for us because they didn’t see it as four steps of this and four steps of that and turn, but rather as a holistic way of expression that opened up the possibility to embrace folk music with the same passion; I guess it is fair to say that popular “folk” music fed us [to do other things in another realm of folk and tradition].”

These undertakings, orthodox or not according to the prevailing views of folklore by Mexican nationalist elites, bring to the surface another major element constitutive of the Cenzontles’ approach. The cultural “soul” of Mexico, today, lives as much in Los Angeles and Chicago as it does, or once did, in the rural settings of Sinaloa and Guerrero or the officialist monuments and museums of Mexico City. Cenzontles learned this lesson of cultural fluidity from looking around their own neighborhood. Movement, as is turned out, was the unifying theme between different waves of Mexican-origin people: for Mexicanos, migration from Mexico within the last 20 years was the key factor; for Chicanos, movement was often expressed in terms of disruptions to their lives caused by social policies that affected their survival. Cenzontles realized that movement, in either direction, "does something” to folklore and tradition; and in the end produces very different effects from those invoked by UNESCO’s efforts to save threatened cultural practices. For example, the circulation of bodies, memories and knowledge across a historical and geographical divide replaces the idea of a bounded living cultural medium (the village, pueblo, rancho or town of origin). The “folk,” in this case, live in motion and cross-pollination, reshaping what has been handed down into new forms in a place far away from “home” that offers, at the same time, a “new home” from which to remember, thus allowing cultural bearers to recover traditions compromised by various kinds of material and symbolic uprootings. Accordingly, Cenzontles’ exploration of folk culture has not been limited to the folk communities of origin of various musical traditions in Mexico, but has also embraced the mobile biculturalism of Mexicans and Chicanos across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Ranch Party, 2003

The effect of working with folk cultures in a diasporic context is nothing short of a total displacement of authenticity — a displacement that moves from center to margin, or from a “Mexico profundo” (deep) to the peripheries that Americo Paredes called “Greater Mexico.”[8] Thus, Cenzontles’ documentary project is aptly named “cultures of Mexico in California” because its key organizing principle is the existence of a circuit of musical preservation from Mexico to the United States and back again. To this effect, Cenzontles have effectively de-centered Mexicanidad (“Mexicanness”) and in doing so, as one critic has noted, not only have they “broken new ground” in our understanding of how ethnic music interacts with the formation of cultural identity in its multiple subjectivities (Chicanos, recien llegados,[9] Mexican-Americans, Hispanics, etc.),[10] but most importantly, they have also democratized the imaginary of the nation-state by casting in a new light any previous hold any national or cultural-sector thought it had on defining what or where Mexican tradition is or resides.

Cenzontles' understanding of folk knowledge as dispersed and hence anti-authoritarian represents an important polemic. On the one hand, its democratic and alternative ethos bucks the direction of many state or NGO-driven folkloristic codification efforts worldwide and certainly most of the character of how the Mexican government, at least in the form of official discourse, regarded traditional culture for most of the 20th century. That is to say that all these efforts at establishing and protecting national patrimony — benevolent, revolutionary or demagogical as the case may be — stress the resolution of cultural heterogeneity into a homogeneous corpus sanctioned to represent the collectivity. In the case of Mexico, for example, the promotion of the charro and china poblana as icons of national identity occurred as a historical and political process of selective tradition that could have included, hypothetically, many other possible and more indigenous representations, but didn’t.[11] When the indigenous was represented, as is the case of the Yaqui deer dance in the folk ballet of Amalia Hernandez for example, dramatic transformations of body postures and speed in the dance movements ensured that a “heroic” nationalist depiction would supersede any vestiges of “Indian-ness” from the vernacular contexts.[12] On the other side of these arguments, however, is the fact that neoliberal policies throughout the Third World have been quite content in recent years with decentralizing and even privatizing the state institutions that previously guarded national patrimony. We must be careful to distinguish, therefore, between policies that democratize culture from those that simply disavow it. In one way or another, Cenzontles’ artistic work has stepped into the minefield of these debates.

Given these multiple strands, it is fair to say then that Cenzontles’ vision towards community transformation is “political” in the classic sense of the word — a change at the level of human consciousness. More specifically, some of their teaching methods are reminiscent of the schools of “popular education” in Latin America (i.e., Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal models) through which “the oppressed” are able to recognize and name their social conditions and challenges. In effect, devising a model of cultural education for youth development in the inner city, one could say that Cenzontles’ “political” work covers many grounds. Yet, because they choose to work with folklore, the political dimension of their work is not always evident. Caught in a conundrum of sensibilities over the uses of heritage, Cenzontles’ work sets itself up to be alternatively admired and criticized. It is work that is praised by those who understand that Mexican identity is no longer contained inside the geopolitical space of the Mexican republic and that migrants have taken with them in their journeys north fragments of the symbolic national patrimony that now resides in Santa Ana, Riverside, Fresno, Sacramento or Oakland. This dispersal also implies that the ultimate say on Mexican “roots” music, far from being settled, is always in process of renewal and discovery in Mexico as well as de este lado (on this side). On the other hand, Cenzontles’ work will likely trouble those who worry that “true” Mexican folklore will be diluted by folksy improvisations concocted by the romantic but faulty memories of Mexican immigrants living in California suburbs.

At the end of the day, however, the merit of Cenzontles' operations is most noticeable with regard to their ability to translate these philosophical and ideological postulates into the prosaic language of arts administration and programming. The act of cultural translation Cenzontles performs is not an esoteric abstraction. When the youth in the company work with an elder maestro who has been all his life a charro (a cattle herder) and never a teacher, the process we call “learning” can become very demanding. “Every master has a different way of communicating their cultural knowledge,” says Fabiola Trujillo, another core member of the group. Lucina, who has been traveling to Michoacan to learn traditional Purepecha dances from Don Atilano Lopez adds: “Don Atilano says, mirame (look at me), and he demonstrates the dance; he never says ‘bend your knees,’ or ‘lower your back’; I have to decipher what he means by observing carefully and then I have to break it down into specific directions to teach the children back home at the Cenzontles school. When Don Atilano says, 'asi, despacito,' his 'despacito' does not translate to 'slow,' but to '“quietly,' which means with deep concentration and understanding.”

This accomplishment of cultural transmission, intrinsically an act of cultural translation as well, is a legacy in and of itself for it transforms the grassroots cultural organization into something more than an “arts service provider” and into a hub, instead, for cultural critique. The hybrid folk context in which Cenzontles has staked its vision calls for a different kind of pedagogy and artistic ethic — one capable of suturing dissonant meanings of traditional culture across time and space and simultaneously rescuing and recovering folk knowledge while inventing new sites from which “the folk” can speak. I am hopeful that their work may also amount to a forcefully persuasive argument against the stereotypical “dancing-around-the-guacamole" syndrome that has for too long burdened Mexican folk music and dance.

Maribel Alvarez is the Public Folklorist at the University of Arizona, charged with interpreting the regional culture of Northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. She holds dual appointments at U. of A. in the English Department and the Southwest Center, and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from U. of A. and a Masters Degree in political theory from California State University. From 1996 to 2002 she served as the founding executive director of MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, a multidisciplinary urban arts space in San Jose, Calif., nationally recognized for its sophisticated innovation in community arts. Alvarez was born in Cuba, grew up in Puerto Rico and has worked in the field of Chicano arts since the 1980s. Her book "There's Nothing Informal About It: Participatory Arts Within the Cultural Ecology of Silicon Valley" was reviewed on CAN by Tom Borrup in February 2006.

You can view videos, listen to music by Los Cenzontles and learn more on the Los Cenzontles Web site, at www.loscenzontles.com.

ENDNOTES

Original CAN/API publication: May 2006