Huapango Arribeño: A Mexican Musico-Poetic Tradition at the Interstices of Postmodernity (1968-1982)

Abstract

Attending to the complex social circumstances that shape vernacular expressive forms over time entails careful consideration of tradition as an embodied aesthetic practice that is maintained as a situated space of quotidian expression while also actuating a cardinal momentum capable of mapping the most present vicissitudes of everyday life. With this in mind, this article ethnographically renders the transformations and circulations of Mexican huapango arribeño—an under-studied musico-poetic tradition—across an emergent postmodern topography of lived life in Mexico from 1968-1982. By providing historiography, alongside transcriptions and practitioners' accounts, a case is made for huapango arribeño as a creative poesis of telluric ways of self-knowing and place-making amidst the political-economic enclosures and officialized cartographies of governmentality during that time.