Pachangas: Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics, and Transnational Marketing 9780292796263

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PAC H A N G A S Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics, and Transnational Marketing

BY MARGARET E. DORSE Y

UNIVERSIT Y OF TEX AS PRESS, AUSTIN

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COPYRIGHT © 2006 BY THE UNIVERSIT Y OF TEXAS PRESS All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2006 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.  The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements
of ansi /niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C ATA L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA Dorsey, Margaret E. (Margaret Ellen), 1973– Pachangas : borderlands music, U.S. politics, and transnational marketing / by Margaret E. Dorsey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-292-70690-1 (cl. : alk. paper) — isbn 0-292-70961-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Campaign funds— Texas. 2. Business and politics— Texas, South. 3. Corporate sponsorship— Texas, South. 4. Festivals— Texas, South. 5. Texas, South—Social life and customs. I. Title. jk1991.5.t4d67 2006 324.7
8
09764 — dc22 2005012895

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I DEDIC ATE THIS BOOK TO MY TEAC HERS—

R. Bauman, K. Boeker, R. González, C. Greenhouse, C. Jáquez, S. Kane, G. Neville, J. Peterson, C. Rule, E. Selbin, B. Stoeltje, and M.Williams— for infecting me with their joy, uniquely and beautifully expressed through their individual styles of disseminating knowledge.

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ix

INTRODUCTION

1

PA R T I

Political Pachangas, Marketing, and Music

ONE

A History and Style of Association Music, Pachangas, and Politics in South Texas

TWO

Marketing Pachangas The Budgirls

23

51

THREE

Budweiser’s Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza 69

FOUR

Out of a Social Gathering, Music 87 Galvanizing Persons into Politics

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FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

Democracy and the Borderlands Two Versions Pachanga Moves 123 A Local Republican and a National Democratic Gathering Ace Hardware 147 National Corporate Marketers Learn How the Locals Do It A Private Event for a Public Servant 168 “Mr. Vega” Meets Modernity

CONCLUSIONS

184

NOTES

193

REFERENCES

207

INDEX

223

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book reflects the seemingly boundless capacity of South Texans to excite, capture, and carry my imagination. Without you, this ethnography would not be the fascinating testament to contemporary U.S. political culture that it is. Thank you for providing such rich information and conveying it with such passion. In Hidalgo County, I particularly would like to thank Zorayda Alaniz, Ernest Aliseda, Edward Aparicio, Marcus Barrera, Eddie Canales, Joel Cano, Cali Carranza, David Champion, Robert Guerra, Ofelia De Los Santos, Luis Estévez, Cecilio Garza, Efren Garza, Patricia González, Crawford Higgins, Kay Jancik, Camille and Forrest Jones, Tony and Val LaMantia, Lisa Lechtner, Rodd Lewis, Letty Lopez, Willie Lopez, Rebeca Martinez, Mary Lou Mendez, Anne and Murray Moore, Teresa Navarro, Esau Peña, Jerry Pollinard, Eloy Pulido, Roberto Pulido, Aída Salinas-Flores, Alfonso Ramírez, Mauro Reyna, Rose Reyna, Elva Ríos, Raul Rodriguez, Hollis Rutledge, Emilio Santos, Mike Sinder, Juanita Valdez-Cox, Eva Wailes, and Dodie Wooldridge. For technical reasons, I changed many of your names in the text, but I am deeply indebted and appreciative to you for sharing your knowledge and making the fieldwork process wonderful. Even though not mentioned by name, I am equally grateful to the many men and women who have preferred to remain anonymous. I excluded their names and those of my contacts to them in respect of this request. I also offer a warm thank you to George Gause and his staff at the University of Texas Pan American. During the early phases of my research in Nueces County, I owe special thanks to Robert Bezdek, Linda Escobar and her family, Edward Galvan, Barbara Kline, Thomas

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Krenek, and Angelica Tovar for sharing their stories. You not only taught me about South Texas, you inspired me. This book is a token of my gratitude to you. I do not feel that it alleviates me from the obligation I owe many South Texans for sharing their knowledge and love for politics and music, but I hope that it does provide a fruitful starting place for future conversation. My sense of debt also extends to the individuals and agencies that provided me with crucial intellectual and financial aid. Richard Bauman and Carol Greenhouse provided essential critical dialogue. This project also greatly benefited from the insight of Cándida Jáquez, Stephanie Kane, and Beverly Stoeltje. Thank you to Helen Cordes, Anthony Fleury, Kathleen Glenister Roberts, Candice Lowe, James McDaniel, Gwen Kennedy Neville, Okello Ogwang, Lena Mortensen, Eric Selbin, and Sarah Quick for your support. A special thank you to Ramiro Escobar for assistance with transcription and translation and to Christina Burke, Kinsey Katchka, Theresa May, Elaine Robins, Pauline Spiegel, Margaret Van Blaricum, and the anonymous reviewers for their careful comments on the text. I also want to express my gratitude to Sharon Casteel, Nancy Bryan, Allison Faust, and Michael Williams at University of Texas Press for their creative and engaging work. Indiana University’s Department of Communication and Culture funded my graduate training, and the Department of Anthropology provided essential material support through the Skomp Fund for my preliminary research as well as my dissertation field research. My final thanks go to my family, Bonner, Linda, Christopher, and J. A. Dorsey.

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A TALE OF T WO DEMOCRACIES . . . AND THEIR SHARED CONSTITUTION Tale #1 Scissors in hand, I sat in my apartment gleaning the Corpus Christi CallerTimes for commentary on the 1998 political campaigns when a photograph made me pause. Rising out of a sea of sign-waving supporters, George W. Bush and Tejano music icon Emilio Navaira stood side by side with their hands clasped together high above their cowboy hats. The article explained that their visit to the hybrid restaurant Wok-a-Mole was part of Bush’s gubernatorial campaign sweep through South Texas. “Emilio” played a special rewritten version of his hit song “Mano a Mano” (Hand-in-Hand). Bush ultimately captured over one-third of the Hispanic vote in the state, the majority of those voters crossing party affiliation to vote for a Republican candidate. Given this community’s traditional affiliation with the Democratic Party, I wondered why a Tejano music star would align himself with a Republican politician. What kind of marketing was this? What does this mingling of a highly polished and commercially successful musician and a Republican politician mean for Mexicano expressive culture and democratic politics? I began researching how and where political campaigns, marketers, musicians, and corporations come into contact. In this case, one point of connection between these actors was Philip Morris. At the time of the campaign, Bush’s “top consultant” (Van Natta 2000), Karl Rove, was also a paid consultant to Philip

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Morris. Miller Beer is a subsidiary of Philip Morris, and a series of live-music events, part of Miller’s “Livin’ Grande” marketing campaign of 1996, had featured Bush’s future supporter and then-Philip Morris performer, Navaira. These corporate, musical, and political affiliations suggested sites where transnational, national, and regional interests mingle for a particular purpose.

Tale #2 Tape recorder on the table, I sat in Mauro Reyna’s law office in South Texas interviewing Reyna and his cousin, Cecilio Garza, about the 2000 district court race when a story made me pause. While in a Texas hospital having a baby, a woman sang the entire campaign song of Judge Edward Aparicio. Garza explained that his daughter had shared a room in a maternity ward in Galveston, Texas, with a woman in labor who explained, “I have been singin’ this song, and I just can’t get it out of my mind.” Six months prior to this event and three hundred miles south of Galveston, Aparicio’s campaign had first aired “El Corrido del Juez” (“The Song of the Judge”) on radio and television stations across South Texas’s Hidalgo County. The song created a phenomenon across the county, particularly in poorer communities, where men, women, and children became animated about politics: children followed Aparicio singing the song, and adults warmly welcomed “el juez del corrido” (the judge from the song) into their homes. Aparicio ultimately captured approximately five thousand new voters, and in his victory, he symbolically defeated Hidalgo County’s political machine. Given Garza’s, Reyna’s, Aparicio’s, and others’ stories about the power of this song to elicit participatory engagement in politics, I wondered what caused this special song to arise. What kind of marketing created this song and disseminated it so widely? What does this mixture of traditionally styled borderlands music and grass-roots politics mean for transnational marketers and democratic politics? I explore these questions, crucially allied to music’s awesome capacity to produce democratic publics, in this text. These vignettes foreground a central facet of contemporary life: symbols saturate our surroundings, and political organizers use them toward various ends. Writing that shifts from the description to the interpretation of symbolic manipulation has long been the lifeblood of anthropology; hence, the discipline’s tools are well suited to provide a sophisticated illumination of our present condition. Music, politics, and personal relations, for example, remain very much a part of life, but the notions that students of society once held about politics, business, and culture as discrete entities no longer suffice. The intersections between these realms are increasingly seamless, and I present instances of this trend through explorations of one manifestation: the trans-

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formation of the political pachanga (a social gathering featuring music) into a spectacle for the purpose of selling a particular product. For cultural studies, political science, communication studies, and anthropology, this research makes accessible a set of issues involving media, music, politics, and marketing. If, for example, your interest is in music and politics in East Los Angeles, or more generally in the future of politics in the United States, you can profitably read this book. Or, if your interest is in how society works, then this book offers crucial insight into the imbrication of personal relations with impersonal media. As for cultural studies and ethnographic studies concerned with the flow of cosmopolitan forms of public culture, by looking at the production, reception, and movement of a text as parts of an interlinked process, the approach I use in this study addresses valid and important methodological questions: How can one study a film, a song, or a speech without limiting one’s analysis to the text? How can one study the relationship between a text and its audience? More specifically, How can one grasp reception without disconnecting it from the production process? My method builds from recent studies of language use that showcase discourse as embedded in relations of power, as having a complex past and future. Speech situations are interpreted as “shadow conversations that surround the conversation at hand” (Irvine 1996: 152). In other words, I explore engagement with political campaigns and musical events as beginning before the cultural performance itself and extending after the performance ends, with these interactions overlapping. Consequently, I orient my research toward live events and ethnic marketing strategies as discursive processes, with chains of production surrounding and constituting campaigns. The ethnographic approach applied here, which pays close attention to linguistic processes, brings to light important data otherwise missed in studies of the relationship between citizenship and consumerism. Only by examining a particular sociopolitical climate, political style, musical form, and the attitude of the text’s author does it become clear how a song might be transformed into a marketing vehicle that galvanizes citizens into a political public— or why a song fails to do so. Moreover, without attending political and corporate pachangas and looking at the enchaining of identifications across them, it is difficult to explain why participants feel a sense of alienation at public political pachangas and intimacy at private corporate ones. Lastly, only by directly observing what national and transnational corporate marketers study when they are taught about “Hispanic” markets—the ways they appeal to these prospective consumers—and the links between this data and local political players is it possible to understand how political net-

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works influence marketing practices and why viewers encounter the messages they do when they watch television or listen to the radio. Those messages, visual and aural, anticipate markets and are crucially linked to nodes of association that arise long before the broadcast of a pachanga. The opening two tales highlight the central theme of this book: the deployment of two different models of democracy—a glitzy, transnational form and a local grass-roots one—and the ways in which music constitutes the differences between these emergent forms of democracy. Throughout this text, I tack back and forth between the emergence of these two poles of democracy and explain their meaning and use in their ethnographic and linguistic contexts. The data on which I base my analysis were gathered in the course of an ethnographic study conducted in several periods over four years, from 1998 to 2001. My main sources consist of transcriptions of tape-recorded performances, archival materials, first-hand interviews, and observations of approximately one hundred live events (as delineated in Table 1) attended during the year 2000 presidential political campaign.

FIELDWORK IN HIDALGO COUNT Y Between August 2000 and January 2001, I lived in Edinburg, Texas, while conducting fieldwork throughout Hidalgo County. The city of Edinburg lies T A B L E 1 . Number and Type of Events Observed: August–December 2000

Dates Sept. 4 –10 Sept. 11–17 Sept. 18–25 Sept. 26 –Oct. 1 Oct. 2–8 Oct. 9–15 Oct. 16 –22* Oct. 23–29* Oct. 30–Nov. 5 Nov. 6 –13 Aug. and Dec. Total

Political pachanga 1 4 5 10 7 3 10 19 2 3 2 66

*Indicates time of early voting.

Corporate Family Other pachanga pachanga gatherings

1

1

3

3

3 6 4 3 2 4 1 2

1 3

5 30

Total 4 11 9 13 9 8 11 19 7 3 8 102

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near the geographic center of the county and is the seat of county government. Hidalgo County is itself located on the eastern portion of the TexasMexico border, approximately fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico. The county is large, spanning sixty miles from south to north and fifty-five miles east to west. I conducted fieldwork at pachangas in cities, small towns, and in the countryside across Hidalgo County.1 This fieldwork, along with the challenges of obtaining invitations to those pachangas, consumed the majority of my research time. I observed that pachangas string everyday life and elections into a series of heightened moments that inspire bonding between politicians and business people in form (both use them to market) and function (to raise money and increase prestige). As Table 1 indicates, during the year 2000 election cycle, I attended approximately one hundred pachangas ranging in size from 10 to 6,500 people and in production price from $500 to $150,000. “Pachanga” is a term whose meaning is polysemic and contested, and I base my usage of it in historical, linguistic, and ethnographic research. In its global usage, “pachanga” refers to a gathering of friends and family that incorporates music, food, and drink.2 More specific to Hidalgo County, I gathered data at sixty-six “political pachangas”—a term that, generally speaking, refers to events explicitly hosted for political candidates or those sponsored by the Democratic or Republican Parties. In Chapter 1, I further divide political pachangas into three distinct genres—the more traditional men-in-the-countryside gathering, the more prevalent mixed-gender small dance-hall event, and the newer, spectacle-style event. By tracing the evolution of the political pachanga and including dancehall style and corporate pachangas within this category, I risk upsetting some of my more traditional-minded interlocutors in Hidalgo County, who favor limiting this label to the men-in-the-countryside form. Among other reasons, the frequent and continued use of the term to describe political dancehall events persuaded me to call such permutations of it “pachangas.” Despite this possible criticism and other limitations inherent to chronicling an element central to the articulation of local culture and social cohesion, I hope South Texans leave this text with the feeling that it presents a reasonable account of music, politics, markets, and pachangas. In Table 1, I use the term, “corporate pachanga” to refer to events that, instead of being hosted by political parties or for political candidates, are hosted by national and transnational businesses—such as Budweiser, Univision and Broadway/Ace Hardware—to raise money and increase brand recognition. “Family pachangas” refers to events hosted by families, usually in the countryside. They are not explicitly for a political candidate, but in their function of

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bringing family together to celebrate and remember their specific Mexicano heritage are political. “Other gatherings” refers to a range of events, from music festivals and stops on political bus tours to meetings at the Hidalgo County Democratic and Republican party headquarters. These events were held in parks in downtown McAllen, in rural dance halls, and at ranches in the countryside, and they often started and ended with food and music. In this discussion, I focus on political and corporate pachangas, and I show how they function as channels that tie and create “publics” and “markets” as interconnected arenas. Pachangas themselves are vital intersections of the local and the global. In my fieldwork, I not only observed South Texans rearticulating the meaning and use of this event form, but I also had access to the agents who manufacture and coordinate global campaigns and imagery. In this way, my research stands out from other scholarly accounts of globalization, which emphasize local people absorbing global formats (see, for instance, Wilk 1995: 110). In conducting this study, I was fortunate to meet with agents at the historical moment when they themselves were figuring out new “ethnic” and “target” marketing strategies involving pachangas. Little has been written on the political pachanga in South Texas, and this perhaps is the case because many consultants consider it a taboo topic for commentary. At least in my fieldwork, moments when people spoke spontaneously about the pachanga were rare, and often consultants happy to talk at length in an informed manner about many elements of South Texas culture became cautious at the mention of the pachanga in the context of politics. They would quickly scan the room to see if anyone could hear our conversation, and then became hesitant and often silent. Others would discuss the topic, but only under conditions of anonymity, and some went so far as to request that I not tape-record or take written notes of our conversation. Many consultants hesitate to speak about political pachangas— especially the politics of organizing them and what occurs at them —for two reasons: they perceive the topic as physically dangerous to discuss, most likely because of Hidalgo County’s tradition of mixing physical force with politics, and they consider pachangas to be aligned with buying and selling votes and attendant illegal practices considered corrupting acts. The consultants I talked with were primarily Mexicano and ranged in age from 21 to 80.3 They worked for state and county governments, at national and multinational corporations, as journalists, for the Democratic National Committee, at advertising agencies, for local political candidates, and as concerned citizens. The men and women I met with—whether at pachangas, in

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their homes, or in their offices—in response to hearing my project described as a study of the relationship between music, politics, and marketing, often smiled warmly and responded that I was in the correct place to study the meeting of the three.

BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF HIDALGO COUNT Y Predominately Mexicano, with more than eighty percent of its population speaking Spanish (U.S. Bureau of the Census DP-2 1990), Hidalgo County is a particularly captivating place to study the channels that link music and politics.4 Approximately thirty-eight percent of Hidalgo County’s population lives below the national poverty level (U.S. Department of Commerce 2001: 25).5 For many South Texans, a candidate’s willingness to walk from door to door visiting residents (“block walking”) in Hidalgo County’s numerous isolated and poor communities makes a significant statement about his or her politics. Block walking shows that the candidate recognizes poor people—as voters, citizens, and people—and is not afraid to mingle with them in their community, or “in their own backyard,” as some consultants put it. Hidalgo County “has the most colonias and largest number of colonia residents in Texas” (Texas Secretary of State 2002), and these largely rural, unincorporated settlements are potentially fruitful sites for political marketers to target. Politicians and marketers interviewed for this study often spoke of their target demographic as homeowners, and the majority of colonia residents are homeowners and eligible U.S. voters.6 Nonetheless, approximately eighty percent of colonia residents over the age of eighteen have not completed high school.7 Things heard—songs—and visual spectacle— colors and images seen— are key ingredients within marketing in Hidalgo County in part because of low literacy and formal education levels.8 Such basic characteristics—a high level of comfort with Spanish and less comfort with reading—influence the ways in which political candidates and marketers appeal to this population. The result is a style of politics unique to the inhabitants of this region. The una palanca (one lever) or “straight ticket” strategy, for instance, is a political option that was heavily pushed by Hidalgo County’s Democratic Party in 2000. Pulling a single lever to vote a straight party ticket is an option for Texas’s voters. Turning this lever automatically casts the entire ballot for every Democrat or every Republican on the ticket. The una palanca strategy deters voters from crossing over and voting for any candidates from another party, a failure of party discipline that was an embarrassment for Democratic

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Party organizers in George W. Bush’s successful 1998 gubernatorial race. In part as a response to Bush’s success in attracting Democratic voters to the Republican ticket, in the 2000 election the Democratic Party of Hidalgo County frequently asked citizens to vote simply una palanca. They spread this message in speeches and on bumper stickers that read “UNA PALANCA” in red letters along with a red sketch of the lever. What is Hidalgo County’s political campaign style? Its style is distinct from that found in other parts of South Texas. Political aspirants raise and spend large sums of money to win countywide offices. Based on firsthand observation and interviews with local political specialists, I estimate that some local judicial campaigns spend close to one million dollars in their countywide elections. Many of these funds go into producing a brand image for a candidate and getting that brand name, and often its attendant colors, into circulation. Another distinguishing element of Hidalgo County’s political style is the intensity and creativity employed in circulating colorful visual political material. During campaign season, the region blooms with bright red campaign ephemera. Shiny bumper stickers, clusters of yard signs, and highway billboards mark the county’s landscape. Marketers and citizens of Hidalgo County take this packaging one step further. They create a logo for the candidate and put it, too, into circulation. Supporters stick large magnets printed with a candidate’s logo on the side of their cars, pick-up trucks, and SUVs (sport-utility vehicles). To facilitate spotting a candidate’s logo from a distance, others nail campaign signs together in pyramid-like structures placed in the beds of their pick-up trucks. Supporters wear designer baseball caps and T-shirts embossed with a candidate’s logo. A candidate, along with his or her closest supporters, often wears collared, oxford-cloth shirts with the candidate’s colorful logo embroidered on the upper-left hand side. At restaurants and parties, a candidate circulates “push cards,” typically three-by-five-inch cards printed in the candidate’s bright colors, with a picture of the candidate (often with his or her immediate family), the candidate’s logo, a list of credentials, and a list of reasons to vote for him or her. The push cards, bumper stickers, yard signs, shirts, billboards, and car magnets in circulation make the county’s landscape flush with color readily observable to residents and visitors alike. Less available to an outsider’s gaze is the pachanga, a point of meeting and exclamation for these manifold color carriers. In 2000, the frequency and timing of Hidalgo County’s pachangas shifted in response to early voting, a recently introduced element into Texas’s political landscape. Early voting

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refers to an extended period of time before Election Day itself, during which the polls are open to all registered voters. In 2000, it lasted for almost two weeks, from Saturday, October 21, through Friday, November 3. Hidalgo County opened voting “substations” in twelve spots. Early voting is a way in which Democrats attempt to make voting in Hidalgo County more accessible. In speeches and conversation, Democrats commonly express a perspective on voting that equates higher voter turnout in “minority” communities with the success of Democratic candidates. They also understand that minority citizens tend to vote at much lower rates than do majority citizens. With this in mind, Democratic officeholders pushed legislation intended to make voter registration (e.g., the “motor-voter” law) and voting itself more accessible. In Democrat-run Hidalgo County, election officials followed through on this premise as much as possible. They increased access to the polls by increasing the amount of time citizens had to vote from one to fourteen days and by expanding the number of voting locations. Organized by county election officials, mobile voting vans roamed throughout the county, going wherever citizens requested them (personal communication with an Elections Department official, November 2000). The Democrats’ push to open the polls to citizens worked to their advantage in Hidalgo County: more people voted and more voted Democratic in the 2000 election than in previous elections. Such efforts to increase voter participation seem to have worked. Between 1992 and 2000, voting in presidential elections in Hidalgo County increased by approximately ten percent. In the 2000 general election, Hidalgo County residents cast more than 100,000 total votes, a twelve-to-fourteen percent increase over previous presidential election years (see Table 2). Over 100,000 total votes is an astonishing number; it is a particularly high number as a percentage of population. As Table 3 indicates, approximately sixty-six percent of the total votes cast were for Democratic candidates. Almost half of those votes were cast during early voting. The early voter turnout for the 2000 general election was 42,032 (Hidalgo County Elections Department 2000). This

T A B L E 2 . More Voted: Hidalgo County’s Presidential Election Voting, 1992–2000 Year

1992

1996

2000

Early Votes Total Votes

N/A 88,000

N/A 86,000

42,032 102,039

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T A B L E 3 . More Voted Democrat: Hidalgo County’s 2000 Election Totals Democrat National Election Countywide Election

Republican

Gore/ Lieberman

61,390

Bush/Cheney

38,301

Letty Lopez Aída Salinas-Flores

60,553 55,163

Murray Moore Ernest Aliseda

31,275 37,257

number is half the total voters counted during the two previous presidential elections of 88,000 in 1992 and 86,000 in 1996.9 Similar to events across the United States on Election Day 2000, voters in Hidalgo County inundated the polls. Citizens waited over two hours at some sites, and the polls stayed open after hours, not closing until late in the evening. Given this level of interest in the election, it would not have been possible for 102,039 votes to be cast in Hidalgo County without early voting mechanisms in place.10 Because early voting is new to the Texas scene, its relationship to political events and the generation of political engagement is not yet well established. Nevertheless, even as voting access appears to be the Democrat’s cause célèbre, both Democratic and Republican party activists wanted to attract early voters to their tickets, and so, to this end, both Democratic and Republican candidates hosted live-music events. In 2000, law firms, families, candidates, and political parties hosted many pachangas in anticipation of early voting. At the same time, political campaigns increased their activities; radio and television ads and signs became increasingly abundant around the time of early voting. As I formulated the plan for this research, I assumed that political activity would reach a feverish pitch the closer we came to Election Day on November 7. In other words, I assumed that from late October to Election Day, political organizers and patrons would host many events, with the vast majority of them the weekend before Tuesday, November 7. Instead, from midSeptember through Sunday, October 29, the county was a frenzy of pachanga activity, but in the ten days between October 29 and November 7, campaign activity virtually ceased. It was as if the county stopped to take a collective sigh. At the height of the political campaign season, the moment of crescendo for both the United States presidential and local elections, public political pachangas—their production, commentary on them, and attendance at them — were in decline. Glamorous private pachangas filled this lacuna. Just when I expected campaigning to reach its height, wealthy South Texans were attend-

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ing fundraisers for far-off political campaigns and for corporate charities. All drew upon music to relate signs to discourse across specific media contexts in South Texas.

POETICS AND POLITICS IN SOUTH TEXAS This study differs in scope and approach from earlier work on poetics and politics in South Texas (Limón 1989, 1994; Paredes 1993 [1978], 1994 [1958]; Peña 1985, 1999) in several important ways. Earlier scholars focused on the role of verbal and musical artistry in forming a vehicle for expressing resistance to Anglo domination. In those works, scholars highlighted the integral nature of music to Mexicano social life and music’s role in the animation of ripostes to a repressive system. Music continues to play an integral role in the formation of a Mexicano political subjectivity and an objectifiable Mexicano identity, but the system of domination—neither now nor in the past— cut crisply along ethnic lines. Economic interests and forces must be more closely considered. This said, some important elements have changed from the period of that earlier research. When those scholars first conducted their fieldwork in the region, Anglos still held most of the dominant political positions. In Hidalgo County today, however, Mexicanos hold almost all of the public political posts. Moreover, the county no longer operates through a rural economy. Rather, it is the region with the third-fastest growth in the country (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2000), infused with a cosmopolitan sensibility and booming with new construction. The output of border factories (maquilas) and implementation of global agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) significantly have affected the local economy, poetics, and politics. Nonetheless, these large-scale factors alone do not explain the contemporary meaning and use of the pachanga— once central to local politics, the constitution of political publics, and the maintenance of political authority. South Texans have rearticulated the political pachanga’s meaning and use from a private, exclusively male event in the country to a public, mixedgender music spectacle held in a dance hall and more recently into a glamorous, ready-to-broadcast piece of marketing ephemera. The contemporary aesthetics of political practice and their relation to a significant restructuring of the economy are not merely passive reflections of the external forces of globalization. Today’s pachangas are shaped by a crossfertilization of ideas. The focus of this study is on the innovative ways in which South Texans’ attitudes toward these performances have adapted to

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new forms of global public culture, and on the ways transnational marketers’ attitudes toward forms of social gathering native to South Texas have shifted in relation to their own versions of a global public sphere. I suggest that the pachanga is shaped by a dialectic between local poetics and politics on the one hand and global economic restructuring on the other.

S P E C TA C L E , C H A N N E L I N G , M E TA C U LT U R E , A N D P U B L I C S A pachanga, whether experienced live or on television, is not only a musical performance but also a visual spectacle. The trope of spectacle points to a chain of associations crucial to the magnification of this form of social gathering from an intimate event in the country, where actors forged coalitions to overturn the Anglo power structure, into one element in a sophisticated, mass-mediated marketing campaign. Emerging out of a visual orientation toward communication, use of the term “spectacle” suggests indexicality and iconicity (Gal and Irvine 1995; Irvine 1989) in a text’s ability to capture a range of associations in a condensed form, and by means of degrees of textual authority and objectivity (see Bauman and Briggs 1990; Silverstein and Urban 1996). Increasingly, the term “spectacle” describes the material phenomena viewed by residents of the Texas-Mexico border area. In South Texas, where oral expressive forms have long been crucial to the articulation of politicized Mexicano identities, an emphasis on the intentional transformation of a fundamentally aural form into a primarily visual spectacle can offer useful tools toward understanding the meaning of these changes for social and political life. Because the shift observed is toward spectacle, this study highlights the role of pachangas in visual channeling, but sound is also a significant element in ethnic marketing in South Texas and, therefore, the concepts I employ (for example, channeling and intertextuality) help us to account for the meanings and practices of marketing through both aural and visual media. My approach to the process of producing new publics borrows from Greg Urban’s (2001) work interpreting culture as transmission and Tia DeNora’s (2000) recognition of music’s special capacity to foster in people the creation of affective bonds with cultural artifacts. Urban’s theory understands that a single text, a song for example, can cross social boundaries, such as those between generations. In addition, in Urban’s view, texts circulate: they move from node A (such as a social gathering) to node B and node C. The movement of the text may be enhanced or impeded by other mechanisms, including other texts (such as a story about a woman in labor singing a campaign

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song). This circulation of texts can itself create publics. More specifically, I view this constitution of publics as a “metacultural” process: the movement carves out particular publics conditioned by the form, context, and rhetoric of the text. There is, however, more to consider than cultural circulation in understanding the production of publics, and in this study I take into account the relationship of texts to persons—mentally and physically—in that production process. Such sharing of substance is a form of identification. In her ethnography of music use in British and U.S. daily life, DeNora observes that individuals “latch” onto music, often without being aware of it. DeNora’s concept of latching provides a palpable metaphor for more established interpretations of “identification” (Burke [1962]: 21). In DeNora’s formulation, music is a text that people relate to easily, and one that circulates in creating new publics. Linked to this opportunity to produce new publics is the risk that transnational marketers will co-opt music’s special capacity to produce new publics, using it toward their own ends, e.g., to sell Budweiser (see Chapters 2, 3, and 5). At the same time, in the chapters that follow, I explicitly address the ways in which both marketers and South Texas residents use culture to mitigate the risk of slippage in the context of marketing by animating spectators and participants. Marketers achieve this end through a strategic and heightened employment of female sexuality, and marketers and residents both do so by increasing the velocity of objects in motion. Joel Kuipers’s (1998) sociolinguistic analysis focuses on aural forms of communication and suggests that long-term shifts in political communication have moved toward the constriction of channels for democratic participation. The term “spectatorship” as I use it here refers to this same process, but because the metaphor of the spectacle implies a strong visual component, I draw from Kuipers’s work and use the term to refer to both the visual and aural channeling of social gatherings. Organized by local politicians and marketers, channeling plays on and with the senses by attaching messages to the sensation of relaxation, convivial talk, dancing, regional foods, sexual allure, and the like, and in this attachment produces a shared sense of identification among people. Things seen and heard link and create publics and markets. In my interpretation, channel manipulation has become central to marketing social gatherings. I further suggest that channels (or instrumentalities) can be significant elements in accelerating the motion of culture and the production of publics. The process of producing publics takes the form of a “cultural snowball

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effect”: the more culture is bundled together, the more talk is produced about that culture, and the more culture it attracts, the faster it moves along. A second and related point addresses the inverse of this scenario: social gatherings also run the risk of decreasing the velocity of objects in motion or of stopping their movement altogether. Perhaps one of the more obvious ways in which they do so is by not linking with other channels, sizes, scales, and cultural forms. In my arrangement of pachanga descriptions, for instance, I emphasize a shift from direct (Chapter 1) to indirect or mediated (Chapter 2) and from live (Chapter 3) to recorded (Chapter 4) channels. I highlight this issue because these shifts affect the speed and movement of discourse by creating more zones for reflexivity (overlap) to come into action: by using discourse that calls attention to itself—for instance by invoking and looking back at itself—actors create more opportunities for discourse to circulate. Channels are an integral, yet neglected, element to be considered in this process. In other words, the more types of channels a campaign has operating, the more opportunities these channels create for hooking into and reproducing discourse in motion, thereby increasing the possibility of accelerating the velocity of objects in motion. In Chapter 5, for instance, I describe a mass-spectacle, transnational-like event hosted by a Republican district court candidate, Ernest Aliseda. Appointed by Governor Bush to fill a newly created seat until general elections could be held, Aliseda aspired to make history by becoming the first Republican to win a countywide race since Reconstruction (post 1860s). The candidate was bilingual, handsome, youthful-looking, amiable, and well-liked by the lawyers, judges, and staff who frequented the courthouse. Aliseda’s event was live and direct (i.e., not mediated by television). He did not integrate it with other elements of his campaign. Taken altogether, his campaign lacked intertextuality; the elements did not “speak” to each other (from the genre of music used and the story it told in relation to his campaign, to the integration of this music throughout the elements of the campaign— e.g., the campaign slogan, push cards, hats, shirts). He did not transmit a tightly integrated message across radio and television, nor did his staff canvass the event with push cards, buttons, T-shirts, hats, or bumper stickers. Aliseda lost the election (see Table 3). As the Aliseda case indicates, rather than exploring spectacles narrowly as hollow conduits, this study considers channels as constituent parts in linking and producing markets by creating circles of exclusion and inclusion. This channeling perspective concentrates attention on actual structures and pro-

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cesses related to media and globalization (Kuipers 1998; Z. Bauman 1998), by viewing democracy as a form of identification, emergent in performance that is channeled through media in global contexts.

D E M O C R A C Y, P O L I T I C S , A N D PERFORMANCE IN HIDALGO COUNT Y The case of music’s mediation of two styles of democracy provides an extraordinary cultural lens with which to examine more general problems concerning the relationship between poetics and democracy. As transnational trade agreements and rapid growth change the social, political, and economic landscape of Hidalgo County, they also deeply affect the ways in which politicians and marketers deploy democracy. If I had limited my attention in this analysis to a study of “the public sphere”— on the level of a publicly accessible deliberative model of democracy—it might have been possible to conclude that relatively little change is occurring. Yet by turning the focus of the study to performative elements that residents of South Texas have long considered integral to their expressive culture—music and pachangas—it becomes clear that something novel is underway. On the other hand, if I had limited the focus of this study to the cultural elements of this dialectic, to the emergence of a new style of live-music event marketing, I would be at a loss to explain why, in this apparently standard ethnographic tale of studying “up” the workings of multinational corporate marketers, specific styles of democracy—and the music that constitutes them —have flourished when other styles have not. As the tale of Ed Aparicio’s song suggests, an important element in the efflorescence of a grass-roots style of democracy are local beliefs and attitudes about the form and use of live music, and how these play a role in the rearticulation of expressive, political material. My interlocutors in South Texas expressed a deep sense of connection to political candidates, elected officials, and the cultural ephemera (e.g., songs and pachangas) used to bring them into contact. They were not passive bystanders to the changes occurring. They actively comment on local, regional, national, and transnational marketers’ use of their culture in ways that provide insight into why some adaptations work and others do not (see Chapter 5). Called forth by locally significant poetic registers such as the color red, the sound of a polka, and talk of farm work, and in their repetition, a form of “verbal magic . . . believed to produce the reality stated” (Malinowski 1965: 238), South Texans’ performance of politics animates democracy in a manner that highlights the central role commu-

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nicating culture plays in the constitution of at least two different forms of democracy. To understand the relationship between politics and performance, I find it useful to adopt an understanding of democracy starting from locally emergent events, rather than beginning with established models and rigid regulations.11 This study starts from a shared premise in a growing body of literature on democracy and ethnography (e.g., Apter 1999; Coronil 1997; Greenhouse and Greenwood 1998; Paley 2001a) that seeks to understand what “democracy” means as produced in specific economic, social, and cultural contexts. Similar to Paley (2001a: 117; 2001b: 144) in her recent study, I am interested in the “marketing of democracy” based in “a logic of gauging, targeting, and creating desire among voters similar to that which commercial marketing directs toward consumers” (in Paley 2001a, quoting O’Shaughnessy 1990: 4). But where I differ from Paley’s work is that I am less concerned with marketing “the idea of democracy” (117) and how actors “define democracy” (2001a: 3) and more concerned with the production and effervescence of democracy, that is, the successes and failures of democracies as they emerge. This point of convergence is where my study is not merely applying a discoursecentered ethnographic approach to the meaning and use of democracy but a performance-centered one (Bauman 1993: 3; Gilroy 1993: 200).12 In the case of Hidalgo County, for example, organizers’ crafting of democracy often begins with how kinship and memory work: pachangas work in the political context by playing on remembered connections to the early days of political mobilization. High among these are the heady times of John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s national election in 1960. Such ethnographically emergent issues are allied to which styles of democracy survive and thrive, which ones are rearticulated, commented upon, channeled and elided. All of these are mediated by music, and as such music has a centripetal relation to understanding why certain forms of democracy persist and others do not. As Paul Gilroy (1993: 79, 102) explains in his performance approach to democracy, music and rituals “enshrine” democratic moments that work through practical activity—language, gesture, desires—that cannot be reduced to a “fixed essence” nor “reinvented by the will and whim of aesthetes, symbolists and language gamers.” This statement of Gilroy’s feasibly could be directed toward other scholarly responses to the effects of the mass media and massmediated forms of communication on democracy. Such calls propose institutionalizing a concept of the political public sphere (e.g., Habermas 1991: 448), relying upon a codified model of democracy. In such approaches, if they are

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mentioned at all, performance, antiphony, and improvisation are seen as actions to be controlled and subject to legally binding rules, especially those forms outside of rational debate (449). In that proposition, scholars assume, for instance, that interlocutors will follow a rule of impartiality: questions transcend one’s own short-term personal preferences and interests (i.e., actors transcend economic interests in favor of the political). This insistence on regulating, as Chantal Mouffe (1999) explains, falters not only along the central practical considerations Gilroy highlights but also along theoretical ones. Habermas’s model is inconsistent in that it ignores the central role of identification (that reaching consensus also relies on the substance of obligation based in shared understanding) in any production of democratic discourse. In fact, taking up Habermas’s model can be seen to do more to exclude communication and its role in constituting democracy, instead being used as a tool to divide and exclude interlocutors (see Young 1996).

A TALE OF T WO DEMOCRACIES . . . AND THEIR SHARED MUSIC AL CONSTITUTION Mediation, Risk, and New Publics By understanding democracy as locally performed and emergent, organized by local, regional, and national actors in South Texas, I begin to explain why an active grass-roots style and a more passive transnational style of democracy will either wither or flourish; and, I might add, part of the pleasure of reading this political ethnography is observing the surprising ways in which these models unfold and interact. The text changes intentionally—moments when you want more description, feel jarred, left-out, and occasionally satiated—because that is just how I experienced those events—brilliant, beautiful, amazing, and disappointing. To preview what is to come and as a heuristic through which to calibrate the emergence of these two models of democracy, I provide a basic lexicon for what I observed in Hidalgo County. Broadly speaking, the locally based active form works through: intimacy (e.g., block walking), political memory and actual familial associations (e.g., the need for a known name to be displayed on a car magnet), empowerment in resistant democratic terms, the choice of personal associations (e.g., gifting) over positional identities, speaking a local democratic idiom, and grass-roots democracy through music. The more transnationally based, passive form works through consumerism, target marketing, empowerment in consumerist terms, transnational marketing

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tools that use “ethnic” marketing, and commercialism backed by the national political parties. A general conclusion that I draw from this research is that political attitudes can be explained with reference to marketing practice as mutually channeled through music. These practices seem to unfold according to at least five cultural processes. 1. Latching is a changing relationship between an object and a person (whether or not they recognize this happening) that recognizes music’s special capacity, through rhythmic activity, to elicit bonding to cultural artifacts (DeNora 2000). By writing a “catchy” melody for “Campaign Music for Judge Aparicio,” Garza enabled latching to the song and political campaign. In singing the song, the relationship between men, women, and children of Hidalgo County and the candidate shifted from one of distance to a close, personal, and embodied one. 2. Metaculture is a process that assumes that culture circulates and in its movement it constitutes publics (Urban 2001). More specifically, the circulation cultivates particular publics conditioned by the text. Among South Texans, for instance, two forms of metaculture—video (at Univision /Budweiser’s Pachanga Deportiva) and invitation (at Budweiser's Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fíesta Extravaganza)— cultivated a specific “grass-roots” public. 3. Entextualization refers to the process whereby actors work to make a text a piece of shareable, transmittable culture often through taking the text from one context and placing it into another. In Hidalgo County, the “Budgirls” wearing the Budweiser logo and appearing at the Rivas home and on television can be seen as entextualizing. On a larger scale, I suggest that the pachanga form is entextualized, subject to recontextualization and decontextualization across time and space with its attendant shifts in meaning. Thus as corporate players recontextualize and more tightly entextualize the pachanga, so, too, is its meaning and capacity to be transmitted. 4. Generic intertextuality concerns a performance event invoking speech acts that connect with and recall another genre and hence connect the present performance with past events and even imagine future events. My analysis incorporates this notion on two levels and through two mediums, that of music and pachangas. For example, the structure of Aparicio’s campaign song invoked the corrido song form. The sequentiality of Budweiser’s Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fíesta (Chap-

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ter 3) invoked the entextualized (dance hall) form of political gathering, creating a range of connections. An effect of this moment of generic intertextuality is to lend authority to the event, more specifically through borrowing a traditionalized discourse with a well-established form of act sequences. Another effect of corporate pachangas borrowing generic features—particularly highly entextualized ones—from political pachangas, is that it imbues one with the sense of the other; political events begin to feel similar to corporate events and vice versa. 5. Spectatorship “is the process in which the relation between performer and audience has come to be projected on to other communicative relations in society, such as that between state and citizen” (Kuipers 1998: 152). I include the visual and aural channeling of social gatherings. Clearly the move from live and direct to filmed and indirect events is a step toward increased distance between participant and performance. In the transition from more localized public forms to sexier broadcasts of the events, participants and politicians are not engaged in a series of unmediated, live conversations; contact is limited to a mediated transaction. At unmediated private events, however, I observed numerous moments in which a great deal of personal contact occurred, but sponsors had selected the attendees and carefully crafted invitations to appeal to these publics. New forms of spectatorship also raise issues concerning segmentation of publics. Marketers increasingly focus on what types of audiences they anticipate, and in the case of South Texas, this segmentation can fall not just along “ethnic” but also linguistic and class lines. The increasing division and distance created between participants and performers raises significant issues concerning the prospects for and feasibility of deliberative democracy as a political model. These general concepts and their attendant meanings come to life in the more experience-centered ethnography ahead, but these labels—for the mechanisms through which a locally based active and more transnationally based passive forms of democracy emerge— correspond, in turn, to the ways in which music mediates their differences. Music connects people at varying levels of intensity. On the one hand, a truck can drive down the street blaring Norteño music, and it mediates that scape without necessarily doing anything political 13 : a group of people merely share a sound. On the other hand, music does something political to its listeners. It cues them to an attitude of resistance; it reminds them of their

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power to be political; it induces latching and draws new voters (new publics) into the political process. Each of the chapters that follow contrasts local democracy with transnational marketing, contextualized within a specific political tradition. In Hidalgo County, political pachangas work in the political context by playing on remembered connections to the early days of political mobilization (e.g., the Kennedy-Johnson election), as well as by borrowing from the forms of a transnational public culture. My eyewitness descriptions deal with the ways transnational marketing has seized on a kind of “reverse” channel, borrowing the notion of a community of identity for the purposes of selling products to an “ethnic market.” Reverse marketing works fairly well for beer marketers in some contexts, but it does not work so well for politics—at least not for a politics based on anything other than consumption. Thus, the contrast between the pachanga, as historically developed in Hidalgo County (traced in Chapter 1), and Budweiser’s transnational marketing at a pachanga deportiva (presented in Chapter 2), is crucial to the framework of democracy. This contrast highlights the difference between the emergence of a grass-roots style of democratic politics enacted through music, and a transnational marketing tool that uses ethnic markers. This polarity continues in Chapter 4, where I contrast the songs of two local judicial candidates, Ed Aparicio and Ernest Aliseda, which clearly show the difference between a local democratic idiom and commercialism. The contrast between the very unsuccessful Democratic National Committee’s live-music event (Chapter 5) and the very successful Ace Hardware live event (Chapter 6) provides a canvas on which I show how these different models work (or don’t work for the Democratic National Committee). In Chapter 7, this story comes full circle back to the pull of kinship and local ties in this new transnational context. My analytic strategy in contrasting two different models of democracy and the way music constitutes the differences between them is based in my firm belief in politics as a phenomenon springing from the events of everyday life—parties, songs, sayings, jingles, icons, advertisements, bumpers stickers, and invitation—that work to activate citizens as voters and subjugate them as consumers. As the opening vignettes underscore, any of these performative elements can be used as entry points into understanding democracy, but their interrelationship, the places where they come together and disperse, work and do not work, is crucial to such an understanding. Different chapters highlight music in different ways, but none of the chapters ignores the key role of music. It is a powerful medium of solidarity, and it seeps into much of our environment, including the political. Music is a socially powerful agent affecting us also as citizens.

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A History and Style of Association ONE

Music, Pachangas, and Politics in South Texas

Political marketers deploy music and pachangas as a strategy to build publics by producing attachments to a politician, a political campaign, and a political party. In this chapter, I contextualize the pachangas that took place in Hidalgo County during the year 2000 political season by providing a general background of borderlands music and pachangas in terms of their politicized history in relation to issues of race and gender. Next, I describe the features that mark a contemporary, locally based, dance-hall style political pachanga, and ultimately through this discussion, I suggest that political pachangas are a distinct style of event: they have a traceable history and form.

A MUSICAL TRADITION OF POLITICAL STRUGGLE South Texas has long been associated with musical and political innovation (Foley 1998; Garcia 1989; Marquez 1993; Orozco 1992). Border ballads, for instance, have flourished as social and political counterstatements to dominant Anglo narratives, and many forms of music, including corridos (Paredes 1994 [1958]), conjunto (Peña 1985), and Tejano (Peña 1999), evolved in tandem with social and political shifts. For the past 150 years, people living in the Lower Rio Grande Valley have been composing and singing ballads praising bandits, raiders, and ordinary men who “each with his pistol defended his right” (Paredes 1994 [1958]: 32). These folksongs burgeoned during an era when both propertied and impoverished Mexicanos were disenfranchised by the U.S. legal system. “The Mexican was ‘victimized by the law’” and “old

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landholding families found their titles in jeopardy and if they did not lose in the courts they lost to their American lawyers,” according to Walter Prescott Webb (quoted in Paredes: 31). State agents played a central role in clearing the path for Anglos to dominate Mexicanos. The Texas Rangers, for instance, upheld and enforced what Paredes calls the “lawless law” that reigned in the mid-nineteenth century, terrorizing border Mexicans. As a consequence, the Mexican border community became more unified and willing to glorify the role of bandits and other lawbreakers. Such rebels became folk heroes, seen as defending the rights of upright Mexicano citizens. Paredes presents the song “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez” as a basic model through which one can understand the corrido as a musical genre. He argues that this border-conflict ballad arose in conditions common to the production of folk balladry: geographic and cultural isolation and a patriarchal, traditional way of life. At the same time, a democratic spirit pervaded these communities: “The Border ranchero,” he notes, “also lived in a rude and egalitarian society” (242). What made the songs of this region distinct were the Texas Revolution of 1836 and the Rio Grande Valley’s annexation by Texas from Mexico in 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo drew the Texas-Mexican border along its present lines. “[T]he bitterness resulting from the events that occurred between 1836 and 1848 provided the basis for a century of conflict” (243). While the winners drew the maps and wrote the official histories of these events, rendering border warfare a thing of the past, the losers composed and sang songs expressing their resistance to the status quo, interpreting their political situation as one of enduring struggle. Singers praised individuals like Gregorio Cortez and celebrated his skirmishes with law enforcement officers (especially the Texas Rangers, known in the local vernacular as los rinches). These songs often transformed lackluster events into herculean and memorable acts of dramatic protest. Corridos and their attendant message of cultural resistance continued circulating well into the mid-twentieth century. In South Texas, I found that people express fond and moving memories of moments when music, drink, dance, and politicians shared the same stage. Many residents recounted the pivotal role played by Dr. Héctor García, founder of the American G.I. Forum, in forging cross-cultural coalitions with key players in the Democratic Party at a time when few activists dared to do so. In 1960, during John F. Kennedy’s closely contested presidential campaign, García orchestrated the special ¡Viva Kennedy! campaign, which distributed and played corridos at events throughout South Texas.1 I learned that ¡Viva Kennedy! used music and at-

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tracted many first-time Mexicano voters, people who continue to be highly active in party politics. More recently, ballads of conflict have become stock songs in the repertoire of Texas-Mexican conjunto bands (Peña 1985: 149), who play a style of music that emerged in agricultural fields around the 1930s. A basic TexasMexican conjunto usually features a bajo-sexto guitar, an accordion, and a vocalist. Manuel Peña, an ethnomusicologist and anthropologist of the Lower Rio Grande Valley’s conjunto music, considers the conjunto genre an expression of working-class consciousness and aesthetics. This form of music remains popular, and the power of the conjunto to elicit voters’ participation and to create identification with an individual’s struggle against the dominant system has not been lost on Mexicano politicians in more recent times. For example, in 1996 Democrat Victor Morales, the first Mexicano to run for the United States Senate in Texas, circulated across Texas in a little white pick-up truck, playing hybrid conjunto-corridos composed for his campaign. Substantial numbers of Hispanic voters turned out at the polls: in this election, fifty percent of registered Hispanic voters cast votes (as opposed to five percent nationwide); of these, eighty-one percent voted for Morales (Attlesey 1996). Clearly, his campaign and its music attracted many Mexicanos who do not normally vote. More recently, in a Democratic primary campaign in Hidalgo County, the corrido “Campaign Music for Judge Aparicio” enticed many citizens out of their homes and into politics to talk with the candidate and vote.

T H E PAC H A N G A T R A D I T I O N O F P O L I T I C A L S T R U G G L E Little has been written about the role of the pachanga in South Texas political life, but from my time spent in Hidalgo County attending approximately one hundred of these events and based on oral histories with local cultural specialists, political pachangas appear to be a cultural form that closely parallels the lives of the World War II generation. What I term “old-fashioned” political pachangas are events in which a group of men, usually spanning two or three generations, gather in the country to talk, informally organize, drink, eat, and listen to and play music. During the early days of political mobilization and today, these meetings provided opportunities for Mexicanos to return to their rural roots and enjoy and replenish their cultural ties away from the oversight and rugged racism of most Anglos. As a zone for upholding cultural identifications in the context of ethnic clash between Mexicanos and Anglos, this setting is a politicized cultural

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realm. The pachanga played a part in Mexicanos carving out a national identity; therefore, it is integral to their imagining of the political. In my oral histories and archival research, I did not find mention of political pachangas before the 1940s. Pachangas became more common cultural events during and after Johnson and Kennedy’s 1960 election, which brought a Texan and a Catholic into the national limelight. Their election marked a partial fruition of a hard, historical struggle for Mexicanos to influence U.S. politics. Starting in the early nineteenth century, the entrance of Anglos into the Texas-Mexico border area translated into a systematic exclusion of Mexicanos from established sources of power (Montejano 1987). Before the Anglo influx, most of these individuals played dual roles as militiamen (whose job was to kill off or domesticate indigenous inhabitants) and as settlers of the northern Spanish frontier. Scholars (see, for example, Alonzo 1998) detail the entrance of Spanish and mestizo settlers into the region beginning in 1740 under the guidance of José de Escandón (Gonzales 1999). Numerous individuals with whom I spoke trace their family’s presence in the region to these early settlers, many of whom served as Indian fighters. Knowing that one’s ancestors settled and owned land from these times is a deeply held source of pride in South Texas, and the arrival of Anglos beginning around the 1820s and their subsequent appropriation of this land symbolizes an equally profound wound. This is manifest in the numerous pending lawsuits filed by Tejano families who want to regain what they consider their patrimony. For example, a particularly large and public suit between the Ballí family and the estate of a now-deceased New York–based financier has been ongoing for the past ten years. In this context, land, place, and space are highly important to Mexicanos’ sense of self in relation to society.

OLDER AND NEWER STYLES OF POLITICS Scholars have documented Mexicanos’ battles for this land and the deep meaning it holds, but sometimes their discussions broadly paint the scene simply as Anglos versus Mexicanos and gloss over more subtle distinctions within the political culture of Hidalgo County.2 An element often lost, for example, concerns the connection between the decline of boss politics, which were labeled as “corrupt,” and the disenfranchisement of poor and ethnic citizens in South Texas (illustrative of a national trend that successfully disenfranchised poor citizens across the United States). In part, South Texas’s Independent and Republican Party reformers achieved this by disseminating a rhetoric of sanitation: their goal was to promote “clean” candidates (Rice 1911, in Anders

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158) and to reveal the Democrats’ “machine methods, bossism, corruption and graft” (Brownsville Daily Herald 1908, in Anders 149). The idea was to make politics “honest” through the application of “modern” methods (Brownsville Daily Herald 1908, in Anders 149). County Judge Jim Edwards, for instance, wrote in 1914 of his desire to expose the “rottenness” in local government and then to “drive Hispanic officials from power” (quoted in Anders 169). As historian Alexander Keyssar (2000) shows, quite often this rhetoric served to excuse cutting out marginalized citizens from the process and to take public attention away from the practices of wealthy political players. This disenfranchising rhetoric seems to have migrated from the Midwest and Deep South along with Anglo settlers. Numerous waves of Anglos immigrated into the Lower Rio Grande Valley before World War II, but two periods are particularly noteworthy for their effects on the political culture of South Texas. The first period, during the nineteenth century, saw the entrance of immigrant Irish and German Catholic settler-ranchers into the region; the second, primarily during the early twentieth century, involved Protestant settler-farmers from the Midwest and Deep South. The first group based their political economy on a slightly revised hacienda-style patrón, or latifundia, system, in which the landowners considered themselves the caretakers of their subjects, who often reciprocated this oversight with loyal voting patterns. A second style emerged around 1904 with the introduction of a reformist agenda spurred by the culture of newly arrived Midwestern and Southern farmers (Anders 1982: 141). Rather than being based on an asymmetrical, reciprocal arrangement, these latter groups successfully advocated a political system that disenfranchised Mexicanos (as well as Blacks and poor Anglos) from voting. The former style was tied to the ranch and the latter style to the city, but both political systems treated Mexicanos in a violent and racist fashion, and both treated rich and poor differently. The more reciprocal, older style of politics was closely bound to the agenda of the large ranch. For example, legendary settlers like Mifflin Kenedy and Richard King acquired enormous properties which today are known still as the King and Kenedy ranches. With their seemingly insatiable appetite for property, these men hired lawyers and lobbied politicians to assist in keeping property taxes low, acquiring land, and controlling the populace. It is not a great surprise, then, to learn that one of the most powerful politicians in the period from 1850 to 1870 was King and Kenedy’s friend Stephen Powers, “the leading expert” on Texas, Spanish, and Mexican land laws (Anders 1982: 4). Powers was perhaps the first person to forge successful Anglo-Mexicano political alliances for the Democratic Party in the borderlands. He came from New York with experience in law and politics and arrived in the Lower Rio

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Grande Valley as an officer in Zachary Taylor’s army (4). Even though Powers helped Richard King acquire land, he was also known to work for landed Mexicanos; for example, he handled cases for Juan Cortina, a rebel leader known as the earliest border corrido hero (Paredes 1994 [1958]: 140). At times, Cortina reciprocated by pulling his ranch hands together to vote for Powers’s ticket. Another important piece of political crafting Powers conducted was pulling various Democratic political alliances together to form the Blue Club of Cameron County. He selected a color, blue, to facilitate party identification among illiterate voters. Beyond forging these political alliances and innovations, Powers perhaps is recognized more widely as the man who nurtured the legal and political career of James B. Wells. In his history of South Texas politics, Evan Anders (1982) suggests that Wells was a political boss in South Texas from 1880 to 1920, and as such, he influenced local, regional, and national action. Wells was a lawyer and sea captain from Aransas Pass, Texas (a few hours north of the Texas-Mexico border on the Gulf Coast). His legal skill is what initially caught Powers’s eye: Wells (a graduate of the University of Virginia law school) debuted as an attorney by winning, in rapid succession, twenty victories in twenty-one land suits in Cameron County district court. In 1880, Wells married Powers’s niece, Pauline Kleiber, and converted to Catholicism. This marriage-based alliance seems to have sealed the younger man’s position as the political authority in the region. Studies suggest that Wells ran a textbook political machine, overseeing the selection of local political bosses. He shepherded the careers of the bosses of Starr and Hidalgo Counties and offered them a steady stream of patronage— for example by naming state appointees stationed in their counties and appointing federal officials to their customs houses (in the rare moments when Democrats, such as Grover Cleveland, held the U.S. presidency). In return for this support, Manuel Guerra of Starr County and Sheriff John Closner of Hidalgo County followed Wells’s lead in state and district races (21). Even taking into account the support of prominent public figures such as Guerra and Closner, large-scale ranchers, primarily King and Kenedy, seem to have played the most important role in Wells’s coalition. Most of the rural population consisted of Mexicanos who labored primarily as ranch hands, farm laborers, sharecroppers, small ranchers, and farmers, and Wells and those with large landholdings worked to round up their votes. Large landowners strove to deliver the votes of their employees and neighbors through the old patrón-peón system of mutual obligation—buttressed by physical force. In his idealized description of it, Wells describes this system as reciprocal:

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. . . they go to their major domos, and they go to Mr. Caesar Kleberg, . . . and to Captain King—while he was living—and ask him whom they should vote for. . . . The King people always protected their servants and helped them when they were sick and never let them go hungry, and they always feel grateful. . . . (Quoted in Anders 1982: 7) Wells liked to present his brand of boss politics as a mutually beneficial system in which constituents’ needs were satisfied. In fact, Wells did provide food, money, and other services (particularly for weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage) to Mexicanos during his political career, but he also actively supported the brutal suppression of Mexicanos who did not play by his rules. He was a Southern Democrat who supported states’ rights, limited government, and white supremacy.3 He worked hard to suppress the surge of populism that occurred around the turn of the century, and, to achieve that end, he often resorted to such tactics as election fraud, voter intimidation, and race baiting (Anders 1982: 67). Unlike the “reformist” agenda of Republicans, which functioned to disenfranchise Mexicanos entirely, Wells’s reciprocal brand of patronage politics needed Mexicano voters. He fought the poll tax Independent and Republican reformists supported, and he also fought other Republican reformist legislation introduced in 1913, which sought to disqualify illiterate voters (102). An indicator of the extent of the Democrats’ reliance on voters of color, and of the animosity that dependence created within Anglo communities (particularly among newly arrived Midwestern and Southern farmers), can be seen in statements made by the Democrats’ opponents. A Republican candidate denounced Democrats for “kissing and hugging the Negroes and Mexicans and pulling them into their primaries” (Scott, quoted in Anders 1982: 116). The rhetoric of the Independent Party in 1908 fit the agenda of Anglo Midwestern settlers with its critique of the Democrats as using “machine methods, bossism, corruption, and graft” in their elections; these political reformers favored “honest, efficient economics and wise business methods of administration of local matters” (149). With the final fall of bosses like Wells, who saw Mexicanos as political capital, and with the rise of reformist candidates, politics reverted to strict racial segregation and a systematic disenfranchisement of Mexicano voters. The texture of politics in South Texas shifted from one of pistol whipping and brow beating— coercing Mexicanos to vote a certain way—to excluding them from the process altogether. Throughout the period of Powers’s political influence and Wells’s boss politics, radical political rhetoric and Mexicano revolutionary movements lit

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up the region, but after 1919, when reform, cleanup, and anti-boss politics utilizing “efficient economics” and “wise business methods” reigned, these incendiary political movements also seem to have fallen into decline. For instance, during the Wells era, around the time of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the radical political rhetoric of the Magon brothers circulated throughout South Texas. Their manifesto, called the “Plan de San Diego” (1915), expressed one of the earliest and noisiest exclamations of anger at this burgeoning racial oppression. It argued for the secession of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Colorado from the United States. World War I followed on the heels of this proclamation ( Johnson 2000), and from 1916 to 1919, alongside the death of the Plan de San Diego revolution, the old boss system of paternal political rule came to an end on the Texas-Mexico border.4 The South Texas bosses’ integration of ethnic minorities into Anglo-U.S. politics follows a trend documented in New York and Chicago (Keyssar 2000). In these places, Republican and Independent agendas also worked to sweep out the influence of ethnic minorities (largely poor people) and poor white voters through literacy laws, poll taxes, and, in the South, Jim Crow laws. The decline of the power of poor people (primarily, but not exclusively, Mexicanos) in Hidalgo County paralleled a national movement that saw their disenfranchisement from the election process. Kinship, religion, and intermarriage were key elements to old style, or “corrupt,” politics. While machine politics treated Mexicanos in a paternalistic way, it provided more room for leverage than the strict Jim Crow segregationist system touting “wise business methods.” Aligned with a feudal patronage system familiar to hacienda politics, the old boss political system grafted many aspects of Mexican political culture onto the borderlands. Many of the non-Mexicano residents of South Texas at this time were Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany, and Catholicism and its numerous attendant rituals provided a common cultural ground for Texans of Mexican, Irish, and German descent, as well as new arrivals. During this era, Irish and German men frequently married Mexicano women, and consequently lines of descent became quite confusing to follow. For example, Leo J. Leo (discussed further in Chapter 7), an outspoken Mexicano political activist and powerful political boss in La Joya (western Hidalgo County) from the 1940s to 1980, is the grandson of James Dougherty, the Irish sheriff of Hidalgo County, and the nephew of Nellie Schunior, a politically active schoolteacher of German descent. Many locals consider Leo’s son Billy Leo to be the present boss of La Joya. When Senator Joseph Lieberman toured colonias with the national press corps in 2000, they visited homes in Billy Leo’s district. Leo

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was one of the event’s coordinators, and numerous reporters from television, print, and radio interviewed him on this occasion. As this episode shows, national political media events and local sites of power still intertwine.

G E N D E R A N D PAC H A N G A S : A V I E W F R O M T H E CO U N T RYS I D E The pachanga event emerged after World War II, when Mexicanos returned to the United States after fighting for freedom and democracy abroad, only to find a Jim Crow social and political system that excluded them. For these veterans, the pachanga offered a place to plan acts of resistance to the dominant, institutionally racist political system. These men returning from World War II, ready to fight for their citizenship at home, held pachangas out in the country, in spaces not publicly known or prominent. This choice of location makes more sense when one recalls Texas’s history of violent treatment of Mexicanos resistant to Anglo order both before and during the era of Jim Crow. This solidarity and its attendant form of pachanga, as a special zone in the country where Mexicano culture could and can be embraced, traced, and taken pleasure in, today is a real and symbolic site of political resistance and indexes a heroic attitude—a stance of defiant pride against Anglo political, cultural, and economic dominance. Energetic supporters of Mexicano political activism were often equally adamant against women’s entrance into politics. Leo J. Leo, for instance, is known to have espoused and believed resolutely that a “woman’s place is in the home.” Even though he marched with farm workers, he did not want women integrated into the political system. Around the same time that women publicly began demanding political recognition,5 dance-hall style pachangas seem to have emerged. Pachangas continued as male-only events until the early 1990s. A noteworthy example of the pachanga’s recent shift from a single-sex event to one that allows women is the Tripas Club pachanga. Traditionally, its members hosted large, male-only, public events where political candidates and aspirants sought support. According to a founder of the club, women were not allowed admittance—as participants—until around 1994, and even then the Tripas Club’s membership only grudgingly allowed women to join. At their event in Edinburg I attended in 2000, during high political season, approximately ninety percent of those present were men and only ten percent were women. The few women present were cooks, candidates, political aspirants, the candidates’ wives, and politiqueras (female ward heelers). Many men continue to protest openly and vehemently against women’s entrance into this domain.

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Traditionally, women who tried to enter this realm of political action and networking were discouraged, ignored, or bullied. Some women worked around this system with the cooperation of their fathers. A few women raised in the 1950s who are active in politics today said that their families owned barber shops or grocery stores where they worked as children at menial tasks like sweeping. In this setting, they overheard conversations and learned about politics. Most women, however, were barred entrance from political domains and thus were denied access to the already existing routes for political coalition building and networking emblematic in pachangas. Today, it is common to attend pachangas and find that the only woman present is the candidate. Although Mexicanas do seek office, they face a significant barrier in raising campaign funds. Female candidates report that male Democratic and Republican candidates can initiate and sustain a campaign more readily because they have access to a financial network that provides money quickly and willingly.6 While one might tend to think of financial backing, networking, and pachangas in terms of the South Texas Democratic Party’s patronage machine, the gendered system crosses political and ideological boundaries. It also works against Republican women. This bipartisan exclusion became clear in two Republican campaigns I observed, those of Murray Moore and Ernie Aliseda. Both candidates were district court judges, both Bush appointees, both respected young attorneys. But Moore, a woman, scraped by with local money and familial associations, whereas Aliseda is reported to have received large sums of money from around the state. The most charged rumors alleged that Aliseda received backing from politicos in Austin who were part of Bush’s “good-old-boy network.”

T H E E M E R G E N C E O F A D A N C E - H A L L S T Y L E PAC H A N G A One of the most important changes to accompany women’s increasing public involvement in politics is the rise of the dance-hall pachanga, where the ratio of women to men is typically larger than in the panchagas described above. This newer form of gathering is held in a dance hall in town rather than on a ranch. It is an invitation-only event, and while the invitations can be highly public, many are mailed to homes or relayed in person. Thus, these are not necessarily “anyone can come” events, despite the more accessible location. Typically, friends of the campaign set up a table near the entrance to hand out campaign materials, guard the door, and note who comes and goes. From entrance to exit, I noticed a particular pattern of action at dance-hall style pachangas.

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In the remainder of this chapter, instead of focusing on the political pachanga’s history, I emphasize the event’s distinct form. I am explicit in this suggestion, where I depict the pachanga as patterned. In other words, dancehall style pachangas are an “entextualized” form of political gathering. Entextualization refers to the process whereby actors work to make a text a piece of shareable, transmittable culture, often through decontextualization and recontextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990). I use this concept because it allows room to consider what actors do to make a text a piece of quotable, more readily transmittable speech. The tropes of repetition and parallelism are powerful methods of entextualizing discourse, and I focus on patterns (primarily and most explicitly act sequence but also shared rhetorics of identification) that render a text entextualized. Many pachangas evidence a particular sequence of acts: the participant’s entrance into the event itself, the body of the event, the climax, and the formal closure. Not all pachangas follow this sequence, nor should they necessarily be taken as clearly defined parts of the pachangas. But these acts are common enough and follow this sequence closely enough to justify identification and elaboration, particularly in the case of the dance-hall style pachanga. While their distinct pattern renders dance-hall pachangas a recognizable form, their organization, based in personal networks of gifting, recalls traditional pachangas. Many local political pachangas are gifts to a candidate from supporters, and the event for Letty Lopez I describe below was a gift to her and her campaign. As such, it implicates the recipient in a larger network of affiliations and carries a double-sided charge, both honoring and challenging the recipient (Bourdieu 1977: 12; Keane 1997: 16). This political scene’s pragmatic function of bestowing honor on the candidate and prestige, status, and authority on the hosts displays vestiges of old-style patronage politics. By gathering a large crowd of voters, Lopez and her supporters communicated access to power.

A DANCE-HALL STYLE LIVE-MUSIC EVENT By mid-October 2000, I had observed about sixty events and had begun to experience pachanga fatigue. Although most of these events were held at dance halls, they ranged from an intimate “ladies’ silver tea” sponsored by prominent local women in an exclusive, upscale neighborhood to a large, public “get out the vote” event hosted by the Democratic National Committee at Archer Park in downtown McAllen.

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Thursday, October 19, 2000—Two Days until Early Voting South Texans were busy coordinating political events and eager to talk politics. The campaign season’s quickening pulse surged through the community and was reflected in my overflowing agenda. Thursday evolved into an exhausting day, with a lengthy interview in the morning, follow-up visits and calls throughout the afternoon, a meeting at Democratic headquarters in Pharr at 6:00 p.m., and three events in the evening: a Red Mass 7, Letty Lopez’s dance at Salinas Sun Palace in Edinburg, and another dance at Greg’s Ballroom in Palmview. After locating Salinas Sun Palace and pulling into the caliche drive, I saw lines of cars and people in groups of two and three walking up to the entrance. I could smell the meat stewing and felt the ump-ah bass of the conjunto band—all signs of a lively and well-attended pachanga. As I passed the threshold, familiar faces warmly greeted me: Letty Lopez (the judicial candidate), Eloy Pulido (a county judge and brother of musician Roberto Pulido), members of the Young Democrats, and a wall of sturdy politiqueras (ward heelers). Elderly couples, middle-aged pairs, and children enlivened the dance floor.8 Approximately three hundred people filled the room, and the presence of so many bodies generated an unusual level of excitement. Everyone was wearing the black-and-red colors of Lopez’s campaign, from T-shirts and elaborate handmade buttons with streamers to more simple stickers reading “Letty.” The five or six greeters manned their station at the door, dutifully welcoming people and ready with push cards, stickers, and other information about the candidate. Red, black, and white information cards decorated the tables. Letty Lopez and her hosts could take pride in their party: the strong turnout made a statement about their power to convene an audience.

The Participant’s Entrance 9 In the parking lot at Lopez’s pachanga, I felt the ump-ah bass of the conjunto band and heard the distinctive squeal of the accordion. The many black-and-red bumper stickers and car magnets—ranging in size from a couple to many feet—attested to the support of Lopez’s constituents. (Author’s field notes, Lopez pachanga, Thursday, October 19, 2000) This introductory moment, of passing from regular life into the heightened tempo of ritual time, usually encapsulates a heavy dose of excitement. The explicit purpose of a political pachanga is to draw the community’s attention—

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and thus support—to a candidate’s struggle in a contested election under the mantle of celebration. It is a social gathering in celebration of one side of a battle. The phenomenon of political pachangas in South Texas is often attributed to Anglo oppression; inside this framework there usually is an allusion to the grass-roots, or la gente, mechanisms that key the participant to identify with the Mexicano community’s political emergence out of marginality and a working-class state. Elements layered inside of this usually point to women’s struggle to gain authority within this patriarchal political tradition. The event organizers may simply employ a color scheme and a workingclass sound, or they may make a more explicit statement in the event’s location, in a greeting, or in the text of push cards handed out to attendees as they enter the event. My experience at Letty Lopez’s pachanga illustrates the relationship between a participant’s entrance into a pachanga and the event organizers’ concern with expressing a working-class orientation in a heightened manner. According to Manuel Peña (1985), a scholar from Hidalgo County who studies the meaning of conjunto music in the region, the prominent sound of the accordion in Texas-Mexican conjunto marks it as working class. Urbane Mexicanos often call this a “hick” sound, and ethnomusicologist Peña considers “conjunto music . . . an inseparable part of proletarian life” (54). While South Texans rarely use the term proletarian to describe the meaning of the conjunto sound, the following testimonies from Peña’s ethnography demonstrate the working-class attributions assigned to conjunto music and expressly to the distinct accordion sound. The popular band Roberto Pulido y Los Clásicos attracts crowds in the thousands to dance halls in South Texas. During the 2000 campaign, I attended a Cameron County 10 Democratic Party event at which the band played, and in the foyer a bright “Budweiser Welcomes Tejano Fans” banner greeted entrants. The band’s leader, Roberto Pulido, speaking with Peña on April 2, 1980, commented on the meaning of conjunto in relation to the orquesta sound: Yeah, the orchestra catered to a little bit more educated crowd— más—se creían más chingones (they thought of themselves as more big shot), money-wise and every-wise. Y el conjunto no, el conjunto siempre it caters to la gente más trabajadora de la labor, la gente más chingoteada, la gente más olvidada (And conjunto didn’t; conjunto always caters more to the people who work in the fields, the most assbusted people, the most forgotten people). (153–154)

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Pulido understands conjunto as “always” catering to working-class people (“Y el conjunto no, el conjunto siempre it caters to la gente más trabajadora de la labor”). Notice his word choice: he speaks of conjunto as catering to la gente (the people) three times. He describes them as the hardest-working laborers, the most “ass-busted” (chingoteada), the most forgotten, whereas he calls orquesta listeners not “la gente” but “the more educated crowd.” This class distinction is one I also found being made in Hidalgo County in 2000. The conjunto sound spilling outside the gates of the political spectacle keys attendees to expect an event overflowing with music and speaking to them as “la gente,” the hardworking crowd. While Roberto Pulido reads conjunto music as working class, the respected musician Don Pedro Ayala specifies what its sound means for “tejano workers”: No, la acordeón es música tradicional, por muchos años . . . y la gente la lleva en el corazón, ya no se les borra de la cabeza, porque es tradicional. La tocaban sus abuelitos, sus padres, y ahora sus hijos. (No, the accordion is traditional music, for many years . . . and the people carry it in their hearts, and it will not be erased from their minds, because it is traditional. Their grandparents played it, their parents, and now their sons.) . . . El día que a la gente le toquen otra música no se les paran ni las moscas. (The day they play a different music for the people not even the flies will stop in.) (interview, November and December 1, 1978; in Peña 1985: 155) The type of music that usually greets participants even before they enter a pachanga tells them that they are entering a metacultural zone that transcends time. For Ayala, it is not of the mind, a thing easily forgotten; music is an object carried in the heart and played multigenerationally. The accordion is carried by “the most forgotten people,” and it says, “We have survived, and we remember.” It is a shard that musicians cannot forget because they carry it in their hearts. Entering from outside the dance hall, feeling a muffled ump-ah, walking through the door and into the inescapably loud pangs of the conjunto—all cue participants to expect a ritual concerned with the triumph of the working classes to which the music points. Color is another strategy pachanga organizers marshal to convey an attitude—frequently a working-class attitude—to participants upon their entrance into the event. Sometimes the meaning of color can be explicit. Usually participants are left to decode color through the lens of their political experience, but the colors used at Letty Lopez’s October event, for example,

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were red and black, the same as those of the United Farm Workers. The effect of the colors on the new arrival—who passes from outside to inside the dance hall—is like moving from a Mondrian to a Pollock canvas. Celebrants pass from viewing neatly framed boxes of red and black into an explosion of red-and-black moving splashes once inside the door. People walking from their car to the dance hall— often wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the candidate’s black-and-red logo or black-and-red United Farm Workers T-shirts—pass by a field sprinkled with yard signs. But these elements only foreshadow the effusion ahead. Upon entering the dance hall, attendees are greeted by campaign workers standing around a table covered on three sides by their candidate’s logo. Also attached to the table are balloons in the candidate’s colors. Greeters clad in campaign T-shirts clip toward entrants, and they often glisten from numerous round, glossy campaign stickers reaching from shoulder blade to chest. After attendees sign in, greeters implore to place a campaign sticker on the neophyte. Color’s signifying does not end with the latest addition to the entrant’s ensemble. Some attendees walk to tables flooded with glittering red stars and sprinkled with push cards printed in the candidate’s colors. Centerpieces made of balloons with streamers attached reach to the ceiling. The only color pageantry in close competition with the entrance is the stage, which is usually overflowing with billboards from the campaign. While the entrance experience is usually a brief encounter, it introduces the theme of politics as being concerned with issues of class. Because this theme is encapsulated in the languages of color and sound, the event “speaks” in an idiom legible only to the already initiated. Neophytes walk into a warm realm of smiles, music, and bright color, and can easily miss the symbols’ reference to class struggle. The event’s body and climax usually develop this theme and make it more explicit.

The Body of the Event Finally, organizers served dinner— carne guisada (stewed meat), Spanish rice, beans, and cotton candy–like white bread (the type that melts in your mouth without chewing). They served free red (a color of her campaign) punch, and the cash bar sold beer and soft drinks. (Author’s field notes, Lopez pachanga, Thursday, October 19, 2000) Perhaps the most salient feature of the body of the event is its lack of luster, its commonness. This phase prepares participants for the event’s climax by sequentially layering more elements. The overall effect of this symbolic piling is to heighten participants’ attention to the candidate’s speech.

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In Hidalgo County, the voters busy themselves at this point with dancing or sitting at their tables—taking a break from dancing to sip a beer or soft drink, visit, or wait to be asked to dance. Usually the male voters will break the monotony of this sitting-dancing routine by going to the bar and purchasing drinks. Political players, on the other hand, use this time to stand, circulate, and talk. They stand in clusters near the door, greeting people as they enter, or they stand away from the music near the door in the back of the dance hall or by the bar. Some position themselves in a large circle between the entrance and the dance floor, greeting participants as they move from the entrance to their chairs. After networking within their zone, some of the political players (usually those campaigning for an elected office or considering it) dissipate from the clusters of politicos and circulate between the tables, shaking hands and chatting with voters. According to political-cultural specialists, ideally politicians and their close supporters and staffers circulate among the voters as much as possible, stimulating “heat” in their campaign. Whether standing among the politicos or sitting with the voters, candidates use this time to make new acquaintances and exchange business cards. The body of the event is usually the lengthiest phase, lasting about an hour, and it can feel uncomfortable. Even though most of the participants wear stickers marking their shared affiliation, this is when politicians and voters inscribe and enact their roles. In particular, the politicians pick up their performance roles as workers, and the voters take on the role of owners (of voting capital that the politicians would like to accumulate). During this phase of the transaction, participants’ discomfort is palpable. Politicos anxiously check out the voters, and the voters dance and sit. The pachanga feels like a form of ritualized business. Voters do not exude a sense of happiness. At the tables, conversation is muted, and participants’ slumped bodies convey a sense of exhaustion. The deadpan, semi-sour faces of so many express clearly a sensibility of not wanting to be present. Although participants greet each other with warm South Texas smiles and friendly chatter, this fleeting and patterned response disappears as quickly as it arrives, replaced by a stonefaced countenance that seems to convey the message: “I am here. Count me. Let’s get on with the ritual so I can go home.” At some point, the music stops, and participants are called to the buffet line to eat. This call to receive food is an exciting moment that marks the beginning of the end of the event. From this point forward, fewer obligations are placed upon the actors. The crowd begins to relax, and boundaries begin to blur. People stand in the long buffet line, and servers heap food on their plates. In the lengthy wait for food, voters and politicians tossed together

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meet and share introductions and stories. Participants from the two camps seem to interact with the least amount of role constraint in this more relaxed setting. Typically at political pachangas, organizers serve meat, beans, rice, and tortillas, but there are many variations on this theme. For the free, public dance-hall style events (and occasionally at paid events), the meat often is not center cut but second-grade, from the intestines, the brain, the stomach. These specialized dishes, including tripas and menudo, are served at political pachangas— especially those held on Sundays. At dance-hall pachangas, meat served is often fatty and taken from near the organs. Such “second-grade” meat products take more time, skill, and care to prepare tastefully. The cut of meat alludes to what many call tradition, the heart, hard times: a Mexicano lifestyle of “la gente,” a struggle located on the margins. Mexicanos associate coming from the margins with a symbolic complex in which one cultural artifact references another. The practices associated with the pachanga are part of a symbolic transaction in which cultural associations borrow from one sphere and give to another. The quote below is from a Tejano in the act of praising Willie Lopez, a highly respected radio announcer, longtime political activist for working poor Mexicanos, and famous political corrido author.11 I recorded this at an old-fashioned all-male pachanga held out in the country. Many of the men were on another part of the ranchito eating, cooking, singing, and playing the guitar. The host introduced Mr. Lopez to me and took us over to the palapa (a hut-like structure shaded with a bamboo roof and open to the breeze on all sides). We were in the middle of a conversation about music and politics when a group of the participants came over to check on us. The speaker uses a series of root metaphors to describe Lopez’s ability to tap into working peoples’ desire: He is sharing a part of his soul with you. . . . He built all of this culture, instinctive . . . There is a lot of people, rural Hispanic people . . . He has poetic rhymes . . . that come instinctively . . . you can’t train for that. It comes from where you came from. He talks to people like he is in the kitchen, in the living room. He’s inside the house. And if you haven’t come from where he has come from, you really cannot talk to people as though you are in the house . . . like barbacoa de cabeza. That’s Mexican barbeque made out of a cow’s head that has become a delicacy. . . . If you call him on the radio on Sunday morning, he is going to get into that . . . Comieron los ojos [They eat the eyes] . . . Down here the older generation likes

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to eat like eyes of the cow’s head, the cheeks. The newer generation they don’t want the greasy part, they just want the tongue, whatever. So if you hear him talking about Mexican barbecue, you can almost be eating the barbecue because you can almost see the tortillas, you can visualize the chicharrones. If you haven’t been there, you couldn’t even start to talk about something like that a baptism, a wedding, a Mexican barbecue, church, traditions, La Virgen de Guadalupe . . . and that’s why they put him into the Tejano Hall of Fame. (Recorded at a ranch near Edinburg, Texas, December 16, 2000) In South Texas, like making a memorable poetic rhyme, special food performs an identity, containing powerful meanings and marking off ritualized occasions. After ambling through the buffet line at the dance-hall pachanga, participants return to their tables, and, before eating, wait for a benediction. At this point, the ritual shifts into full swing, starting with a recitation of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance and moving into a series of benedictions. Following the prayer, participants begin eating, and simultaneously, a round of mellow speeches warmly praising the candidate begins. To demonstrate the tenor of this moment, I return to a description from the Lopez pachanga. After reading from his manuscript, the speaker finally calls “nuestra candidata” (our candidate) to the stage. But another women, not the candidate, takes the stage and begins a prayer for Lopez, which ends with a fairly standard line, “God bless each of you, and God bless America.” The male master of ceremonies returns to the stage and notes the elected officials and other distinguished persons present: a mayor, a distinguished person from San Juan, the district attorney, a county judge, the tax assessor/collector, numerous district court judges, a newly elected justice of the peace, a school district trustee, a Democratic candidate running against a Bush appointee for district court, and a city council member from a small town in Hidalgo County. After the introductions of the long list of public figures present, the participants at the pachanga usually shift into low gear with the introduction of the candidate. They no longer dance or mingle, but focus their attention on the featured speaker.

The Climax of the Event The crowd broke into a standing ovation when Lopez began speaking directly following this introduction: Welcome . . . to this outstanding gathering honoring the candidacy

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of Letty Lopez who is an outstanding individual, who has always served the community with dignity and respect . . . For seven years in Hidalgo County, she worked on the most high-profile, emotionally charged cases. . . . wife beaters, drinkers, and cold-blooded murderers. . . . helping victims reclaim their lives, bring justice to the innocent and victims, and that is exactly what she will do as district court judge. . . . In 1997, she decided to leave the . . . district attorney’s office to work in private practice to gain more experience in law. . . UT School of Law . . . Letty knew she would return to community service, where she grew up and had deep roots in community service and business. Her parents [are] shopkeepers. Her grandparents operated La Tienda Amarilla [The Yellow Store] in the 1940s and 1950s . . . their successful business in Edinburg taught her the value of hard work and the meaning of community and the importance of education. Her message that the doors of justice should be open to all is resounding to the public. A top go-getter in Democratic programming, she continues to spread the message throughout communities of our town. Letty is a new name for justice. She will be the new and first elected judge of the 389th District Court. Please help me welcome our candidate, Letty Lopez for 389th District Court. (Recorded Edinburg, Texas, October 19, 2000) Perhaps the most salient trope of political pachangas, and politics in general, in Hidalgo County is a struggle against poverty. Speakers interchange talk of poverty with that of farm work in the fields. While the Lopez pachanga worked to exploit these connections implicitly (for example, through color and sound), at other events candidates are explicit about such bonds. Creating such linkages does not just add metaphoric piquancy to the candidate’s tropological brew. The regularity with which these associations are made suggests that they are customary to Hidalgo County political speech. They appear to be meaningful components of political identities thickly bound to social experience. Articulating a political identity through poverty rooted in field work is a locally based form of political response.12 The references to working-class origins and orientations appear with a great deal of consistency at South Texas political events and consequently should be treated as markers of political capital distinct to this political landscape. In Hidalgo County, farm work is an experience shared by people across different classes, genders, and generations. It touches the lives of men, women, children, grandmothers, grandfathers, the poor citizens, and those who once

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worked in the fields and are now wealthy citizens. First-, second-, and thirdgeneration Mexicanos have lived through the hardship of migrant farm work. Earlier, I mentioned that references to experiences of back-breaking labor separate Hidalgo County politicos not only from those on the national scene but also from others in South Texas, for example in Nueces and Duval counties. Perhaps this difference can be attributed to a difference in political economy, but the replaceability, due to proximity to the border and lack of specialized skills required, of farm laborers living on the border creates conditions for a distinct economy and politics. As a couple of consultants explained, this situation is unlike the traditional rural economy further north, where ranch workers lived about one hundred miles from the border, in close proximity to the owners, and provided specialized service to the ranch across generations. The border farm-labor economy is based on cheap, plentiful, mobile, and accessible labor. Border Mexicanos have responded to these circumstances by building a social and political system that values their work, viewing them and their labor as more than a highly replaceable commodity. In particular, female candidates invoke their hard work for “the community” in various guises. Their candidacies stand in contrast to traditional, patriarchal conventions associated with Hidalgo County politics, political authority, and pachangas. Women carve out their place in this traditionally male political arena by employing popular rhetoric praising toil against an entrenched system. They often represent themselves as active participants holding family together, economically and socially. Women struggle against poverty out in the fields alongside the men, and economic struggle and success parallels their political evolution. Women have earned the respect of men in the political domain (of which I consider the pachanga a significant form of political networking); their voices and numbers rival those of men. In public political gatherings, including pachangas, men and women share the floor. In recent years, Hidalgo County women have become such a potent political force that I have heard many male politicos muse that in a head-tohead contest (of a Mexicano man against a Mexicana) the woman will win, no contest. When women take the floor at political gatherings and speak, residents of Hidalgo County listen. Below is my transcript of a female judicial candidate’s speech in which she had the audience (all female) enraptured. Her performance generated heat. Often, speakers do not explain exactly where they worked in the fields, what they picked, how hard the labor was, or how long they worked. The pain is not the point—the existential association is. Usually, they simply mention

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that they were cotton pickers or field laborers and move on to their education. This narrative tells the audience that the speaker comes from a family of substance. Speakers often switch easily from English to Spanish, with the majority of the account spoken in English. I am uncomfortable attributing a specific meaning to the code-switch, because it is commonplace in everyday talk, but the ability to move between the two languages, and especially the ability to speak Spanish, adds a degree of credibility to claims of having worked in the fields. At a women’s pachanga on the McAllen-Edinburg border in 2000, the candidate takes center stage and begins her address at the height of the pachanga, making explicit her poor field worker’s roots: 1. I love you all too. I am so filled with emotion to be here. I would like to thank Alfonso and his wife . . . [hosts]. They not only opened their doors to this beautiful place but also they opened their hearts to us. . . . Love is always expressed through our families. [Crying and wiping tears with encouragement from the audience.] 2. Whenever you take a position of power, whenever you take a position of importance. . . . Whenever you choose to serve other people, it is for your glory and for other women. I always have been moved to serve my fellow man. Even when I had no idea that I was going to be a lawyer. 3. I was a field worker. I worked in the cotton fields with my parents. We uplifted fields of wasteland or mondes, woods . . . We picked them out and turned them into fields for growing corn or growing produce. . . . We worked as a family together. Later on as a family when my father became disabled and my mother lost her job, I was in charge for providing for the family and working very hard. . . . I worked myself through high school and later college. In two and half years I graduated from Pan Am College. . . . 4. My public service started . . . as a teacher back in 1970. I went on to continue my public service work at the Adult Probation Center. . . . How hard it is for our children to become enrolled in these universities [flagship campuses like University of Texas at Austin] because of the price of tuition, the price of books, the price of room and board, and that is why it is so important that we stress

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education. It is through education that I was able to accomplish something. . . . I supported my family. It was a very painful process for me. I had to leave my mother, my grandmother, my father, my family, and I had a two-year-old daughter with me at the time. . . . 5. She is a second year teacher at La Joya, teaching sixth graders. . . . And she is here with us. [Name of daughter. Applause.] And she is also following in the legacy of service. She comes home and sometimes she spends a lot of her paycheck buying school paper and notebooks for her children. She has tears in her eyes and says, “Mom, those children are so poor.” And, it only reminds me of the poverty that I overcame. 6. I said: “Mijita, you are crying because your mom was one of those little students that you are feeling sorry for. Praise God that you are in that profession and that you know what poverty is and that experience brings so much compassion to your heart.” I know you are a great teacher. . . . I never knew that I would even go to college if it hadn’t been for her who saw a spark in my eye when I asked a question in English [class]. So, we owe a lot to the teaching profession. 7. And when people tell me, “Why is it that we should vote for you?” 8. And I tell them, “Because I can connect with you. I can connect with you in a lot of different ways. I can connect with you when you tell me about your struggles with poverty. I can connect with you when you tell me about your struggles with . . . our judicial system. . . . I can connect with you when you tell me about the difficulty of being the wife of a police officer . . .” 9. I was the first female assistant district attorney this county had. . . . I was the first person to try a juvenile as an adult because this juvenile had committed . . . a murder of a fifteen-year-old boy at point blank “just because. . . .” I was chief prosecuting officer. . . . I went to morgues and viewed the bodies of the deceased. I wanted to see the hurt in people’s eyes and tell jurors the story. . . . I prosecuted a capital murder case. I prosecuted a rape case. . . . I opened my own office, and for the past twenty-three years I have had a 10. legal profession . . . on the side . . . of the mother where the father threatens to take the children away from her. I have been on the

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side of the father where the mother . . . I think women are the most important voice in this county. . . . My qualifications are there and in place. I am willing to help you, and I am willing to do this job for you. . . . I have the maturity and the experience to make a good judge for you and rule on cases based on the law and facts of the case. . . . 11. “Why should I get involved?” . . . 12. Everyone of you has a vested interest in this court . . . Statistics say that fifty percent of the marriages end in divorce. . . . 13. Who do you want in a position of responsibility dealing with the responsibility of your own divorce, your daughter’s divorce, your son’s divorce, your grandchild’s divorce? . . . We are not perfect . . . Sometimes we make mistakes just by the sheer nature of the fact that we are human. . . . I have two other children. Do you want someone who is going to criminalize your children? . . . I know when to be hard and when to be soft. I know that at the end of this journey throughout the earth I will be judged by a higher judge [a member of the audience responds with a soft “Alright”], the judge that we all fear, Lord Jesus Christ. We have made great strides in our campaign, and if you can say one thing about me it is that I am not a quitter. I am a survivor. [Pitch increases as she moves through the phrases. Applause.] 14. We are committed to this cause until the very very end. I cannot do it by myself. I need your help and as women we are the workers in our community . . . because we are passionate about the things we do in life. . . . It is not because we are women; it is because we care. There is a saying, “If you educate a woman, you educate a whole nation.” . . . We want to educate you so that you can go out to the community and educate the rest of the community about this campaign. . . . My other beautiful daughter just came in [Applause. Speaker lists daughter’s responsibilities in the campaign.]. . . . There is a very important lady in the room. I want you to meet my mother. . . . [Her mother now stands beside her, crying. Audience responds with support.] 15. I guarantee you we are going to win [strong applause]. . . . There is going to be fifteen election days . . . I consider November 7 the

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last day of the election. Early voting starts October 21st and we go all the way to November 3. . . . Our job is to get to vote . . . as many registered voters . . . as many of our people out to the polls. . . . We have over 230,000 registered voters in this county. There are 9,000 registered Republicans. We certainly have the numbers in the Democratic Party. We need to take our friends and our families out to the polls. . . . [Her mother speaks.] Thank you all. The high point of the pachanga is listening and responding to the candidate’s speech. Struggle is almost always a theme of such speeches, be it against their opponent, the odds, or adversity. Candidates often touch upon issues associated with beating poverty and the importance of familial support in this endeavor. The act of winning has a particular poignancy for women sitting at a pachanga. It speaks to their recent victory and recognition in the public sphere. The candidate and the woman introducing her create identification through the development of a series of evolving clusters: boundary crossing, work, and family. The introduction sets the event first within a frame of nearly realized success, alluding to women’s entrance into the political sphere, formerly the domain of masculine political authority: “We as women are on the threshold of opening the doors to make it a women’s world. We are on the threshold, ladies, we are opening the doors. . . .” It is clear that these doors are to the elected political sphere: “It is our privilege to get her elected.” In addition to cuing listeners to the kinds of struggle in which women in South Texas politics are engaged, this speaker prepares the audience for what is to come— a candidate’s speech that creates identification first through women’s familial roles as “mother, sister, wife” and one that interprets upholding/maintaining these connections as work, a “job.” In her lengthy and beautifully crafted speech, the candidate picks up and pulls these themes, from “opening doors” to the dominant theme of “family” and “work.” The speaker sets the speech within an emotional framework; she begins crying and then speaking of love. The act of crying punctuates the speaker’s need for the audience’s support. Women hug her and send aural forms of support like, “No, don’t cry!” Now having dramatically affirmed the extent to which she needs the audience’s assistance, she quickly moves to the dominant themes of her talk: work and family. Notice the rhetoric of connection when she moves from her arduous work with her parents to a communal “we” (no. 3): “We uplifted fields of wasteland or mondes, woods . . . We picked them out and turned them into fields for growing corn or growing pro-

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duce. . . . We worked as a family together [emphasis mine].” This is a rhetoric of connection between work and family. In the next series of paragraphs (nos. 4 –6), she continues to tug at the relationship between family and work, building up audience reception to her metaconnection talk (no. 8). And the way in which she frames this explicit linkage between herself and the audience is through struggle, poverty, and familial roles (no. 8): “I can connect with you when you tell me about your struggles with poverty.” Only after reiterating her connections with the audience multiple times does the sender tell of her credentials (no. 9), demonstrating a touch of toughness when speaking of herself as an enforcer of the law, but she quickly jumps from her credentials back to a language of affiliation through familial roles (no. 10), “mother,” “father,” “children.” The female family or matriline is a centerpiece of her text. She speaks of women in multiple roles, and these roles shift as the speech progresses. She moves from talking about women as lovers, as servers, as providers, as field workers, as educators, as preservers of religious faith, as supporters, as mothers, as daughters, as wives, as grandmothers, as fighters of poverty to addressing women as achievers, as prosecutors of men, as survivors, and, finally, as voters. She plants the seeds for this transition in paragraphs 9 and 11. Once again, she moves quickly through her qualifications, presenting them in a more distant voice of “law” and “facts,” to arrive back into the rhetoric of family. She dramatically marks this transition with a change in footing, assuming the role of the audience when asking (no. 11), “Why should I get involved?” This move with a flair—from her qualifications to participant interaction, indicated by a shift in voice—is like the long pause before the grand finale of a fireworks display. She alerts the audience to be ready for the climax of an already exciting event. She progressively heightens recipients’ interest by speaking increasingly through the prism of family: marriage and divorce (nos. 12–13). She does not address divorce in general terms but refers specifically to “your own divorce, your daughter’s divorce, your son’s divorce, your grandchild’s divorce.” She continues, all the while tightening this bundle of family and belonging, increasing the pitch through invoking highly emotional issues like “criminalizing children” and the role of God. This passionate rhetoric takes the audience to the ultimate moment of this speech about struggle: this candidate is the ultimate fighter. She does not quit, and everyone knows it. “I am not a quitter. I am a fighter.” These phrases, framed within the “if you can say one thing about me” trigger, are particularly brilliant in their placement, because the speaker is playing on intertextuality—that is, she takes her long history as

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a losing candidate and transforms it into a credential. Talk that has been hurting her candidacy becomes capital, a reason to vote for her. From the clever climax, she harks back to the pressing issue, reminding the audience: “I need your help . . .” (no. 14). She appeals to these women as women, but not really; she appeals to this audience because they are passionate and caring. Her ultimate point is, “I am strong, but just like I needed my family’s support, I need your support.” The speaker encourages her listeners to transfer the attitude of caring to the sphere of political action, getting “families out to the polls” (no. 15). The speaker moves from the hardship of working in the fields, a test overcome through the support of family and committed educators, to the present struggle faced in the election, emphasizing the importance of women, family, community, and the strength of the Democratic Party in helping her leap this hurdle. The logic goes something like this: just as her family’s labor turned barren fields into sustenance-yielding land, so too can this group’s labor transform an unproductive position (the post occupied by the sitting Republican judge) into one that nourishes the community. The candidate’s account of surmounting the challenges of farm labor keys the audience for a similar victory in the election—but only through cultivating the grass roots. It is interesting to note that this speech does not point to the causes of poverty, only to solutions. Perhaps this use of poverty in terms of exceptionalism (that is, spoken about primarily in terms of triumph rather than as a long-standing, continuing problem widespread throughout Hidalgo County) points to reluctance by local political leaders to accept poverty as a problem that requires their guidance. Such poverty amnesia seems to be where local discourse and national discourse on the working poor converge. Candidates rarely inquire into the roots of poverty. While this speech was exceptional for a political pachanga in that it was addressed to an all-female audience (except for the candidate’s husband), it does incorporate elements that I observed repeated on numerous occasions, and thus can be considered to exhibit some of the basic features of a political speech. These include references to a candidate’s background, thanking the hosts, and asking for the participant’s vote and work in the upcoming election.

The Formal Closure “Go out and vote!” (Author’s field notes, Lopez’s pachanga, October 19, 2000) Reaffirming the group’s solidarity and power as a social unit that can change the system or maintain it is a form of closure that resolves the tension pro-

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duced in the narrative around the issue of struggle and poverty. This reaffirmation might involve invoking a sense of unity through political party affiliation, friendship, and other such forms of familiarity. To punctuate the “ethnic” nature of this unification, often speakers will say something in Spanish like “We are of the same stock,” or “We are the same people.” Whether in Spanish or English, the closure almost always points to one simple solution: voting. The ways in which candidates present the attendees’ job of voting varies. In the preceding speech, the candidate presents voting as a task. She issues a directive: “Our job is to get out to vote.” I have heard other female candidates boldly command the audience: “Go out and vote!” Usually, this is a moment suffused with antagonism, and the request to get out and vote is presented as a challenge. The candidate mentions the antagonists, the Republicans, only once and does so in soft tones. In other words, the speaker does not spend much energy on creating animosity toward the Republicans. Instead, she paints them as a rather benign threat; they have 9,000 to our 230,000 registered voters. I believe she does this because such heavy-handed language would work against her theme of forging connection. Emphasizing connection (Tannen 1990) instead of opposition might suggest a more feminine style of political campaigning. Either way, often the call to vote points to the resolution of a problem, or to union as a social unit around an act. Other than increasing the group’s sense of connection, an expectation of the immediate social benefit of voting and getting anyone you know to vote is not created. The social utility of voting is performed at this function, coming into contact with and being bound with others—through this shared sense of struggle and resolve. Consequently, statements of closure typically mark the explicit purpose of the event (to get votes), but the metamessage broadcast is an attitude of social solidarity. This metamessage of the social gathering serves to tell listeners that this candidacy has cohesion and is building momentum. Ideally, it puts on display the prowess of the candidate, accumulating status for the hosts in the process. After the candidate’s speech has ended with a “Thank you” or a “God bless you,” the music starts up again. This indicates that the formal part of the event has come to a close and that participants may resume dancing or begin leaving. Typically, they leave en masse after such utterances of closure. In many pachangas, the progression of acts, from the participants’ entrance, to the period of chatting and eating, and ultimately through the candidate’s speech, builds excitement around the election contest. Attendees leave ready to vote for an individual (or a slate of candidates), whom they now consider their candidate, their slate.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter, I present political pachangas in a generic idiom, making it possible to view them as a form with a reliable patterning of acts—and often sounds, colors, and other symbols—moving from the participants’ entrance, to the body of the event, the climax, and formal closure. Having rendered the locally based pachanga formally, with its own historical and contemporaneous trajectory, I concentrate in the next chapter on a particular permutation of this entextualized pattern: an event organized and sponsored by a multinational corporation.

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TWO

The Budgirls

In this chapter, I focus on the use of direct live-music events in corporate marketing campaigns to produce publics. National and transnational marketers herald live-music event marketing because they believe it creates “passion” and brand loyalty. Experienced corporate marketers use this tool well.

T R A N S N AT I O N A L M A R K E T I N G D I S CO U R S E My research focuses on channels of ethnic marketing evident in live-music events. “Ethnic marketing” is in its formative phases, and trade journals detail the strategies of successful “ethnic marketing” campaigns. Literature on marketing to ethnically defined groups emphasizes the role of music in effective advertising campaigns. In these campaigns, advertisers focus attention on “ethnic markets,” “live events,” and “brand promotion” as methods of selling products and retaining sales within unspecified “Hispanic” communities. Marketers consider those they label “Hispanics” an ideal target group because they have a “combined annual buying power of $228 billion” (Wells 1996). As one marketer explains, they are “younger, brand loyal, and have strong family values” (Skirloff, quoted in Edenkamp and Khermouch 1996). In 1997, the top fifty advertising companies spent $393 million targeting this market (Minority Markets Alert 1998: 6, in Zate 1997). They also recognize that under the Hispanic umbrella, buyers within distinct culture groups— Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican Americans, to mention but a few—are acutely sensitive to language use. Therefore, ethnic marketers target groups

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speaking different Spanish dialects in culturally specific ways. They have seized on the role of live-music events for this purpose. More important, marketers attribute the high rates of success at live-music events to the mood in which they put potential purchasers. For instance, Helegson explains: “Consumers are more malleable . . . They’re relaxed, in a setting where they’re open to new ideas” (quoted in Fitzgerald 1999: 3). In 1998, marketing with music grew twenty percent over the preceding year, and marketers expect music to continue drawing the most sponsorship (Fitzgerald 1999: 3) Ethnic marketers herald live-music event marketing because they believe the personal contact involved inspires greater brand loyalty, and, as Schmitt and Simonson say, brands are “the hens that lay the golden eggs” (1997: 58). According to a writer in Advertising Age, “Music is stealing the show as marketers realize its power to inspire loyalty and passion among ethnic groups” (Fitzgerald 1997). Exactly how a live-music event creates brand loyalty is unclear; however, what is clear is that marketers believe in brands’ manifold abilities to attract and retain consumers: brands enhance name recognition (Freeman 1999). Brand markings index an individual’s lifestyle, affiliations, and identity (Aacker 1996; Schmitt and Simonson 1997). According to brand guru Kapferer (1994: 4), they “imply a feeling relationship.” In my interviews with political marketers for Univision and media marketers for Budweiser, I heard these claims repeated. Local media marketers concentrate on disseminating their brand logos as frequently and in as many places as possible; Budweiser’s media marketer cogently stated this goal as “getting in their face” (personal communication with Val LaMantia, December 5, 2000). Pachangas are a favorable vehicle for them to do so. Corporate and political pachangas follow a set pattern, but one element distinguishes the two: the attempt to create a setting where people are relaxed. Simply put, corporations host fun pachangas. Most of those for political candidates are not relaxed and fun. Budweiser’s pachanga deportiva exemplifies one such strategy. Literally translated, “pachanga deportiva” means “sports pachanga.” Univision and Budweiser created the pachanga deportiva as a multi-layered media event. Consultants explained to me that women are Univision’s primary audience, but the station wanted to increase its male viewership. They hoped to use the pachanga deportiva to do so. The pachanga deportiva was a prize that viewers won. People mailed postcards to the station, and approximately once a week a reporter selected a postcard at random. The winner won a pachanga at his or her home. The party included free food, beer, and celebrity enter-

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tainment. Clips from the live event aired during the sports segment of the evening news.

Budweiser and Pachangas Budweiser is the top-ranked beer in the United States and the signature product of Anheuser-Busch. Anheuser-Busch concentrates its mass marketing on transnational and national arenas, while local Budweiser marketers use the pachanga as a grass-roots strategy along the Texas border. Two of the most important ways in which local Budweiser distributors project their brand are the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza and the pachanga deportiva. In this chapter, I analyze the pachanga deportiva and in Chapter 3, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza. I draw data from these two corporate-sponsored pachangas to explore the relationship between texts and publics. I emphasize the construction of discourse in the channeling and constitution of democratic publics by focusing attention on two forms of metaculture by which this is accomplished: broadcast video (at Univision /Budweiser’s pachanga deportiva) and printed party invitation (at Budweiser’s Hispanic Scholarship Fiesta Extravaganza). Both video recordings and party invitations allow for the decontextualization and recontextualization (i.e., the circulation) of discourse along new paths. The circulation carves out particular publics, conditioned by the form, context, and rhetoric of the text. Budweiser’s producers entextualize the pachanga deportiva event on videotape to create a specific “grass-roots” public, and they do the same in the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza invitation to construct an elite public. Simply stated, they inscribe distinct publics on video and on invitations as part of the process of carving out their particular niche. Budweiser does this through producing excitement and comfort within an aesthetic of glamour and quaintness. One of the more effective ways in which corporations such as Univision and Budweiser foster these states is through their pachanga deportiva. This grass-roots event—broadcast on television, radio, and by word of mouth—functions as a multimedia publicity vehicle for Budweiser and Univision. The latter dimension is particularly important to Budweiser’s marketers, because people learn about Budweiser literally from the grass roots. The pachanga is a special event hosted at a winner’s home, and word spreads through the neighborhood and to friends and family outside the community. Budweiser’s organizers invite participants to take photographs and film videos of the event, leaving the family with mementos to remind them of their Univision /Budweiser party. Before discussing Bud-

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weiser’s grass-roots ethnic marketing strategy, I want to sketch the company in a broader context. Budweiser has a knack for entering communities with politicized identities and, despite that identity, becoming accepted as the “beer of the people.” Arlene Dávila’s study of Budweiser’s television show El Kiosko in Puerto Rico provides one example of this (1998). The pachanga deportiva in South Texas is another way in which Budweiser enters a community with a rich tradition of cultural contact and conflict and reinforces its status as “the beer of the people.” Budweiser has proven its ability to inject itself into a community and gain acceptance as part of the community’s highly politicized cultural substance without directing attention to its status as a transnational corporation. I suggest that this seemingly benign “King of Beers” thins people’s relationship as democratic subjects to the political by focusing an audience’s attention on a narrow range of action. Niche marketing channels people into evertightening ethnic subjects, setting female bodies into a context as readily objectifiable phenomena, and taking a public’s attention away from the radical “bottom line-ism” of corporations. Budweiser is a business, and its business is to sell beer. Two beer brands dominate the U.S. market, Miller and Budweiser. Presently, Budweiser sells the most beer in the United States. The owner of the Budweiser distributorship for South Texas, a territory that fans from Corpus Christi to Laredo, is Joseph LaMantia. It is one of the largest Budweiser distributorships in the country. He and his children run the business, which includes Budweiser media and field marketing, out of their offices in McAllen. Budweiser has more than sixty percent of the market in South Texas, according to Val LaMantia, director of media marketing (personal communication, December 5, 2000), and the LaMantias constantly seek ways to grow business and shrink Miller’s market share. Budweiser marketers in South Texas characterize Miller’s core product purchasers as more likely to be poor, bluecollar, immigrant, and Spanish-speaking only. Budweiser’s drinkers, they say, are more likely to be Tejanos (Texans of Mexican descent) who have resided in the United States for at least one generation, are bilingual, and are whitecollar workers (or striving to be). At the national and local levels, Budweiser’s primary target audience is men between the ages of 21 and 34.1 Local marketers are careful to segment their constituency by place and function. For instance, they do not rule out women in their marketing strategies at supermarkets, because women tend to buy the household groceries. Men tend to be the primary beer buyers at bars and convenience stores. Budweiser uses different point-of-purchase market-

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ing tools (e.g., Budgirls and different styles of sign art). Thus, the point-ofpurchase marketing varies from situation to situation with an eye to expected audience.

A Global Giant Budweiser is the signature product of Anheuser-Busch, a tremendously powerful company in terms of size, profit, output, and diversity of product. Anheuser-Busch Companies is the largest brewer in the world. Based in St. Louis, Missouri, it is also one of the largest theme park operators in the country and the largest recycler of aluminum cans in the world (Business Wire 2001).2 In the first fiscal quarter of 2001, the net gross sales for Anheuser-Busch Companies Incorporated were $3.47 billion, before excise taxes (Wall Street Journal Europe 2001: 4). Its brewery operations are almost self-sufficient. The company makes labels and cans, runs malt plants, grows hops, mills rice, and develops real estate (Hoover’s Inc. 2001). It diverges from old-fashioned Fordism only in its transnational ownership and global distributorship. Anhesuer-Busch leads the U.S. beer market in sales with a forty-eight percent share. In response to the rise of microbrews, Anheuser-Busch bought and developed several specialty brews (e.g., Ziegenbock Amber and Doc Otis), and it holds minority stakes in several small breweries. Anheuser-Busch labels found in the United States include among others Budweiser, Bud Dry, Bud Ice, Bud Ice Light, Bud Light, Busch, Busch Ice, Busch Light, Devon’s Shandy, Doc Otis’ Hard Lemon-Flavored Malt Beverage, Hurricane, Hurricane Ice, Hurricane Malt Liquor, King Cobra, Michelob, Michelob Ale, Michelob Amber Bock, Michelob Black and Tan Lager, Michelob Classic Dark, Michelob Light, Michelob Pale Ale, Natural, Natural Ice, Natural Light, Pacific Ridge Ale, Red Wolf Lager, Redhook, Rhumba, Safari Amber Lager, Tequiza, and Ziegenbock Amber. In addition to producing diverse forms of entertainment and owning many of the products necessary to produce and distribute beer, Anheuser-Busch partially controls numerous beers produced outside of the United States. It has a licensing agreement with Kirin Brewery of Japan to brew in the United States. It owns about fifty percent of Mexico’s Grupo Modelo (Corona) and in January 2001 designated Corona a “Budweiser brand,” investing $400 million to expand Modelo’s U.S. distribution network (El Economista 2001). The company owns breweries in the United Kingdom and China (Budweiser Wuhan International Brewing, 1996) and has interests in Argentina (Compañía Cervecerías Unidas, 1996) and Chile (fourteen percent of Compañía Cerve-

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cerías Unidas, 2001). Both internationally and domestically, Anheuser-Busch dominates the brewing industry.

Budweiser’s Public and Brand Image Since Prohibition, Anheuser-Busch has become acutely aware of its public image to U.S. citizens and has promoted itself to politicians. When repeal came, Budweiser’s trademark Clydesdale horses emerged to celebrate the end of Prohibition. Anheuser-Busch quickly resumed brewing and delivered a case of Budweiser to President Franklin Roosevelt in a carriage drawn by Clydesdale horses (Hoover’s 2001). In South Texas, Budweiser presents itself as the all-American beer, and in the “All American City” 3 of Edinburg, the red, white, and blue “Bud” logo is ubiquitous. Whether driving past billboards along Highway 281 from Edinburg to Pharr or at home watching television, South Texans cannot escape the Bud logo. Residents on both sides of the border hear Budweiser ads on television, radio, and at parties. For many residents, the red, white, and blue Budweiser label indexes patriotism and allegiance to the U.S. flag.4 South Texans do not take their U.S. citizenship, nor its signifiers, for granted. Many consider it a consequence of generations of struggle, and they know the high price many have paid to safeguard their place in U.S. governance. Service to and reverence for the United States of America is expressed in a variety of ways; as previously mentioned, a common manifestation at the political pachangas I attended was the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. At Budweiser’s Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza (see Chapter 3), before participants sat down to eat dinner, members of the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen made a “presentation of colors” and the McAllen High School Chorale led the crowd in singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” Such patriotic gestures are common. Transnationally, Budweiser has a talent for entering a community, being accepted, and taken as a popular and benign sign of the people. The same can be said for the red, white, and blue “King of Beers” in South Texas. One of Budweiser’s most successful strategies for inserting itself into a local market has been its effort to associate itself with common identifiers of the folk. Puerto Ricans, for instance, assume Budweiser to be the “beer of the people” (Dávila 1998: 463). More recently, Budweiser introduced itself in Germany as “Bud,” causing much confusion with the diminutive “Bit” of the popular local beer Bitburger. This evolved into a contentious trademark dispute that Budweiser and Bitburger argued in court. The German Federal Court of Justice ruled in favor of Bitburger, holding that ‘“Bud” is too much like lo-

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cally popular “Bit’” (Greimel 2001a). As they have attempted to do in Germany and succeeded in doing in Puerto Rico, Budweiser works to present itself as a product of the people. In the United States, Texas, and South Texas, Budweiser employs this transnational marketing strategy of selling itself as a product of the people at the national, regional, and local levels. As I already mentioned, the red, white, and blue of the Budweiser brand ties South Texans’ strong sense of allegiance to the nation-state. Cleverly playing on Texan pride, Budweiser also produces special “True to Texas” cans featuring, among other emblems, the red, white, and blue Lone Star flag. Another promotional strategy marketers translate for local tastes to popularize the Bud label is the live-music event. Live events comprise a significant strategy for distributor LaMantia Budweiser’s beer sales, and such events are used to sell across media. Company media marketer Val LaMantia explained it in this way: [With] Univision radio [broadcasts and Univision] TV, you go to a neighborhood—you touch a lot more people [that is] if [the] weather’s good [we are] on TV, so [with this coverage] we are seen as somebody who goes into the community. On Sunday, everyone is having a barbecue. It is a different type of avenue, a different type of message. Customs [are] very different across the country. I look for men 21 to 34. As beer distributorships go, LaMantia Budweiser puts large sums of money into marketing their product. For instance, whereas Dallas Budweiser spends twenty cents per case on advertisements, LaMantia spends two to three dollars. It channels much of this budget into promotions relying on live-music events. They sponsor more than one thousand live events per year, almost all featuring live music. These events range in size from an intimate scale of twenty people at Univision’s/Budweiser’s pachanga deportiva to four hundred thousand people at the George Washington Days celebration in Laredo. They might last two hours or two weeks. LaMantia Budweiser puts such a large amount of resources into such a range of live-event promotion because they consider it important to be seen as “somebody who gets into the community.” Moreover, she considers it an excellent way to “get in your face” and “sell more beer however you can” (personal communication). Budweiser’s marketers interpret the pachanga deportiva as “a grass-roots effort” whose purpose is to provide yet another route into the community.

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The event gets the brand out to new people in an expanding new medium (i.e., a medium new to corporate marketing) to touch more people. People learn about the pachanga through radio and television. But most important, since they hold the glamorous event in a local neighborhood at someone’s home, the pachanga stimulates conversation from the grass-roots about Univision and Budweiser. The exclusivity of the event also generates excitement and talk among the family: the winner is allowed to invite no more than twenty-five guests. In these ways, the event touches more people, and this is what promoters want—as many people as possible interested in their product. The Univision /Budweiser pachanga deportiva series began in Laredo in 1999, and it is a live-music event that Budweiser hopes to extend into other areas. The location, in a home, underscores family. The pachanga deportiva emphasizes this theme, something marketers who target ethnic groups consider to be one of the more salient features of Hispanic identity. Nationally, regionally, and locally, Budweiser emphasizes this family image. It promotes Anheuser-Busch as “a family tradition” passed down from the founder through generations of heirs. Similarly, the LaMantia distributorship—also family owned and managed— emphasizes its local roots through the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, which raises money to improve the lives of South Texans. Finally, the pachanga is an event with strong family connotations. Traditionally held by men to bring together fathers, sons, padrinos (godparents), and other close associates, today pachangas continue to bring family and close friends together.

Budweiser/Univision Pachanga Deportiva Wednesday, November 1, 2000—Six Days until Election Day In the backyard of the Rivas family, in a small town ten miles west of McAllen, people gather on a Wednesday evening. The distinct smell of mesquite smoke rises from the barbecue pit. About thirty people are present; there is one Anglo face in the crowd. Folding chairs are spread in the shape of a crescent moon on the grass, and a group of four or five people are sitting on them, merrily talking. An excited hostess circulates through the groups, checking to see that everyone is content. She brings food from the kitchen and invites guests to take a beer or Coke from one of the ice chests on the patio (blue/ beer and red/Coke). As extended family and members of the Univision /Budweiser team trickle in, the hostess warmly greets guests with a hug and words of welcome. People spread and disperse through the yard and patio, greeting each other with “Hola. ¿Como te vas?” (Hello. How is it going?). They hug,

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shake hands, and pat each other on the back. The patterned chatter expected for such occasions will continue for some time (from one to twenty minutes) before the greeters disperse. On the patio, a group of close male friends and relatives stand around the barbecue pit, with the host cutting the meat, marinating it, sipping beer, and chatting as he flips and braises more meat. Groups of children and older members of the extended family sit on benches, watching the activity from a safe distance. Almost everyone is dressed in neat yet loose-fitting casual clothes—men in boots and jeans, women in skirts, jeans, or shorts with matching shirts. The bustle of people, cars, music, and food generates an energy that can be felt outside of the family’s fence. Half an hour earlier, at 7:30 p.m., a very different scene unfolded. The Univision coordinator, cameraman, and reporter pull up to the house in a Suburban and walk across the lawn. Children run to the backdoor of the house, and the winner/hostess rushes out of the kitchen. She enthusiastically greets the three and conveys how amazed and happy she is to have won this special prize. She tells the team that she watches Univision exclusively, and that the television is always turned to Channel 48. The Univision coordinator (Melva) sips her Bud Light, listens, and after a couple of minutes of happy banter, gestures toward her car, explaining that she has the beer and meat in there. The group goes to the car and unloads the food and drinks. While the family prepares the meat and ices down the beer, Melva, the cameraman, and the reporter find a good spot in the yard to park the Univision Suburban. They park near a power line, so that if necessary they can feed their tape directly to the station. The cameraman (Robert) and reporter (Luis) spend the next thirty minutes setting up the camera and light cables. Melva begins rearranging the placement of the barbecue grill and chairs. She converts the side of the house and barbecue pit area into a stage, placing three rows of lawn chairs in the shape of a crescent so that they face the yard, qua stage, providing seating for “the audience.” With the arrival of Eddie, a member of Budweiser’s Contemporary Marketing Team, the pitch rises a decibel. This charismatic young man bounces onto the lawn, and Luis and Robert warmly greet their comrade, asking him about the Budgirls. Eddie quells their fears, responding that the Budgirls are in the car touching up their makeup and will be around in a few minutes. Melva points out the stage to Eddie, instructing him to hang a banner along the side of the patio. Eddie hangs a twelve-by-three-foot, bright red, white, and blue “Budweiser: King of Beers” banner as Luis and Robert set up lights so that the stage area is sufficiently illuminated for filming.

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Next, music manager Honorio and members of the Tejano band Iman 5 arrive and file across the newly formed stage, immediately greeting Eddie, Melva, Luis, and Robert. Honorio and the members of Iman meander through the yard and patio for the next twenty minutes, politely greeting and visiting with the hosts, family, and other guests. Eventually, the musicians and the marketing man rest in the folding chairs arranged by Melva, calmly watching the cooking and stage construction. The glamour of Iman, with their brightly colored and heavily starched shirts, shiny belt buckles, excruciatingly tight Wranglers, and glowing instruments is rivaled only by the three Budgirls, who by this point have appeared and are visiting with the guests and handing out Budweiser trinkets (e.g., Texas-shaped pins illuminated by a red blinking light with “Budweiser” across the center). The Budgirls wear identical skin-tight, black, sparkly dresses cut low around the neck and high around the legs. Despite their hypersexualized outfits, the Budgirls (a college student, nurse, and housewife) interact with hosts and guests as “just hometown girls” blending into the clusters of conversation without difficulty. By this point, everyone has arrived, finished a beer or two, and begun to settle into comfortable conversation. The separation between family and the event producers largely dissolves. The hostess’s sister and family move outside and sit on the folding chairs near music manager Honorio; children run around the yard; the Budgirls mingle with guests on the patio. The host is still at the barbecue grill, but his uncles and friends have fanned out, visiting with other guests. The sounds from the soft accordion, bajo sexto, and vocals compete in the background with the clapping, yelling, and loud chatter from multiple other conversations. The group of pachangueros is clearly relaxed, happy, and having a good time. This feeling is indicated by the high pitch and depth of conversations. They move from pat topics like the weather to those of deeper personal investment like cooking, the judicial and presidential campaigns, discrimination, and family history in relation to political loyalty. Much of the family is originally from Starr County, and the older relatives revel in telling stories of their political rivalry with other dominant political families. These political alliances formed the lines of marriage and cognation: e.g., a Sáenz could not intermarry with a García or Pérez. They explain that vestiges of this rivalry remain in local political races, accounting for why there are still fist-fights and brawls at the polls. The tradition makes some unsure about how to vote in the presidential race, with the governor of Texas running against a Democrat—the party of John F. Kennedy. From the loud discussions on the patio, echoes of tales of conflict reveal that the content of conversation has turned the political into the familial and

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the personal. Guests move comfortably. Most stand, listening to the stories, ducking their heads from one group to another, adding an omitted detail at moments. They touch each other: the storyteller stretches her arms around the two nieces at her sides, hugging them around the waist. Quickly, she moves her hands out front, slapping her palms together using the sound and gesture to punctuate the Rivas-García fight. As she moves her hands back, she pats a listener on the other side of the circle on the shoulder, assuring that the listener’s attention is centered on the story and the teller. A teenager in the circle stares at the storyteller while stretching to the ice chest to fumble for a Coke. The group’s moves are loose, and at a pause in the story someone walks back to the barbecue grill to see how much longer until dinner is ready. The fight tale ends, and Sylvia, one of the Budgirls, asks if anyone would like a Budweiser pin: it glows in the dark. Of course, everyone wants a free pin, and they unwrap and put on the blinking pins. Even though Sylvia stands out in her dress and in her ability to give away gifts, she becomes part of the group in the storytelling session. Sylvia, like the teenage nieces, is welcomed into the story as a fellow confidante. Similar clusters of friendly bonds form, with guests feeling free to shift and rotate about (to the barbecue grill, to the ice chest, to another Budgirl to get some pins). A shout of, “We are about to film” slices the conversation, directing the group’s attention to the lights and action surrounding the barbecue grill. Following Melva and Robert’s instructions, everyone hurries to the barbeque area, except for a few diffident participants who slide onto the margins of the stage. “No, please, tighter,” Melva politely commands in an attempt to transform the clusters into a line below the Budweiser sign. Having somewhat positioned the pachangueros, the producers further instruct: “We want this to look exciting and fun . . . Stand back. Music. Five, four, three, two, one.” Everyone shouts and whoops. For what seems an instant,6 the lights get brighter. They dim. Silence. Melva hollers, “Stand by. Uno, dos, tres . . .” and again the lights flash on and off. The producers thank the group, and Luis, Roberto, and Melva quickly exit toward the Univision van to view and edit the film. Iman plays, the groups reassemble, and most of the conversation continues as if the party had merely stopped to take another photograph. The filming was so quick and easy that the pachangueros easily return to their cooking, talking, eating, and drinking. Iman concludes their performance by circulating through the crowd, playing and singing. Between these last three songs, they pause to say good-bye. In this manner, the musicians complete their exit within fifteen minutes of the filming’s termination. The Budgirls continue visiting with participants, courteously accepting requests from the male participants for souvenirs.

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Robert, Luis, and Melva return from the editing, relieved that they have enough quality footage and confident with the package they have produced. Eddie happily chats with guests as well as Robert and Luis as the three disassemble the wires and lights and take down the Budweiser sign. Eddie’s next stop is the bar Peckers, and they discuss meeting there or at Liquids, a popular bar, after dropping off the film at Univision. Finishing their work, Eddie, Luis, Robert, and Melva talk with the hostess and family for some time, finally congratulating them on having such a nice party and thanking them for their hospitality, before packing into their cars and the Suburban. Within forty-five minutes of the filming, musicians and producers leave the pachanga entirely to the host family. The pachanga deportiva differs from previous pachangas described in that the atmosphere is fun and relaxed. Held at a private home, it requires only a quick setup, and is filmed and edited on site. The distinction between frontstage and backstage is a useful one in this context, since specific staged images appear on TV screens across the borderlands.

FOR VIEWERS:

Luis, Iman, and the Budgirls, the pachanga family and friends

B A C K S TA G E O F PA C H A N G A ,

Eddie, Melva, Honorio, Robert

F R O N T S TA G E O F PA C H A N G A

TV VIEWERS: F R O N T S TA G E O F PA C H A N G A F O R FA M I LY:

B A C K S TA G E O F PA C H A N G A :

Melva (with Robert,7 news reporter Luis), Eddie (with the Budgirls), Honorio (with Iman) a) transnational marketing discourse on live-music events b) local/regional/ethnic marketers—Val (Budweiser media marketer), Melva (Univision marketer who also ran E. Pulido’s campaign), Tony (Budweiser Field Marketer), Joel (Univision Sales Manager/ Political Media Marketer), Honorio (Iman’s music manager, linked with multinational label BMG)

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The pachanga hosts and guests watch the staging of the media event and become collaborators in the production process. For them, the managers normally backstage are frontstage. At the same time, Melva as coordinator and Eddie as marketer are guests in their home, helping them pull off a successful party. Budweiser/Univision and the Rivas family mutually aid each other in hosting a relaxed and fun party.

Why Relaxed? The pachanga deportiva differs from most political pachangas in its ability to create a relaxed setting. Both provide free food, drink, and music, but the location differs. The party’s location at the Rivas family home primarily contributes to creating a comfortable ambience. Univision /Budweiser came to the winners, and the producers became guests of the Rivas family—not the other way around. From the initial greeting through the filming and departure of the Univision /Budweiser crew, the Rivas family and the producers endeavor to make guests feel relaxed or “at home.”8 This relaxed atmosphere is in part due to the context surrounding the event. Mrs. Rivas won this party; it is not simply one of a string of pachangas held in her honor. Budweiser/Univision produce the event in a way that makes the hostess and her family special. Univision selects her as a winner. Her power is proven, and this party is the reward. The production crews are present because of her, to honor and showcase her family. Thus, her warm and excited greeting of guests is genuine. She is happy and excited to have won and be featured on television. The select relatives in attendance are also in a position of honor because she was only allowed to invite approximately twenty-five people, and they were the select few chosen to attend. The warm feeling at this event, as manifest in moments of dissolution of barriers between producers and participants, speaks of the ability of Univision /Budweiser to throw a party well attuned to South Texas culture. In addition to hosting an event that everyone enjoyed and will talk about for some time, Univision /Budweiser successfully turned this party into a publicity vehicle—bundled into sound bites and digital morsels broadcast that evening across the borderlands—a medium that could also be used for future radio and television spots.9

Warming the Crowd and Setting the Stage:The Budgirls The Budgirls significantly contribute to Univision and Budweiser’s creation of a comfortable atmosphere and transformation of pleasure into a transmitted object. They work in groups of three and attend most of Budweiser’s

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events. These women come from the community in which they work, and Budweiser’s marketers consider them “marketing tools.” They work approximately three nights a week and earn fifty dollars per event, notwithstanding the number of hours they work. They usually warm up the crowd by walking around smiling, visiting, and handing out Budweiser promotional paraphernalia. Additionally, they serve as “the frame within the frame” (Keil 1966: 118) both at the event and in the spots that appear on Univision television that evening. The Budgirls, for instance, stand on both sides of the band, framing the images of the pachanga broadcast across the borderlands. The camera pans from one Budgirl across the band to the next Budgirl, then cuts to the reporter. The Budgirls in their sparkly dresses frame the broadcast and animate the event with their presence. Even though Budweiser marketers see them instrumentally (“as marketing tools”), it is ultimately the Budgirls’ subjectivity—their ability to position themselves within the social grouping—that contributes to the event’s success. They have to navigate difficult terrain by dressing and acting in repertoires that do not ordinarily “go” together. They present themselves as beautiful, but they balance their heady and possibly intimidating physical presence with a way of speaking and interacting that is familiar to local people and does not intimidate. Their attitude balances the possible dominance of the observer’s gaze (focused on their visual presence) with aural interface (conversation)—a form of interaction between person and person rather than person and object.10 This makes attendees feel comfortable in their presence, as I observed in the Rivas-García storytelling. Both as embodied subjects navigating complex cultural terrain and as readily objectifiable circulators, they give Budweiser a doubly attractive face. The sexualized images broadcast on television and the women’s diminutive label as “Budgirls” dominate their subjectivity. Anheuser-Busch presents them primarily as objects, and even on the ground they are framed as less than full subjects, as when, for instance, they are interpolated as an accompaniment to the marketing team. Their dependent or accompanying role as less than full citizen-subject is reinforced by their relationship with Eddie, from the contemporary marketing team. Eddie is their affable chaperon, and the person who sets up the Budweiser logo at events. Readily smiling, chatting, and warmly greeting those around him, Eddie is a friendly field operator who insures that the Budweiser brand and the Budgirls are constantly “in your [coparticipants’/consumers’/audiences’] face.” By their presence and ability to “get in your face,” the Budgirls embody Budweiser. He drives the car that carries them, knows of their whereabouts while they are working, and stays

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nearby them at events they attend, whether during a pachanga at a family home, at a bar, or at a dance hall. Eddie generally keeps track of their movements (as witnessed with their arrival). Their projection as sexualized objects and the label “Budgirls” marks them as less than full subjects 11 and plays a significant role in their reception and ready categorization as such. The image of them that is broadcast treats them as objects: on air they do not talk (as does the hostess); they do not play instruments (as do the band members); their sparkling, skimpy dresses lead the eye away from the face and toward eroticized body sites; and their being the only people present dressed in such a manner further highlights this erotic object presentation. Ironically, such iconization focuses on sites associated with maturation, while the semiotics of “Budgirls” refutes this by labeling them “girls,” with the “Bud” brand dominating this diminutive title. The projection of this characterization of women as less than subjects implicates our imaginary of citizen subjectivity. The juxtaposition of family with “marketing tools”—performers presented as young and nubile in sexualized roles, framing the action of the spectacle—perhaps sets an expectation to see women in public as objects of sexual desire. These and Budweiser’s attendant images of women showcase a more sexualized figure. Behind the scenes, in private, women are expected to be speaking subjects, while in public settings, they function to frame the event (via visual glamour unaided). Does this cultural expectation influence the ways in which women in politics who seek office in Hidalgo County present themselves? Yes, a media marketer who worked on the campaign of the first woman who won a countywide judgeship proudly admitted to me that they capitalized on the candidate’s beauty, turning her face into an icon and the primary visual point of reference for her campaign. Today, the situation has shifted. One recent female candidate, Murray Moore, used the color purple, with its “regal” associations, and emphasized her role as an active family member (e.g., mother, daughter, and wife). Moore lost. My experience in the field suggests that this shift is a demographic one; many women vote today, making these images of female beauty less potent than those of mother, daughter, and wife in formal politics. While political marketers have adjusted their strategies by including women’s tastes with those of men, beer marketers are increasingly segmenting their market along gender lines. As a local media marketer explained: “We have several products intentionally grouped for women: Doc Otis Lemonade, flavored Red Zima. . . .” They created this segment is so that they will not “cannibalize what we already have.” The marketing of beer continues to be saturated with salacious imagery

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associating women and beer with consumption. This imagery abounds in the borderlands’ expressive culture.12 From large highway billboards displaying thirty feet of cleavage to cardboard cutouts and posters of women in red, white, and blue Budweiser bikinis on display at bars and the workplace, the use of highly sexualized and objectified women to push product is a salient feature of Anheuser-Busch marketing. These images are prominent not only in South Texas but in Anheuser-Busch’s national and transnational marketing—presented directly (at pachangas and bars) as well as indirectly at local (billboards), regional (radio, television), national (television, internet), and transnational (internet) markets. This multilayered bombardment of images that associates beer drinking with sexualized, entextualized bodies sets audiences’ expectations to receive the Budgirls first (or dominantly) as sexualized markers of Budweiser Beer. “Entextualization” (Bauman and Briggs 1990) refers to making an object readily transferrable and the attendant processes of taking an object out of a text, putting it into another, and changing its meaning along the way. In other words, when pachangueros encounter the Budgirls as embodied individuals, they are already prepared to greet them as objects. In their marketing, companies like Anheuser-Busch draw from, perpetuate, and expand this tradition. They entextualize, decontextualize, and recontextualize their brand on female texts of their own making—the Budgirls—a form made easy and affective for audiences to hook onto.

CONCLUSION In this discussion of the pachanga deportiva as live-event and tape-recorded broadcast, I use the example of Sylvia and the Budgirls to emphasize both a certain indexical continuity (they are already expected to be received by television viewers as objects of pleasure) and a split (at the event they skillfully blend in as something other than objects, as subjects). A significant component that creates the conditions for or contextualizes Budweiser/Univision’s successful pachanga is building a comfortable and relaxed yet glamorous aesthetic. Melva, the event’s organizer and producer, casually arrives at the pachanga in an unremarkable car, wearing jeans and sipping a beer; she contextualizes the text in a specific manner. She does not saunter into the yard wearing flashy clothes. But, layered within Melva’s interactional frame is that of the Budgirls. On the ground, they both blend in and stand out; they enact a dual role—which on film is limited to a singular role—accentuating and entextualizing the event. At the live event and on screen, they function within a familiar trope readily available to work as prepackaged sexy, movable markers

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(signifying beauty and glamour), simultaneously continuing and indexing this tradition. As recorded text, the Budgirls create an intertextual relationship in their rendering of the text as “ordered, unified, and bound” and yet “open-ended” (Bauman and Briggs 1992: 147). They create the conditions for discourse to move and in the process etch out a particular public. Like the broadcast of this pachanga, the layering of the elements within the event itself is meant to appeal to both sexes in a special sequential layering of meaning and action.13 It broadcasts on a station understood to be viewed predominately by women but at a time when men are more likely to watch (10 o’clock in the evening), inside a program (the news) men are more likely to watch, and within a segment of the program men are even more likely to watch (the sports). By framing the recorded frame in a “pachanga” idiom —anchor and reporters call it a “pachanga deportiva”—this music event also evokes that of the live genre, i.e., celebrating family, food, and fun across generations. The pachanga genre speaks “de la gente” (of/from the people), and in this lexicon it also speaks of Budweiser’s marketing strategy employed transnationally and cross-culturally. Furthermore, in that it spans and flattens time (mother, grandmother, grandchild are co-present and taking in the good time), it does not limit this discourse to a blip on our screen; it is presented as a time-crossing artifact and event, one also meant to spill over spatial boundaries. Budweiser’s media team herald this event as superb because of the legwork it does within “the grass roots.” It is held outside, and the lights, noise, and overflow of cars at the live-music event attract the attention of neighbors, which generates locally based talk or talk located within the community about the spectacle. It produces this specific, reified public in its own sphere. The organizers take the artifact-ness further. To show inquisitive neighbors proof of the spectacle, the Rivas family can pull out their memorabilia from the event— blinking Bud lights, photographs, and perhaps even a tape of the clip broadcast on the evening news. I explored the pachanga deportiva as a community-based event made increasingly interesting for attendees, television viewers, and radio listeners with the infusion of a little glamour in the form of Iman and the Budgirls. The metamessage is, “This is not a regular band, but Iman, and we also have sexy women in glamorous clothes.” The tropic dynamic of this event simultaneously broadcasts two messages: “This winner could be you—this could be your family, at your house” and “These babes could be at your house”— eliciting strong participant identification from women and men alike. With such a conclusion, how does this broad strategy carve out a particular public?

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Clearly, by bringing the sign and the signified into such close alignment as to collapse (that is, to literalize the trope), they are carving out a specific grassroots niche. The pachanga genre and the Budgirls are central to this task. My argument concerning Budweiser’s channeling of distinct publics becomes clearer in Chapter 3, where I discuss how the company accomplishes this goal with its invitation to the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza.

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Budweiser’s Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza THREE

Sunday, November 5, 2000—Two Days before Election Day On Friday, November 3, the early voting polls closed, and Hidalgo County’s election commission began to prepare for Election Day. Al Gore’s frenzied itinerary for the last few days was frequently discussed on radio, television, and in the newspapers. November 5 was the last Sunday in the campaign to attend and host pachangas, and oddly, LaMantia Budweiser chose that day to host a grand party to raise funds for Hispanic education. Despite the enticing invitation, I assumed that candidates would be too busy block walking and attending public political pachangas to show up at the Budweiser event. The large paved parking lot at the new La VillaReal Convention Center in McAllen was filling up as we pulled in. Couples in “Texas casual” hurried from the sun’s heat into the air-conditioned building. After greeting Eddie and the Budgirls (from the Rivas family’s pachanga deportiva) and handing over my entrance voucher, I walked into the huge convention center. It was immense, about the same size as Greg’s Ballroom in Palmview, the place where Judge Aliseda had held his four-band live-music political pachanga (described in Chapter 5) a few weeks earlier. Instead of encountering a wall of heat and humidity, flush young faces, and pounding sound, I found this room flowing coolly with political, business, and medical professionals. A series of long folding tables stretched out from the stage in ten columns. Servers dressed in black and white weaved between the tables, which were set with silverware and china (not the usual paper plates accompanied by plastic forks, knives, and spoons). At the back half of the room, shaped in a horseshoe, stood

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a series of seven well-stocked bars where attendants served Budweiser, soft drinks, and expensive liquor. Items for the silent and live auctions covered tables in the main hall. At the threshold between the doorway and the hall, an event organizer with a headset and a yellow legal pad greeted us, asked for our names, and told us that we were seated at table B2. She pointed us toward an area a couple of rows away from the stage. Suspended above many of the tables were large pieces of laminated paper hailing businesses—Hidalgo County Hospital and Univision, for example. Slowly making my way to the table, I bumped into clusters of acquaintances and visited with them. I chatted with the general sales manager from Univision and the former political boss and Democratic county chair, Ramón García. Finally arriving at the table, I set my belongings down and went to survey the auction items. Near the bars, groups of people stood chatting merrily. On my way to the display table, I ran into Matt, Judge Murray Moore’s husband and a LaMantia son. Near the auction table, I visited with State Representative Roberto Gutierrez, along with several other judicial candidates. County, district, and appellate court judges were in attendance. Approximately one thousand people filled the convention center, many of them politicians and candidates whom I assumed would be busy with grassroots campaigning. Their presence here spoke of their priorities. During the heat of the political campaign, when politics saturates television, radio, and newspapers, LaMantia Budweiser had managed to assemble a heavyweight cast of political players from the South Texas community. They brought together not only this sizable group, but also a pool of elite and influential professionals. Most attendees paid one hundred dollars per person to attend. This assemblage spoke boldly of LaMantia’s power in South Texas.

CO R P O R AT E M A R K E T I N G : R I S K A N D E XC LU S I O N LaMantia Anheuser-Busch impressed me with the company’s marketing acumen. In addition to creating a relaxed ambience at the event, the company’s marketing team carefully tunes the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza to the expectations and customs of local political culture. At the same time, the fund generates large quantities of publicity; it is a vehicle for advertising signs (television, radio, newspaper); it raises money for a popular cause; and, perhaps most important, it demonstrates LaMantia Budweiser’s powerful ties to the community’s leaders in business, medicine, law, and politics. In bringing together the community’s most powerful people, the event blurs the lines between public politics and private business.

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The use of different media to advertise the pachanga deportiva (public television announcements) and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza (private invitations) underscores a shift in register from one of public inclusion to private exclusion. A resident’s relationship to the pachanga deportiva usually begins through television or radio—publicly accessible media both because almost everyone has access to them and because they project visual and aural signs that even people without a formal education can understand. Univision airs raucous clips of previous pachanga deportivas to entice the public to register to win a chance to participate in one themselves. This medium and its attendant imagery convey a message that anyone can have a pachanga deportiva. In fact, it is not possible for everyone to be chosen. Recall the earlier discussion of the context of the pachanga deportiva’s production. Hosts of the pachanga are chosen by lottery from postcards mailed to Univision. This format calls all and selects few, simultaneously playing into a Protestant capitalist ethic and a populist epistemology. For selected groups, such as the Rivas family, their relationship with Budweiser then becomes a less mediated, face-to-face, “grass-roots” interaction. Winners like the Rivas family enjoy the pachanga at their home, but the remainder of the public interacts with the pachanga indirectly, as viewers and consumers (perhaps desiring to join the fun). Their invitation is as consumers mediated through the television and the Budweiser and Univision brands. In contrast to the pachanga deportiva, which is advertised and broadcast to embrace as many people as possible, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza is presented in a more exclusive manner. Written invitations are sent to carefully selected private residences, and these invitations later function as door passes. This format restricts both who is invited and who is allowed to enter,1 and door guards keep careful control: the person I accompanied knew and greeted the gatekeepers and the LaMantia children by name—but the doormen persisted in requesting his ticket. While he fumbled around searching for it, the guards allowed others with tickets to pass into the party. I observed this with many guests, with couples scurrying back to their car to fetch forgotten tickets. The written invitations functioned literally as border passes, reifying and further heightening the relationship between those invited and those left out. The invitation as a written-text-object both codified this relationship and indexed who the hosts wanted to know about the event. The prominence of the textual, rather than the aural, format is telling of this audience. It speaks to a specific English-reading audience selected by LaMantia Budweiser to attend. But this exclusive approach carries risk. As

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the Democratic National Committee event demonstrates (Chapter 5), it is possible to host an extravagant event that few attend. It takes more than bigname musicians to attract an audience. In throwing a party, the host and host institution open themselves to social risk. Risking a loss of status is not merely a local issue. For cosmopolitan elites, it can carry deeper implications, and parallels exist in the increasingly global system of finance. Often machinations that characterize capitalism, for instance the transfer of capital or property, involve a logically based transaction. Perhaps capitalism differs in the style of risk involved in these situations, but commonly it works logically, and risk-bearing for capital might be envisioned as a game that can be calculated in a rational fashion. In the practice of securitization and securities clearance of capital, another trend has been observed: a discourse of property rights has been replaced by one of risk (Maurer 1999). Around global capital movements, a type of riskbearing exists in which status plays a role. Conceptions of property have been transformed from the Enlightenment idea of a bounded thing, an object that can be possessed, into a “trace of the future” (385) that helps to manage risk. An important symbolic analyst in articulating this paradigm shift is law professor and global economic commentator Charles Mooney, whose statements focus attention on property as constituted by “relationships among persons” [emphasis in original] (Maurer 383).2 Property and personal ties are inextricably bound in this formulation. Transactions of property are fundamentally concerned with people—perhaps to the point where observers cannot determine the difference between the two. Which one constitutes which? Despite this conundrum, Mooney’s interpretation of business transactions encompasses an understanding that personal relationships are central to business. Business or property transactions anticipate “relationships among people.” Professionals in the field know that this is a risk-bearing endeavor and that a system of insured status guarantees the value of that risk. In other words, a person’s character determines whether an individual is the object of insurance practices. I suggest that risk-bearing relationships that are important in facilitating the movement of global capital are grounded in and even reliant on these most parochial-seeming relationships, in which risk is a component. Second, within this paradigm, property anticipates personal relationships. The global is reflected in the local, and the local in the global: the ability of Budweiser’s marketers to bring together the political and business elites of South Texas at an event like the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza implicates the LaMantia family and their business at many levels.

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The Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Invitation Despite the relations between the local and the global, the translation that occurs between one party sending an invitation and another party electing to attend an event carries risk. In this section, I argue that persuasion functions to mitigate against that risk. More specifically, the invitation pragmatically functions to convince people to spend the time, money, and energy required to attend an event. Frequently, it also must persuade people to select between competing events. Since the event I attended was held during the height of the campaign season, days before Election Day, it faced a lot of competition from other events. Because the scholarship event focused more on attracting participants than broadcasting a party—as with the pachanga deportiva discussed in Chapter 2—it was important for the organizers to emphasize the element of achievement at this specific event. Substantive elements of the party—for example, the country-western band Alabama’s performance—were more about establishing metaculture for the next event (stimulating interest and recollections concerning why one should return) than about functioning as a multimedia publicity vehicle. Prior to the 2000 Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, and at the event itself, participants commented on the virtuoso performance of the preceding year’s featured artist, comedian Bill Cosby. Bringing in nationally known talent like Cosby and Alabama—rather than just another conjunto band, the norm at political pachangas—adds glamour to the event. It makes a statement that South Texas, and particularly Budweiser, is translocal and extra-regional—that is, connected to the outside world. LaMantia Budweiser wants those invited to the fiesta to attend and, consequently, maintain and enhance Budweiser’s corporate image. Since the invitation is one of Budweiser’s primary vehicles for attracting guests, I will dissect the form and text of the invitation itself to show the ways in which it attempts to draw prominent citizens under Budweiser’s mantle of celebration. The exciting or carnivalesque tenor of the invitation stimulates interest; creators achieve this tone through color, content, and placement of characters. If invitations were cars, this one would be a fifties-era hot rod with flames roaring off the sides. The paper bursts with color. The flaming red and bright gold background and deep blue lettering stimulate the eye, leaving the viewer little choice but to look.3 Additionally, the combination of tall and skinny, short and fat, big and bigger typefaces allows readers little choice other than to dive in and investigate its contents. On the front page, color functions to attract interest in the event. The

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Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza Invitation (Clockwise from top left): front page, second page, third page, back page.

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background is printed with the colors of a sunset. As the eye moves from the bottom of the invitation upward, the colors gradually transform from a deep, burnt orange to a bright, mid-afternoon, sunshine yellow. Before the color rises from its deepest of oranges into the brightest heights of yellow, the word “Extravaganza” coolly perches in a velvety blue hue. Sitting in regal contrast to the lush orange, the blue letters attract the eye. “Extravaganza.” The large, white lettering “Fíesta,” overpowers that of “Extravaganza.” Then, higher up and floating closer to the implied sun is the red logo for the Hispanic Scholarship Fund: a big red “H” with a white (lone) star emerging from its center. This juxtaposition of color stimulates the eye,4 and the text introduces the primary themes and lexical ties: excessive party (fiesta extravaganza) and worthwhile charity (Hispanic scholarship). The bright colors and style mixing imbue the text with a sense of the carnivalesque. At the top of the second page, a wild mix of typefaces and -sizes embodies the spirit of the fiesta extravaganza. A polyphony of characters piled to such levels that they verge on cacophony greets readers. Words run horizontally and vertically. Letters do not start at a uniform margin or measure; for instance, normally a text begins 11⁄2 inches from the left hand margin or, more likely in the case of an invitation, the text is centered. For this invitation, one line starts 1⁄3 of the way across the page, another at 1⁄4 inch, another at 5⁄12 inch, and so on. The letters range in height from 1 inch to 3⁄16 of an inch and in length from 31⁄4 to 1⁄4 inch. The fonts run the gamut from Times New Roman italic to fat PosterBodoni and Goudy Handtooled. This range of size, space, and layering of characters is another way of adding heat and excitement to the invitation. Out of this bacchanalia of script, a familiar contrasting rich blue color immediately directs the eye to the words “HISPANIC,” “BUDWEISER” and the lexical tie, “EXTRAVAGANZA.” As free beer and a grand party are not enough to entice the invitee, the text next takes readers down to the name of the famous country-western band “ALABAMA” written in fiery, fat, yellow lettering outlined in red. The placement of “ALABAMA,” beneath the big, blue “Extravaganza” lends credence to the sponsors’ claim that this event will indeed be an extravaganza and aids in attracting a sizable crowd. To those for whom a good cause and free beer is not enough, good music leaves them with little excuse to not attend. Another way in which the invitation ratchets up interest is through its appropriation of Spanish. Both the first and second page of the invitation label the event as a “Fíesta Extravaganza,” and the word “Hispanic” is dominant on both pages as well. (I will deal with the unnecessary acute accent below.) The

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usage of “Hispanic” is another index of locality: South Texas is a community in which members of the upper classes prefer to label themselves as Hispanic, and this is the group to whom the invitation is addressed. The word choice is also an “ethnic” marker that Budweiser uses to set off ethnic from non-ethnic U.S. citizens. I interpret “Fíesta” in both senses, which configures with Jane Hill’s (1993) interpretation of Anglos’ use of Spanish in the American Southwest. This analysis presents the appropriation of Spanish as actively and fundamentally distancing, part of an established regional political economy based on racial hierarchy. The strategic use of Southwestern Anglo is part of the “practical conscious” (Williams 1977: 110), the daily lived reality, of Anglo-dominant status. Because Texans of Mexican descent (Mexicanos) are part of the dominant group, it is also appropriate in the context of Hidalgo County to speak of a daily lived reality of blanquido/jaitón ideology and upper-class hegemony (literally “high-toned,” white-skinned, upper-class “Tejanos” who favor an assimilationist paradigm).5 This invitation is an example of Anglo and Mexicano appropriation and “parodic pejoration” (Hill 1993: 163) 6 of Spanish expressions. The use of the word “fiesta” (party) hardly attends to Spanish as a language; instead, it seems “to exist as a loose agglomeration of symbolic material entirely available to be rearranged according to the whim of an English speaker” (ibid). The word is not only taken from one place and put in another, but it is used in an illiterate fashion. Taking Spanish out of its rules and norms of usage and putting it into an English register is part of what reduces Spanish to a subordinate status, to an exotic ingredient. “Fíesta” and the name of the convention center, “La VillaReal,” are the only Spanish words used in the invitation. The addition of the needless acute accent mark to the “i” of “fiesta” is known as a hypercorrection. This line of reasoning has a few steps. First, such overcompensation occurs within the context of one hundred years of Anglo cultural, political, and economic domination. Second, the use of another language, of a loan word, performs a function on the text: when a change in speech occurs, so too does a shift in tone— and often it has an intonation of exaggeration and parody.7 Third, the shift could have many connotations—positive, negative, and a combination of the two—but given the expressed context, in addition to what one uses and how one uses it, determines this interpretive move. I agree with Hill when she interprets the context as one in which Anglo Spanish has been organized around its role in the constitution of the “Mexican” Other. Like “extravaganza,” “fíesta” is meant to sell the event, enhancing a tone of carnival excitement through exaggeration. The Spanish “fiesta” also sounds foreign, and

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thus special in this English text. Moreover, the incorrect use of the acute accent mark makes the Spanish loan word’s status of difference still more noticeable. The adaptation within this context of excess suggests the use of a Spanish loan word subject to semantic pejoration. Such a “parodic pejoration” of Spanish expression reduces Spanish speakers and Spanish to a subordinate status, as it is strategically used to reduce the Hispanic community to marginality. It is not necessary for me to take the argument as far as Hill and state that this apparently innocent usage represents, in fact, a strategic attempt to reinstate cultural, political, and economic domination, but her discussion of parodic pejorations and distancing do explain in part the ways in which this text’s employment of Spanish excites interest in the event. As both Spitzer and Bahktin rightly point out, a change in speech (from an English to a Spanish register) does mark a shift in tone. The text moves from the serious “Hispanic Scholarship” to the bold “Fíesta Extravaganza,” with Hispanic, Budweiser, and Extravaganza highlighted in blue. In this instance, the authors use the Spanish word to frame the event as something special, that is beyond English and translation; it is not just a party but a fiesta (and not merely a fiesta but a “fíesta”), leaving intact its attendant racial stigmatizations of this pejorative register of the “Mexican” Other that Hill and Paredes (1993 [1978]) document. The hypercorrection of the acute accent mark over the “í” in “fíesta” serves to further highlight this difference. For those that might mistake it as any old Anglo pejorative parody of Spanish, this one is the authentic product, a real (accent and all) Spanish fandango. This clear mark makes the shift even more palpable to readers. On the third page of the invitation appears a schedule of events and the phrase “Must Present Ticket at Door for Admittance.” Directly addressing the audience without calling attention to the speaker, this phrase imbues the text with immediacy and authority. This tough, exclusionary language inscribes the audience; it simultaneously entrusts them with a power and subjects their power to the authority of the host, Budweiser. It reminds readers that not just anyone was invited, and that only those with proof of invitation will be allowed inside. Again, this warning and its strict enforcement and adherence at the event performs a recognizable function, in a way familiar to the daily lives of residents of the United States–Mexico border region. To cross a threshold, to be admitted, one must have documentation. The “person” reaching out to and subjecting entrants to their authority is not literally a person—it is a corporation (Budweiser), but there is a physical person at the event entrusted with the power to keep actors from crossing the line.8 Bud-

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weiser mitigated the risk of its admonishments by having already loaded possible participants with enticing thoughts of extravagance, free beer, and nationally known artists. Budweiser takes this risky dance of enticement one step further in the red warning that stands above the blue “Must Present Ticket at Door for Admittance” statement. Once again the diction distances the author’s agency from the warning and from the addressee (relying on the third-person plural “guests”). Invitees are told: “Due to the full program it is necessary for all events to begin on time and guests are asked to please plan on arriving promptly.” The diction does not directly address readers but uses the thirdperson form, “guests.” The passive voice (“are asked”) obscures the agent of this invitation. This displays an odd tension between attraction and coercive force. This warning functions dually: it reflects an understanding of the South Texas custom of arriving at least a few minutes late, with the majority slowly arriving throughout the evening; and it tempts guests by informing— in a subtle manner—that this event will be sufficiently special that they will not want to (nor, theoretically, will they be allowed to) miss a minute of the spectacle. At deeply fun parties, participants break a few rules. Here, celebrants start with a breach of tradition. This approach marks the event as more than your regular pachanga, a special “extravaganza” not to be missed. The custom break creates a juxtaposition that attracts one’s attention to the event and tantalizes the viewer.9 The final phrase the reader’s eyes encounter is red italic script at the bottom of the page stating, “If You Think Education Is Expensive, Try Ignorance.” The use of the inclusive pronoun “you” transforms invitees into participants in a meaningful cause. This statement reminds them of the official raison d’être of the party: raising money to improve the lives of South Texans through higher education.10 The last statement on the page brings readers full circle from the message of wild party to moral imperative. Anheuser-Busch further mitigates against the risk of losing its audience by highlighting the country music band Alabama’s popularity, inserting a page with the band’s promotional biography inside the invitation. Alabama is described with a rags-to-riches narrative carefully articulated to appeal to an upper-class, jaitón (Peña 1985: 117, 139), multilingual, and “ethnically” diverse audience. In addition to proclaiming what an important and top-notch group of musicians the organizers are bringing to South Texas by borrowing hyperbolic, nostalgic statements like, “Alabama are true legends in Country Music” and “Since their first #1 hit ‘Tennessee River’ in 1980[,] ALABAMA’s record sales are now in the neighborhood of 60 million,” the insert also describes Al-

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abama as a kind of band of starving artists within a civil rights activist narrative. First, they are presented not as a bohemian band who got lucky with a hit, but rather as hungry and hardworking artists who “played for tips six nights a week,” reaching the pinnacle of recording success, in part, due to their endurance. It promotes a culture of capitalism imbued with a Protestant work ethic. Another way in which Anheuser-Busch frames Alabama in order to appeal to this audience is by presenting the band as groundbreaking in its ability to integrate audiences and open the industry to new voices. Whereas Alabama’s music praises the Old South, this story paints the band members as the civil rights marchers of country-western music. Some readers might interpret this use of a metaphor of integration solely in terms of its musical meaning (i.e., circumscribed to integration of musical styles with broader resonances), but the use of this word, with its attendant imagery, especially in South Texas’s climate of racial inequity, suggests a racial interpretation. What this narrative does is position Alabama in relation with popular themes in South Texas and in national marketing: 11 social advancement and economic evolution through hard work. Upward mobility is not just about personal financial success. It also includes improving the lives of others by “not alienating” and incorporating otherwise marginal audiences (an experience particularly salient to Mexicanos’ origin), as well as opening a reluctant music industry to accommodate new tastes. With these themes, the text performs a capitalist political logos: work hard within the system and endeavor to create successful fissures by increasing consumption and production. This spirit of change is easy to embrace; it sets aside the ethos embodying “a man with a pistol in his hand” (of Aparicio’s border ballad) and the real and violent affairs that South Texas’s civil- and working-rights marches became when meeting a similarly blunt logic embodied in law, order, and industry. It looks beyond the daily and deadly encounters with the Border Patrol and the toxic and discriminatory environment faced by blue-collar factory, service industry, and domestic workers. In addition to being an excellent example of how Budweiser frames narratives to appeal to a specific audience, the Extravaganza invitation text exemplifies the dangers inherent in savvy marketing. It erases and glosses important struggles in order to appeal to a specific audience. This approach does not find common ground through recognizing a shared history of struggle but rather by glorifying a singular struggle to become rich and famous. And, perhaps, this frame helps a particular class element justify its existence vis-à-vis obvious contexts of sociocultural inequality. The pragmatics of the Alabama card

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demonstrate to the invitees why they should come to hear this band at this party: because the musicians are recognized nationally and because they stand for a cause this audience relates to—integrating industry and opening doors.12 The final page of the invitation is the most somber in look and tone. Against a faux wood-grain-shaded background, Budweiser printed a lengthy narrative in white type. The length of the narrative—as well as the darker background coloring—suggests that this page is less about enticing a reader to participate and more concerned with conveying a message about Budweiser and how they interpret their relationship with business and the local community. The back page functions less to attract the invitee than as a billboard to promote the beneficence of Anheuser-Busch. This spot seems to be a space filler, and what better way to take up space than to promote the cause of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and publicize Anheuser-Busch’s strong community support? This advertisement for Anheuser-Busch plugs the corporation by telling how much money the company infuses into the community and how many scholarships they have awarded to South Texans. It concludes with: “The key to success is education and South Texans are very proud of all the doors they have opened by supporting the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.” At the bottom of the page, the statement “All money raised in South Texas stays in South Texas” makes explicit—and repeats—LaMantia Budweiser’s ideology toward the event.13 According to their lead media marketer, Val LaMantia (personal communication, December 5, 2000), it is crucial to point out that the money raised for scholarships stays local, and since the funds being raised are seen as beneficial to the community and perceived as staying within South Texas, this is “an easy sell.” Part of their marketing job is to reach out to the community, and LaMantia Budweiser wants everyone to know that they are reaching out to the community and keeping their investment within the community. For the steadfast who choose to read beyond this blurb, the first paragraph of the white-lettered narrative highlights the history and selection criteria of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund. One of the most salient features is the expression “SOUTH TEXAS COMMUNITY LEADERS” in the first two lines of the second paragraph. Here, Budweiser connects with community leaders through the placement and structure of this phrase in the text. The text reads: “Anheuser Busch, SOUTH TEXAS COMMUNITY LEADERS, and the MEDIA . . .” With the redundant words “South Texas” and “community” and their placement to the left and below, Anheuser-Busch horizontally and vertically connects with their theme of locality. It is almost as if “little” Anheuser-Busch merges into

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the big signs, “South Texas / Community Leaders.” In the following sentence, LaMantia Budweiser takes this strategy one step further: it no longer distinguishes between the media and Anheuser-Busch, nor between these groups and the community. In the next sentence, Anheuser-Busch assumes the voice of the region: “South Texas has raised over $2,875,000 and given out 2,140 scholarships to students from this area [emphasis mine].” Corporate fundraising stands in for community agency. Next, the company takes on the voice of South Texans, assuming the ability to both speak for and read the desires of this vast, shifting, and heterogeneous population: “South Texans are very proud . . .” In co-opting the voice of South Texas and South Texans, Budweiser subtly enacts its marketing strategy, and in the act of doing so, blurs the boundaries between community and company, the public and the private. Another significant signal within this text concerns the way in which Budweiser sets itself in relation to other industries, in this instance, “the / MEDIA.” In the opening lines of paragraph two, “Anheuser Busch, SOUTH TEXAS / COMMUNITY LEADERS, and the / MEDIA,” they juxtapose the specific corporate label, “Anheuser Busch,” with the generic “media.” This also reflects Budweiser’s media ideology. The company uses its influence to persuade the many media outlets in South Texas to give in-kind donations (a trade of the goods in which they specialize) and to sponsor (give money to) the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the event. While Budweiser courts and receives in-kind donations and sponsorship for shared endeavors like this Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta, it makes sure that they get top billing and exposure (personal communication, Val LaMantia, November 2000). Its strategy and event-marketing ideology ensures that Anheuser-Busch does not get generically categorized as just one among many beer companies. I was told in an interview at the LaMantia offices: “We will sponsor [events], but no matter how many [events] we sponsor, the community thinks we are doing it. And [we] get the TV exposure.” In this text, Budweiser asserts its influence and authority over the media industry of the borderlands. This local rhetoric of industrial dominance underscores the direction in which power flows in relations between television, radio, and their advertisers. Advertisers, of course, receive top billing, but they also influence the form, agenda, and content of what is received. Transnationally, television, radio, and print media survive and thrive due to advertisers’ dollars; therefore, they are beholden to advertisers’ needs and interests.14 Dominance through dollars also stands behind their promotion of community service and scholarship. Budweiser marketers write the text in ways that appeal to a certain sensi-

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bility of citizenship— opening doors to causes and individuals traditionally marginalized. More specifically, it promotes a logos of hard work within a system that leads to success. Behind and central to this ethic is money and the ability to raise it. In statements like, “The key to success is education and South Texans are very proud of all the doors they have opened by supporting the Hispanic Scholarship Fund,” money keeps the circular pattern of success in motion. (Education costs money and leads to success. People donate money to open this route.) This presence is further evidenced in their featured speaker and scheduled events. Finally, the invitation outlines the date, time, and special guests to increase the event’s luster, doing additional work in persuading individuals to attend this massive spectacle. It is held on a standard pachanga day, Sunday, and at a new and more upscale venue. While the sequence of the events outlined is fairly standard (“Cocktails, Preview Auction Items, Presentation of Colors, Star Spangled Banner, Dinner, Featured Speaker, Live Auction, Entertainment by ALABAMA”), the featured speaker (Margarita Flores, AnheuserBusch’s national field director for corporate relations) and musical act (Alabama) add glamour to the fundraiser because they are nationally prominent. This tells guests that Budweiser cares enough to bring in important players for this event; nonetheless, Flores once worked in McAllen for LaMantia Budweiser. The main presence from Anheuser-Busch’s headquarters is also a hometown star, hence they reinscribe this glamor-folksy aesthetic—with the Budgirls. The previewing of auction items is another way in which this pachanga stands out from others; the “sheer charm of [these] commodities” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 238) elicits heightened attention. Like the invitation, items auctioned are tuned to the tastes of the local audience. They range from a much-sought-after custom-made shotgun to a Key West getaway. This setting suggests that those expected to attend are players with disposable time and income. Together these elements project an aesthetic of glamor and philanthropy to attract participants. The invitation appeals to prominent South Texas residents through a presentation of the event as something not to be missed: it is bright and exciting, featuring free food, drinks, and nationally renowned musical talent (not just another local Tejano band); and it is for a cause considered worthwhile to the borderlands community.

Event Coverage Rituals make fields of transaction apparent (see Strathern 1988: 264). In its ability to assemble the South Texas media and political elite during the heat

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of the political pachanga season, Budweiser asserts and proclaims its power. Or is it (recall Mooney’s paradigm) control of property? This act (a corporation’s assertion of authority over political actors) points to a duality or the mutually constitutive nature of political and corporate action, not to mention the shared interest these players have in presenting an image to the community of raising and spreading money within that very community. A subtle twist on the frame of this image, of being skilled in the art of gathering and disseminating money, has a strong hold on local attitudes toward politics in the vernacular of “corruption.” Politics as corruption (see Chapter 7) similarly plays with this aesthetic of luster and informality. I did not hear much talk, however, of the action of businesspeople working for their own economic interests as corrupt or that their assertion of authority in political and other spheres as corrupt. This form of action was taken as a given. The non-elite, of course, were not invited to this private party. The local newspaper covered the live-music event in Monday’s McAllen Monitor, with a headline that read, “Year of Fund Raising Nets $1.5M for Hispanic Youth.” Billboards and television and radio messages repeated this theme of how local businesses raised big money for Hispanic students. Although the party brought together the power elite of the community in a private, guarded space to which the public was not invited, the select message broadcast focused on the big-money benevolence of business and the importance of education in creating “better citizens” ( Joseph LaMantia, quoted in Marciniak 2000).15 The public discourse, as represented in the Monitor article, follows a careful script that coincides with transnational, national, and local marketing discourse, while also focusing on rootedness.16 The headline emphasizes youth and ethnicity. The article quotes Flores, Anheuser-Busch’s national field director for corporate relations and former La Mantia employee: “It’s for Latino higher education. . . . This part of the country is where most of the money is raised . . . and the money raised comes back to the community” (Marciniak 2000; emphasis mine). This piece of often-quoted speech rings familiar. Except for her use of the term “Latino” instead of “Hispanic,” Flores utters the same phrases printed on the invitation and used by Val LaMantia in our interview.17 They emphasize community as territory and people’s rootedness to place. Their repetition of these themes of place—in layers—performs a conception of locality authoritatively. Not only does this discourse contradict the reality of Anheuser-Busch’s global position and transnational networks, it also contradicts the historical and present translocal or “deterritorialized” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 3) situation of Latinos in the United States, more specifically of Mexicanos partially residing in South Texas. Many residents of South Texas are recently

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from Mexico, and many of these people are migrant workers.18 Migrant work is on the rise, and a preponderance of migrant farm workers have connections to Hidalgo County. One study (Plascenia, Ceballos, and Glover 1989, cited in Richardson 1999: 18) indicates that migrant jobs have tripled in the last twenty years. Another ( Juárez et al. 1994) proposes that Texas has the highest population of migrant farm workers in the United States. The data from another study (National Migrant Health Program 1990) estimate that approximately forty-two percent of Texas farm workers live in Hidalgo County. The presence of a United Farm Workers headquarters in the county, a few miles from the border, further underscores this reality. Budweiser’s repeated emphasis on territory and on money-as-boundto-territory stands in questionable relation to the lives of many of Hidalgo County’s inhabitants, who live and go to school outside of the county for much of the year. Many migrant workers attend South Texas’s public schools, fall behind, and drop out (Richardson 1999). Such data suggest that the theme “all money raised in South Texas stays in South Texas” is primarily concerned with conveying a specific image to a specific audience. The invitation entextualizes the audience. Budweiser is speaking to an audience with a sense of rootedness: citizens with a strong sense of money as tied to South Texas, and not necessarily those most in need of financial and other forms of assistance. Here, I suggest, once again, that this discourse and the image projected falls along class lines. Within these channels, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza and the pachanga deportiva provide South Texans with material to look forward to and later remember.19 The events involve semiotic abundance and an intensification of experience, and in this heightening, they call attention to Budweiser’s role as the benevolent party host who brings “the community” together. In its formal elaboration of cultural ephemera, the company attempts to control recognition or level of focus on these happenings—the wild, sexualized grass roots (the pachanga deportiva) in contrast to community development through corporate sponsorship (the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza). A consequence of their production of semiotic corpulence, whether it is Bill Cosby or Iman’s performance, is reportable material culture to be talked about.

CONCLUSION My analysis of the Fiesta invitation highlights the ways in which LaMantia Budweiser attracted an audience in a more sophisticated way than did the

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Democratic National Committee (see the Archer Park rally discussed in Chapter 5). By analyzing this text, I highlight the specific features of a written invitation as they relate to each other in the process of arousing and producing an audience. Since this text is one of the audience’s first points of contact with the event, it also begins the important task of preparing the audience and their expectations for the event to come. The textual format—the sending of the invitation to individual and familial residences—and the required door pass all signal that this is an exclusive event meant for a particular crowd. At the previous Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, the nationally prominent television personality and comedian Bill Cosby provided the entertainment, and for many guests, memories of Cosby’s performance shape their reading of the event. As the discussion of the Archer Park rally will demonstrate, while the invitation is only one part of creating a well-attended and exciting event, it is an important component of communicating with audiences and shaping their expectations. From typeface to parodic pejoration of Spanish expressions, this analysis has drawn attention to Budweiser’s construction of texts for circulation and constitution of publics. The invitation employs discursive devices to heighten interest in and sell the event through enacting an exaggerated tone of carnivalesque excitement. It does so by extracting language and color from one context and putting it into that of the invitation. And, as was seen at the pachanga deportiva, this intensification of interest through discursive devices is balanced with contextualizing acts that ultimately leave readers with an understanding that this will be a glitzy yet casual and somewhat familiar event. It is strange, but not too strange. For example, the text fluxes from “Texas casual” to a recontextualization of Spanish into a super-authentic register. The organizers have recruited a name-brand band that stands out in the pachanga context (it is not Tejano), but at the same time Alabama is an “everyman’s band” that plays at state fairs across the country. Additionally, the band fits neatly into an upper-middleclass Tejano ethos of success. The tradition invoked is not one of endurance as protest against a racist capitalist system, nor one that questions the value of growth and expansion, but one that provides a tale of endurance that focuses the reader’s attention on the value of making change through increasing consumption and production. The authors recontextualized success in an idiom of a singular struggle to become rich and famous. Capital accumulation, moreover, is the centerpiece of this performance. It is what allows the invited to be munificent and to gather as benefactors of the community. Like many of the attendees at the event, LaMantia Budweiser is

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accomplished at amassing money and is highly influential. In this text, it asserts its authority over the media industry and again recontextualizes the frame when assuming the voice of South Texas and South Texans, effectively blurring the lines between community and company, public and private. The Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza brought together the powerful members of the community: public servants mingled with private entrepreneurs. If viewed narrowly as bringing these groups together in a private space, it would be difficult to distinguish the LaMantia event from some political campaign events, especially fundraisers. Another private live-music event that invites the elite to participate is Judge Eloy Pulido’s fundraiser (see Chapter 7), which also provides an emblematic instance of this comingling of businessmen, politicians, and performers—although in a much more intimate setting. As with Anheuser-Busch’s Fiesta Extravaganza, the explicit purpose of Judge Pulido’s live-music event is to raise funds. Before returning to this theme of the interconnectedness between politicians and businesspeople at social gatherings featuring music, in the next chapter I present a hopeful circumstance of music animating grass-roots voting publics in South Texas— just those people excluded from Budweiser’s fundraiser.

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FOUR

Galvanizing Persons into Politics

Consumers are more malleable . . . They’re relaxed, in a setting where they’re open to new ideas. —a national marketer, on live-music events I view writing a song as a telling of a story. . . . in a very short span of time to put something together that would allow these people to see something . . . depending upon what your agenda is. Or, you bring about the people’s needs . . . and they learn from that as well. —a hidalgo county – based marketer and musician In this chapter, I demonstrate that political climate, political style, musical style, and the songwriter’s attitude resoundingly effect an audience’s entrance into politics. By analyzing musicians’ and politicians’ narratives about the production and reception of two political campaign songs—“El Corrido del Juez” and “El Aliseda es el Bueno,” written for Ed Aparicio and Ernest Aliseda, respectively—I elaborate on the mechanics surrounding the transformation of a song into a marketing vehicle for political identification. I argue that an understanding of the media package and the conditions of production are crucial to understanding the songs’ transformation. I relate politicians’ and musicians’ shared experiences with farm work and an economy of gifting to the position their music occupies in Hidalgo County politics.

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I also discuss why their potent products accumulate (or fail to accumulate) publics through their differing attitudes toward politics and Mexicano cultural expression. I pay particular attention to the corrido genre’s meaning, as a vehicle used to reify a relationship in a recognizable form within a musical tradition of political struggle. In other words, the corrido musical form makes a heartfelt sentiment recognizable to others through a performance indexed to a particular genre, the corrido. EL CORRIDO DEL JUEZ

(THE SONG OF THE JUDGE)

Voy a cantar estos versos Para un juez que conocí Lleva por el nombre Ed Aparicio

I am going to sing these verses For the judge that I just met His name is Ed Aparicio

Y por Ed estoy aquí El es el juez de la gente Su destino quiso asi Digan, “Sí” por Aparicio Y adelante va a salir

And Ed is the reason why I am here He is a judge for the people Thus, he desired his destiny Say, “Yes” for Aparicio And he is going to win 1

“The Song of the Judge,” which Cecilio Garza wrote, performed, recorded, and gave to political candidate Ed Aparicio, was a strategy for dealing with a particular situation. While the music’s effect on Hidalgo County was extraordinary (and helped reelect Aparicio), the situation out of which it arose was ordinary to persons like Cecilio Garza in two fundamental ways. First, Aparicio was a district court judge campaigning to be reelected, and second, he was raised in a situation of economic poverty, specifically marked by the particulars of being a migrant farm worker. To explain Garza’s “The Song of the Judge” as a strategy for handling a specific situation, I compare it to Cali Carranza’s “Campaign Music for Judge Aliseda”—also written for an incumbent district court judge who faced a district court reelection campaign in Hidalgo County (which he lost). Both campaigns integrated corrido-like songs into their marketing package, but the character of the songs and packages differed in significant ways.

PA RT I : T H E PAC H A N G A E N CO U N T E R Ed Aparicio’s campaign was not going well when he decided to drive out to the fringes of Hidalgo County to visit a sympathetic friend. Aparicio had hired Rodd Lewis, a man many consider to be Hidalgo County’s best at pro-

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ducing and coordinating political campaign media, but this advantage was offset by the incredible political and financial clout of his opponent’s primary supporter, Ramón García— one of the most financially successful plaintiff lawyers in South Texas. At the time of the campaign, García was the chair of the Democratic Party in Hidalgo County. In addition to the party machinery, he had seemingly unlimited resources to utilize in this campaign; for example, he owned dance halls and a popular radio station. Even though an incumbent, Aparicio had an uphill struggle against the power structure as embodied in García. The opposition began painting Aparicio as an outsider, a foreigner from Washington State without family or any sort of attachment to South Texas— essentially someone citizens could not trust on the bench because he neither knew nor understood South Texans and their culture. The message worked. With this perception overshadowing his Democratic primary campaign, Aparicio, thoroughly depressed about his prospects for winning, visited his good friend, Mauro Reyna. Reyna lived in Peñitas, an old town that was once a Spanish colonial outpost in western Hidalgo County. Reyna and his cousin Cecilio Garza were outside Reyna’s law office grilling some meat and sipping beer—having a pachangita (a little pachanga)—when Aparicio arrived. The three relaxed on the back porch and began talking about their shared experiences. Below Aparicio describes the conditions under which his campaigntransforming music arose: I had a friend of mine from western Hidalgo County whom I met who was from, who had also traveled a whole lot, off working in the migrant fields, as a migrant in the fields. That went up north to Washington, where I am from. We just hit it off and started talkin’, and he [Mauro Reyna’s cousin, Cecilio Garza] is the actual singer and author of the corrido. He is a former band member in a very popular Tejano group down here, Roberto Pulido y Los Clásicos. . . . So we got talkin’. We had a few beers out there on the back porch . . . We were out there just talkin’. (Personal communication, Edinburg, October 24, 2000) Aparicio starts the story by highlighting their points of shared experience in migrant farm work and explains that they were just relaxing and sharing tales of hard times. He continues the story with the presentation of the song as an unsolicited gift: Then, all of a sudden, a week later he calls me up and says, “I got somethin’ for you.”

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So I went out there. And, what made up this corrido was the fact that he and I just talked about working out in the fields, family, friends, basically we got to know each other pretty well. Because his cousin is one of my best friends, that is how we got together. Then all of a sudden I go there a week later, and he comes up with this deal [the corrido-like song]. And, I says, “This is my campaign theme right here.” He was not involved in my campaign whatsoever. He was not involved in the system at all. So, it was just an impromptu thing, from our conversations. Notice, in the last three sentences above, the various ways in which the candidate underscores the songwriter Garza’s closeness to farm labor and distance from formal politics. And, when I heard it, I said, “That is it. I am telling you. That is the campaign.” Now, if you notice. Let me show you. See that hat up there [he points to his bookshelf, to a white baseball cap crammed between family photos, with “Aparicio” in white and “sí” in red lettering.] “Aparicio sí.” That was my whole, that was my campaign. [He gets the cap down.] But this “Aparicio sí”—we had started doing bumper stickers and all of that. Now he [Cecilio Garza] hadn’t seen any of these yet. . . . All he had known was that he saw my cap “Aparicio sí,” and that was it. There the corrido was made. M D : And so, y’all knew each other for quite a while then, since you were kids? A P A R I C Í O : No. No. No. No. No. We talked about working out in the fields. We talked about our childhoods. We talked about where we had been, what we had done. And uh. I had known him all of a week or two, when he just came up with this song. This pachanga encounter generated the song that Garza wrote, performed, and donated to Aparicio’s campaign. As Aparicio mentioned, Garza was a successful musician: in the early 1970s, he led a popular band that had some recording success. By the spring of 2000, he had long since put away his work as a musician seeking popular and professional recognition. But, a week after their meeting, Garza casually handed Aparicio a cassette with a corrido-like song inspired by their conversation.

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Garza used what he learned in their exchange about Aparicio and his campaign to write the song: he knew Aparicio grew up as a migrant farm worker like himself, and he knew that Aparicio’s campaign slogan was “Aparicio sí.” The fact that the corrido was an impromptu gift to Aparicio, not a piece of music contracted out to an artist—and from a man the candidate had met informally and with whom he shared a background of experiences—is important to underscore, because it influences both the composition of the music and the tenor of its reception and reproduction.

Conditions of Production and Identification Cecilio Garza identified with Ed Aparicio’s experiences as a migrant farm worker laboring in agricultural fields across the United States during the 1950s. For Garza, Aparicio’s identity as a former migrant farm worker who had become a district court judge made him unique. Aparicio’s evolution from deep poverty to an educated professional gave his experience a marked structure. Despite this advancement, Aparicio retained the ability to navigate within an economy that emphasizes personal alliances. In sitting on the porch and sharing stories, Aparicio acted in a manner that indexed a way of life. These two men shared substance—in acting together, in sharing similar stories, images, ideas and attitudes of that lifestyle. In the words of Kenneth Burke, they became “consubstantial” (1962 [1950]: 21). Garza used this form of shared substance as the basis for the music he wrote for Aparicio. The piece of verbal artistry that Garza composed sized up the candidate’s situation in a manner that was in keeping with this consubstantiality and its attendant attitudes (Burke 1941: 304). Garza employed typical ingredients to key listeners to this attitude: most notably, 1) elements within the song (the four-line quatrain structure) indexed it in relation to the corrido genre; 2) he gave the corrido-like song to Aparicio; and 3) in the song, he highlighted his foreignness to politics in a manner that complimented Aparicio’s own experiences. The generic intertextuality of Garza’s campaign song, with the themes of Aparicio’s personal narrative as well as other forms of verbal artistry, transformed the context of his candidacy. Burke’s in-depth exploration of relationships between texts, aesthetics, and participant roles is relevant to my discussion of cultural attitudes and political identification. His studies ask us to interpret art forms as “equipment for living,” that is, as conveying strategies for dealing with situations (1941: 304). Identification, for instance, is an object used to create cohesion. For Burke, identification changes over time in a way that creates political alignments. The ways in which a speaker persuades an audience may result in the audience identifying itself with the speaker’s interests. Burke’s discussion “Identifica-

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tion and the Autonomous” (1962 [1950]: 27) focuses on identification’s capacity to treat actions as objects.2 This means interpreting an activity (such as a speech act) as a unit or as a text with a position in a wider milieu, one that has broader implications beyond those known by one actor.3 Applying Burke’s insights to my data on campaign music in South Texas locates Garza’s compliment to Aparicio in a succession of events that shadows (Irvine 1996) past and future occurrences. The men met at a pachanga and told stories; Garza wrote, performed, and recorded the song; he gave it to Aparicio; Aparicio passed it on to his media man, Rodd Lewis; Lewis made the song the frame of the campaign (for example, timing Aparicio’s television advertisements to the song); and the song played on radio and television. With the song out in the public sphere, many people latched on to it in various ways. For instance, Garza told of a woman near Houston who sang the song while in labor; she identified it as “a catchy song.” The point is that different people pick up identification in different ways for different purposes. Identifications shift as the actors and identifiers move across time and space. While Aparicio’s campaign spoke from a certain aesthetic associated with farm workers, people did not have to be farm workers to identify with it. The music and video image were widely popular in South Texas. The song form hailed participants, and the video narrated his story in a remarkable and reified manner. We talked about working out in the fields. We talked about our childhoods. We talked about where we had been, what we had done.

United Farm Workers In the pachanga encounter, identification is the material woven from Aparicio’s narrative with substance, farm work. Identification is also material with which Aparicio binds events through their friendship, more specifically located in being former farm workers. Aparicio’s parallel clause structure (“We talked about”) dramatically underscores their shared experiences (of consubstantiality, identification) as migrant farm workers: they had both worked in the fields, and they had spent their childhoods traveling to distant locales like Washington. His and Garza’s choice to index a history of migrant farm work is strategic. It is a salient political marker in borderlands politics, since many residents either work in the fields or have connections to this experience through family and friends. It touches many residents, and because it is such a powerful set of experiences, it reaches them profoundly.

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Not only does farm work invoke identity in a powerful way, migrant farm workers are an organized political block in South Texas; candidates, especially within the Democratic Party, want the United Farm Workers (UFW) political machine (and its people power) behind them.4 Hidalgo County’s UFW organization enhances its local strength through its strong ties to the Democratic National Committee (DNC): its leader, Juanita Valdez-Cox, is also on the executive committee of the DNC. When nationally prominent Democrats come to Hidalgo County, the local UFW is part of the action. For example, during Senator Joseph Lieberman’s visit to a local colonia on October 13, 2000, a UFW representative served as the candidate’s translator and appeared on television standing beside him. They shook hands, and his translator stood out in his red UFW T-shirt. The UFW received publicity along with Lieberman and the national Democratic ticket. The local UFW enhances its visibility, prestige, and power by appearing with national leaders and by building alliances with other grass-roots political movements. For instance, UFW members and leaders have actively worked to build Valley Interfaith,5 an organization that seeks community unity and a better life for citizens by bringing together people of various religious affiliations. With these ties, the local UFW can draw from a range of resources to assist people and to support aspiring political candidates. Whether at the polls, at Hidalgo County Democratic Party meetings, at national Democratic Party agenda-setting events, or at political rallies of national, regional, and local import, UFW is a visible presence and force. Candidates want the UFW membership on their side, and for this reason most candidates highlight their experiences as migrant farm workers in speeches and advertisements. An experience of farm work is so important that even candidates with dubious credentials have been known to claim this background. Aparicio and Garza’s discussion of shared farm worker experiences not only bridged the divide between a politico and a non-politico but also brought together two people with distinct familial trajectories within Hidalgo County: an outsider (Ed Aparicio) and an insider (Cecilio Garza). Garza’s family has lived in the region for 250 years, since the time of the Spanish land grants. As the pictures and other memorabilia on the walls of Mauro Reyna’s law office showcase, his and Garza’s ancestors have run stores, bars, and places of trade along the Rio Grande River for generations. Garza not only brought his experience as a musician to the conversation, he also brought the legitimacy that comes with generations of cultural knowledge about the Lower Rio Grande Valley, further enhanced by a lifetime of experiences observing interaction in his family’s taverns and stores. His song and his form of handing it over to

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Aparicio, the way in which it arose, index another pronounced tradition in South Texas’s cultural expression: gifting.

Gifting and Proximity 6 As I mentioned above, another significant aspect of this story is that Garza gave the corrido-like song 7 to Aparicio. A key feature of the act of gifting, as Marcel Mauss notes, is that it carries a piece of the donor’s self with it. “To give something is to give a part of oneself. . . . In this system of ideas one gives away what is in reality a part of one’s own nature and substance, while to receive something is to receive a part of someone’s spiritual essence” (Mauss 1967 [1925]: 10).8 The song was a surprise present, and this style of presentation, giving a song from the heart to politicians (or to the public about popular politicians) follows a tradition. Corridos for the 1960 special ¡Viva Kennedy! campaign (organized by Mexican American leaders in South Texas in support of John F. Kennedy’s presidential bid) and for Victor Morales’s 1996 U.S. Senate race were also gifts. The songs were meant for the candidates and were tuned to circumstances unique to their races and background. Particularly emblematic of the corrido as expression of intimate personal, as well as cultural, pride in political aspirants were those written following John F. Kennedy’s assassination (Dickey 1978). The Kennedy corridos spoke to Mexicanos’ desire to be treated as full citizens in the United States. The numerous Kennedy corridos—which portrayed Kennedy as a hero (Dickey 1978)— express Mexicanos’ identification with this symbol of the extension of citizenship to a member of a minority group, an Irish Catholic, and his struggle for acceptance by the Protestant Anglo mainstream. A corrido has been an art form used by Texans of Mexican descent to mark a personalized, emotional relation between a citizen and a politician. It is a vehicle used to reify a relationship in a recognizable form. In other words, the corrido musical form makes a heartfelt sentiment recognizable to others through a performance indexed to a particular genre, the corrido. Garza’s gift formalized and marked a shift in the relationship between the men from one of distance to closeness, and it had value because it reified this process of personalization. The object indexed their new subjectivity in relation to politics. It performed this social work by formalizing/codifying Garza’s new closeness to politics; he no longer was as detached from his subjectivity as a citizen. He informed me that until he wrote the song, he considered himself to be apolitical. Until he met Aparicio and heard his story, he was estranged from formal politics. Giving a corrido to his new friend, a politico,

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marked Garza’s new alignment in a striking manner: the act pointed to a form of solidarity grounded in personal ties. In a society increasingly dominated by impersonal, and usually capital, transactions, this was a meaningful and memorable gesture marking a shift in Garza’s relationship with politics.9 The conditions in which the song arose and the way in which he handled its production keyed a certain attitude that was echoed as a theme in the lyrics. All of these elements conveyed a traditional masculine and predominantly grass-roots attitude toward Aparicio, politics, and U.S. citizenship. Ultimately, the package that Garza wrapped, bound, and gave to his friend said to Hidalgo County residents, “Think of him this way and vote for him,” and “Identify with Aparicio as a man of the people and vote for one of us.” Ed Aparicio was a migrant farm worker who still knew how to pass a sunny South Texas afternoon hanging out on the back porch, telling stories, drinking a cold beer, and savoring barbecue. In sum, Garza’s “The Song of the Judge” is an objectification of the anticipation of a relationship. It encompasses a personalized mode of transaction that inherently implicates “us,” the people of Hidalgo County, as a community interested in Aparicio’s campaign. The song stood for Aparicio and Garza’s personal relationship forged around stories of shared experiences. Just as Garza shared Aparicio’s experiences and memorialized this moment in an art form, so too was the song to be pulled from one person and absorbed by another, anticipating a personalized encounter.10 Garza achieved something notable by identifying with Aparicio, recognizing the words and objects in play and then by putting them into the song. He caught Aparicio’s story and framed it in a way that spoke to citizens of Hidalgo County; it said, “He is one of us.” Lewis handled the rest of the packaging and made sure people heard the message and connected it with Aparicio. Taken together, these transactions produce a public realm. An informal pachanga encounter, identification in shared experiences of farm work, an economy of gifting, and performance in a familiar genre already associated with local identity and politics are crucial to this instantiation of new publics.

T H E M E D I A PAC K AG E : M U S I C , F I L M , AND GOSSIP AS INTEGRAL INTERTEXTUAL ELEMENTS “The Song of the Judge” makes notable gestures to the generic corrido. It follows a traditional, or “old-fashioned” musical style. This well-worn musical form flows from the opening, “Voy a cantar estos versos,” through the fourline quatrain structure. This formulaic structure led people to “latch” onto

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the song. The concept of “latching” (DeNora 2000) is a useful point of entry into understanding what moves music and aligns human beings with music. Latching refers to the moment when people come into configuration with music; it marks palpable moments when human beings became entrained with music. Latching provides a way to talk about the act of passing a threshold and becoming a “musically animated agent” (160). Aparicio understood that the song’s power resided in its catchiness via a familiar— or in his words—“simple” melody: A P A R I C I O : Ah. It was catchy. M D : How was it catchy? A P A R I C I O : Good tune. It had a good message. . . . M D : It sounded to me like it was a classic corrido, in structure. A P A R I C I O : Old-fashioned values, old-fashioned tune. Everything was

old-fashioned about it that made you feel comfortable. And, it was easy to sing. When Aparicio speaks of the song as evoking comfort, he touches upon a built-in quality Garza gave the composition. It has an inherent familiarity that lends it to being readily picked up by listeners. My comment that the song appears to be “a classic corrido, in structure” led to his assertion that it offers “old-fashioned values, [an] old-fashioned tune,” and suggests that this common tune easily leads people to associations and themes typically tied to the corrido. The song is short, with familiar verses and a tune allied with the evocative and legendary corrido. The populist themes of Aparicio’s campaign narrative link neatly with South Texas’s corrido tradition. Ed Aparicio ran against the system, “the man”—the power structure in Hidalgo County. Aparicio’s campaign did not position him as another rich politician seeking status by beating the current, wealthy, political establishment, but as a man of the people with his roots still in the fields, struggling against an unfair system embodied in his opponent. Aparicio became known to the voters of Hidalgo County as “a man of the people,” fighting a heroic struggle against the fat-cats in power. These themes fit squarely into Greater Mexico’s balladry tradition of “a man fighting for his right with his pistol in his hand” about which Américo Paredes tells us so much in With His Pistol in His Hand. An element of the corrido tradition is its use of narrative mechanisms that dramatize events, add immediacy to their significance, and create a heightened awareness of shared values and orientations (McDowell 1982: 47). The

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corrido does not function to relay news, but rather relies on interaction with other genres—gossip, legends, television commercials, periodicals—to do this informative work (McDowell 1982; Paredes 1976: xxi). In other words, a corrido relies on intertextual gaps to be filled by other forms of communication. Clearly, Aparicio was not Gregorio Cortez “with his pistol in his hand” fighting the rinches, Texas Rangers, sent out by the likes of legendary Hidalgo County Sheriff A. Y. Baker. But Aparicio was fighting the present boss, who had plenty of institutional support. True to corrido style, Garza’s song relies on the audience’s knowledge of the present political boss—and prior transmission of that information— to foreground the drama. Explicit mention of García in the song text or in the video would have been both redundant and politically unwise. It was not needed: juicy layers of discourse already circulated concerning García’s bloated political heft and his attempts to push judges around. Instead of a pistol, Aparicio used the media as his weapon. These old themes resonated with people not only because they referenced a musical tradition of struggle, but also because recognizable elements existed in the circumstances unique to Aparicio’s challenge. He came from a hardworking migrant farm family, and he struggled against those in power.11 This corrido interpreted, celebrated, and dignified “events already thoroughly familiar to the audience” (McDowell 1982: 48). The song elevated Aparicio to the status of a hero: by being a subject placed in a song that recalled traditional corridos, he became a largerthan-life figure in an almost epic fight. Scholars typically explain reflexivity as metanarrative segments within a text that enable the text (in this case a song) to refer to itself (see, for example, MacDowell’s discussion: 1982). But mentioned less often is the text’s function as a metanarrative, a comment upon other objects in circulation. Like internal metanarrative, external reflexive properties call attention to the performance event and the circulation of objects in motion. Typically in a corrido (and “El Corrido del Juez” is not an exception), the narrator calls attention to the occasion of the performance: “Voy a cantar estos versos . . . Y por Ed estoy aquí” (I am going to sing these verses . . . And Ed is the reason why I am here). Perhaps, Garza’s song is exceptional in the proportion of time and space allotted to the writer’s voice (e.g., “I am . . .” and “. . . why I am here”). Garza tells listeners that he is “here” to introduce a fellow that he has just met. Then, the metanarrative ends, and he switches to the third person to explain why Ed Aparicio is a person worthy of such a dramatic introduction (in a song, a gesture to a special type of song, the corrido). Garza calls our attention and sets the frame (personal, as one of us) in which the narra-

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tive is embedded through his metanarrative. Such an analysis of the work of discourse internal to a narrative is not new to ethnographers of speaking, but in this case the melody itself also functions like metanarrative to solicit the listener’s attention and introduce him or her to the campaign. The melody enabled latching to the song and campaign; it enabled bonding to cultural material. When I spoke to the corrido’s composer about the song’s catchiness, he reminded me that it owed part of its beauty to its closeness and seeming inextricability from Aparicio’s campaign package: G A R Z A : The lady, she couldn’t believe it and says, “I have been singin’

this song, and I just can’t get it out of my mind. I like that.” M D : And you think that is because of the melody? G A R Z A : The melody has a lot to do with it. The melody’s so simple and

catchy. And, of course, Aparicio, when you saw the song, when you heard the song and saw Aparicio’s poster in the black cape [see page 000 for a discussion of this significant and transformative “flash”]. It just went together, you know the song and the judge. It just went together. It wasn’t planned. (Personal communication, Peñitas, October 2000) As Garza suggests, the song is difficult to separate from the rest of Aparicio’s campaign package, and the themes the corrido conjures tightly fit with other aspects of the campaign. The music or “the jingle” played a central role in affecting modes of reception of the campaign, from how prospective voters greeted Aparicio while block walking to how they engaged with his television commercials. It cued people; it caught their attention and called them to the television from another room. Aparicio explains: I would hear many a stories about how the kids would react or how the parents would react or how both [“both,” may be “folk”] would react to the video at the house . . . As soon as they’d start hearing the jingle, they would look at the television, and they would see the pictures and stuff that Rodd [Lewis] put together. And, that carried our message. The film advertisement played a central role in constituting the corridolike song as a narrative. As I already mentioned, typical to the corrido form is generic interaction, a symbiotic relation between the corrido and other forms of narration. Together with Lewis’s series of videos, “The Song of the Judge”

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tells a complete story. The sequentiality and consequentiality of the photos do the work of one long corrido. Visual images showcased in the campaign’s television ads, billboards, yard signs, T-shirts, and baseball caps played a pivotal role in centralizing the discourse surrounding the election. This ephemera came together, reinforcing the “‘Sí’ por Aparicio” motto. (The precise wording of the motto varied.) Perhaps the most important agents in this process were song and film. The song produced a latchable rhythm, and the television commercial provided a palpable narrative strand that hooked into the themes alluded to in the music. Similar to the music, the images depicted in the video narrative were familiar,12 speaking a dual idiom of familial support and struggle against poverty. Rodd Lewis played a central role in publicizing the song, tying it into Aparicio’s campaign themes. Aparicio describes the situation: A P A R I C I O : No one had had a corrido campaign theme before. Once that took off, I will tell you how entrenched that became. M D : [W]hat radio stations did it play on, and what were your time slots? A P A R I C I O : . . . Rodd is the guy you need to talk to about, really about the substance of the campaign. He knows everything about the T.V., the radio, the billboards. All I would do was give him feedback as to how this corrido was. Because he hadn’t even thought of it, I hadn’t even thought of it. It just came into my lap. And then I went to Rodd. I said, “Look. I am telling you. This is it. This is our campaign deal.” And Rodd put the magic to it by creating videos for it. And it worked.

The sequencing used in the video advertisement and song make it a narrative, and this development can be seen in the introduction of the music and video. Old-style corridos often tell the story of a hero and usually begin by connecting listeners to a place by saying something like, “El es del Condado de Cameron” [He is from Cameron County]; they climax with a fight and then generally end with the hero’s death. Garza, however, does not begin his corrido with “Aparicio es del Condado de Hidalgo” [Aparicio is from Hidalgo County]; instead, a series of photos show Aparicio as a young boy handing groceries from the boxcar that was his home. The images do the work; they signal an experience migrant farm families and many South Texans understand: of constantly moving during harvest months. Having such a humble home and using it in a campaign in which the candidate already has arrived at the position of judge signals a special instantia-

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tion of pride in origin, of gaining political capital by detailing where and from whom Aparicio came. In contemporary South Texas politics, this strategy of referring to one’s humble roots is not rare, but when Aparicio’s campaign did it, it was edgy and, in a sense, new (in that such types of politicking seemed to be of another era). Aparicio and his media team took a risk in emphasizing his roots in migrant labor. Rodd Lewis produced and aired four versions of the campaign video that ran in chronological order. Each starts with a photo of Aparicio as a boy with his family and concludes with him as a mature man with a mustache, standing upright and shrouded in a black judge’s robe. The unfolding of the images makes Aparicio’s present position as public servant in Hidalgo County appear as a natural outcome of his hard work and strong family and community support. The images also glide smoothly along as he shifts from lower to upper class in this “rags to riches” narrative. All of the video advertisements feature photos of farm workers and the children of farm workers. In using such symbols, the ads assert a shared sense of identity. They feature farm worker children and activists who now are prominent citizens of Hidalgo County. They feature pictures of regular working people; for instance, one photo shows a woman coming out of a meeting and greeting Aparicio. In these moments, the visual narrative indexes the corrido’s assertion, “El es el juez de la gente” [He is the judge of the people]. These photos depict Aparicio as a warm fellow and close friend of farm workers. As previously mentioned, Aparicio’s experiences as a migrant farm worker and their objectification in the photographs are a powerful zone of identification with South Texans of various classes and levels of political influence. Another theme floating through these commercials is family. Calculated by sheer abundance of images, family clearly is the strongest theme conveyed. Aparicio is shown in childhood as an active member of his migrant family, handing packages down to his father from the boxcar that served as home. As an adolescent, he cradles his older, disabled sister. As an adult and professional, Aparicio remembers his roots. He stands 1) as a college-age fellow with his mother and stepfather; 2) as a practicing attorney wearing a suit and holding his own young son, who is dressed in a charro suit; 13 and 3) as a judge running for reelection, holding another toddler-age son. The images depict Aparicio as an active family member whose relationships have evolved from caring son to loving and supportive father. This visual story depicts the protagonist as a man whose deeds are in step with the Lower Rio Grande Valley’s corrido tradition, a tradition known to express a

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masculine perspective (McDowell 1982: 53). The story parallels canonical corridos that portray the protagonist as a man of action fearlessly facing a challenge—part of a heroic worldview that scholars like McDowell (1982) and Paredes (1993 [1971], 1994 [1958]) attribute to this region and its maledominated cultural tradition. A leitmotif throughout the four videos is a tale of success framed in a modern logic of evolutionary progress, in this case of making one’s way upward economically and socially through education. Aparicio fought poverty through education. The “education” video most explicitly narrates this movement, showing viewers that Aparicio learned and succeeded with the help of family and friends. For example, the only pictures of Aparicio standing alone are the closing shot of him as a judge, of him in a cap and gown during his high school graduation, and another of him standing beside a sign reading, “University of Houston Law Center.” The story begins in Hidalgo County with a sequence of photos showing Aparicio supporting local schools. One photo depicts him at a Red Ribbon Week event (which celebrates students who do not use drugs and encourages others not to do so) standing arm in arm with a well-known and respected football coach and his son, the school principal.14 Throughout Hidalgo County, Red Ribbon Week is treated as an important and grand event. An element of Aparicio’s grass-roots strategy included visiting schools and speaking to students in their classrooms. The purpose of both is to communicate to them that through education and with community support, people can change their socioeconomic circumstances. Mexicanos can move from the silences and obscurity of poverty into the middle class. This transition indexes a particularly salient shift in the lives of farm workers. As the video advertisement rolls, Garza sings: “Ed es el juez de la gente” [Ed is the judge of the people]. Juxtaposed against this familiar evolutionary progression across time and up the ladder of success—from boy to man, from working class to professional class, from son to father—is a magical moment. The final and climactic moment in the visual narrative occurs when Aparicio undergoes a magical metamorphosis from a regular man into a judge.15 He stands in a suit one second, and in the next instant (poof!), a black robe appears over him. This stunning transformation is a dazzling moment of technological wizardry.16 I observed viewers’ astonished reactions when I watched the commercial with Aparicio and his staff, as well as during subsequent viewings with others. Aparicio’s media marketers (Rodd Lewis and Essua Peña) knew this splashy effect was a key element of the commercial. The produc-

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tion of this quick transformation was painstaking, requiring an entire day of work. Aparicio’s almost magical transformation is central to the message. This mysterious happening and its placement in contrast to the logical narrative can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Most significant to me about this moment is that R. Lewis and E. Peña’s production allows people to accept this appeal in two seemingly paradoxical formulations: that of a modern logos and a magical one. In the context of the television, however, they do not appear paradoxical. This maneuver is part of the magic of marketing. Marketers throw the seemingly disconnected together and pull it off smoothly so that individuals can see the ad and read it in contrasting ways while still connecting with the ad and not seeing (or worrying about) the paradox. This dynamic, moreover, also alludes to a particular characteristic of borderlands culture and politics in general. Many South Texans feel comfortable with this juxtaposition of the magical and miraculous with the rational. Logic and mystery appear closely allied in the experience of everyday life, and often people do not consider them to stand in contrast. In official political discourse, political scientists, historians, journalists, and government officials inundate the media during election time with logical analyses of political campaign outcomes, typically prefacing or closing their comments with a statement of “Anything can happen in politics.” Marketers put this paradox, inherent to democratic practice, into a seamless narrative. Like any seamstress, they know it is an illusion, a fiction of the extraordinary. What is important to marketers is not the fiction-versus-reality issue that disturbs many social scientists, but the issue of creating interest. The magic moment of transformation in this commercial addresses just that issue. The instant of rapid makeover alerts viewers to what is coming: the brand. Previously, I mentioned that corridos tend to climax with a fight and end with the hero’s death. I also noted that the only scenes of Aparicio standing alone were those marking his climb up the ladder of educational attainment and the closing shot. Such exceptional moments of excorporation summon a heightened attention. These are liminal moments. Viewers learn that Aparicio is a fighter, but instead of dying after the battle, he undergoes a metamorphosis. This parallels the biblical story of Christ’s crucifixion and death followed by his transformation and reappearance to the Apostles. Rather than depicting Aparicio as dying and having stories about his deed live on in memory, rather than transforming him into legend, R. Lewis and E. Peña present his transfiguration from man to judge—iconized (in the nontechnical semiotic sense of the term) or entextualized.

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This semiotic process is centrally concerned with branding Ed Aparicio— be it through lexical, rhythmic, or visual ties. The most powerful reconfiguration is his from judge (mortal) to icon (immortal). After the magical moment, the screen turns a pure and ethereal white, then the red “Si” (no acute accents are used in the television ads) from the candidate’s logo bursts onto the screen and remains there for a second. Next, below the “Si” pops a blue “Aparicio” with the “si” being part of his very name: ci  si: Si Aparicio. The “S” from “Si” sitting on the first “i” of “Aparicio” and the “i” from “Si” sitting on top of the second “i” in “Aparicio” complete his brand “Si [por]: Aparicio.” Finally, beside the logo appears a repetition of the magic icon of Aparicio, the man, warmly smiling, standing in a relaxed contrapposto sway with the folds of his black robe flowing over his body. The three visuals come together in a powerful piling of images, while Garza’s catchy melody grabs listeners’ ears: “Digan, ‘Sí’ [por] Aparicio” [Say ‘Yes,’ for Aparicio]. This is a potent layering and repetition of rhetoric. Bronislaw Malinowski accurately attributes the magic of political oratory and advertisements to the power of repetition: At the very basis of verbal magic there lies . . . “the creative metaphor of magic.” . . . By this I mean that the repetitive statement of certain words is believed to produce the reality stated. (1965: 238) R. Lewis and E. Peña’s repetition, layering, and tight bundling of media illuminate why Aparicio’s campaign caught on in Hidalgo County. As Burke says: “Many purely formal patterns can readily awaken an attitude of collaborative expectancy in us” (1962 [1950]: 58). Aparicio’s song and television advertisements created an expectancy of personal contact.

Rooting: Making Contact Aparicio wanted to make his a “grass-roots” campaign, which meant that rather than spending most of his precious campaign time moving from fundraiser to pachanga he devoted it to block walking. A time-consuming and exhausting proposition in the South Texas sun and heat, block walking requires the candidate to walk from house to house knocking on doors. He or she is often invited inside to talk to residents, generally providing them an oppor-

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tunity to get to know him or her on a more intimate and personal scale. Traditionally, candidates hand out flyers, such as sample ballots or colorful cards with the candidate’s logo on one side, a photo of his or her family, a listing of his or her qualifications, and a list of other reasons to vote for this person. They also give away buttons, bumper stickers, T-shirts, and baseball caps. On his door-to-door walks, Aparicio gave away many T-shirts and caps emblazoned with his patriotic red and blue, “Sí por Aparicio,” motto (the precise wording of the motto varied)—which was also a line in his song. The song, aired on the television commercial, provided a latching point and common ground for citizens to connect with the judge on his block walks. Children walked with him, singing “The Song of the Judge.” Voters recognized Aparicio as “el juez del corrido” and used the photos associated with the corrido as a conversational starting point. Knowing his song and his story, people already felt acquainted with Ed Aparicio. As he put it, the song “had a bonding effect” so that they could start asking about his grandparents and sister and then move into other questions. Aparicio explained this experience concerning the power of this song and its attendant visual images to produce identification: A P A R I C I O : Let me give you a little bit of background to answer, to

better help you understand what I am talking about. Their big hangup with me, my opponents, critics, was that I was not from here. I am an out-of-towner. I don’t know the family values of South Texas. I have no family here. [Imitating what his opponents said:] “He’s an outsider. Ah. Don’t trust a foreigner.” OK. So I never really was readily adopted by [three-second pause] the folks, the common folks here. Other than the ones who personally knew me. When this thing came out, then people would just identify with me: “Your grandparents are like my grandparents. . . . It seemed like we knew your grandparents. Where they live, where they’re from,” and so forth. So, it was kind of like a bonding effect. That was what was so incredible, that experience behind it. M D : So, what did the song say about your grandparents that people identified, that people pointed out to you? A P A R I C I O : Absolutely nothing. . . . other than, they would see the pictures. The video would be played with pictures. And people, just kids

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would be singing my songs. I’d go to walk the neighborhoods and the little kids would start singing it. M D : Like five to ten, or what age group are we talking about? A P A R I C I O : Five to ten [would] be about right. Probably, five to twelve, five to thirteen. I mean they were just kids. They’d be running up, and I’d be block walking, and you could see the kids just coming over. Ah. And, you could see the kids coming over. They identified with who I was because of the video. . . . All it was, it just had a nice jingle to it with the pictures. When you heard the music coupled with the pictures, it sent a message. Which basically is, “I am one of you. I have experienced the same thing.” Ah. It was catchy. . . . I can’t sing worth a flip. . . . but everyone would just be singing it. And, every time I would go give a speech at a town hall let’s say, at a neighborhood party, at quinciñeras, at weddings you would always hear, “Andale el corrido!” They would always be saying, “There is Aparicio. Sí con Aparicio.” Look at all of my campaign literature and so forth. People identified the videos, songs, billboards to the makeup of the campaign. Block walking and speaking personally to constituents affects the level at which candidate and constituent relate. These activities up the ante in prospective voters’ relationship to politics and provide a metacultural stimulus (e.g., a motivation for neighbors to converse about the candidate). Aparicio deviated from traditional political form in his decision to block walk, and this shift in political form alerted citizens to a polis in a heightened way. Aparicio’s decision to move away from standard large pachangas (a vestige of patronage politics) and embrace grass-roots appeals like block walking is also a significant symbolic step, telling people, “I come to you, in your community, humbly as a guest in your house.” This approach is unlike large pachangas, such as those used in most other district court races and in Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, which tell people, “You come to me. I have the goods.” This shift is significant; it allows people to interact with candidates in a space in which they create and feel comfortable; it tells people that they are worth the political effort. It does not organize or command people, putting them in a place of inferiority. Instead, it asks them. It is a form of direct marketing, working to establish intimacy in an environment perceived as highly

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intimate, without the negative connotations of traditional forms of direct political marketing in South Texas. Block walking keeps the campaign, as a floating constellation of objects, in the face of citizens. It works to keep actors from detaching from Aparicio and his candidacy. It works against this hazard to simulate a palpable sense of intimacy. In the present era of global commodity flows, Aparicio’s tactic reminds citizens of the practice, in face of the need, for people and objects to feel close or risk losing their meaning. The song created a sense of unification in a context of liquid identity. The corrido and campaign were both successful at reaching out to the “grass roots” and transforming the relationship between Aparicio and potential voters from one of distance to one of proximity and familiarity. Given the metanarratives of the campaign, Cecilio Garza’s song and the videos Rodd Lewis created spoke to working people who often tune out politics; children and elderly citizens particularly were vocal about the power of the song. At pachangas (which were not numerous in this campaign), people frequently approached Aparicio, Cecilio Garza, and Mauro Reyna and expressed their fondness for the song. Allow me to repeat this striking point that inverted Hidalgo County political norms: at political functions, voters approached the candidate. Reyna, Aparicio’s close friend, campaign confidant, and cousin of the corrido author, describes one such encounter between Aparicio and an elderly couple: 17 During the campaign . . . . a couple came up to me and said—I was with Ed, of course: “Ud. eres el juez Ed Aparicio?” [Are you Judge Ed Aparicio?] [Aparicio responds] “Sí, yo soy.” [Yes, I am.] [Couple continues] “Ud. eres el juez del corrido?” [Are you the judge of the corrido?] [Aparicio responds] “Sí, yo soy el juez del corrido.” [Yes, I am the judge of the corrido.] [The woman in the couple responds] Dijo, “Mis niños no más oyen, no más oyen ese canción en la televisión y se ponen a cantar.” [She said, “My children they no longer just listen, no longer just listen to the song on the television, but they start to sing”] . . . In other words, it created that phenomenon. . . . If Bush or Gore had somethin’ like that, it would be the difference. Aparicio metamorphosed from an unknown outsider into “el juez del corrido.” His image transformed to such an extent that upon appearing in pub-

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lic—at rallies, at pachangas, at parades—strangers came up to him and asked unusually intimate questions such as, “How are your grandparents?” Unknown people would offer, “You are one of us.” In the course of the campaign, such extraordinarily intimate questions became the norm. It was not until Aparicio’s convertible rolled along a parade route that he understood the incredible popularity of his corrido. A dramatic moment of recognition of the popularity of this song among working families occurred during a winter citrus parade in Mission, a political hub in western Hidalgo County. The momentum of his campaign shifted noticeably for the candidate at this event. Children chased his car singing; adults rallied around the corrido and asked personal questions emanating from the video images. The marketing format had been inverted. Rather than Aparicio and his advertisements reaching out to citizens, regular people proactively reached out and wanted to connect with Aparicio on a more personal level. Below he explains the shocking popularity of this song: A P A R I C I O : We were over in a parade in Mission. And this is when I knew of the profound effect it had on folks. When we rode in a vehicle 18 in a parade and, of course, my insignia was all over the vehicle so they knew it was my vehicle, but the people started singin’ the deal. They started saying, “El corrido, onda corrido.” [The corrido, ride the corrido.] People would be asking me about my grandparents. . . . “¿Como están sus abuelos?” [“How are your grandparents?”] I was like, my wife and I were astounded by people’s knowledge of the corrido. And, you have to understand that this video only is thirty seconds long. The pictures with the music made me a hometown guy. You see, I am not from here, but . . . Everyone was just kind of like: “How are your parents?” . . . Actually, we just couldn’t believe it. It was just phenomenal, the response. I came back to the house and called Rodd and I says, “We’re in. This campaign’s over. . . . Go play.” There were twelve thousand people out there. From one end of the parade to the other, all we heard is: “How are your grandparents?” “How is your sister?” “Onda con el corrido.” And other people would be singing it. Ah. It was incredible. M D : It must have been a wonderful experience.

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A P A R I C I O : Oh, it was. It was probably the highlight of the campaign, because right then and there I knew people identified with that. Then, shortly thereafter I started hearing from people, “Hey, can you hear this. Hey, can you hear that.” Everyone was just talking about it. I gotta tell ya. This campaign was exciting because of this corrido, because of the effect this corrido had on folks.

Not only did people identify with the corrido and sing Aparicio’s campaign song in the citrus parade, but the corrido and video images fundamentally altered their relationship to the candidate. Further, he transformed from an outsider with little connection to South Texas culture to someone familiar to everyone (i.e., working people, those outside of the legal, business, and medical communities). This shift and identification was enmeshed in a network of kinship (“¿Cómo están sus abuelos?”) and was mediated through the song and photographs that became icons of their own. The tight integration and layering of cultural elements in Aparicio’s campaign conveyed to constituents a grass-roots attitude toward politics. The attitude these durable and recognizable ephemera carried was familiar, thus catchy. Once citizens latched on to the campaign, the crossover and interlinking of genres provided terrain for the creation and increased circulation of discourse, which leads to my final story about this campaign’s ability to cross boundaries. The wishes of citizens who hollered “onda con el corrido” (roll with the corrido) seem to have been granted. It rolled as far in location as Galveston (350 miles away), and continued running six months after the election. The following story told by Garza concerns a woman singing the campaign music in this context while having a baby. C G : And the other day, my daughter lives outside of Houston, and she just had a baby and anyway she was in Galveston. And there was another lady there. They happened to be in the same room, and they started talkin’. She was from the Valley originally. She was over there because their babies were, you know, premature or somethin’ like this. And, they started talkin’ and about politics and stuff and songs, and Laurie’s my daughter. And she said, “So you heard that song.” And she says, “Yes, I heard that song.”

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And she sang the whole song . . . and she was having a baby. . . . And Laurie said, “You know. Well my dad is the one that wrote and sang that song.” The lady, she couldn’t believe it and says, “I have been singin’ this song, and I just can’t get it out of my mind. I like that.” It just stayed.

PA RT I I : R I P P L E S F R O M A PA R I C I O ’ S S O N G Since the spring of 2000 and the success of Aparicio’s campaign song, workers in South Texas political campaigns have increasingly commissioned musicians to write, produce, perform, and record songs in order to propel an image of their candidate into a largely Mexicano political context. As a fieldworker, I was particularly interested in the campaign of Ernest “Ernie” Aliseda, which he and his staff managed through their use of push cards, billboards, radio appearances, music, and live performances in homes and dance halls across South Texas. By the summer of 2000, when I began my research, all of these features, except specialized campaign music, were well-established features of Hidalgo County’s political culture, and much energy was devoted to creating, producing, and injecting these symbols into the public and privates spaces of the region. As a consequence, much of what I know about marketing politics was gained by attending political functions, talking with people, gathering push cards, recording television advertisements, cataloging billboards, and speaking with marketers, politicians, and musicians. These individuals and their analyses of these signs inform my interpretations of the causes and effects of creating political identification with “the common folk.” I suggest that the candidate’s and musicians’ modern-capitalist orientation to “Campaign Music for Judge Aliseda” influenced how and to what extent it produced new voting publics.

Conditions of Production and Identification: An Exciting Election In 2000, Ernie Aliseda was a young attorney who had recently been appointed by then-governor George W. Bush to a newly created position on the 398th District Court. As an appointee of a Republican governor, he felt compelled to run for reelection as a Republican. His Democratic opponent in the November election was Aída Salinas-Flores, who herself had applied for the Bush appointment. The Salinas-Flores–Aliseda race generated a high volume of metacom-

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mentary for a variety of reasons. It was something to watch, talk, and write about primarily because if Aliseda were to be elected and keep his position on the court, he would make history as “the first Republican elected to a position in Hidalgo County” (television newscaster quoting Aliseda, November 7, 2000). Democratic and Republican political activists consider district court races to be symbolic of a party’s domination; thus, they understood that if the Republicans broke through in this election, they symbolically would have challenged the Democratic Party’s unquestionable reign in one of the last Democratic strongholds in the state of Texas. Hidalgo County is and has been a burr in the GOP’s side, and this election looked like their chance to cut into and break the Democrat’s Texas outpost once and for all. Bush’s carrying of the county in his 1998 gubernatorial race already had begun to stimulate questions. Recall that George W. Bush and Tejano music icon Emilio Navaira toured South Texas together with Emilio playing a special rewritten version of his hit song “Mano a Mano” (Hand-in-Hand). Bush ultimately captured over one-third of the “Hispanic” crossover vote. Ernie Aliseda’s campaign hoped to attract these crossover votes, and using music was one of its strategies. For this reason, this campaign captured people’s attention. Everyone seemed to be talking about “the guy who’s gonna beat the Democrats.” For a Republican, Aliseda was running a strong, well-financed, and unusual campaign.

Capitalism and Detachment: Hiring a Hand In contrast to the impromptu production of Ed Aparicio’s song, Aliseda’s campaign purposefully selected and hired Cali Carranza to compose and record a corrido. Aliseda was aware of the power of Aparicio’s music during the March Democratic primary. (They are friends and probably discussed this issue.) For Aliseda, the corrido encapsulated a way to appeal to voters across the political aisle. He wanted to create identification through his corrido. The strategy he meant for it to convey was, “He’s one of us.” Aliseda explained: Just because I am running as a Republican doesn’t mean I’m not one of them. I think that it helps appeal by saying, “Hey, this guy, he’s one of us.” “Just because this guy is running as a Republican doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a heart and, you know, he doesn’t bleed when he gets cut.” [It] makes ’em feel more comfortable. (Personal communication, McAllen, October 4, 2000)

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The circumstances of Aparicio and Aliseda’s races were similar in that each candidate ran against the entrenched power structure of South Texas and their intentions were similar (e.g., to create personal identification), but the manner in which Aliseda’s corrido was requested, written, and broadcast differed—and anticipated a distinct attitude—from that of Aparicio. Where the latter encompassed an economy of the gift and its attendant emphasis on personal relations, Aliseda’s music conveyed a modern, capitalist, and distanced attitude toward politics. Aliseda hired a professional musician to produce a commodity, and the musician produced the song in an equally professional and detached manner for his employer. Carranza, the musician, considered the song he wrote to be a piece of political propaganda, not an expression of his friendship with Aliseda. Aliseda indeed hired a well-qualified musician to work for him. Carranza has been writing music for thirty-six years. He has written four or five political campaign corridos, including one for President Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign. Moreover, he has written highly successful songs for white U.S. pop bands such as Chicago. He tours extensively across the United States and Mexico; during our interview he outlined the band’s upcoming international tour. Carranza also explained that he is polylingual, college-educated, and a professional musician. As a professional, he holds few illusions about a systematic maximization of profit being central to writing and performing music.19 Aliseda understood his relationship to Carranza and the music as one based in a modern, technical mode of operations. This attitude appears when he matter-of-factly told me: “I have a guy working on a corrido for me.” You can see that Aliseda did not present this as a personal relationship among friends; for instance, Carranza is not “my friend” but “a guy working . . . for me.” He is a nameless employee of Aliseda’s. The politician, media liaison, or candidate orders that a specific task be accomplished by his worker. The musician’s primary role is as a manufacturer of a product, music. He is a pieceworker, and Carranza shares Aliseda’s disposition toward musical production as operating within a capitalist economy. Carranza’s interpretation of the writing process is almost the opposite of Garza’s. For instance, it is a product commissioned and created in the capitalist mode, not an inspired, impromptu gift. Employers specify the musical themes: As far as writing for politicians, it’s not something that’s inspired. In other words, I don’t write corridos because I am inspired by a politician. Ya know. I write a corrido for a politician if he asks me to write it.

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In other words, somebody comes to me and says, “Hey look. We want a corrido for this individual, and here is what we want said about him.” And, I just put, you know, the words together and put music to it. And that’s where a corrido comes from. In other words, it’s not because politicians inspire me. They don’t. (Personal communication, McAllen, October 4, 2000) Carranza understands that composing corridos is work, contracted and carried out rationally. Unlike Garza, Carranza treats corrido composition neither as a special task undertaken to compliment a friend nor as inspired by a shared history of social and economic struggle. Writing for him is not about faith in politicians. Carranza thoroughly disconnects corrido writing from any romantic notions about shared substance, musical composition, and his association with “politicians.” He wants to create distance from these associations; he does not identify personally with the politician or the product. And his music encompasses this attitude. Carranza elaborates on this attitude of alienation from producer, performer, and product when speaking of his mechanical writing style. He checks off a list of topics to be covered as he writes a campaign corrido: This is what he has done. This is what he has accomplished. This is why he’s the best person for this position, whatever. Again, the final “whatever” speaks Carranza’s enthusiasm for the project and sentiment of detachment from the piece of music. He concluded this agenda with an equally cool and distanced, “That’s where it comes from.” The context of production, a business transaction carried out in a calculated and disinterested manner, conveyed a professional attitude toward the song that ultimately anticipated the song’s similar cold and detached anticipation of publics. Carranza’s perspective of a corrido is highly impersonal and suffused with a knowledge of the commercial market. For instance, Carranza understands that the corrido is not meant to make him money by selling compact discs. He highlights the usefulness of a campaign corrido, underscoring the financial reason behind writing a corrido for a commission: As a rule, it’s not something that’s gonna sell in my market. See. And, I am here to sell CDs. I am here to sell cassettes and stuff ’cause that’s where my money comes from.

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If I record a corrido, it is not going to be so that I can play it on the radio and put it on, ya know, and put in a music store to sell so that people can buy it in stores. Because people don’t buy it. He envisions the corrido’s purpose in terms of a calculated financial transaction. Central to his orientation are markets, sales, money, and marketing. For him, the corrido is an object broadcast to perpetuate another person’s career, not something to facilitate bonds or identification. Carranza is aware that when his corrido airs in Aliseda’s campaign commercials it is not marketed as his product, which means even more distance exists between the producer and the product. Campaign songs are unlike regular commercial songs in which the radio disc jockey announces the performer’s name. In the political format, Carranza receives little, if any, public brand recognition. Even if he did, he does not believe it would boost sales in his market because “people don’t buy it.” By contrast, Garza told me that his popular corrido for Aparicio reignited his amateur career as a performer and aroused a good deal of political corrido business (had he wanted it). Furthermore, Carranza later recognized that non-campaign corridos do make money for bands popular within the Mexican diaspora, for example, those of Los Tigres del Norte (The Tigers from the North) and Los Tucanes (The Toucans). More mainstream bands in the United States like La Mafia (The Mafia), and Los Lobos (The Wolves) have also recorded corridos; nonetheless, for Carranza, the market will not absorb his corridos, particularly an encomium to a politician. In an interview with me and his agent, Luis Estévez, present, Carranza frames his corrido for Aliseda singularly as a marketing tool for a political candidate. The song’s discursive life ends with the election: C A R R A N Z A : A corrido for a politician is written so that it’s played on the air as part of a commercial bite. . . . Usually it’s politically motivated, and the way it’s done is, ya know, instead of, say, buying a twoor three-minute commercial with somebody talking about, “Well, I want you to vote for this individual” and so on. Instead of playing that, they’ll play the corrido. The corrido tells people about what this individual is about: where he’s headed and what he’s looking for . . . E S T É V E Z : If I can interject, Cali, I view writing a song as a telling of a story. And the telling of a story . . . is basically in a very short span of time to put something together that would allow these people to see something positive or negative, depending upon what your agenda is. Or you bring about the people’s needs, or what they perceive to be

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necessary to be living in their area. So that the candidates that are running let people be aware of what the platform should be. And they learn from that as well. What both Judge Aliseda and Carranza have said, thus far, indicates that they have established a detached, contractual, professional relationship in the spirit of modern capitalism (Weber 1983a [1930]: 119). Aliseda hired Carranza for a sum of money to write a political corrido for his judicial contest to appeal to “traditional Democratic voters” in Hidalgo County. Carranza accepted Aliseda’s offer because being paid by the piece is the only way (in his estimation) to make a profit from a campaign corrido. In Carranza’s discourse, however, moments exist where he leaves telling clues as to his understanding of the category of “politician” and where he draws lines between business and political associations. Consider his modern business frame: after being hired, Carranza will sit down to write and produce a song, checking elements off of his list as he progresses so that he conveys the expected message. This is a transparent, over-the-counter financial transaction. There is nothing unseemly about Aliseda paying Carranza to write a song: in this modern capitalist mode, Aliseda can have a “crystal-clear conscience in exploiting” Carranza’s labor; both parties demonstrate “an ethical fitness . . . identified with respectability in business” (Weber 1983b [1930]: 136). This is a clear-cut transaction, something, for instance, that Carranza must pay federal income taxes on. Additionally, in a relationship that is understood to be between two objects/commodities (money and music) where the subjugation of persons is obfuscated (c.f. Zizek 1994: 26), moral considerations become incredibly difficult to introduce (c.f. Weber 1983b [1930]: 129). Now consider the modern political frame: Carranza is not authoring the song because Aliseda owes him a “favor” (as their song puts it) or because he owes Aliseda a favor. His action is not about personal obligations. Acting out of a personal obligation is in the realm of the “politically motivated.” When people act out of such motivations, those acts carry a taint. Carranza uses the term “politically motivated” in the context of radio politics, an arena of negotiation understood to operate within a payola logos—that is, one in which gifts and favors constantly circulate so that, for instance, one’s music is played. Under such conditions, when actions can be attributed to “political” motivations, it suggests events that gifting and personal obligation occasioned. To complicate matters, Carranza uttered a puzzling statement in the same interview: “And, I will be very frank with you. Ernie Aliseda is a great person.

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Personally, he’s a friend. His affiliation with me is not political. It is a friendship-type thing.” Carranza works for a friend because he wants to do so (because he is free to do so), not because he feels compelled to do so, or because he wants to get something out of it. A political act is one that an individual does because of self-interest, because one has no other choice, or because one is obligated to do so. For Carranza, friendship is not a political relationship, and political relationships are not between friends. Friendship is what gets you in the door, so that Cali will write the song (for his friend Ernie, who was also in the military). Friendship is not a force that compels him to work. He suggests a thick culture of personal networks, of sociation, of the work identification does in sparking the encounter. And thus, when he says something like “it’s politically motivated,” he means that this is a tainted action because it is forced—an action outside the domain of a person’s own free will. What does not seem to matter is: “By selling his labour ‘freely’, the worker loses his freedom —the real content of this free act of sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital” (Zizek 1994: 22). In Carranza’s view, purely political acts are bad— an attitude he expresses in his lyrics: EL ALISEDA ES EL BUENO

( C A M PA I G N M U S I C F O R JUDGE ALISEDA)

Vengo a cantar un corrido Senores tengan presente Hablo del Juez Aliseda El juez de toda la gente En el condado de Hidalgo Todo saben que es decente

I come to sing a corrido Sirs! Pay attention. I am talking of Judge Aliseda The judge of all the people In the county of Hidalgo Everyone knows that he is decent

Juez Aliseda es derecho Nadie no puede negar Aliseda no se vende Aunque no quieran comprar Aquel el que sea culpable Del juez se de cuidar

Judge Aliseda is straight Nobody can deny Aliseda is not for sale Even if you wanted to buy Those who might be guilty Better watch out for this judge

Requerda bien mi gente Vota Aliseda primero En la elección de noviembre Juez Aliseda es el bueno Juez Aliseda es el bueno

Remember well my people Vote Aliseda first In November’s election Judge Aliseda is the good one Judge Aliseda is the good one

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(Sixteen-second musical bridge) El suerte no esta contado Con el Juez Ernie Aliseda En su corte de distrito La justicia es la que reina Los ha probado con hechos Y no con falsas promesas

Luck is not counted on With the Judge Ernie Aliseda In his district court Justice is king/queen [that which reigns] He proved it with acts Not with false promises

Ya me he despidido señores Ya dejaré de cantar Sólo un favor yo les pido No se les vaya a olividar Juez Aliseda es el bueno Y por eso él debes votar

Now I say goodbye sirs Now I will stop singing 20 Only one favor I ask of you Do not ever forget Judge Aliseda is the good one And therefore you should vote for him

Requerda bien mi gente Vota Aliseda primero En la elección de noviembre Juez Aliseda es el bueno (Repeats three times)

Remember well, my people Vote Aliseda first In November’s election Judge Aliseda is the good one

T H E M E D I A PAC K AG E : AU R A L A N D V I S UA L D E TAC H M E N T In its production, lyrics, and instrumentation, Carranza’s song anticipated an alienated disposition to politics on the part of the listener, and the media package elicited little participatory involvement due to how it was marketed. Aliseda and his media man, Brad McCumber, did not integrate the song into Aliseda’s overall media package as Lewis did with Aparicio’s. Lewis aired four different television ads with a montage of photos. Together the song and photos marked time and told a story about the judge’s life, dramatically layering his transformation. The corrido-like song also introduced Aparicio and cued participants to what was to come. In contrast, Aliseda’s television advertisements did not use Carranza’s corrido, and the candidate did not appear in parades. Rather, the corridos were coupled with Aliseda’s appearances at pachangas, which were more central to Aliseda’s campaign than they were to Aparicio’s. These pachangas were the

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types of settings in which individuals could make direct contact with Aliseda, and at such live-music events, “El Juez Aliseda es el Bueno” played. It functioned as background music at more intimate events; or at larger spectacles, it played before he was introduced and after he spoke. The music and pachanga together did not tell a full story. I detail Aliseda’s pachanga—the tradition it indexes, and the way in which it builds constituencies—in the following chapter, but his dance hall style pachanga sent the opposite message from block walking. Instead of “I am one of you,” his appearances said, “I am more than you.” His campaign broadcast a vertical message of hierarchy rather than a more horizontal one of identification. Aliseda’s “traditional Democratic voter” (personal communication, McAllen, October 4, 2000) seemed to be the same people that followed Aparicio at the Citrus Parade in Mission—financially poor, working people. Carranza defined this audience for me and understood the importance of aural media to this group: You gotta remember that around here a lot of the people are not the type of people that will actually open up a newspaper and read a brochure on somebody, ya know, to find out where they are at. We have a lot of people in the Valley that are citizens, that are voters, they’re not illiterate. But it’s not their concept of taking the time to read . . . so, uh, if they hear it in a corrido, then it’s their level of identifying. You know. What better way for them to do it than to hear somebody that they know sing about a certain candidate. Because when you are a public person, the common folk tend to identify with you. They, since they hear your name on the radio, since they’ve seen you on TV, since, you know, they’ve been at your dances and so on, they feel that they know you. So if they feel that they know you and you’re telling them that “This person’s good,” then they have a tendency to want to hear it from someone they know. Then who better than someone they identify with. Broadcasting across multiple channels (radio, television, and dances) is a method to create identification, to personalize an audience’s relationship to a candidate. According to Carranza, people want to “feel that they know you” and “want to hear it from someone they know”; he understands that people want to have a personalized relationship with a political candidate. Contact is

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significant in producing identification, but this does not seem to be the message “El Juez Aliseda es el Bueno” publicized. As Carranza’s agent Estévez explains, songs tell a story, and these tales “bring about the people’s needs.” Carranza’s corrido was intended to stimulate anxiety in a judge’s “straightness” and integrity (character) as well as that of the political system (a place of buying and selling infused with superstition,21 not one of open and free deliberation). The songwriter throws together an odd mixture of discourse surrounding the marketplace, electoral practices, and politics. Rather than excite people into the public sphere through shared identification with the candidate (his personal experiences), this song admonishes actors into voting due to an assumed shared identification around politics as a marketplace characterized by magic and unsavory acts. The song’s complex presentation projects an image of professional distance from the object and, thus, the acts it wishes to encompass.22 Notable instances of its over-production and inutility to the Aliseda campaign are its lengthy musical interludes. Other internal markers of the song’s decidedly commercial production include: the highly polished sound found in the balance of the accordion and snare drum; the clean sound; the gesture to newer music like techno found in the stop beats in and between verses, an aural symbol of the instrumentation overriding the lyrics (which speaks a pop idiom). Such a song is not easy for a child to imitate. The refined sound and the flourishes make the song difficult for an amateur or a regular listener to reproduce. The length of the ballad, moreover, almost ensures that children are not going to run around singing the entire song. Such elements keep participants at a distance from the song, reducing the corrido’s capacity to induce latching and accelerate culture. As Carranza’s agent implied, this song anticipated a modern capitalist (calculated, distant, and commercial) attitude toward politics. Aliseda’s song did not become a popular phenomenon, and it definitely did not catch on the way Aparicio’s did. I heard no stories of women in labor singing, “Juez Aliseda es el Bueno.” Elderly couples did not report their grandchildren singing, “Vota Aliseda primero.” I cannot say why this song did not click with South Texans, but I suggest some possibilities: 1) the song was not packaged with videos; 2) it was not part of a grass-roots campaign strategy; 3) it carried a modern attitude of detachment; and 4) it was overproduced and highly commercial, not evocative of traditional corridos.

CONCLUSION I have spoken pointedly in this chapter about Hidalgo County’s different styles of forging identification by focusing on music, but there are also general fea-

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tures of these happenings related to culture, motion, and latching that are relevant to this discussion. As scholars interested in the production of political identification, we must take into account global forms of public culture and their motion in order to analyze the ways in which their patterns ground culture and to understand their interrelation. I draw on theories of language and culture to explore how culture, identification, and people interact to create public spheres. These theories draw attention to the importance of the relationship between subject and object in galvanizing political loyalties. Addressing DeNora’s theory of latching, for instance, in the light of other studies of ritual speech (e.g., Keane 1997) and the public sphere (e.g., Habermas 1991) raises a relevant point concerning a subject’s awareness of the process of being entrained with an object. Music is particularly suited to this elision of conscious recognition: “Music places in the foreground of perception an ongoing, physical and material ‘way of happening’ into which actors may slip, fall, acquiesce” (DeNora 2000: 159; emphasis mine). DeNora observes retailers using music to affect consumer behavior and notes a woman conjoining with music, snapping her fingers to its beat while skimming the racks. Later in an interview, the woman expressed what came to be a commonplace lack of recognition—that she was unaware of tuning in to the music. DeNora documents this repeatedly. An actor’s subjugation to music is an observable phenomenon, but one of which the actor is often not consciously aware. If agents latch on to it, music becomes a social object through which their agency is figured, reconfigured, and transfigured. It is a powerful medium of solidarity, and it seeps into much of our environment, including the political sphere. It is a socially powerful agent affecting us as citizens. Cecilio Garza’s corrido for Judge Aparicio moved around Texas both during and after the campaign, and this circulation of discourse constituted a market or, in Urban’s terms, a “public.” A market is constituted by the motion of culture, as identification (a shared substance) through them, and by the circulation of culture within them. The corrido did this by hooking South Texas’s citizens and then by circulating with them (on baseball caps, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and in spoken words). The movement of these signs often resulted in song and more talk about the judge’s family. This propelled the corrido’s circulation so that it was transmitted and began ricocheting off of other people’s experiences, and bouncing across with them. While moving around, the text conveyed an attitude and strategy toward the candidate, Aparicio, and his election. This locally based text produced an active public with a shared posture toward citizenship. Identification and latching work to anticipate and establish a relation to political fields, and a higher velocity of objects in motion evokes and speeds

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up the constitution of publics by acting as “a cultural snowball.” I suggest that what accelerates the text’s movement is that it fits into a borderlands musical tradition, that it works cohesively as part of a campaign package that includes tightly connecting visual images. The style of the song and visual narrative cohere with Aparicio’s style of campaigning. These three imbricated domains demonstrably hasten the text’s motion, serving to “arouse” (Burke 1968 [1931]: 123) a public. In addition to identification and latching, velocity is a key element in music, television commercials, and push cards, which together constitute political fields. Velocity refers to the speed and directness of cultural objects in motion. This cultural material can be music or a television ad, and public display puts them into motion. The movement of culture as such a politico-commodity works to make publics. It is the exceptional story that tells of U.S. citizens getting excited about politics, of rooms being silenced to focus on a campaign commercial, to hear of elderly couples singing about a judge’s political destiny, and perhaps most significantly, to find children, from working-class families, enthusiastic about politics and the political process. The music enticed children to such an extent that they felt comfortable to approach and ask Aparicio personal questions and ones about how to get involved in politics. In other words, actors need to come into meaningful contact with symbolic forms for a new voting public to develop. In this chapter, I analyzed musicians’ and politicians’ narratives about the production of two political campaign songs and argued that one—rooted in an economy of the gift—anticipated a personal relationship with citizens of Hidalgo County and the other—rooted in a modern and capitalist economy— encompassed a much more ambivalent relationship to people and politics. These attitudes, based in different forms of identification, ultimately affected the enchainment of people into politics.

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FIVE

A Local Republican and a National Democratic Gathering

Events run the risk of decreasing the velocity of objects in motion, and one of the more obvious ways in which they do this is through not connecting with other channels, sizes, scales, and event forms—by lacking intertextuality. My discussion of pachangas started with Letty Lopez’s dance, an event form that is most clearly in response to (and contact with) the traditional, exclusively male pachanga of the country. In this chapter, I discuss two pachangas less connected to this form: one held to publicize the Aliseda campaign and one organized by the Democratic National Committee. I explain that both failed to produce new voting publics in South Texas in part because they in no way reflected or invoked the traditional pachanga. Pachangas and the discourse their sponsors hope to bind to these events keep the risk of subject distance at bay through challenging South Texans as citizens operating in relation to the mechanism of heroic citizenship. If, like the corrido, pachangas prompt and articulate an arena for South Texans to emerge as players, implicated by and as participants in a fight, then they also attract people. A way in which pachangas excite this sensibility of challenge is through gifting: the party is a gift to the participants. Another means is through setting the pachanga in the foreground of masculine honor: they cue a sense of “heroic citizenship,” implicitly reminding Mexicanos of their role in an epic struggle as United States citizens. As previously mentioned, Hidalgo County’s political pachanga—as an event— emerged when the World War II generation returned to the United States after fighting for freedom and democracy abroad— only to find a Jim Crow social and political system

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that excluded them. For these veterans, the pachanga was a place to plan acts of resistance to the dominant institutionalized system. Now such stylized political events index their Civil Rights struggle. Moreover, to a certain extent, those individuals who organize and host events in a hybrid economy of the gift— events located on the margins (i.e., in the country) of border cities and free-trade zones—subtly resist contemporary capitalism. Encompassing a resistant stance to an imperialist, and often racist, capitalist economy, participants in these old-style, out-in-the-country pachangas offer an alternative version of a global public sphere. On the other hand, events like Ernie Aliseda’s dance point to corporate political marketers’ initial attempts at co-opting and transforming such an attitude. They attempt to rechannel the force of live-music events into a brand of transnational marketing (or live-music event ethnic marketing). In the discussions in Chapters 2 and 3, I presented instances of this: that is, of the pachanga’s transformation into a spectacle for the purpose of selling product— Budweiser. The power of the pachanga form and participants’ interactive roles are channeled to another goal. Corporate marketers working for Univision and Budweiser, for instance, co-opt and shift the political pachanga to their own ends of declaring their authority. Such work rechannels the pachanga’s challenge into an arena of safe competition controlled by the companies. Risk exists, primarily in advance of the party (in the invitation, creating buzz before the event), but is not inherent to it. In their events, corporate marketers tightly control the power of the image. These actors handle the pachanga form’s indexical attitude of resistance. They are also aware of the capacity of channels (e.g., the overlap and interaction of word-of-mouth discussion produced at the event and of the televised film clip of the event) to magnify and snowball discourse and thus actively work to produce specific images and sentiment at the event. Compared to Univision /Budweiser’s awareness of the power of both intimate and large pachangas to elicit participatory engagement and clever event manipulation, local and national political marketers clumsily handle this power.

A T R A N S N AT I O N A L - L I K E PAC H A N G A : A LOC AL, BIG, DIRECT LIVE-MUSIC EVENT After Lopez’s Event—Thursday, October 19, 2000 One of the most exciting moments of my fieldwork awaited at Greg’s Ballroom. As I drove west on U.S. Highway 83, a patch of construction forced me to move from the bright heights of the interstate to the access road, which was

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sporadically lit from the convenience stores that intermittently lined the road. The lanes narrowed and traffic slowed. Past the small town of Mission, the sign reading “Palmview” signaled that the dance hall was nearby. Red brake lights flashed and streams of pickup trucks pulled off to the right. Simultaneously I saw Greg’s Ballroom off to my right and heard the Norteño music. I glimpsed a trailer rig supporting a large Aliseda sign. Following the orange cones and observing the sea of vehicles in disbelief, I asked one of the men directing traffic if this was in fact Judge Aliseda’s dance. Answering in the affirmative while gesturing me forward, he warned me that the lot was full. Surveying with astonishment the acres of field converted to parking, I rolled forward. Meandering down the makeshift lanes, I watched as coveys of young people animatedly left their vehicles and sauntered toward the dance hall. The sharp accordion-charged music from the hall mixed with the boom-boom bass pounding out of the sparkling plum-toned low-rider car just ahead of me. Grass brushed under our cars as I followed, bumping down lengthy lane after lane seeking a parking place. We would reach the end of one lane only to reverse all the way back. Finally, I made a parking space where a lane came to a point. Heart pounding and mind buzzing, I quickly strode across the vast, dark parking lot toward the bright lights and blaring sound coming from the entrance to Greg’s Ballroom. Passing the black, vibrating radio-station van with neon pink lettering, gaping at the crowds of young people, I arrived at the door. As I waited in line, I stood behind a girl in a gold lamé halter top and a boy in tight-fitting Wrangler jeans and a brown ostrich-skin belt whose buckle was adorned with a white-stitched caracara (the eagle on the Mexican flag). After I waited outside for a few minutes, a man dressed like a law officer waved me inside. There were so many people that I barely made it through the door. Noise, humidity, and packed youth overwhelmed and pumped the air. Directly in front of the foyer stood a staircase overflowing with scantily clad young women. I stepped around them and made my way into the dance floor area. I surveyed the sea of people in front of me, realizing that I had no way to accurately gauge how many people were present. I estimated fifteen hundred. I scrunched my way around the perimeter of the heaving ballroom. To the right, left, and back stood rows of tables topped with empty Miller Light, Budweiser, and Sprite cans. Scattered between these cylindrical monuments to consumption reverently sat Aliseda’s wafer-thin push cards. At the far left of the hall, crowds of men formed a knotted human line stringing out from the concession stand.

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I glimpsed a lady sitting next to these men at one of the tables strewn with cans. Catching her breath between dances, she sat in a pink, raw silk dress in the metal folding chair intently reading a “KEEP JUDGE ALISEDA” card. One side reinforced Ernie Aliseda’s campaign theme of equality: “As your Judge, my commitment is to continue to [in red print] “KEEP JUSTICE ALIVE” through fairness, impartiality and equal treatment to all who appear in the 398th District Court.” The other side focused on family, featuring a photograph of “Judge Ernest Aliseda and family.” The candidate and his wife stood side by side, with Ernie holding their infant and the three additional children fanned out in front of the couple. Three sections printed in red type overlapped the photo: “A Proven Leader,” “Personal Background,” and “Community Service.” Beneath these red headings followed lists in blue print. “A Proven Leader” bulleted Aliseda’s legal experience: U.S. Army Reserve Officer; Judge Advocate General Corps/President; Hidalgo County Bar Association /Past President; Hidalgo County Young Lawyers Association / Past Board Member Texas Young Lawyers Association; State Bar of Texas/ Appointed to the 398th State District Court by Governor George W. Bush (emphasis mine). “Personal Background” told of his credentials and background: “Raised in McAllen, Texas; Married with four children /Graduate of Texas A&M University/Law Degree ( J.D.)[,] University of Houston Law Center/Fluent in Spanish and English.” “Community Service” outlined the candidate’s activity with family issues: “Member of Hidalgo County Task Force on Family Violence/Member of McAllen Citizen’s League/ Volunteer with Mujeres Unidas [domestic violence organization] and for various local civic organizations/ Volunteer Judge, McAllen Teen Court /T-Ball and Youth Soccer Coach.” A dramatic stop in the music drew our attention away from the cards and toward the stage. Aliseda stood to the left of the stage, indicating that he was preparing to speak. I pushed my way through the crowd to a spot directly beneath the front of the stage, a space typically packed with an encampment of the performer’s loyal listeners. As I reached around my back to pull a tape-recorder from my bag, I recognized four twenty-somethings from Letty Lopez’s pachanga who had just arrived. They made their way toward me, still covered in a set of round campaign stickers—black-and-red “Letty Lopez” stickers and the bluered-and-white “Gore, Lieberman 2000” stickers. The loud music made conversation difficult, but we exchanged incredulous exclamations about the high turnout and younger-than-average crowd. They, too, were staring out and gaping in awe. A big Aliseda sign hung from the wall at the back of the stage. After a dramatic introduction, Aliseda took the stage and began to speak.

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¿Tengo su apoyo? (cheers and applause) ¡Con su apoyo vamos a ganar! La justicia no tiene partido. . . . No me importa se alguien es cobre, rico. Todos están iguales en los ojos de la ley. . . . Soy padre, cuatro hijos. . . . El 21 de octubre empiezo la elección . . . Ayúdame mi gente. Mi puerta está abierta. . . . Por favor, llámame. Yo soy el juez de la gente. Gracias. (Recorded, Mission, Texas, October 19, 2000) [Do I have your support? With your support we are going to win! Justice does not have a party. . . . It is not important to me if someone is wealthy, rich. We are all equal in the eyes of the law. . . . I am a father, four children. . . . On October 21, the election starts. . . . Help me, my people. My door is open. . . . Please, call me. I am the judge of the people. Thank you.] While he spoke, a chant of “Ali-seda, Ali-seda” rolled forward from the back of the hall. The Letty Lopez supporters around me joined in, “Ali-seda, Aliseda.” With so many people, so close together, the level of energy conveyed by the bold-sounding, loud voices chanting “Ali-seda” repeatedly in unison and swelling toward the stage amazed the supporters around me as well as Aliseda’s political team. After Aliseda finished speaking, his corrido played: “Juez Aliseda es derecho/Nadie puede negar/Aliseda no se vende/Aunque no quieran comprar . . .” The corrido paused, and Joel Cano, a long-legged young man sporting a sumptuous, caramel-colored ostrich skin coat and matching boots 1 began reanimating the crowd: “Es muy importante para todas las mujeres están aquí. Puedes contar con el cien por ceinto.” [It is very important that all of the women are here. You can count on him one hundred percent.] He also reminded the crowd that Judge Aliseda does not have a price, and that he does not charge a tax or fee (impuesto) to win. As he uttered “impuesto,” the corrido began, but Cano pressed forward with his point, repeating that women are important and that Aliseda is not for sale. Finally, the corrido at full volume began, “Recuerda bien mi gente/ Vota Aliseda primero/En la elección de noviembre/Juez Aliseda es el bueno . . .” and Aliseda exited the stage. Aliseda, standing off to the right of the stage, spent the next twenty minutes posing for pictures with groups of young women. This act of celebrity hooked into a genre of discourse surrounding the candidate concerning his handsomeness. Often women would speak of his “youth” as code for how good-looking he is. In the glamour-infused post-performance photo session, the candidate and his master of ceremonies, Cano, played up their sexuality

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as a form of appeal to the women present. It provided an enticing piece of culture to talk about and generate excitement around. With the bulk of the speeches finished, the next Norteño band, Luis y Julián, began playing. The crowd returned dancing to the floor. There was not a mass exodus. Between songs, the lead singer would remind dancers, “Vota Aliseda.” To escape the hall’s heat and humidity, I went outside for some fresh air. On the front porch, I ran into a group of Aliseda’s core workers, including Zorayda Alaniz, called “Z,” Aliseda’s assistant with whom I had many conversations about pachanga dates and times. Despite the hour and their pachanga fatigue, this core group of ten chatted loudly and hurriedly about this event. In the spirit of ritual effervescence, they explained that, with Aliseda’s successful election due to events like this, they are “history makers.” Individually, they repeated “history maker” as if meditating. They stood over me, reading my notepad to ensure that I properly chronicled their names and role in this event. After making a list of their names, titled “History Makers,” and enjoying their hard-earned moment of bravado, I began asking questions. They promptly introduced me to the promoter and “political organizer” of the event. He informed me that the sole form of advertising for this livemusic political event was U.S.-Mexican radio, and for this pachanga they extensively advertised on his stations. He suggested that his son could explain the event’s organization more clearly and introduced me to Joel Cano, the dandy I had just seen on stage in the ostrich-skin coat. Joel Cano told me that the four bands cost approximately sixty thousand dollars. The dance hall owner allowed them use of the venue for free, but the owner made a profit in beer sales easily exceeding one hundred thousand dollars. Pointing to the fire marshal and line of people at the door, he added that over five thousand people were in attendance—the maximum legal capacity of the ballroom. I found this event exciting because of the younger-than-average age of the attendees, and the large number of people in attendance (sixteen times as many people as attended Letty Lopez’s pachanga). The emphasis on “youth, not ethnicity” and sexuality seemed pulled straight out of a transnational marketer’s promotional kit. My conversation with the promoters 2 indicated that, in fact, it was: Cano’s office is in Mexico, his agency has a website, and he markets thirty-five bands that play across the United States and Mexico. The promoters handled it like a large corporate transnational marketer’s “livemusic event” in that the show was highly visual.3 The musical show was as much about lights, costume, and personality as it was about sound. With this combination, the potential to reach and energize young voters was formidable.

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Compare this to Ed Aparicio’s campaign, which articulated a broader interpretation of citizenship, that is, as a lifetime of activity that emerges outside of the time and space of the campaign, starting at a young age. Public schooling is a centerpiece in this form of citizenship (e.g., Aparicio’s involvement in Red Ribbon Week and his speeches to school classes) as contextualized in his videos. And his campaign corrido, which captured the community’s interest, was written by a friend and given to him. On the other hand, Aliseda’s event was a loud political bleep that treated citizenship as an act of attending an occasional extravaganza—neatly bound within the event. It did not allow much space for politicos to circulate. It lacked the tranquil pause for eating and digesting. An emphasis was not placed on joining the campaign, but simply on responding to the stimuli of the event. Aliseda’s spectacle was a marketing event whose organizers were aware of the amount of money it would bring the dance hall— one hundred thousand dollars in beer sales. The expensive talent showcased at this event was part of the Norteño music industry, which is a male-dominated enterprise. Even though this enormous venue was donated, as well as the sixty thousand dollars in talent, in terms of matching funds, the cost of this event (including the radio publicity blitzes prior to the event and the van present at the event itself ) exceeded one hundred thousand dollars. That is a substantial amount to spend on a countywide district court election. In 1994, judges running in such contests typically spent less than this on their entire campaign (including the Democratic primary). Combine the cost of this single event with the understanding that women candidates do not raise the same amount of money as men (because they are outside of the loop of male political networks both locally and regionally), and activating democracy begins to appear like an endeavor that requires vast sums of money and that favors men. From the perspective of this event, citizenship seems like a narrow moment that favors male capital. I would argue that this is performance-enacted citizenship embedded in a style of democracy that is imperialist and heteropatriarchal (Eisenstein 1994). Moreover, the audience gathered for this pachanga raises issues of generational fragmentation. Grandparents, parents, and young children were not the primary attendees of this event. Unlike dance-hall style events, it was not set up to attract a cross-generational audience. As with the niche-marketing trend, the target audience was “youth,” and the political and musical performers appealed to this audience by presenting themselves as flashy young men. This spectacle demonstrated many points of commonality with global spectacles and perhaps foreshadows a new style of political marketing oriented toward the demands of “the next generation” (as a Pepsi commercial puts it).

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The Effectiveness of Spectacle Rather than organize an event that centralized his message and bound his material to actors as political subjects, Aliseda’s spectacle emphasized participants’ roles as spectators. It clearly divided the audience in front of the stage from the performer onstage. The metamessage was not one of “we are citizens,” reinforcing why citizens should vote or what their role is as political subjects; it presented politics as consumption—yet another leisure activity. As a political ritual, the event lacked the high formality that cues the audience to a sacred attitude that lends to its formulation as a political mission. In an event that lasted between four and five hours, Aliseda took the platform once and made a short statement that did little to persuade attendees to cross over and vote for him. His speech did not connect the objects in circulation to his agenda. There were no sample ballots, lists of early voting sites, or places and explanations of how to register. This lack of materials was so contrary to form that people approached me, asking if I was there to register voters. Webb Keane (1997: 176) explains that “incompetent performance exposes the vulnerability of the ties among words, things, and persons.” Aliseda’s speech draws our attention to this issue. Recall the female candidate’s speech from my discussion of an event’s climax (Chapter 1). In that speech, the candidate forged connections between the audience and herself through words. The interaction created in that performance moved the relationships from mere transactions to ones embedded with risk in which everyone present was implicated. Her speech, for example, gradually increased the rhetoric of connection as the performance evolved, from a smattering of “we’s” and “our’s” in the first three-quarters of her talk (#1–10) to a barrage of such language of connection in the last quarter of her speech (#11–15). She said “we” and “our” nineteen times, with the majority appearing in the final paragraph. Her utterances transformed her personal struggle into a shared one, and in the process erased distances between subjects and objects. Ritual speech, through such devices, converts the speech objects in circulation into agents of moral cohesion. They shift from commodities to objects of shared identification. Aliseda’s speech (and participants’ early exodus from the Democratic National Committee event), on the other hand, did not convert participant energy into shared identification. Aliseda’s speech borrowed a common trope, that of opening doors, but presented it in a manner that distanced the audience from the candidate. He stated, “Mi puerta esta abierta.” [My door is open]. This highly conventional image also appeared in the introduction speech for

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Letty Lopez, the introduction speech discussed in Chapter 1 for the other judicial candidate, as well as that candidate’s speech itself. Consider the difference between Aliseda’s wording and that of the female candidate: “Her message that the doors of justice should be open to all is resounding to the public” (Lopez introduction, emphasis added); “We as women are on the threshold of opening the doors to make it a women’s world. We are on the threshold ladies, we are opening the doors” (Lopez, emphasis added); and “They not only opened their doors to this beautiful place, but also they opened their hearts to us” (the candidate in Chapter 1, emphasis added). All apply the same metaphor, but Aliseda stylizes it as one of personal possession, not communal possession. He says, “My door is open.” In other words, “The door I own is open to you.” The women’s quotes speak a language of connection, “our door,” not ownership. The first quote sets up the entire group as outsiders (including the candidate): “. . . the doors of justice should be open to all,” and the statement is a moral imperative. That form of metaconnection appears simple compared to what is found in the next quote, where connection is made on multiple levels. First, as in the previous speech, “the doors” are being opened by this group together. They are not opened by someone else. Syntactic parallelism further binds this act together (e.g., “We are”) along with repetition (e.g., “We are,” “threshold,” “doors”). Opening a door is not something a man does for a woman, but an act women are carrying out together, and they know that this act (of women together opening doors) is one with a heavy symbolic charge. They are not just performing a courtesy but are telling the world that it is now a women’s world. This group is comprised of actors working with a “morally loaded” (Keane 1997: 177) purpose. From this strong introductory statement of cohesion, the candidate picks up the door metaphor and encompasses it in the realm of emotion (e.g., links it to the phrase, “opened their hearts”). These women are not investing their linguistic capital in a rhetoric of cool, rational thought (i.e., a jural, modern one). Rather, they are giving parts of themselves to a charismatic rhetoric of shared feeling and struggle. This act is more than a transaction of words as things; it is one in which “we” all are implicated. In addition to the candidate’s words, Aliseda’s actions also spoke another language, and it was not a language of connection. His way of relating to the guests during the speech gave the impression that a kind of invisible symbolic-cultural line separated the candidate from his audience. The stage and the platform seemed to be as close as he was going to get to la gente. The platform and stage provided a protective barrier—a door, if you will. At the event,

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he spent most of his time outside the dance hall, rather than circulating inside with the masses of people—for example, meandering from table to table or in and around the lengthy concession stand line. I do not want to discount the numerous symbolic lines Aliseda did cross as a Republican running in a Democratic strong-hold; for example, at the “bipartisan” Tripas Club pachanga, Aliseda dove into clusters of Democrats of whom the other Republican candidate steered clear. At events brimming with political elites, he seemed much less intimidated by those invisible barriers that custom creates and codifies. His being a former law partner of the Democratic Party County Chair, Bobby Guerra, and being “one of the boys,” may have mitigated his level of comfort in crossing thresholds at the Tripas Club pachanga. Nonetheless, at this particular event (one that was not overflowing with male political elites), the candidate seemed reticent to cross lines. He acted more like a celebrity performer who goes on the stage, performs, takes a few photographs, and then leaves than a man “of the people”— with shared experiences with which those present could connect. A unifying theme at this event at Greg’s Ballroom, from Aliseda’s speech to his song and push cards, concerns the role of money, and this theme did not add prestige to his position. The symbolic message of his pachanga—an expensive spectacle—worked against the explicit message delivered in his speech, in his corrido, and on his push cards. These sources informed recipients that he is fair by indexing the inability of money to influence his partiality (“It is not important to me if someone is wealthy, rich”) and used visual metaphors to speak of justice’s and the law’s erasure of difference (“We are equal in the eyes of the law”)—an awkward word choice at a spectacle that clearly distinguished performers from audience. Despite his talk of equality and the lack of influence money has in his court, the size of the venue and notoriety of the bands at the pachanga spoke an idiom of big money and old-style political patronage.4 The dominant metamessage of this event was, “You come to me, el patrón who provides”— not the “I will come to you” message that Aparicio so persuasively conveyed while block walking and in his radio and television broadcasts. Aliseda’s event spoke the language of hierarchy rather than egalitarianism and connection. A patina of success overlaid the event. Aliseda’s expensive pachanga appeared to be an achievement. It attracted over five thousand people. The room was animated; people responded enthusiastically to Aliseda’s speech and persona. Guests read and learned about his qualifications. Considering such markers, it seems reasonable to expect that this event generated interest in the campaign. When looking deeper, however, it becomes clear that Aliseda’s event did not seem to do much for his campaign.

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This event cost the Aliseda campaign a large sum of money, and the crowd did not reflect the standard voting demographic in Hidalgo County. Experienced politicians and musical promoters interpreted Aliseda’s event as a waste of time, money, and energy. When I enthusiastically began discussing this live-music event with so much potential to one such seasoned consultant, his response was, “It’s stupid.” He explained that the big event did not bring in voters. Those present were “not there for the candidate” but “for the music,” and he estimated that “five percent are voters, lots of young kids, sixty percent not even legal residents.” Rather cynically, he continued describing those he imagined were present: “Mexicanos who are . . . not old enough to vote are not very responsible . . . For example, [they wear] gold chains, nice exotic boots and are unemployed. They come across from Reynosa [Mexico] just to dance.” I do not endorse his characterization of those present as irresponsible, but his description of their age and dress corresponds with my field notes. While it is likely that this consultant exaggerated to make his point, the key point remains that huge live-music political events like Aliseda’s might not be the most cost-effective use of resources. Such commentators suggest that a much more effective use of time, money, and energy is hosting fundraisers and then using that money to broadcast one’s message primarily through television, but also through radio and leaflets targeted to “homeowners.” Aliseda’s event did little to accelerate metaculture (commentary) on his campaign. He did not overlap channels in a way that produced greater reflexivity. The materials he used—push cards and music— did not tightly index his candidacy. He did not tell a story. Pachangas particularly are cued for creating a personal sense of voter participation; his did not. In addition to the way in which his event was structured, the location also sent a message of vertical authority: it was held in a symbolically loaded boss-politics locale in a small town in western Hidalgo County; its large size did not speak of grassroots support; it was not a “mom-and-pop-sized” dance hall. Finally, the music sent a message of superior status instead of local connection. Rather than inviting one local band to play, Aliseda’s marketers lined up four bands, and the headliners, Luis y Julián, are a big-name group. Rather than subtly evoke a struggle against the Big Man, this pachanga evoked Aliseda’s proximity to the really Big Man. It was a brash display of his wealth without an awareness of the customs of local political culture. Democrats in South Texas thrive when they paint Republicans as rich, greedy hoarders of material and social wealth. Speeches made by local politicians— especially those surrounding Senator Joseph Lieberman’s visit to western Hidalgo County’s colonias and the Democratic National Committee event held the following day— often paint the Republican Party and its can-

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didates as primarily interested in accumulating wealth for their own ends and those of their wealthy constituents rather than redistributing goods to hardworking, poor communities. For instance, a widely loved Democratic district judge who spoke at the DNC event I describe below was depicted to me by consultants as looking like Emiliano Zapata, the dark-skinned Mexican revolutionary leader who favored radical redistributions of wealth. Judge Fernando Mancias has a long-handled mustache and smooth dark skin, and he is known as being from the people—i.e., of the working class, from a small rural town. Mancias draws from and plays off this resemblance to project an image as the leader of the righteous poor against hoarders of social, political, and economic capital—and these individuals tend to be Republican politicians. Aliseda’s public persona stands in contrast to Mancias’s Zapatista image in physical appearance, political affiliation, and family background. South Texans consider Aliseda to be light-skinned; he is clean-shaven (no mustache). He is a Republican. He is from the “city” and from a rich, professional-class, Mexican family. His event played into Mancias’s stereotype of Republicans. Ironically, the way he spent this money pointed to him as “fat” and possibly corrupt (cf. Alonso on Northern Mexico: 1995; Pitt-Rivers: 1971). To borrow a suggestion from Pitt-Rivers, Aliseda’s pachanga may not have bestowed prestige because it was not employed in a morally approved manner (1971 [1954]: 63), that is, broadcasting a populist message of connection. In addition to this transnationally produced pachanga put on for a local judicial candidate, the national Democratic campaign hosted a pachanga to kindle national and local “Hispanic” interest in the Gore-Lieberman candidacy. While Aliseda’s live-music event at Greg’s Ballroom was well attended, attracting and invigorating over five thousand borderlanders, the Democratic National Committee live-music event did not generate widespread or enthusiastic local interest in the Democratic presidential ticket. At the DNC event, I counted 365 people, and others in attendance expressed shock and dismay at the low turnout. The work done by the DNC Hispanic marketing team 5 highlights the ways in which generating an audience and appealing to that audience might fail. Through the critique of a local political specialist, Mike Sinder, below I focus on the ways in which this live-music event sponsored by the DNC and the Hidalgo County Democratic Party failed to coalesce. Both the Aliseda event and the Democratic Party’s live-music event were timed in conjunction with early voting. But the DNC event did not generate an audience and interest because organizers: 1) advertised by print media only rather than aural media, such as soundcars; 2) produced uninteresting leaflets; 3) selected a

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poor day and time; 4) organized the event ineffectually; and 5) lacked strong coordination that failed to link with other groups such as labor unions and Lieberman’s team. Gore’s people demonstrated a lack of savvy; they did not appear to know how to draw from and coordinate groups.

A N AT I O N A L PAC H A N G A : ( I N T E N D E D TO B E ) A B I G , D I R E C T, A N D I N D I R E C T L I V E - M U S I C E V E N T On Saturday, October 14, one week before early voting began, the Democratic National Committee and the Hidalgo County Democratic Party staged a live-music event that had many of the elements likely to produce an exciting rally. It featured the well-known Tejano band Little Joe y La Familia at Archer Park in downtown McAllen. This event showcased political personalities prominent on the national, state, and local levels. Following Little Joe’s musical performance, nationally known political figures Henry Cisneros (president of Univision and former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development), Dolores Huerta (a United Farm Workers cofounder), and U.S. Congressman Rubén Hinojosa addressed the audience. Prominent statewide Democratic speakers included Texas Democratic Party Chair Molly Beth Malcolm and former Texas Land Commissioner Gary Mauro; prominent regional Democrats like Cameron County Judge Gilberto Hinojosa, popular local Judge Fernando Mancias, and local judicial candidates Aída Salinas-Flores and Letty Lopez also appeared. The Democrats went further than presenting a live-music event that featured speeches by known political players. This moment of celebrity was also a fundraiser. Simultaneous with Little Joe’s free outdoor performance, the Democrats hosted a fundraiser across the street and upstairs in the elegant Renaissance Hotel, charging five hundred dollars per person to attend. According to Democratic Party County Chair Bobby Guerra, they raised seventy-five thousand dollars from this event. Guests informed me that they sipped champagne, nibbled hors-d’œuvres, and had the opportunity to chat personally with invited speakers. Between Little Joe’s performance and the speeches, the guests left the air-conditioned hotel and made their way to the guarded and shaded VIP section reserved in Archer Park. The fundraiser and Little Joe y La Familia charged citizens of Hidalgo County in distinct ways. But attendees of both events had one more reason to be excited about this pachanga: everyone had been reading, hearing, and seeing coverage of Joe Lieberman’s visit to McAllen and a colonia in La Joya the preceding day. On Friday, October 13, Lieberman toured Hidalgo County, making the

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Democratic Party highly visible on front pages, televised newscasts, and as a topic on radio shows. Lieberman spent Thursday night in McAllen, and on Friday morning he and the national press corps toured a colonia in La Joya. They visited with residents of three homes; they also dined at President Bill Clinton’s favorite Mexican restaurant in McAllen, La Casa del Taco. Despite the press coverage and excitement surrounding Joe Lieberman, Henry Cisneros, Dolores Huerta, the fundraising event, and Little Joe y La Familia’s performance, the live-music event attracted fewer South Texans than anticipated. I counted 365 people at the event, and more than half of the attendees left long before the speeches finished. Barely enough people attended for me to describe Archer Park as spotted with spectators. That spectators would leave early made an acute statement about the event’s inability to generate and sustain interest. Of the many events I attended during the 2000 election, this was the first time I observed such behavior. Adherents to the Democratic Party in South Texas have a strong sense of etiquette, which includes respectfully listening to and, at appropriate moments, praising speeches. Only after the speeches end do people seem to feel at liberty to leave, when they frequently and politely exit en masse.6 The untimely and meaningful movement of people at Archer Park punctuated the low turnout and fizzled enthusiasm that this political event came to signify to local political marketers and those present. The early exit of the participants also calls attention to the vulnerability of ties among words, things, and persons. In other words, having a ritual overflowing with formal elaboration—speeches, music, signs, color— does not ensure that these transactions mediate social relations in a manner that creates a public. To understand what happened (or what did not happen) at the DNC event, I spoke with various media marketers from the Gore campaign. They called it a success, explaining, for example, that over one thousand people were in attendance.7 I found this assessment contrary to my observation of the numbers of people present and their behavior, so I continued trying to understand why the event itself failed to attract, generate, and sustain interest in the scene.

Politics and Marketing In The Gender of the Gift, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1988: 121) suggests that power is evidence of actors’ capacity to compel engagement and that actors measure power against the risk of unsuccessful outcomes. Coordinating an event is a dangerous act. Layers of political skill surround being able to attract people, knowing how to attract the right people, and setting the stage for a congenial mood. Another layer of politicking involves swaying people to interest their friends and family in politics and a specific election.

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Recall the pregnant woman singing “El Corrido del Juez,” children following Aparicio’s car at the Mission Citrus Parade, and residents greeting the candidate with personal questions while he was block walking. The ability to induce this force, to generate interest in citizenship beyond the “party regulars,” is one reason why Ed Aparicio, Mauro Reyna, Cecilio Garza, and Rodd Lewis find “El Corrido del Juez” exciting. It demonstrates that music—more specifically the music that Aparicio initiated, Garza wrote and performed, and Lewis marketed—has power. All three men became marked by the effects of the music’s exchange throughout Hidalgo County; it evidenced their power and extended it with its enchainment of other men, women, and children into their sphere of transactions. The various pachangas I describe demonstrated a certain power, and each iteration had strengths and weaknesses. Aliseda was able to generate a huge audience but not an audience of voters. He showed that he could produce a spectacle and bring people together, but from the perspective of political and music marketers, they were not the right people—not registered U.S. voters. On the other hand, Letty Lopez showed that she understood the subtleties of the South Texas cultural and political terrain. She generated a substantial audience of voters and tapped their sense of obligation. Her gathering of expected voters, the political rank and file, and politicos spoke of the connections of her supporters and their ability to pull the political powers of Hidalgo County together in a highly traditional manner. However, neither of these events did the work of Ed Aparicio’s corrido. They did not draw into the political process families and friends that otherwise would have stayed home. Their shortcomings show the risk involved in coordinating live-music political events.

Danger Proven:Why It Failed Longtime Democratic Party activist Mike Sinder offered a cogent explanation of what happened at the Democratic Party event in Archer Park. He echoed the opinions expressed by other cultural political specialists with whom I discussed this live-music event. While this material is drawn from that conversation with Sinder, the issues raised in this interview index sentiments expressed by other borderlanders uncomfortable with going “on the record” in critiquing party-sponsored live-music political events. Out of respect for their reservations, I quote heavily from the Sinder interview in discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the DNC event. Observers of the Archer Park event agree that it failed to arouse much local interest because of poor advertising, a poor choice of day and time, a lack of understanding of the interests of the prospective attendees, and a lack of supervision of and coordination with groups active within the Democratic

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Party. A common thread connecting these problems is a lack of expertise with event coordination on the part of the DNC and local Democratic planners, and its attendant problem of not coordinating with local cultural-political specialists. To be more specific, local Democratic workers did not advertise the pachanga in ways that reached the majority of the Democratic constituency in Hidalgo County. Many residents do not read, thus aural communicative forms—radio, television, word-of-mouth, sound car—are the most effective ways to reach and generate interest about a live-music event. Sinder explains: I would like to have seen a sound car working that morning, which probably would have been playing music by Little Joe very loudly with a voice-over telling people to come to the rally at three o’clock or that there would be Little Joe at three o’clock. The only other advertising that I know of done is newspaper advertising, which at that type of rally I think is very frivolous. It may’ve served other purposes, but in terms of generating the audience they were looking for . . . it did no work at all. (Personal communication, McAllen, October 19, 2000) According to Sinder, this lack of aural advertisement resulted from a lack of supervision from the DNC and a lack of experience among the workers affiliated with the DNC in the Hidalgo County Democratic Party. Sinder begins by explaining, from his two decades of experience, how the event should have been coordinated from the DNC end and then explains the missing role of the locals: S I N D E R : . . . Every time The Function was going on, I have been in-

volved in it since 1980. This is the first time we had a The Function without heavy end supervision from outside. I don’t mean heavyhanded in a nasty fashion. I mean they came in and said, “OK. We are going to do radio. This is what we’re gonna do. What stations do you recommend?” And they saw to it that it got done. They said, “We’re going to do leafleting.” They prepared the leaflet. They did this, and would rely on us to assist them, rather than take the lead. And so we had people taking the lead that were incompetent to take the lead in each of those areas. Nobody made contact with the old folks’ centers to bus their people in. . . . I don’t know how much,

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if any, contact was made with the unions, other than the farm workers, to get their assistance. Traditionally if we get sound cars, we get ’em from the unions. They have the attachments to put on cars. No contact was made. I have a feeling that there was little, if any, contact made because one guy from one of the unions was there at the end of it inviting Congressman Hinojosa to a function that they were having at the same time. . . . M D : And the reason is that there were not people with the DNC coordinating that for you? S I N D E R : Well, I am not one hundred percent sure why that particular thing was not coordinated, but it should have been. M D : Do you think it is a combination of Gore’s people trying to do something new and also a combination of the new leadership here or . . . S I N D E R : Certainly, the new leadership here did not have a lot of experience. It’s Bobby’s [Bobby Guerra, the Hidalgo County Democratic Party Chair] first time. The people that he was relying on, [name excluded], he has never done a big rally; Letty [not the candidate], she’s done some work in some campaigns, but when I mentioned her to one of the media people, he started laughing [Sinder laughs]. M D : Not a good sign. For this pachanga, the DNC marketers advertised solely through print media, leaflets, and the newspaper; this did not accelerate discourse. Moreover, they did not produce the leaflets in a manner that enticed readers. A glaring problem with the leaflets was the Spanish. The organizers produced double-sided leaflets, one side in Spanish and the other in English, and the text was translated literally from English to Spanish. As a consequence, the Spanish side read in an awkward fashion. But this error is minor compared to other mistakes made in the leafleting strategy. The organizers produced the publicity piece in a manner that generated little interest: it lacked “splash.” Sinder explains how “splash” works: S I N D E R : The third component that was supposedly in effect was the

leafleting. And probably if it would have been effective, people [would] have it in their hands when they get there. But since they didn’t see any there, then the handouts were not effective . . . Someone would look at it and be interested in reading what it says. And so, in big letters, “COME SEE LITTLE JOE!” “COME SEE HENRY CISNEROS!” [raising voice in exclamation] whatever you

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think the hook is. That’s what you splash with. That flyer looked like an institutional invitation. You know everything was nice and in order. M D : It didn’t even have musical notes or anything to indicate that there was a band. S I N D E R : No splash, no hook. It was just an announcement. In addition to advertising without splash, the promoters decided on an uncommon time and day to hold the event. Saturday is not a popular day for pachangas, and three o’clock in the afternoon is not a good time of day for holding outside events. People work at this time, and 3 p.m. is almost always the hottest time of day in this region.8 Sinder explains that Sunday is a superior day for pachangas—not only because it is traditional, but also because Saturday events may exclude two significant demographic segments— older and younger voters. Older citizens are not likely to come on Saturday, especially without busing from the “old folks’ centers,” and younger citizens are probably unable to come because they are working. Sinder describes statewide candidates going to pachangas in small towns, not people from across the county coming into the city. He also outlines another problem with holding an event on Saturday: S I N D E R : The problem is: number one, three o’clock on a Saturday af-

ternoon is a miserable time . . . So, [in] the Valley unlike almost anyplace else, Sunday is a great day for political events. . . . Here, traditionally they do events on Sunday. . . . I mean you go out this weekend, on a Sunday afternoon drive around, and you will find political events in every little town. There will be a pachanga here, a pachanga there, and you’ll find them. That’s just when they do them. I remember in statewide races years ago, candidates would, you know, want to come down on tour. They’d want to come on Saturday. [Sinder would tell them]: “Don’t come down on Saturday. Come on Sunday.” [Imitating their response] “Well, why Sunday?” [Sinder explains] “Sunday’s the day.” They’d come down here, in the primary season, then when we had a lot more races going on. We could take a candidate on Sunday starting at 11, go to no [one] place for more than one hour, and stay busy until ten at night going to political functions. M D : Wow.

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S I N D E R : Yeah. Because every little community has pachangas. Every

candidate, every J.P. [justice of the peace] candidate, every constable candidate, they all have pachangas going on. And you just stay busy with them, and those are Sunday deals. They don’t do them on Saturdays. If candidates come on Saturday, there is no place to go. Our people [Lower Rio Grande Valley inhabitants] work on Saturday. It is hard to get people that are working to come to a function. So if you are doing Saturday, you try and do it after work, in the evening. Saturday afternoon is just difficult. If we could have just gone as late as 5, 5:30, we could have gotten people leaving the downtown businesses. But at 3? M D : It’s dead. S I N D E R : It’s difficult. And so that was ill-fated. As I say, Saturday is not a good day. You do the evening, or you do a Sunday. Saturday afternoon is not good. This lack of consideration for cultural practices went beyond attracting South Texans to the event. Organizers also demonstrated a lack of coordination with Lieberman’s people and their schedule. Sinder explains that with a little bit of coordination between Gore’s Hispanic team from the DNC and Lieberman’s people, this could have been an exciting event held on Thursday night. As I learned at the Lopez and Aliseda events, Thursday night is good for livemusic events. The Gore and Lieberman campaign staffs did not coordinate, however, and as Sinder explains, it took the intervention of a local advertising agent for Gore’s people to realize the problem: M D : So the only reason they had it at that time was because of Little

Joe, or did some people actually think that Saturday was a better day? S I N D E R : Well, number one: I think they [the DNC] thought Saturday was a good day. Number two: it couldn’t be later in the day because of Little Joe’s schedule. They [The DNC] initially, we are not supposed to know this, but they were trying to do Lieberman here at the same time. They didn’t realize that Lieberman couldn’t commit on Saturday. Because it wasn’t Lieberman’s people planning it, it was a different part of the DNC that’s not familiar with Jewish rules. Lieberman doesn’t travel on Saturday; they didn’t realize that. They called a local ad agency to assist with the visit, and they said “Lieberman.”

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And, he [the ad man] said, “Well Lieberman won’t be able to come.” [Imitating the DNC representative:] “What do you mean?” [Sinder inserts laughter into his commentary, highlighting the absurdity of the entire episode.] [Ad man:] “Lieberman doesn’t travel on Saturdays.” [DNC representative:] “Oh, we didn’t know that.” M D : Right. No idea? S I N D E R : They had no clue. So, I think that was originally the plan that there was a hole in his schedule that day; and unbeknownst to them, the hole in his schedule that day was intentional. [Laughter] . . . We would’ve been much better advised if we would’ve had done it on Thursday night while he was here. It would have worked out perfect if we would have done a rally on Thursday night, same location, everything the same but on Thursday night and then tour the colonias on Saturday [he meant Friday], and we’d have had a crowd there. M D : And the reason why you say Thursday night is better is because of Lieberman? S I N D E R : Because he was here. Certainly having Lieberman would have been a bigger draw, I think, than Henry [Cisneros], and the number of people that showed up at the park thinking that Lieberman was going to be there was just astounding. This moves the discussion to another problem: the lack of supervision provided by the DNC live-music event marketers. For Sinder, the inexperience of the DNC live-event coordinator and his team was evidenced in actions ranging from not taking into account Lieberman’s schedule to not knowing how to stage an event. This disconnect occurred to such an extent that in the first sentence of his interview Sinder slips, saying that the DNC team was absent. Sinder highlights their failings by comparing this event coordination to those in the 1984 Mondale and 1988 Dukakis presidential campaigns: S I N D E R : Yeah. [The DNC] did not have an advance team down here.

They did not have experienced advance people down here, and that hurts . . . He [The DNC leader] was asking questions instead of giving orders a lot of the time. They should have been giving orders . . . He was the one in charge, and he was a nice guy. And I am not sure what his experience is. I am used to dealing with guys who we’d sit in a bar and chat, and they’d talk about, you know,

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how they blocked off a street in New York to get the traffic to flow into where their rally was so they’d automatically have a crowd. You know guys that think like that and have experience doing that. M D : They’re savvy. S I N D E R : We didn’t have anybody like that here. M D : . . . I did speak with some of the other people down with the Gore team, and they are very inexperienced. . . . It doesn’t seem like he had a lot of experience around this kind of politics. All of the people they brought down were Hispanic men, young Hispanic men. S I N D E R : . . . They were all from the Hispanic portion of the DNC. I can remember in ’84 —I can’t remember the guy’s name. I remember he was a Puerto Rican. He was the guy that came down with Mondale, and we had two thousand people on a weekday afternoon, for a primary event for Mondale in the Donna city square. [He] spoke from the steps of city hall in Donna. That guy, he was the one talking about diverting the street in New York City, he could understand those kinds of things. He came down. He did a lot of dictating, and we did a lot of dictating to him. But basically, he knew what he was doing. With Dukakis in ’88, they sent guys, didn’t send Hispanic guys down. But they sent guys down that were experienced with crowd building. They knew what they were doing because that is what they had done. They had worked in outreach or voter ID and all of these other areas. They had worked in crowd building for events. I remember we used Palmer Pavilion, which is a horrible place, but it was the only place we could come up with. And he came up with the idea of borrowing a giant flag that flies over one of the automobile dealerships . . . because that could cut the room in half so that we could fill it up easier. M D : Yeah. S I N D E R : He knew what he was doing. . . . Some of it was the kind of things I did. In Palmer Pavilion, we set up tables and chairs so that it would look full if we got to two hundred people. We were expecting five hundred people. So we had a crew of kids hired to set up so that in a rush they could run in and set up more tables and chairs because of this fantastically large crowd that we were not expecting, even though we were. But we made the plan to do it all that way. It turned out that we had a much bigger crowd than we ever expected.

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All of those things were planned. In contrast to this kind of approach that reflects thoughtful preparation for a range of scenarios at an event, the supervisor of the DNC team was uncertain where to set the stage, much less take into account a small turnout. For example, Little Joe y La Familia’s sets and the speeches lasted for almost three hours, and they did not set up bleachers or make arrangements for non-VIPs to sit. This would have been fine if they had put the stage in a place where people could sit in the grass under shade trees. Instead, the stage was set in front of the only concrete and unshaded zone of the park, which during the heat of the day does not invite people to come closer. Sinder details more ways in which the DNC team lacked foresight: I never heard [the DNC lead man] mention, “What if we only have five hundred people? How are we going to arrange this?” . . . I mean he decided where the stage was going to be. And the stage was in the most awkward place in the park for dealing with a situation, “If we don’t have a big crowd, how do we make it big?” in that it had the concrete in front of it. So it limited what we could do in terms of pushing people in . . . . You don’t do things that way. For the VIPs, who primarily came from the fundraiser, the DNC people placed the bleachers far from the stage, in the shade provided by the gazebo, and cordoned them off. Guards ensured that only the right people entered the bleacher zone. Bleachers, like tables and chairs, can be instrumental in directing crowd flow: S I N D E R : I had wanted to use the bleachers flanking the stage. Well,

if you use the bleachers flanking the stage, you have created a small area. Well, we didn’t have anything flanking the stage so it was wide open on both sides. You saw how people were stretched out on both sides. . . . You can enclose it and always open it up. But if it starts out open, you can’t close it up. Reasonably, you can’t. It is easy to open it up. It’s hard to close it up. M D : Yeah. S I N D E R : I always put the VIPs in front because you’re sure to fill the VIP section. He put the VIPs in back. It’s not somebody experienced at doing that kind of function, and then he had a misplaced idea of what kind of drawing card Henry Cisneros has.

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Despite this lack of engagement between the local and national event coordinators, it is important to look at what did happen at this event. On the ground and at the local level, this DNC event did not attract South Texans, but the Democratic National Committee’s Hispanic media marketing team transformed the live event into a publicity vehicle and sent out national television feeds, marketing to Hispanics in the battleground states of Michigan, Ohio, and Florida. The messages broadcast at these crucial sites emphasized connections. Speeches that afternoon at the rally and newspaper reports stressed communicating with family and friends in these highly contested sites to vote and to vote Gore-Lieberman. Through this media message, the event attempted to drum up excitement in Hispanic communities across the United States. How pachangas are promoted and organized selects participants and sets their roles— e.g., as VIP, as College Democrat, as UFW member. More specifically, a ladies’ tea was advertised through written invitations mailed to select citizens; a Norteño live-music event was advertised to the public on select radio stations; a kickoff party featuring Little Joe y La Familia was advertised publicly in the local newspaper. A fundraiser held inside the Renaissance Hotel and the Tejano music outside divided participants along class lines: those invited guests who were capable and willing to contribute a fairly sizable donation to the Democratic Party and those who were not.

CONCLUSION The two events described in this chapter, the DNC’s and Aliseda’s, were distinct variations on the political pachanga. Aliseda’s stylized spectacle, which attracted five thousand people, marked a successful moment of live-music event promotion (in that it drew a sizable crowd). The DNC and Hidalgo County Democratic Party’s live-music event drew only a few hundred people and ultimately failed to compel engagement. This discussion is significant for a few reasons. First, it underscores the importance of having a well-focused strategy tailored to local culture. The nationally organized pachanga failed to attract and sustain a large and interested crowd, and this situation highlights the perils of organizing and throwing a live direct event. Paradoxically, the national television audience was not affected by this failure, since the DNC only broadcast its narrowly focused pictures. In addition to channeling a message across the United States, the Democratic Party also raised money. These factors suggest why the Gore Hispanic media and event teams called the event a success while local workers saw it as a failure.

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Second, Aliseda’s mass music spectacle, on the other hand, was attuned to local culture and the transnational live-music event form —but not to voters. Locally based politicians and musical promoters interpreted Aliseda’s event, and pachangas in general, as a waste of time, money, and energy. The traveling and multi-event attendance exhausts the individual candidate, simultaneously sapping and thinly spreading their energy (and campaign dollars). Commentators suggest that a more effective use of time, money, and energy is hosting fundraisers and then using the money raised to broadcast one’s message primarily through television and then through radio and leaflets. Aliseda’s event was not a publicity vehicle, grasped by the media, and broadcast, garnering increased publicity. Events produced by Budweiser, Univision, and Pulido (described in Chapter 7) are attuned to local political culture, and they generate multimedia publicity. Third, corporate marketers for companies succeed in bridging these chasms by organizing and generating an exciting event that uses the event as a vehicle for multimedia publicity. Corporate marketers move the conversation toward the channeling of participant roles stimulated by methods of promotion that vary from event to event. This also guides our conversation toward other business elements inherent in politics, such as the role of business networks in political action and “live-music event” and “ethnic marketing” as modes of channeling events and participant interaction roles. In this chapter, I treated the pachanga as a nexus of political acts flowing in sequence across campaign time. One encounter (Aliseda’s) did not move discourse across politico-scapes and another (the DNC’s) did move discourse, and in the process pulled together identities and identifications in the hope of momentarily dominating a citizen’s subjectivity—by drawing them together, reifying them, and quickly catapulting them to their purposes. Such instantiation displays power working to construct and dominate political fields. This account of the relationship between power and the political considers the forces of identification, motion, and time in centralizing, in making “state” and “citizen” appear as legitimate commodities whose interaction justifies a potent image—that of democracy.9 In the following chapter, I describe how local marketers use a pachanga to teach national corporate marketers how to use live events to market “ethnically.” Marketers treat actors as consumers— emphasizing “buying power”—and turn them into savory demographic morsels palatable to national corporate branders.

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Ace Hardware

SIX

National Corporate Marketers Learn How the Locals Do It

Hispanics are a major market force out there, and more of corporate America is gearing to go after this share because of growth. [We are] doing a major association with Broadway and Ace. The Tejano music industry is growing dramatically. The death of Selena put it into a stall, but it grew dramatically. Everyone is going after Hispanic market share. Ace is not doing enough advertising catered to the Hispanic market. . . . Ace has committed to analyze this. [I/We] want them to affiliate with the Pulido family from the Valley. [The] tradition of Hispanic [is] very family, and Pulido is all family. — a hardware marketer, november 2000 This statement anticipates the process of a group of national corporate officers and marketers learning about and making plans for their next campaign. Central to this process is a discourse about Hispanic market share in which music and family play a prominent role. The commentary above shows marketers beginning to understand the area’s potential: “This is a market with money. How do we reach them?” The sophisticated discourse of marketers in South Texas demonstrates their ability not just to reach markets but to make them. Advertising is metaculture, and this chapter concerns the process of advertising and building markets—i.e., transmitting metaculture and carving out publics. I show marketers creating markets for fellow marketers and their

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use of pachangas to do so. Their story begins with a pachanga spectacle. Spectacle is something that people look at, not participate in, and this is part of the shift in how marketers deploy pachangas.

Four Days until Election Day—Friday, October 3, 2000 County Judge Eloy Pulido arranged for us to meet at Broadway Hardware in McAllen to follow up on our interview two days earlier. Around 11 a.m., I pulled into a hardware superstore wondering why a county judge would spend five hours in such a place. I walked past workers rearranging items such as fertilizer and looked without luck for the judge. Doubts stirring, I asked a worker if he knew about Judge Pulido’s event. He looked blank and called over an assistant manager, who explained that Pulido had already been there last week. He explained that the Broadway Hardware in Edinburg was hosting an event today and that he might be there. Relieved, but running late, I exited into the ninety-degree heat and drove half an hour to the store a block away from Edinburg’s courthouse and town square.

PAC H A N G A # 1 : T E AC H I N G AC E This event was a true twenty-first-century circus. Immediately upon turning east of the square, I heard the music. Two black vans with neon pinkand-green radio call signs stood at the front of the parking lot with speakers facing multiple directions. Beside the trucks a couple of young men with microphones emceed the live broadcast. Their rapid banter flashed between Norteño songs, inviting (in Spanish) the community to join them at the Broadway Hardware pachanga right off of the square in Edinburg, featuring a raffle and fajitas (a tortilla filled with meticulously barbecued beef and pico de gallo— a chunky hot sauce made of tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and jalapeños). Circling the full parking lot, I caught the glorious scent of marinated beef grilling over mesquite wood. I finally parked and walked toward the large blue-andwhite-striped tent, which was filled with heavy black cast-iron barbecue pits (not to be confused with the lightweight butane pits found in the Midwest). Outside of the tent perched two trailers ready to serve fajitas and soft drinks. Anxious to get away from the heat, loud music, and smoke, I entered the store. I met the South Texas general manager of Broadway Hardware and representatives from Ace’s national field office and media marketing teams. I learned that this was not just an event to generate local, regional, and transborder excitement about hardware, but also a display for Ace Hardware’s corporate office, which flew down a team of planners and marketers highly interested in learning more about Hispanic marketing and transborder sales.

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This live-music event was the grand finale of their field trip before returning to their regional and national offices in Chicago and Atlanta to begin implementing their new marketing directive. Roberto Pulido—the county judge’s brother and a “brand-name” musician—sat behind a table autographing a tall stack of glossy black-and-white photographs. He conversed agreeably, speaking primarily in South Texas border vernacular, with whoever stood in line as he signed. He worked casually, but his long, bright-red Broadway Hardware apron signified that this was not a regular signing ceremony. A few minutes later, attendants entered and escorted him outside for the celebrity cook-off. The fajita cook-off—held outside at the edge of the big tent—pitted Pulido and a news anchor for the local television station Channel 5 (KRGV). Ace and Channel 5 organized the competition, and they planned to donate the proceeds to Channel 5’s philanthropy, “Wednesday’s Child,” which collects money for a different local orphan every week. Another newscaster from Channel 5, Letty Valdez Garza, was also present to document the pachanga competition, which was being filmed and packaged for Channel 5’s viewing public. While the celebrities grilled meat in the South Texas heat under multimedia scrutiny, the team of Broadway/Ace managers and marketers remained in the air-conditioned building animatedly conveying their plans to reach a transnational Hispanic market. The Hispanic market they were trying to reach included consumers from Texas, northern Mexico, and the Latino diaspora in the United States (within these groups, they specified by language, style, age, and buying power). Broadway’s South Texas general manager demonstrated sociolinguistic awareness when he explained that old-style, general, mass-market advertising no longer works; marketers must target. He pointed out that at this event, two radio stations and a cable television station were onsite; one radio station targets the northern part of the region, the other the southern. Mass marketing, in addition to being inefficient in reaching people, is expensive. Rather than waste precious advertising dollars on a mass campaign, he explained that Broadway (like most companies today; see Turow 1997) chooses to be more strategic in its marketing because it provides a “higher return on [our] investment.” He explained that the company aggressively seeks consumers and does not depend on the corporate office to market to Hispanic shoppers. (While he said this, my eyes wandered over to the clerks handing out free T-shirts emblazoned with the Broadway Hardware logo.) Sounding somewhat patronizing, he said that “Broadway calls employees ‘family’” in “the tradition of Mexican culture.” “Style is critical to coming across to the Hispanic population,” he added.

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It influences “the way that you want them to really shop and become a customer of yours,” and thus, “the way you say things is crucial” within the Hispanic market. He elaborated that when “advertising to the senior citizens [who are] very proud to be Hispanic, formal Spanish is very important to them —proper, no dialect,” whereas “younger” residents “have a lot of dialect.” In such statements, the speaker evidenced an understanding that form matters. He explained that Broadway marketed with events like this “to attract a unique audience.” Pointing to the presence of radio station FM 96.1, he said that while “good will doesn’t touch the heart and soul of people,” music and branding through the radio does. Broadway Hardware invited officials from Ace corporate in order to pursue a partnership campaign geared toward a Hispanic market. The general manager continued, telling me that the Ace corporate team “from Chicago” was highly impressed with the Valley, and that they were leaving with “a totally different view of specialty or targeting advertising.” They seemed surprised at Broadway’s “first-class and professional marketing and advertising.” For them, this was a learning expedition, and they were eager to discuss their plans and share their new knowledge. When I met with the Ace representatives, I learned that Ace’s national marketing campaign was becoming less about one campaign reaching a generic mass audience and more about chains of regional and ethnic connection. In other words, they are interested in reaching, from the centralized national headquarters in Chicago and Atlanta, specific clusters of people by region and community. National marketers, for instance, gather in Chicago or Atlanta to coordinate campaigns geared to the community, with a couple of central regions in mind. This strategy has allowed the corporate groups to join together and thus to have more buying power—the kind of partnership that they were exploring with Broadway on this trip. Ace’s marketer and officer for the eastern United States came to the Rio Grande Valley for six weeks preceding the event to investigate these possibilities. He and members of the corporate marketing team were excited about their discoveries on this trip. They considered a couple of newly acquired facts to be “a real education”: first, that Texas is a new market area, and “each community has its own culture” (e.g., the Valley, Austin, and Houston), and second, that within the Valley, the population is close-knit, with important numbers—that is, significant buying power—for communities “that close together.” Their eyes widened when they informed me that over nine hundred thousand people reside in two cities in the Rio Grande Valley and that over one million people live in Monterrey, Mexico. Monterrey’s numbers re-

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ally excited this crowd, but the scenario appeared even rosier when they recognized this region’s untapped Hispanic market anxious to spend in the United States. I was told that Mexican shoppers spend “here” (on the U.S. side, in the Valley), buy immediately, and take their goods back. They were impressed with how “very easy it is to get across” the U.S.-Mexican border 1 and how “very quick [Mexicans are] to buy.” They learned of “affluent, wealthy” Mexicans who come across primarily to shop with their special shopping passes.2 “This really exciting new info[rmation]” branded the minds of Ace’s team. Their transmission and replication of these texts carves out a particular public conditioned by this spatial-demographic rhetoric. They repeatedly affirmed their shock concerning the potential the borderlands held, especially when taking into account Mexican markets. As one national marketer said, “I didn’t realize how close Mexico is,” and “so many people, so close”— drawing out her emphasis by accentuating the “o” in “so.” Flush with conviction in their fresh awareness concerning the geography, population density, and potential buying power in the borderlands, the Ace team’s conversation shifted to marketing strategies. Music emerged as a key strategic device. They seemed to understand the formal power of music to elicit participatory engagement, and they realized that it also can index social gatherings and family occasions. As we enjoyed this pachanga, the team spoke generally of music, family, and “brand” musical names as being central to their Hispanic marketing campaign. An individual from the Ace corporate office chimed in: “I think music is going to be a part of it, but I don’t know how.” He speculated about Roberto [Pulido’s] “tremendous power” and reputation in “all markets,” offering that they need to see if they can “partner” to “solidify.” They liked the idea of partnering with Roberto Pulido because his “very strong family values” might help them “to capture a younger audience.” This concern with public image aligned with another comment made by an Ace corporate visitor, who added that part of the company’s shift to target marketing would include talking to neighborhoods and family. One of the corporate officers explained that on this trip, he ran into a guy from Chicago who was visiting family, and they talked about neighborhoods and family. Then, a marketer highlighted the ties between South Texas and the Chicago area: “Aurora, Illinois, is fifty percent Hispanic.” And they juxtaposed the style of interaction in Hidalgo County with that of Chicago, noting, “People here are very nice, cordial, unlike Chicago.” On that note, the team disbanded, going outside to get a fajita and observe the contest and increasingly intense media coverage.

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Lisa Lechtner, the advertising supervisor, remained behind and continued to discuss how music could help Ace’s campaign. Using music in sponsorship ties the company to the community and has the potential to attract many people. Music is connected to the corporation’s strategy of using the brand to reach people at the grass-roots, neighborhood, and community levels. It relies on using brand-name recognition to relate the national to regional and local levels. Presently, according to a Gallup poll Ace commissioned, Ace is at the top in terms of “mind awareness.” The Ace brand is ranked third in brand recognition among hardware retailers. Lechtner highlighted the point that, even though its annual advertising budget of thirty million dollars is far less than Home Depot’s hundred million, the company is still able to stay in the minds of consumers. It plans to grow into more local-level promotions, such as this live-music event, in order to sustain its momentum and build loyalty and attachment to community. It “always” works to host something “like this barbecue,” which includes a few marketing elementals: charity (like the Children’s Miracle Network), music as part of the background (radio), glamour (Pulido), and draw (Pulido and radio marketing). Using radio to broadcast music and event sponsorship appear ideal for increasing local-level brand attachment for a couple of reasons. First, the concept of using music appealed to Lechtner because it “transcends” difference, and its habituation within the radio medium is ideal because it is cheaper than television advertising. She said that she found music to be a useful marketing mechanism because it stands out, crosses barriers, and connects with “a culture within cultures.” She expressed a keen concern about connecting across the many styles of Spanish spoken in the United States and has found that music is an excellent remedy to this problem: “Audiences can be from any background and enjoy the music; for example, anyone can listen to Gloria Estefan and enjoy the sound.” She advocated “moving away from target into transcendent marketing, in which ties open into ethnic markets.” She predicted seeing a clear shift. This ties into language, media, and the high cost of producing transnational and multidialectal Spanish spots. They marketed a television spot internationally, and the voiceovers quadrupled the price of production. Television is expensive and charges for such services; on the other hand, radio is “always free.” Due to the cost and challenge of producing for different Spanish dialects, they find the music marketing concept appealing. It transcends dialects, and it relates to people from all over. We walked outside to get a fajita. Broadway’s costumed mascot chatted with us. The fajita vapors enticed our noses. Television crews surrounded Pulido and the Channel 5 anchor as they flipped meat, smiled, and chatted.

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The radio vans blared in the background. We passed through the big-top tent filled with barbecue pits specialized for South Texas, and she said to me: “These guys will be successful because of the time and effort put into the event. The key is enthusiasm about the event. What you put into it [is] not really money but putting passion into it. These people have passion for what they do.” Broadway’s marketers and staff also showed their passion by piling the event with many substantive layers—well-known local and transborder 3 television personalities, a celebrity musician, a raffle, a competitive celebrity cook-off event, a filmed entextualization, and charity fundraising—making it more and more unique and thus a standard showbiz extravaganza. Lechtner’s talk of injecting passion into marketing underscores the importance of affect in eliciting participatory engagement. Passion clearly is a key ingredient to successful marketing (and political) campaigns, but the desire to make money—and influence action—frequently fuels that passion. The team of corporate marketers and national marketers for Ace flew down to South Texas to learn about live-music events and ethnic marketing and carried back to their offices in Chicago and Atlanta a host of ideas concerning marketing and the marketability of Hispanic people, but the ultimate purpose of their trip was to increase profits for their business.

Marketing Pulido Family, music, and making money are ties that bind South Texans. I wanted to know who the middle person was who coordinated these ethnic marketing networks linking music events, Ace, and Broadway. An Ace marketer told me of their meetings at a bank directed by a local marketer named Robert Peña, who appeared to be cultivating these connections. She explained that it was Peña who suggested to Ace that partnership with Broadway Hardware would provide the company access to a wealth of Hispanic buying power in the Rio Grande Valley. I later learned that Peña worked out of the county courthouse with Judge Eloy Pulido, and that his marketing work with Ace was directly connected to the business interests of Roberto Pulido. Peña’s office was located less than a hundred yards from the judge’s. We met there and discussed the presentation he developed to entice the Ace team and its goals. Early in our interview Peña pointed out that his work for the county and Ace did not conflict and that he worked for Broadway and Roberto Pulido. This moment was awkward, in part because we both knew that his work did conflict. Peña’s prosody highlighted this discomfort; for instance, after telling me that Eloy [ Judge Pulido] hired him, he changed the subject by asking if I wanted something to drink. I hesitated and declined; he persisted. Our

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movement from Eloy Pulido to another topic (drinks) and another part of the office ruptured the conversation. When we returned to our topic, he emphasized his familial ties: “Our families have known each other for years.” Family ties and economic development brought Peña, the county, and Broadway together. He rather ambiguously explained that this work belonged to two separate spheres: It is not really something that comes out of this office [the county courthouse]. . . . It doesn’t relate with my work here for the county and economic development. It is more a marketing and promotional thing, and I did it out of my friendship with the Pulido family and out of my background and research on statistics and demography . . . and my years with economic development. Peña negates the convergence of his work for business and government. He works hard to explain that his marketing efforts originated in the private, personal, familial sphere—not in his public work. In reality though, “economic development” ties Peña’s public job with the county and private marketing activities with Pulido, Ace, and Broadway. The goal of bringing in money binds public work, political affiliation (e.g., Eloy’s fundraiser and Robert’s job for the county), and transnational marketing campaigns. Willie Aguirre, a friend from his years working for the local chamber of commerce, brought Peña into contact with Ace. Aguirre, the vice president of Broadway Hardware, convinced the Ace team to travel to South Texas, explaining that they would not be able to get a feel for the market without directly observing the region. He invited Peña to give Ace an “overall view and scope of the market.” Peña’s two presentations to the corporate and marketing team from Ace Hardware focused on the market of Hidalgo County and the Hispanic market of South Texas. He talked me through the slide presentation he had showed his visitors. His talk used a demographic idiom, focusing listeners’ attention on numbers to chisel out a distinct “Hispanic market.” After recontextualizing Hispanic markets as market share through his talk, Peña recontextualized this text by shifting into nostalgic language. In this manipulation and recirculation, Peña called his audience’s attention to the broad reach of the project he was pitching—a sports show featuring musicians and music—to members of the upper, middle, and working classes. The ideas directing Peña’s presentation parallel those scholars suggest are leading the process of globalization. He framed the Valley as a node of trans-

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national transaction—global treaties made possible its significant industrial, economic, and population growth that continue to fuel its expansion. His presentation made clear that these three types of growth are part of the reason why the Valley is a wise marketing expenditure, as well as a possible site for expansion. He presented the Valley as a significant site of study and investment due to its central location as a place where new forms of economic globalization materialize (Sassen 2000: 20). According to Peña, transnational economic treaties are key to persuading Ace of the importance of Hispanic marketing on the national level. The slide show begins with NAFTA; following a “Welcome to Hidalgo County” image is one demonstrating “the national scope of how NAFTA impacted the area.” It claims that due to NAFTA, Hidalgo County is “the Epicenter of North America.” The image accompanying this text demonstrates that the Rio Grande Valley is the nexus through which trade from Canada, the middle United States, and Mexico flows. He adds that with the upcoming completion of U.S. Interstate 69—a special trade route from Port Huron, Michigan, to the Rio Grande Valley—the Valley’s place as the epicenter of North America will only become more significant. Peña continued to define Ace’s public in talking about the Valley as a hub of industry and international transactions. Directly associated with NAFTA and the growth of free trade is the Rio Grande Valley’s place as a substantial and expanding export-processing zone. An average of 253 new maquiladoras were built in the United States and Mexico each year between 1995 and 2000; 86 of those were built in the Valley. In his “Two-Way Trade Flow Comparison,” Peña asserted that $222.2 billion passed through South Texas annually and that the Rio Grande Valley’s share was $76 billion.4 Development in the amount of trade passing through this region and industrial expansion affect the size of the population, the amount of money people have to spend, and where people choose to live.

Think Locally, Sell Globally Despite global media’s appearance of fluidity, geography is central to the process of selling media and using media to sell product. Peña’s presentation showed that radio and television advertisements pass through national borders with as much, if not more, ease than does transnational trade, but their market value is moored to census and map.5 Peña pointed to a map circling the territory within a one-hundred-and-fifty-mile radius of Edinburg. According to him, Televisa (the station on which Roberto Pulido’s show airs; see page 159 for a discussion of Pulido’s show) broadcasts for a one-hundred-

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and-fifty-mile radius around Edinburg. Based on his data, Televisa’s broadcast extends farther than does that of Univision. Univision, according to its general sales manager, reaches to just a couple of miles outside of the industrial Mexican city of Monterrey. Peña highlighted that Televisa’s broadcasts straddle the border and saturate further southwest. For marketers and media buyers, the value of territory correlates with population. Peña next directed my attention to a bright yellow histogram and read its contents, telling me (and echoing my conversation with the Ace team) that, according to a 1998 U.S. Census estimate, the Rio Grande Valley’s population on the U.S. side was 907,802. The next image— one that really shocked the Ace team and got them thinking not only about partnership but expansion—informed us that close to one million people live in the nearby Mexican border towns of Reynosa and Matamoros. Again, Peña’s statistics reveal that Monterrey sits within broadcast range of over three million people. Approximately five million people live within one hundred and fifty miles of Edinburg and the broadcast range of Televisa. This location is important because people not only have the option of watching and listening to the same promotions, but they also live close enough to come for a shopping spree to buy the products they see and hear advertised. Monterrey’s proximity and large population are appealing to corporations based in the United States, and the buying power and shopping style of its residents increase its luster. Peña read the next slide, which claimed that this Mexican city is the “fourth largest industrial power in [sic] entire Latin America.” Then Peña’s “Mexican National Visitors Profile” told more about the targeted public. The image of a husband, wife, daughter, and son accompanies the claim: The typical Mexican national traveling party is a married couple with one child and travel [sic] monthly for 1–3 days to the Valley to shop and visit family and friends. . . . estimated annual economic impact of [their shopping is] $1.5 billion. Another bullet point explains why they shop in the United States: “because of the quality of the products, lower prices, and better service.” The first and third points— quality products and service—are central features of Broadway and Ace’s brand image. The combination of millions of people nearby with money to spend, who travel with Ace and Broadway’s mantra on their minds, transforms the Mexican national shopper into Ace’s ally. On the surface, this increased opening of the border to Mexican buyers

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sounds wonderful. It is like a postmodern, post-racist vision of “freedom.” Mexican nationals are free to enter, shop, and eat in the United States. Workers at these stores and restaurants even speak Spanish. But this depiction of the border as porous for shoppers, goods, financial transactions, and broadcasts stands in stark contrast to another reality: that it has become more difficult for workers to enter the United States since the signing of NAFTA due to the increased militarization of the border—a situation that has grown even more since September 11. The difficulty with such appropriations of “freedom” 6 is that freedom is about more than buying power; it is about the connections suturing politics and economics, the relationship between government and citizens interacting in public and private property. It is in part about the freedom for all citizens to move where they desire. These discursive enactments select who is free to transgress boundaries, and it is typically the wealthy. This “economic development” ties public and private interests. By focusing on data such as buying power, the discourse on open borders narrowly highlights those with sufficient buying power, eliding the existence of the rest. The ease with which borders are presented as open and free for the moneyed contrasts with the difficulty closed borders pose for working-class migrants.

Hidalgo County: An Economic Geography Peña’s presentation depicted Hidalgo County as a territory of interest to corporate marketers. He reinvented Hidalgo County’s economic geography in terms suitable to investors, emphasizing its growth in jobs, population, and spending to prove that Lower Rio Grande Valley residents have both jobs and money, and that they spend. Peña charted and graphed hard numbers to persuade his interlocutors. From 1990 to 1999, jobs increased sixty-four percent in the area; gross sales rose from $4.8 billion to $7.9 billion. According to Peña, Ace found the seventy-four percent upsurge in retail sales—from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.5 billion in 1999—particularly interesting. Peña’s presentation closed with a favorite demographic of transborder marketers: a table from the U.S. Census Bureau listing the “Top Ten Fastest Growing Metro Areas: 1990 –1996.” Peña highlighted, in fire-engine red, that the two Valley metropolises ranked third and tenth in the nation in this category. The Census Bureau ranked Edinburg/McAllen /Mission third, with a 29.2 percent growth increase, and Brownsville/Harlingen /San Benito tenth, with a 15.2 percent increase. He then noted that the border city of Laredo was ranked second, and the central Texas Austin /San Marcos region was ranked seventh. Peña proudly added that the top ten growth cities all have

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large migrant populations. Even in discourse concerned with migrants, he attached the value of place to the value of the people, in particular, their buying power and concentration. These two points connect to his earlier suggestions concerning the centrality of the NAFTA corridor—Austin, Laredo, Edinburg, and Brownsville all sit on the main NAFTA trucking route—and the significant role of Mexicanos, particularly mobile ones, in demographic shifts. This demonstrates that citizens of Hidalgo County have money to put into the economy, are willing to put their money in the economy, and that business can reasonably expect this trend to grow with the population. Peña used cultural tools familiar to marketers— charts, graphs, and statistics—to persuade fellow marketers of the value of Hidalgo County and its residents. The material does some interesting work. It contrasts elements of solidity and movement in its construction of place. It depicts Hidalgo County as both a territory comprised of residents with buying power and as a nexus of transcapital flows— of trucking and of migrant workers. His presentation makes place through using a modern form of territory—bounded place—and a transnational form of territory—based in boundary crossing—to create his economic geography. He flips out the margin to expose the center.7

PAC H A N G A # 2 : H I S PA N I C M A R K E T I N G , MUSIC, AND PULIDO’S TELEVISION SHOW Peña’s package for Ace had three purposes: to partner with Broadway, to convince Ace to advertise on Roberto Pulido’s television show, and to help Ace reach its target market. He presented their target audience as “bilingual and bicultural.” He informed me that Ace and Broadway wanted to advertise more to target markets such as South Texas, which is “ninety-eight percent” Hispanic, and it needed a regional, rather than a national, advertising scope. In helping companies reach this public, marketers like Peña are turning the tables on the traditional relationship between ethnic and general markets— and they are changing the meaning of the term crossover. Rather than speaking of the need for top Tejano musicians who sing in Spanish, like Selena Quintanilla or Emilio Navaira, to cross over into the mainstream —Englishspeaking only, Anglo, U.S.—market, he said: “Advertising needs to cross over into the Hispanic marketplace.” Rather than saying, “We need to change for them,” he is advising, along with a chorus of “ethnic” marketers, that “they need to change for us.” This change represents a powerful and significant shift within the advertising world that has begun to take hold in the past five years and which exists

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in both political and corporate marketing. The downside to this “ethnic” and “target” marketing is that it is narrowly focused on Spanish-language advertising created for a narrowly focused Spanish target market; it is not about Anglos—beyond the corporate officers and marketers— coming into contact with Spanish language and Hispanic cultures. Rather than opening space for people to come into contact, it tightens spaces and roles for participant interaction. Thus far, via this discussion of Peña’s presentation, I have established that a definable and desirable “Hispanic market” exists for companies and advertisers to reach. Constructing this audience, however, is key. Businesses need to see an audience—a group of people with money to spend—before they can justify spending to advertise. A way in which Peña suggested targeting this market is through music, more specifically, through the popular entertainer Roberto Pulido. Recall the Ace marketer and corporate affiliate (at the Edinburg Broadway Hardware event described above) who expressed that “music is going to be a part of it, but I don’t know how,” and who, in the next breath, uttered Roberto Pulido’s name. Perhaps part of the reason why he knew music and Pulido would be a part of the scene, yet was unclear of the specifics, was because Peña had mentioned the musician in his presentation to Ace during their two-day visit. By the time Peña and I met three weeks later, he had finished a piece of this nebulous component of his proposed strategy. Actually, he was planning to mail the package to Ace’s head media marketer that afternoon. This package included a biography of Robert Pulido, a printout of a PowerPoint presentation for Pulido’s new television show, called Buscando a Las Estrellas,8 and a writeup of Buscando a Las Estrellas, explaining why it would be smart for Ace to invest in the program. Pulido’s show is a hunting and fishing program that features a different Tejano musician or band weekly. Stars featured include Bobby Pulido (Roberto’s son), Ramón Ayala, and the members of the band Control, all highly popular Tejano musicians. At the end of the show, the star musicians come together around a campfire, chat, and sing. To most readers, this ending may sound incredibly hokey, but such moments are salient to many South Texans. Musicians pervade the show, and it closes with “a little pachanguita.” Peña explained what he found special about the show. The marketing jargon disappeared and a boyish grin momentarily overtook his face: When he had Ramón Ayala, that was awesome because . . . they were sitting around the campfire . . . talking . . . Ramón and Roberto. Then, Bobby [Roberto’s son] showed up to close the show. They were sitting

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around the campfire strumming their guitars singing songs that they all knew. . . . You don’t see that anymore, and it is typical culture. It is typical of South Texas . . . a little pachanga. His statement, “that was awesome” only touches the edge of the sentiment he conveyed to me in that sterile room with his laptop shining and printer humming—so far away from el campo. I almost could see goose bumps rise up his body culminating in an enormous, beaming smile; the thought made him glow. Even though he only watched the show, the experience still managed to touch something deep inside of him —“typical culture . . . of South Texas.” The meaning that a watcher takes from the televised pachanga is relative to their cultural moorings and experiences, but as Ace’s media marketer said about music, there is something about it, a feeling created that can and does transcend boundaries. Peña and the corporate marketers hope to capitalize on this capacity. The recorded and replayed event is an entextualized pachanga, like the pachanga deportiva, but of a different type: men sitting around a campfire. Peña’s moment also indexes a nostalgia for a time and a space that is fading with the lives of the World War II generation. It recalls a time before women’s entrance into the public sphere was recognized, and when men met out in the country to make decisions. Unlike that earlier form of pachanga, this one takes out the decision-making element and fills this void with talk of recording. At this pachanga, a glamorous cultural icon, Roberto Pulido, takes the place of a political leader. Although the meanings are different, a similar emotional chord of male bonding is struck. The pachanga is a place where men can be men; where they can kill animals and then share stories outdoors. After I had listened to Peña’s description of this hunting and fishing show that culminates with a group of men of varying ages sitting at the campfire chatting and singing, Peña told me of the types of businesses he was soliciting for advertising on the show. In addition to Ace, he had approached companies that produce and sell hunting and fishing items such as rods, reels, and lures. Listening to this talk of all-male hunting events and companies that make, market, and sell hunting equipment— of which the majority of buyers are men—made me think that his target audience was not just Hispanic people of the borderlands but specifically men. Peña agreed with my characterization that the program is targeting men, but men and homeowners appear to be the primary audience of Pulido’s show. After their trip to the area, Ace’s marketers became highly interested in using Pulido’s show to sell their product to borderland Mexicanos. Peña’s pres-

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entation offered the following information to convince Ace’s media marketing team to sponsor Pulido’s television show. It starts subtly, with a slide describing what “el show” is about: Joining Tejano stars “con la gente” Outdoor show featuring Top Musicians Friendly chat amongst Musicians sharing: Experiences History Background Outlook on Profession & Themselves. The next image is of Roberto Pulido on stage playing the guitar and smiling, wearing dark glasses and a big cowboy hat. It characterizes Pulido as a Tejano musician with thirty years of experience, fifty records, many awards, and international recognition. After three images of place and population taken from his previous presentation, the remainder of the presentation focuses on the recent incredible growth in Latin music sales and Hispanic buying power in the United States. The presentation concludes with a rate sheet for advertising on the show.

Buying Power Peña wanted his viewers to learn that U.S. Hispanic buying power is concentrated in Texas and that Hispanic Texans have more buying power than nonHispanics. Neat blue graphs show that from 1990 to 2001, U.S. Hispanic buying power has significantly surpassed that of other minorities, increasing by 118 percent. Another chart ranks U.S. Hispanic buying power by state: California leads with $140 billion, followed by Texas, with $70 billion. Peña was careful not to over generalize the category Hispanic. Markets like Texas and California are also the states with fewer “disparities.” That is, the measurement of Hispanic markets in New York is thrown off by the large Puerto Rican population— one that does not have a strong showing of Tejano music fans. Having shown that U.S. Hispanics have more money to spend and that this wealth is concentrated in Texas, Peña shifts the presentation to the importance of the buying power of U.S. Hispanics in Texas. This increased buy-

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ing power correlates with increased Hispanic population growth. From 1990 to 2000, Texas’s buying power increased 102 percent, and Hispanics contributed to more than half of the population growth in the state. His next slide shows that Hispanic buying power in Texas increased 133 percent during this same period, and the final slide claims that “Hispanic Buying Power Exceeds!” that of “non-Hispanics” in Texas. What makes this narrative of the triumph of Hispanic capital particularly interesting is that the story connects with mi gente (the gente of Aparicio and Aliseda’s political campaigns—also referred to by Budweiser’s marketers as “the grass roots”) and its strong evocations of poverty. The nostalgia Buscando a Las Estrellas taps in the pachanga transcends boundaries and reaches across classes. It sells the U.S. American dream within a specific context. In its celebration of the successes of good Mexicano capitalists, the program almost seems designed to tempt the many poor people of South Texas. The show’s themes of hunting and fishing suggest upper-class activity. One has to have leisure time and energy to do these tasks, as well as money. One must be able to afford to own a large enough piece of property to hunt or have substantial disposable income to lease land or pay the high price for a weekend hunt. One also must have money to spend on the gear—at the very least a shotgun and shells or a rod and reel. This show is not just “a little pachanguita” on a halfacre of property in the country. It combines this nostalgic image with the dream of having the money, time, and energy to dispose on leisurely pursuits. Peña framed Buscando a Las Estrellas with strong evocations of being working class in many ways. The conjunto musical style the show emphasizes has strong working-class ties.9 It highlights the accordion’s sound, considered an essential marker of a working-class aesthetic. Peña’s narrative setting up the show tells investors: “The background sounds of an accordion playing to the tune of a polka while the twelve-string guitar and bass soon follow.” But the groundwork Peña laid is both for those who struggle with poverty and for those who have “made it” and have more buying power. The narrative presents Buscando a Las Estrellas as “a bridge that joins Tejano stars ‘con la gente’ (with the people)”: This unique format is . . . an opportunity to express “que somos de la misma gente.” (We are family.) [I would translate it as “that we are of the same people or place”—not family.] Many of us are migrants and many of us struggled for the American Dream. Yet although these musicians “made it,” they always remember “mi gente” in their music [emphasis mine].

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Music and brand-name musicians are not just a selling point but also mediate new class relations. This narrative emphasizes common working-class roots through music, family ties, and a shared ethic to achieve the U.S. American dream. Pulido’s biography also plays up these themes of family, individual hard work, and music. It describes Pulido’s “humble attitude,” hard work, and commitment to place. A “self-taught musician,” the famous Tejano singer “worked as a migrant laborer with his family,” turned down university scholarships in other parts of the country, and “stayed in the Valley to be close to family and lend a hand economically.” This decision forced Pulido to “selffinance his way through college.” Pulido’s career began ascending when he was the lead singer for Cecilio Garza y Los Kasinos. This display of Pulido’s status and Peña’s continual references to Pulido’s roots in poverty—in the biography, write-up of the show, and PowerPoint images—point to a trend in Hidalgo County of seeking status and then publicly spreading an image of munificence. For instance, Peña’s presentation of Pulido’s narrative and its rhetoric parallel that of successful judicial candidate Ed Aparicio. Recall Cecilio Garza’s corrido, its evocation of mi gente and the accompanying images of Aparicio as a migrant farm worker rising up to be a respected and known—iconized— citizen. What is being enacted here is more than a culture of earning and hoarding money 10 but of being recognized by the entire community as the individual with money and being seen as the person (from the branded family) that shares his or her wealth with the community. Citizens want to be iconized and metonymized as the community. It is very much about being first recognized and second recognized as a person of status to be reckoned with by all—as a giver. In the current context, this process takes the shape of transnational marketing showcasing the leisure pursuits and lifestyles of prominent citizens.

Branding Surnames The move toward using transnational marketing forms—like ethnic marketing through live-music events or cosmopolitan forms of public culture (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988) such as live-music spectacles—as mechanisms to brand an image in the public’s mind is very much in alignment with this postindustrial moment and conditions. For example, Eric Wolf (1959) analyzes the hacienda system as a modern industrial form, a system designed to produce goods, regardless of the qualities of the laborers as human beings or persons. It is uniquely suited to a culture in Mexico that functioned to “personalize” relations: “the relationship bears the guise of a personal relation

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but serves an impersonal function . . . to realize returns on invested capital, to produce profits” (207). The hacienda, according to Wolf, personalized many aspects of the relation between owner and worker. Wolf ’s image of the hacienda—and Stoeltje’s (2000) similar image of the West Texas ranch—shifts a popular, romanticized image of a Hispanic past, of ranch culture, indexed by Pulido. This image evokes a forgotten personal place in the country where family revolves around a small community, not an impersonal place mediated by commodities, labor, currency, exploitation, and economic stratification. Peña’s preferred symbols depict a lifestyle of leisure, warmth, and fun. An element underlying these forms of ethnic marketing and their salience in South Texas concerns a contradiction in the meaning of capital accumulation and displays of it. The links I make between sixteenth-century Spain, via Wolf, and the present social situation of South Texas may appear tenuous. Wolf ’s analysis, however, provides insight into why displaying family brand— iconizing the surname, seeking public recognition—in forms such as livemusic events in political and corporate campaigns is such a significant element of borderlands life. It is about more than making money. Wolf argues that the Spanish conquerors who went to what is now Mexico had a medieval goal and used a modern instrument to achieve this goal. They wanted autonomy; they never again wanted to bend their wills to that of another. They achieved this goal through the modern instrument of wealth: many accumulated gold and property. Whereas Anglo-American puritanism dissolved the contradiction between self-reliance and wealth accumulation by interpreting capital accumulation as a virtue, Catholic Spaniards in the New World remained captured in a contradiction. Capital accumulation was not a virtue in itself. The means (accumulating wealth) and the ends (autonomy) remained contradictory. Caught in disliking a system of bondage while needing it to achieve autonomy, a way to deal with the contradiction is through public monuments. This becomes clearer in a Spanish businessman’s interpretation of the Spaniard who “with his hospitals, foundations, cathedrals, colleges . . . raised a monument to his own self ” (Madriaga in Wolf 161). He constructed public monuments to raise his personal image. Hearing Robert Peña, Ed Aparicio, and Roberto Pulido’s moving and frequent evocations of their past farm-working experiences and their struggle for a better life, while they are at the same time marketing this past, reminds me of this longstanding contradiction between means and ends. Even if these speculations concerning why so many in South Texas seek large-scale public recognition of themselves appear implausible, I am on more solid ground when arguing that displays of the self, in the form of a television

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show, advertisement, billboard, or live-music event encourages “vicarious identification” with the subject’s achieved splendor and glamour (Wolf 209). Modern institutions like the hacienda functioned to personalize relations— bearing the guise of a personal relationship but serving an impersonal function: to make money. Haciendas advertised their grandeur through images of the hacienda itself—i.e., through circulating images of that company. Advertisers no longer market industries in that fashion but through selling an identity or lifestyle.11 Hence, it seems these campaigns are performing similar functions as in the past, just in a different format—as a pachanga, television ad, or a song indexing a working-class lifestyle. The form —for example, direct marketing (in the postmodern age)—is as personal as possible but the end is impersonal: accumulating wealth. Perhaps the propulsion of this contradiction is what fuels this social dynamic to continue operation. My discussion of ethnic marketers using music to hook into consumers’ migrant roots and selling them as part of their identity in a milieu of neoliberalism raises additional issues. I do not think the triumph of capital is the type of power most Chicanos had in mind when they demanded more power in Texas over the past forty years. This is more like a familiar tale of capitalism devouring the story of the person or group demanding recognition. In today’s narrative, actors gain recognition because of their “buying power.” But are they gaining recognition? “This is it; we have the money: listen to us.” Is Robert Peña’s transformation of Hispanic power problematic? Some (Dávila 1998) would say that it is just fine. Peña drowns out the voices of those with insufficient buying power. What about “la gente” who do not own homes or do not have much disposable income? How does this discourse speak to them? Does it really care to speak to them? I suspect it speaks to them in words similar to those of Eloy Pulido: “That’s stupid. . . . They are not voters . . . [or] homeowners.” The nostalgia produced by a television show about hunting unites two sectors of the population, those who have accumulated money and those who have not. On the other hand, through recontextualizing the pachanga, it appears to divest it of its radical political evocations. The television show seems to capitalize and co-opt a politicized place and discourse, transforming it into a marketing tool. This style of marketing overlaps with the ways in which politicians are reaching out in locally based campaigns and ties to Aparicio’s campaign song and block walking. But this narrative is about globalization and being globalized— confusing and coupling—and shared channeling of markets and politics. In the Ace corporate team’s field trip and Peña’s presentation, marketing emerges and moves as an imaginative enterprise.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter on Ace marketing, I outlined an extravagant pachanga that national marketers and corporate executives attended in order to learn about increasing brand loyalty and selling products to Hispanics. The hardware store “blowout” event itself was filmed and entextualized for the public of South Texas. Then the marketers’ talk provided an opportunity to hear them marvel about the event and the potential to sell to residents of the Lower Rio Grande Valley through target marketing. They were informed that livemusic broadcasts are just the way to do that, especially because they are cheap, malleable, and can transcend linguistic variation. Speakers steeped in local buying mores, for example Broadway Hardware’s general manager, articulated the ways in which form mattered in advertising to an audience—and discussed metaculture’s (advertising’s) role in making that audience. In these conversations, music, family, and musical brand names frequently surfaced. In spite of the overlap between this discourse and that of general U.S. marketing, music, family, and brand musical names connected the actors at these events. Robert Peña, the point man for this meeting of Ace, Broadway, and the new Pulido television show is an employee of Hidalgo County. Peña’s marketing of the value of Pulido’s show heavily relies on constructing Hidalgo County’s economic geography through census, map, and money. Despite the seemingly static representation of the area’s demographics, he plays with mobility. NAFTA, mobile Mexicanos, and other such facets of our transnational world constitute this peripheral area as one of growth, change, and interest to the center of the United States. In reconstructing Hidalgo County, he also rewrites Tejano identity. He inverts traditional marketing and political discourse on Hispanic and ethnic crossover, arguing that the center (Anglo, mainstream United States) needs to change to meet the demands of the present periphery (Tejanos, Latino America). It no longer means “them” coming to “us.” Finally, Peña paves the way for mainstream marketers to come to Mexicano buyers, and he does this through a television show featuring men in the country, which culminates with a pachanguita. While Peña and Pulido’s personal history index working-class origins, the show itself projects an upperclass lifestyle. It strips the pachanga form of its rich, politicized, and contested substance and uses it to sell “typical Mexican culture.” The audience the show sells is Hispanic homeowners, who are most likely men. Again Ace marketing and Peña understand the significance of this demographic through

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their buying power and location, key terms to media marketers. As a marketer, Peña stands out in his ability to differentiate among Hispanics. He elucidates subtle cultural differences like music preferences in New York versus those in Texas—knowledge based in conversations with artists who perform for those communities. Despite his rich experiences with Mexicano and U.S. Latino populations, Peña ultimately celebrates the success of mi gente—that is, of their buying power. I suggest that this triumph of Mexicano capital perhaps is not as much to celebrate as he would like. It seems to erase the ongoing hardship and deep poverty of many Mexicanos. The type of pachanga spectacle used by local marketers like Peña to sell further erases contradictions or reflections that might arise at more active family associations. As with Univision /Budweiser’s broadcast of the pachanga deportiva, the stories told at the event are replaced by a broadcast framed with the Budgirls, icons of sex. A distinction between Budweiser and Pulido’s more transnationally based spectacle form of democracy and Aparicio’s more locally based active one is that Aparicio’s campaign song has connections; people latch onto it. Spectacle is something that people look at, not participate in, and this is part of the shift in how pachangas are being deployed. Like Aliseda’s splashy event, they are becoming spectacles that put sex and money on display with the goal of selling products to viewers. With the channeling of pachangas, meaning becomes less important and participant interaction roles narrow. But this discussion does not entirely explain why entextualized icons are popular and prominent in Hidalgo County. Bearing in mind the profusion of icons of self-achievement, I explore why residents strive for community recognition through prominent displays of the self in Hidalgo County—whether they be in the form of political campaigns or live-music events marketing a television show. I suggest that this struggle—what propels it—is a contradiction that comes from a deep-seated desire for autonomy sought through capital accumulation. The mantle this contradiction takes—that of personality and lifestyle—is fitting for our postindustrial times.

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A Private Event for a Public Servant SEVEN

“Mr. Vega” Meets Modernity

By definition a private gathering is not known publicly, and this is the case with Judge Eloy Pulido’s live-music fund-raising event described below. My encounters with Pulido provide a useful frame to enter the semi-exclusive and often guarded world of fund raising and live-event marketing. This event also provides a means of illuminating issues regarding traditional, patriarchal South Texas voting customs as well as “old-style” and “new-style” political marketing practices. Before being elected a county judge and rising through the ranks of the education administration, Pulido worked as a music manager for his brother, Roberto Pulido. Roberto Pulido y Los Clásicos remain popular musical performers in Greater Mexico in part due to their ability to “successfully [synthesize] the orquesta and conjunto styles” (Peña 1999: 113). The band still draws crowds in the thousands at dance halls in South Texas, for instance at public political fundraisers. More popular today, however, especially among young men and women across the United States and Mexico, is Roberto’s son and Eloy’s nephew, Bobby Pulido. Eloy Pulido’s experience in politics and the music industry—and the brand-name recognition that he, his brother, and his nephew share—make him an ideal consultant from whom to learn about live-music event marketing as a channel between music and politics.

9:00 am,Thursday, November 2, 2000—Six days until Election Day I had an appointment to interview County Judge Eloy Pulido. During this interview, Pulido informed me of his fundraiser that evening and the Ace live-

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music event discussed in Chapter 6. At the top of my field notes, I wrote, “Goal: to talk about connections between the business of politics and music.” Our meeting did not go as I had planned. As his first appointment of the day, I arrived at his office sprightly and with questions ready. He walked into the main office painfully ill, wheezing and frequently coughing. We moved into his private office and barely progressed beyond polite introductory conversation before his office phone rang—an important politico. Then his cell phone rang. Between the rings, and with one phone to each ear, he mentioned to me a fundraiser that night at Alisa’s Acres. As soon as he hung up one phone, the other rang again. Finally, he winnowed down to the office phone, dealing with a delicate matter, and an assistant walked in with a letter for Pulido to sign—asking elected officials and workers to contribute one hundred dollars to the county Christmas party. He proofread it—while talking on the phone about which judicial candidates he was supporting and speculating about the national campaign—and found an error. He pointed this out to his assistant; they agreed that it would be too expensive to reprint the letter. He continued talking on the phone as he signed the letters. As he ended his telephone conversation, our time expired. Pulido escorted me out of his office, saying that he sincerely desired to visit with me about my research. During the interview, he invited me to a fundraiser that evening at Alisa’s Acres—a simple convention center–like facility on a few acres of property owned by a wealthy developer. Having a party there sends a metamessage of “I am aligned with somebody important.” I already had attended fundraisers there for other Democratic political candidates. Between the wheezing, phone calls, and proofreading, Pulido and I managed to exchange a few words. He informed me that the Alisa’s Acres fundraiser was scheduled from seven to nine o’clock and that it was for sponsors of his 2002 campaign. Individuals paid one thousand, twenty-five hundred, or five thousand dollars to attend. He described these attendees as “true supporters” and part of a “network.” I still had little idea of whom to expect at the fundraiser. From previous conversations, I knew Pulido to be a sophisticated politician, a man who knew how to imagine a crowd that a particular type of event would convoke and who knew how to campaign without wasting time, money, or energy.

PAC H A N G A AT A L I S A’ S AC R E S A new building that provides only the basics for hosting a party, Alisa’s Acres is nothing fancy. It reminds me of a new church hall. It looks like a little lime-

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stone house with a front porch. The interior is one long corridor. The floor is concrete, and the walls and ceiling are white—no crown molding, no tile, not a lavish room. At the back of the room is a little kitchen area. The building conveys little meaning other than that it is a place to meet, eat, and drink— one meant for social gatherings. The property, on the other hand, and the builder convey power. Albert Cantú, a real estate developer, built Alisa’s Acres on property he owns in Sherryland. In Hidalgo County, to own a “Cantú house” means that one has made it. According to local assessments, it is the status symbol, higher on the status hierarchy than a two-carat diamond ring and a Mercedes convertible. A consultant once told me, for instance, that some political candidates, before they were candidates and were trying to figure out the best way to convey their status to the community, chose between two options: spending three hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a Cantú house or running for office. Through both facial expressions and hand gestures, the elected official who invited me to join him at a previous Alisa Acre’s fundraiser conveyed to me that this location means something. It tells invitees that the organizers have support—powerful support at that—and that they (the politically inclined) had better pay the hundred-dollar minimum for a ticket and attend. I found procuring a free ticket to that event to be a fairly delicate negotiation. To hold an event at Alisa’s Acres tells guests that the candidate has Cantú’s support, that of money and power. The location of Alisa’s Acres also speaks of status and changes in Hidalgo County’s power elite. Alisa’s Acres is located on a few hidden acres of land in Sherryland. Sherryland, once hundreds of acres of fruit trees owned by a prominent farmer named Sherry, is developing into the wealthy neighborhood in Hidalgo County. Located between McAllen and Edinburg, large homes with equally large fences and gates are interspersed between acres of grapefruit trees. The rich of Hidalgo County not only desire large homes but also homes cut off from the rest of the county, residences that provide a sense of security amid wealth. It is in this context that one enters Sherryland. One cannot find Alisa’s Acres without precise and detailed instructions, and entering Alisa’s Acres is rather ominous. The building cannot be seen from the public road, and that road is not a major artery. It is narrow, shoulderless, and two-lane. One needs to pinpoint both intersections between seemingly identical columns of grapefruit trees and rows of brick and saltillotiled homes. After turning down this little road, one must find a mysterious road that turns off of this and leads one, winding down a dirt road and through

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lilting weeping willow trees, to the building. Usually events start at dusk, and the descending darkness adds a sense of ambiguousness. One needs to attend numerous events at this location not to feel a slight sense of dislocation upon arriving. I found it for the second time and parked between a couple of shiny pick-up trucks. Only men were present. Fortunately, Pulido was standing in front of the porch, and he warmly welcomed me. I wandered inside the building, hoping to see a woman, only to enter a hall empty except for the lone bartender standing in the back of the shotgun-shaped room with bottles of top-brand liquors fanned out before him. This signaled that this was a special crowd. I noticed that the brands were attuned to the tastes of the upper classes in South Texas and northern Mexico: for example, Buchanan’s Scotch, not Cutty Sark. “Coke” in hand (a nice, ambiguous drink that participants could assume was a mixed drink), I returned to the porch and joined a group standing to the immediate right of the doorway. They conveniently positioned themselves around two kegs, Miller and Budweiser. A fellow lamented that the Budweiser was sure to go first, leaving them to drink Miller. Assuming that he was being hyperbolic in his expression of grief, I responded incredulously, and a chorus joined in agreement with him, citing examples of this travesty from previous parties in support of their cause. They light-heartedly mourned this foolhardy choice of Miller between introductions. In addition to being informed that Budweiser is the beer of choice, I learned that everyone in this circle worked in the construction industry. In fact, the construction industry employed everyone present at the pachanga (except the non-paying attendees, who included Pulido’s and Cantú’s employees, family, and the family of employees). I met approximately twentyfive people in the construction business—architects, engineers, contractors, designers. Guests came from distant parts of the state to attend this event, and local contractors and developers were in attendance. They left me with the impression that they did fairly large-scale construction, such as highways and schools. In hindsight, my not being able to immediately guess that morning who would pay five thousand, twenty-five hundred, or one thousand dollars per person to have a beer and listen to music with a county judge appears painfully naïve. The group consisted of Anglo and Mexicano contractors from near and far, but the event sustained a distinct South Texas pachanga feel. A Spanishspeaking musician performed, but his style indexed a different aesthetic from that at pachangas I previously had attended. Unlike Iman at the Univision / Budweiser pachanga, whose conjunto sound inflected a working-class aes-

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thetic, the Spanish-styled music at Pulido’s event projected a traditional and upper-class aesthetic. The musician was a classical guitarist from Reynosa, Mexico. He primarily played music, such as flamenco, that signified connections to Spain. Even though a flamenco sound can often suggest a subaltern history, within this context the style referenced Spain generically, connoting the land of the Peninsulares.1 In South Texas, Spanish phenomena still index an upper-class realm. The guitarist’s mastery of complex styles of instrumentation impressed his audience. He played the kind of music that one hears, for instance, in the finest restaurants and hotels in Reynosa. Out on the porch, the musician’s intense strumming and deep voice were relegated to impressive background music to the crowd of men’s discussion of construction projects. In contrast to the humdrum of business talk, inside rumors rapidly circulated that the famous musicians Roberto and Bobby Pulido might come to the party. The opportunity to spend time with star musicians added an element of unexpected glamour to the evening. That day, the musicians had attended a benefit at the country club in honor of Bobby Pulido, who had organized a celebrity golf classic which raised approximately fifty thousand dollars for the local Easter Seals programs. McAllen mayor Leo Montalvo had announced at the event that November 2 would be “Bobby Pulido Day, El Día de Bobby Pulido.” 2 If willing to stay a little late, then guests probably would have the pleasure of spending time with the famous Tejano stars. By this point, the edges of the party were beginning to loosen. The mother, wife, and friends of an employee-guest arrived. The men stood in clumps outside, and the women sat in the air-conditioned building. The musician began circulating more freely among the clusters of men outside, taking occasional breaks inside to get a whiskey. The men on the porch almost finished the keg of Budweiser. The women inside came out to the porch and began marveling at the virtuosity of the guitarist. He walked over dramatically, pulled a chair out of the hall, put his left foot on it, and asked them for requests. He was unfamiliar with a couple of well-known regional songs, but they agreed upon a few décimas.3 With this renewed performance, many of the guests gathered closer together around the musician and began whispering about his talent and asking how the organizer found him. Other guests began to shift as they prepared to depart. The lines of time began to run together. While the musician sang of a mythic era of lost loves, a local elder standing close behind me began whispering in our ears, telling us about politics and music. This moment is one of the few in my field work when people began to

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speak spontaneously— or to speak at all for that matter—about what many consider to be a taboo topic: the relationship between music, politics, and pachangas. Below I include recorded excerpts from her monologue: Basically, the music is a lure. People love to dance. I mean, I love to dance. They like the free dances. If one candidate does a dance and the other doesn’t, the people are going to remember the one that threw the dance. They remember who throws the dance and who doesn’t. There are not any issues. . . . The voter is not an issueoriented voter. That is just the way it is. It is strictly word of mouth and personality. Families tend to be very clannish when it comes to supporting the candidate. There is the family down the road [She points west, and I assume that she is speaking of Billy Leo’s family in La Joya, in western Hidalgo County], a very extended family. You see the head honchos. It still exists. In my case, it is beginning to die out. My children are beginning to vote. I shouldn’t demand anything of them —but they should vote my way. Ha! [laughter, jokingly]. If we are beginning to lose it, it is more in the newer generations, in the younger generation. The twenty-to-thirty crowd. In the older generations, it is still there. If a candidate goes to a pachanguita or a family gathering, all they have to do is show up at somebody’s family gathering, and they’ve got it. [For example,] my son married a Barrera. The mom is a Treviño. She has thirteen brothers and sisters, and the father has nine. Their voting worth increased, the voting power in the family. . . . [This is] how it is understood. The father has nine brothers and sisters. My vote control increases, larger voting power. They inherited me as a voter. “Talk to Mr. Vega,” and he tells you who to vote for. “Sell yourself to him”— one hundred and fifty relatives. People fall in line because he is respected. That is the respected thing in that culture. Mr. Vega, his family votes the way he says, [the] padrino, because he is the head of the family and that is the way the family thinks. That is the respected thing in the family. They inherited me. “Talk to Mr. Vega. Sell yourself to Mr. Vega.” The speaker’s (“Mrs. X”) awkward shift in person from the distant “people” to the personal “I” and back to a distant “they” points to her ambivalence and discomfort in speaking about the topic. Because this topic is so rarely breached

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and because people are such performers, I ask that readers not take this viewpoint entirely as a literal “social fact” about the history of the pachanga nor about its relationship to family and voting. Rather, I suggest reading this monologue as one person’s interpretation or attitude within a social field— albeit an older individual now in the middle class, from the area, with experience in politics— on politics, pachangas, family, and music.

Analysis “Mrs. X” 4 locates voting within webs of relationships. Voting derives meaning through these relationships—as they stand in relation to and through the political. Thus, she also comments upon the reproduction of legitimate power or authority. A hermeneutic useful to understanding some of the meanings embedded in her interpretation is Max Weber’s formulation of three basic legitimations of domination (in other words, of “a relation of men dominating men”): traditional, charismatic, and jural. Traditional legitimation is an authority “sanctified through habitual orientation to conform” (1958 [1921]: 79); patriarchal domination exemplifies this form. Charismatic authority relies upon followers’ personal confidence in the qualities of an individual to lead and coerces obedience through appeals to two forms of personal interest: material reward and social honor. In other words, those striving for material reward and social honor are particularly likely to be attracted to charismatic domination. Jural (legal) domination relies on rationally based rules, as in domination by the modern “servant of the state” (ibid). Weber argues that “variants, transitions, and combinations” of these three forms legitimate obedience—in this case, who votes, which way they vote, and why. Combinations of these forms of authority can be seen in the local elder’s impromptu speech cited above. “Mrs. X” works hard to distance herself from traditional and charismatic forms and to seat her present self in the realm of the jural/ modern. Stuart Hall’s work clarifies my borrowing and usage of the hybrid concept jural/modern. In his introduction to Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (1996), Hall frames the term modern within a process that led to the emergence of four distinctive features, which, taken together, constitute modernity. These features include political, economic, social, and cultural changes: 1) sovereignty and legitimacy within defined territorial boundaries; 2) an exchange economy marked by mass production and consumption, private property, and accumulation of capital on a long-term basis; 3) the decline of fixed social hierarchies and emergence of a social and sexual division of labor; and 4) the decline of traditional religious worldviews, the rise of materi-

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alist culture exhibiting individualistic, rationalist, and instrumental impulses, and ways of producing and classifying knowledge (1996: 8). “Mrs. X’s” narrative mimics many of these features, notably a modern way of classifying knowledge. She sets the pachanga, in its diminutive “pachanguita” (little pachanga) form, into a hybrid traditional-charismatic domination frame. Voters are “not issues-oriented” and so the act of voting is embedded in direct personal relations. Families select a candidate “strictly [by] word of mouth [traditional] and personality [charismatic].” It is a form of traditional authority “sanctified through habitual orientation to conform” (Weber); her “traditional” political support is “clannish” and based around the patriarchal family and its leader, i.e., the “honcho.” She points out that voting is a form of family power. This provides an incentive to vote, and it becomes a type of capital. The more voters, the more prestige the family has. Voting is a process—not just pulling a lever. It is understood as involved in a system of control, power, and authority. Like a good modernist, she uses “honcho”—a term with resonances similar to “boss,” “patrón,” and “machine”—in conjunction with politics to convey what is wrong in Mexicano- U.S. politics. She makes this apparent toward the end of her discussion when she specifies the system (beyond a simple exchange of capital) as one bound through “respect” to a “padrino” (godfather) with its hierarchical, sacred, Catholic overtones intact. She moves from “all they [the candidates] have to do is show up at somebody’s family gathering, and they’ve got it” into the realm of cause that points to the complexity of a system: “People fall into line because he is respected.” Her repetition of “respected” three times further highlights its centrality to this system of vote getting, authority, and state formation (domination). It makes the listener wonder, what makes people respect the honcho, here imagined as “Mr. Vega”? A way to understand the underpinnings of this idea of respect is through reviewing the political history of a famous political boss of Hidalgo County, Leo J. Leo. The speaker literally pointed to the part of Hidalgo County that Leo “ran,” and her story parallels that of Leo, a man who died recognizing his place as the quintessential patrón in Hidalgo County. Like this speaker, Leo himself realized the contradictory nature of being a boss. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, he dismantled the master’s house using the master’s tools and got entangled in its reticulations. Leo earned respect because he fought against a “corrupt,” “boss” system centrally concerned with cultivating personal networks whose effect was often manifest in the form of “pay-offs.” He earned his position through doing just what he opposed, cultivating his own personal networks at his local business.

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In an oral history of his life in South Texas politics, Leo begins his account by listing the old patróns of his childhood: E. B. Reyna in La Joya, E. Vela in Hidalgo, P. Avila in Donna, S. Cavazos in Alamo, and the Chapa brothers in San Manuel (Miller 1980). His story starts with the relationship between politicians, money, and construction. He tells of marveling at the beautiful homes built by bosses Reyna and Cavazos— coincidentally out of the same kind of red brick used at the new schoolhouse, around the same time, and manufactured by the same contractors who provided the bricks for the school. Leo’s career began in opposition to this patronage system. He did not care for Reyna and those like him and structured his political career around exposing their corruption (i.e., political players using their networks to forward their own economic interests). Thus, it seems to me that people respect a “honcho” like Leo for reasons beyond his position as the patrón. Leo owned a grocery store, and he listened to people’s complaints. He worked against the institutionalized racism and classism (and occasionally against the sexism) of the Jim Crow South. He spearheaded the ¡Viva Kennedy! campaign (the Kennedy-Johnson campaign coalition focused on Mexicanos) 5 ; after his win, President Kennedy acknowledged the central role organized Mexicanos played in his narrow victory. Later in the 1960s and the 1970s, when campesinos marched and the people of Mission and McAllen treated them with hostility, as mayor of La Joya he supported the campesinos and turned their march into a cause for celebration. Such counter-hegemonic actions brought respect to a political man like Leo J. Leo. Scholars (Anders 1982; Keyssar 2001) have tracked the work of people, particularly upper-class conservatives in power, who use terms like “boss,” “patrón,” and “machine” in conjunction with politics to convey all that is bad in U.S. politics. Usually such discourse functions to disenfranchise poor citizens (who tend to be darker and immigrant), keeping them as far removed from the political system as possible. I do not want to sound like an apologist. Unchecked power leads to abuse; nonetheless, many charismatic leaders earn respect through acts that provide a needed service or counterweight to the power structure of their community. The ambivalent attitude toward traditional charismatic authority shown by “Mrs. X” at the Pulido fundraiser, nods to the duality of a respected padrino’s persona and perhaps also echoes the United States’s historically ambivalent attitude toward what it means to be a democracy in a classical sense of the term, i.e., of the people and their acts. The 2000 national presidential election, Leo’s history, and “Mrs. X’s” experiences coalesce around the meaning of family and the branded name. All three include appeals to traditional authority in the form of family custom.

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She repeatedly mentions the centrality of family to voting and ties to power (e.g., “Their voting worth increased, the voting power in the family,” and “Mr. Vega, his family votes the way he says, [the] padrino, because he is the head of the family and that is the way the family thinks”). Leo’s grandfather was one of the first sheriffs in South Texas; his Aunt Nellie (Leo Schunior) was politically active in Hidalgo County politics; and his son Billy Leo still “lives in his father’s ghost” (as one consultant aptly put it) as the ostensible patrón of La Joya today. When Lieberman and the DNC came to Hidalgo County to tour a colonia, it was not by chance that Billy Leo appeared to be at the center of the local Democratic delegation. (It was in Billy Leo’s part of the county, too.) Leo faced the national press corps (e.g., reporters from the New York Times, ABC News, and the Washington Post) speaking of the problems associated with poverty endemic to the region. On the national level, both George W. Bush’s and Al Gore’s ties to politics began with their families, and they ran on those branded political names. Bush’s grandfather was a Connecticut senator, his father the President of the United States; Al Gore’s father was a Tennessee senator. At all three levels (local, regional, national) and in their political situations, family is central to passing on a type of legitimate authority or power. Another connection to the national campaign—not to mention “Mrs. X’s” roots as a South Texas Democrat— concerns the modernist way in which she frames the old-fashioned pachanga system as meant for the nonthinking voter. Her appeals through a lens of modernity sound like part of the national media’s conversation about the elections, particularly like Al Gore and the DNC’s campaign rhetoric contra George W. Bush. Gore’s campaign, especially until the last month, constantly emphasized “issues,” reminding voters that electing a president is about more than “personality.” Some media commentators interpreted the Bush campaign’s use of leadership imagery as a strategy to counter this characterization. This problem became a theme central in the election. As New Republic editor Peter Beinart explained on Charlie Rose’s televised talk show following the first presidential debate: [The leaders of the Bush campaign] tried to turn every issue into a metaphor for leadership. Everything came back to: “Well it really doesn’t matter what the specifics are because after all they couldn’t get it done. I can.” I can hear Gore at the debate podium sighing into the microphone with exasperation as Bush speaks of leadership— once again—and then asking Americans to look deeper into Bush’s record, fighting to move the nation’s attention

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into policy details and away from character. In a similar fashion, “Mrs. X” talks of pachangueros as remembering “who throws the dance. . . . The voter is not an issue-oriented voter.” This modern technocratic stance (Wander 1994) marks off her present politics from forms that rely on traditional or charismatic authority to prompt action. In perhaps a defiantly ironic stance, “Mrs. X” distances her present self from the world of charismatic forms. She puts the world of the pachanga “there,” not “here” in the present and in that company. She acts as if those present at Pulido’s fundraiser are not attending a pachanguita of sorts, relegating the “traditional” pachanga to the realm of cultural lag and poverty. She literally points to the poorer part of the county and states that voting loyalty based on tradition resides with “the older generation,” something “they do,” again something “they” who “like free dances do.” She elaborates the system only after mentioning the practices of the older generation and then moving toward those of the urbane, “the twenty-to-thirty crowd.” In doing this, she does not recognize that young people attend pachangas in droves, particularly in poorer zones of the county. She refuses to recognize our attendance at a form of pachanga. Perhaps our attendance at a county judge’s fundraiser infused with music and packed with builders, engineers, and architects (paying from one thousand to five thousand dollars to attend) triggered her reflections on a system, characterized as dying, of controlling votes through bringing together the social and political elites—many of whom are also businessmen. Thus, in the presence of this field of economic and political capital, I find her stance that distinguishes between “there” and “here” ironic. This attempt to defy the present and locate the problematic on the bodies and acts of the poor, the older generation, and those on the rural margins of the county is important to her narrative and also from the position of a middle-class, urban, Mexicana. In other words, numerous MUPPIES (Mexicano Urban Professonals—younger, elite, university-educated leaders of the community) read the politics of people in the poor rural areas and/or in the adult day-care centers as sites of another form of politics, from a world of which they are not a part. Focusing on the difference between “us” and “them” erases the connections between that system of material reward and social honor and the present system of material reward and social honor. Time and glamour seem to be the primary differences. A helpful characterization of the distinctions between types of selling is “old-style marketing” versus “new-style marketing.” As I have already indicated, “Mrs. X’s” narrative primarily concerns itself with using new-style marketing (that of her

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children) as a tool to juxtapose and consequently elaborate upon the constituent elements of old-style marketing: pachanguita, not issue-oriented, wordof-mouth, clannish, patriarchal, relying on extended kin, vote-as-procreation, personal selling. Her use of first and third person posits the problematic on their bodies and not-modern ways and inserts her authority through modern reason, based in the mind. Finally, her bridges between these worlds and the third and first person acknowledges herself as an object, which is a meaningful move if one interprets politics as a relation among persons (i.e., as exchange). Her “inheritance” or transfer as voting capital from one kin group to another is an effect or marker of that transaction.

Old-Style Marketing and Presence “Mrs. X” speaks in a distanced third person referring to “the people,” “they,” “the voter,” “families,” and “that culture” in a way that locates their attitude toward power in highly present and embodied terms. It is not located in the mind, in the realm of distanced, objective, and cool thought. First, she begins her story in that awkward shift from “people” to “I” and to “they” (“People love to dance. I mean, I love to dance. They like the free dances”), locating the difference between herself and other Mexicanos through money/class, or disposable income. She likes to dance, but “they” are attracted to “free dances.” The utterance “free” subtly marks this as being in the arena of those who do not have money, and hence safely locates these acts in the arena of the poor body. Their thought does not follow abstract principles but rather adheres to tangible forms of coercion like physical presence. Music and dance play a crucial role in drawing people into these webs of coercion. Music attracts people (it is the “latch”), and dance is the axis around which this political social gathering revolves. For “Mrs. X,” people who respond to old-style marketing do not attend to issues, only word of mouth (metaculture/dialogue/the transmission of culture), personality (charisma), who the sponsor is (brand name). Voting is not something they think about too much; the candidate will “show up” at a pachanguita, and they “fall in line.” If a race requires more than someone showing up, then they reserve thought for “the head” of the family. Perhaps, in this context, “head” conveys multiple and overlapping meanings: head as in leader, head as in thinker, head as in phallus. This final characterization and location of agency on the body is particularly interesting. They increase their political capital through having babies. Reproduction of people is how a family accumulates voting capital, ensures its “voting worth” and “voting power” within a community.

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When the speaker calls attention to her presence and personal relations in the text through using “I,” “you,” and “my,” it highlights her recognition of the system and its changes. She employs the first person “I” as she characterizes the patrón system and follows this up with an example. To make her proof more present, she uses a personal “my” and inevitably shifts back to a detached, descriptive position: “My son married a Barrera. The mom [not his mother-in-law] is a Treviño.” Maintaining this stance of detached observer and analyzer of political systems is difficult. Even when she speaks of voting in a modern register, she stumbles and her ambivalence seeps out. She comforts listeners by pointing out that this premodern hierarchical form of traditional politics belongs to another generation: “In my case, it is beginning to die out.” But in the next couple of sentences, her modern instrumental reliance on charismatic and traditional authority self peeps out: “My children are beginning to vote. I shouldn’t demand anything of them —but they should vote my way [ha, laughter, jokingly].” In this rupture, she recognizes the contradiction between what she is professing and the reality of her situation. Imbued in this statement is a tension between two desires (one modern and rational and the other premodern and based on obligation) and where she sees her authority. This slip within a modern register, marked by her laughter, underscores that voting is a practice permeated with meaning and meaning-filled ties to people, and that as much as one would like to escape these ties, one really cannot. Her reflexive bridge statement, “they inherited me,” moves from the distant to the personal and foregrounds the “sexual division of labor” (Hall 1996) implicit in her place in the pachanga system. She recognizes herself as an object within the social field and is taking on the attitudes that others in the community had toward her role, place, and situation (Mead 1934: 182). In this instance, “they” is a multivalent vehicle: it is a community of clans with Spanish surnames (Vega, Barrera, Treviño); it also is the family that inherited her; it is the patrón, Mr. Vega; it is the system; and it is marked male. Personal and collective agency falls into an ambiguous zone in this system of charismatic authority. Actors become a form of property, merely an instrument of someone else’s desires, a transaction: “They inherited me as a voter.” The speaker envisions herself within this realm as property, a thing inherited, passed on from honcho to honcho. Marriage is a hybrid feudal-capital arrangement. It is a political alignment. Marriage is about forging alliances (between clans). Here, too (as in Mooney’s formulation), property is a relationship among individuals. She as inherited object is a marker of that exchange. Her inheritance by the Treviño father is proof that power has been added to

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his voting pot. She, as effect (increase in voting capital), proves the cause (the transaction). Instead of seeing the vote in a traditional property paradigm — as something “I” possess—this speaker interprets it as a cohesive element galvanizing relationships among groups.6 Gender is central to this model. Decisions are made by men at pachangas and passed down to women as carriers of the vote. This is tied to a commonplace understanding that political pachangas began as male-only events; many remain so, especially those hosted by members of the World War II generation. Well-known, gender-integrated pachangas only began in the past few years; for example, the Tripas Club pachanga was opened to women around 1998. The new style of pachanga, held not on a ranch in the country but in or near town in a dance hall, began with the entrance of women into the public political sphere, around the 1970s but perhaps as late as 1985 (personal communication, A. Ramirez). Men were present overwhelmingly at the Pulido fundraiser; none of the women present (ethnographer, mother, wife of staffer) were involved in the core of the business or politics being negotiated at this event. “Mrs. X’s” reference to a pachanga of “the older generation” alludes to a male-only event. Her mention of these pachangas, and the decisions made at them concerning for whom “their inheritance” was to vote, purposefully references a systematic exclusion of women from politics and political fields. As attendants at this event, the speaker and her audience cannot help but notice that this event is also about the exclusion of women from the political in relation to economic transactions at live-music event fundraisers. She objectifies herself. She recognizes “me,” herself, as an individual within a social field and as an object to be exchanged in the form of a vote. In the next sentence, she assumes the voice of the community—simultaneously addressing herself and audience—affirming this sense of the self as object: “[You!] Talk to Mr. Vega. [You] Sell yourself to Mr. Vega.” It goes even further with the repetition at the second: “They inherited me.” Listeners feel as if the “me” has become chattel. The move from me-object to the juxtaposed “sell” and “yourself ” attempts to negate this object status really illuminating that this exchange is more than just a simple barter, a beer, a dance, free food for a vote but a Mephistophelian selling of the soul—the self. The command really tells that this is not about just looking back and selling your vote as a community, a collective “you,” but about selling “your” personal and “your” communal soul and “your” agency (suffused with legitimacy). That modern voice, based in that enlightened distinction between mind and body that privileges the mind, steps out and tells listeners that they

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cannot legitimately do this. In other words, we/me cannot do this without losing our legitimacy in the eyes of the modern, jural/legal (authority-based) state. This point is particularly relevant because this logic encapsulates just the way representatives of the Republican Party have historically argued against the enfranchisement of marginalized groups.7 In my analysis of one actor’s narrative of old-style marketing, I have called attention to an interpretation of the relationship between music, politics, and marketing that focuses on politics unfolding within the pachanguita. The pachanguita is a dimension of kinship associated with relationships of exchange. Foregrounding this modality is the anticipation of politics as corrupt, cultivating a field of personal networks whose effect (that points to the cause) is in a form that marks an increase in one’s capital (political/voting/property). In old-style marketing, this accumulation is what persons gain in exchange for bringing their votes to Mr. Vega. Flagging alliance accumulation is key to selling, advertising, and marketing.

THEN AND NOW: FROM SMOKE TO GLAMOUR From the heavy and somber notes of “sell yourself,” a happy call of “Maarrgaarr-et!” jolted me into the present. A group of hair-coifed, nails-manicured, toenails-pedicured, rhinestone stiletto heel–packing Southern /Latina women were heading right for us. Unfortunately, I did not recognize the glamorous person addressing me. Taking thirty seconds to read through the hair, dress, nails, and make-up, I deciphered my acquaintance, Alma, a legal assistant. She introduced me to her friend, smiling ear-to-ear with blond hair piled high on her head, “[ Jennifer] Pulido, Margaret Dorsey.” As we animatedly discussed the black-tie event in Bobby’s honor, a medium height young fellow with slick black curls and a European-cut suit walked up to us, and Alma introduced me to Bobby Pulido (the Tejano/Latino musical sensation plastered on the bedroom walls of many teenage girls in the United States and Mexico). Another group of about twelve people, including Roberto and Mrs. Pulido, Bobby’s band members, and their personal managers, walked up and into the building. With the arrival of Roberto, Bobby, and their entourage, the event shifted indoors and transformed in standing from a good party to a memorable event for all present. Their arrival, smart clothes, and entourage added a level of importance and glamour to the event. They made the event truly unique and memorable. Their high spirits and spectacular singing—lasting for hours—punctuated the event with an exclamation point. The developers and contractors paying one thousand to five thousand dollars per person had a night through which to remember the name Pulido.

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In the warm flow of the pachanga, people talk. This talk can lead to insights regarding an attitude about the pachanga in relation to politics and markets. This pachanga arose out of political marketing in order to finance future political marketing across radio and television, and it brought a politician in contact with not so disinterested members of the private sphere. Within this setting, talk coincidentally returned to another world where legitimate domination—framed as somewhat illegitimate—is based in personal connections, family, and word of mouth. Here, music is the lure, part of what entices us, moistens our lips, and frees our tongues to speak knowingly and critically about that /this world. Under these conditions, I suggest collapsing the distinctions between old- and new-style marketing and interpret “Mrs. X’s” commentary on the old as one equally concerned with the new. Her commentary on pachangas blurs the distinctions between private and public, politics and markets, past and present. This woman’s narrative is a rare moment of metacommentary, a glimpse that complicates boundaries most South Texans and political philosophers seem to take as given. I, as participant-observer of this event, cannot help but think that this reflexivity has something to do with the context of the situation at hand—that is, an exclusive, private event hosted by a public servant for businessmen to gather. The event blurs and confounds the borders between politics and markets, private and public spheres. That and the pachanga moments highlighted throughout this text bring into focus issues beyond, “What constitutes a successful pachanga?” and “What does the replacement of large public face-face live-music events by private fundraisers mean?” and brings us to “Where does the sphere of marketing end and that of democracy begin?” or “Where does the sphere of democracy begin and marketing end?” With these data, can scholars realistically continue to argue that the realms of markets and politics are clearly divisible, separable? If scholars recognize that they are no longer divisible, then envisioning where and how the political, democractic, marketing, and capital realms—understood as interrelated spheres— emerge becomes a crucial issue.

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In this text, I have focused on the ways in which politicians and marketers deploy democracy through music. My ethnographic study of the pachanga indicates that marketers, candidates, and musicians have taken this traditional form and used it to achieve political ends and articulate local knowledge in a global context. The form of pachanga has never been fixed, but in recent years it has become increasingly transformed by agents who have restyled it and, in the process, altered its meaning. People decide to attend these social functions, where they relax, have fun, and talk politics, family, and fortune. But my evidence supports a view that flatly contradicts the notion widely popular in academic circles that people vote and make decisions as autonomous actors. Attendees themselves often recognize the importance of influencing action by wrapping others into their social webs, going so far as to anticipate political gatherings as sites that can be mined for personal profit. These social gatherings—and publics created at and through them —are just as highly produced as the music played at them. Expressive forms—music, pachangas, speeches, invitations, and the like— are excellent vehicles through which to study these shifts in meanings of traditional configurations and their implications for political action in South Texas. Both foundational and contemporary scholarship (Limón 1989, 1994; Paredes 1994 [1958], 1993 [1978]; Peña 1985, 1999) have inquired into the relevance and meaning of verbal and musical artistry in the formation of a politicized identity. My study contributes to that scholarship by reframing the literature on the poetics and politics of Greater Mexico by more closely

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considering economic interests and forces—such as Mexicanos’ dominance in the local public political sphere, the rapid economic growth in the region, and the role of cosmopolitan forms of public culture. In Hidalgo County, even though some politicians and political players consider them outmoded and inefficient, pachangas have not vanished. In fact, they seem to be experiencing a moment of efflorescence. They are still being used in numerous ways, albeit by different people. The newer forms seem to eclipse the pachanga’s traditional role as an arena for forging a politicized identity and instead spotlight its function as a conduit of glittery fun. While the particular elements that constitute the social gatherings of Hidalgo County remain unique to this region’s cultural vernacular, the actions of transnational corporations are not unique to the county. Transnational marketing for corporations is an ever-present facet of contemporary life. Coopting a specific regional form, divesting it of its political meanings for the ends of circulating a message across multiple media, and increasing its velocity so as to maximize its potential to reach, create, and captivate audiences to sell congenially—for the ultimate purpose of making and siphoning money into the accounts of transnational corporations—is not unique to the experience of Hidalgo County’s inhabitants. A close look at the shift in the use of the pachanga shows that this form of event has been changing for the past fifty years and that, while the pachanga-as-publicity-vehicle is exciting in its newness and ability to affect actors, three distinct styles of pachanga remain intact as active parts of Hidalgo County’s social scene. Even when residents of Hidalgo County critically reflect on the region’s various political forms (e.g., men in the country, the dance-hall style, the spectacle) as corrupt or wasteful, if one asks, “Why are they so popular?”, they are slower to respond. I attribute this to the less obvious nature of the answer. To understand changes in political practice in Hidalgo County while keeping intact the voices of its citizens and its cultural richness (e.g., not interpreting such change solely in a facile language of co-optation of “good” local practice by “bad” outside invaders), it is useful to turn to campaign music and explore how it shifts the political landscape. The idea of “latching” is suggestive here because, rather than understanding identification as a purely mind-based phenomena (i.e., one of cognition and recognition), it allows for music’s special capacity to create physical bonding to cultural artifacts. The simple and catchy tune, for instance, of Cecilio Garza’s campaign music for Judge Aparicio made it readily latchable for residents of Hidalgo County; moreover, it cued them to Aparicio and the themes of his campaign. At parades and homes, citizens stepped out into the public sphere and resoundingly

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voiced their sense of identification with a candidate. But when analyzing the song as a piece of verbal artistry subject to the accountability of an audience, readers and listeners realize that it encompasses an attitude toward politics relevant to the music’s ability to induce latching— one aligned with South Texas’s own social, political, and economic cultures. Juxtaposed against the inability of Cali Carranza’s “Campaign Music for Judge Aliseda” to forge identification, this performative element becomes particularly salient. The process of latching as related to producing shared forms of identification is crucial to the formation of publics in South Texas. Latching is one cultural process through which political publics can be articulated. A general conclusion that I highlight in the introduction involves five cultural processes—latching, metaculture, entextualization, generic intertextuality, and spectatorship—through which politics and music are mutually channeled. Recall: 1. Latching marks a change in relationship between a person and an object. 2. Metaculture refers to the circulation of culture, and its ability to snowball. 3. Entextualization draws our attention to the process of a person making culture an object, which often involves being able to take that piece of culture out of one context and put it into another— a demonstrable act of control. 4. Generic intertextuality takes as a given that speech acts are dialogic. 5. Spectatorship encapsulates the idea that audience/performer relations are projected onto those between citizen and society and that the role of sound and sight must be taken into account. The aural and visual channeling of audience/performer roles in Hidalgo County suggests an increasing distance between audience and performer: a shift toward more distance between politicians and citizens exists. This move draws our attention to the limits of deliberative models of democracy. That the general findings in this text are also broadly relevant to studies of politics and communication, particularly those interested in interrogating consumerism and citizenship in relation to the feasibility of achieving delib-

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erative democracy (see Habermas 1991; Sunstein 2001). One important criticism of studies of deliberative democracy and other related studies concerned with communicative approaches to the political public sphere and citizenship is their failure to account for the power of rhetoric in political interaction (see Farrell 1993; Mouffe 1999; Young 1996). In this study, I address this issue in several ways. First and most broadly, I have made use of a concept of publics as a material phenomenon constituted by poetic forms that mediates and patterns relations between public political and private economic acts. As communicative vehicles recontextualized and decontextualized by social agents, publics can be subject to the authority of marketers, candidates, musicians, and citizens. The processes of latching, metaculture, entextualization, generic intertextuality, and spectatorship—as they were played out in Hidalgo County—all describe ways in which persuasive forms acted upon political interaction and resulted in channeling publics, processes in which some actors and groups had more power (experience, time, energy, and/or money) than did others. Second, by focusing my analysis of the constitution of publics on the shifts in a specific form of social gathering— once valued as an arena for proclaiming political authority—I show political and market forces coming together. Politicians and marketers both channel publics through live events featuring music. It is not merely an issue of political and business elites sharing the same stage, or of political and business events looking the same and confusing one for the other or one marketing style for another. Corporate marketers have become so savvy at mimicking and reproducing political pachangas that they seem to have eclipsed them. My analysis of who attends events, who produces them, and why they do so reveals the meaning of citizens being treated like consumers and consumers being treated as citizens. My conversations with local people show that many of them perceive political forums with an anticipation of corruption (i.e., as events sponsored by agents acting for their own economic interests). Communicative models (such as those presented in Habermas 1991 and Sunstein 2001) need to allow room for such highly charged, deeply felt, and cautiously shared attitudes expressed in relation to political gatherings. Third, I introduce key rhetorical tropes for producing identification through which residents of Hidalgo County articulate their ideas of citizenship. “Farm work,” “gifting,” and the “grass roots” are all crucially linked to music and pachangas and have been part of defining the region’s socialpolitical-marketing geography for some time. My study of ethnic marketing highlights trends of increasing market seg-

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mentation and of narrowing participant interaction roles between state and citizen. This idea, stimulated by watching marketing models applied to political action, is also shared by Cass Sunstein (2001). In his study of consumerbased models of citizenship circulating in contemporary U.S. society, Sunstein argues that democratic practice is increasingly vulnerable to fragmentation, with consumer-citizens breaking up into insulated enclaves where individuals are only exposed to commodities as well as interpretations of history and current events of their own choosing. He suggests countering this trend toward social fragmentation by using the Internet as a public forum for deliberative democracy that fosters reflection, exposure to alternative viewpoints, and shared knowledge. In light of the findings presented, however, a solution cannot only rely on a political public forum (that excludes the economic sphere) of deliberative democracy, but rather to poetics and politics created by local, regional, national, and transnational actors that inform and cultivate the formation of publics. Key expressive components include: 1. Music. Since music is a central mediator between politics and markets in South Texas, it should be taken seriously as a way of fostering democratic action. Accessible to literate and illiterate residents alike, it is relatively cheap to produce and broadcast. Historically, songs like “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez” (Paredes 1994 [1958]) have exposed residents to alternative viewpoints, provided a base for shared knowledge, and were dialogic. Processes similar to this have also been traced in the creation of an alternative black public sphere (Gilroy 1993, 1994). 2. Social Gatherings. In this text, I outline the intimate link between social gatherings, proclaiming authority, and manufacturing publics. I interpret traditional pachangas as key to the celebration and coordination of a shared and politicized Mexicano identity—as well as sites where men bartered voting capital. But many actors, most notably women, recognized the negative implications of this linkage. They worked to change the nature of these gatherings, increasing pachangas’ receptivity to other voices and their ability to produce alternative publics. 3. Talk about Music and Social Gatherings. Citizens of Hidalgo County mobilize a political public—rhetorically, symbolically, and performatively—by their talk about music and pachangas with which they identify. Their actions underscore the extreme difficulty encoun-

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tered in transmitting culture and communication to other persons when the musical and ritual contexts are unfamiliar. Familiarity is an issue advocates of deliberative democracy marginalize. Marketers understand this. Even marketers—with a limited knowledge of linguistic and cultural norms—now have more access to methods that allow them to alter the way people receive information, reproduce it, and interpret its meaning. If scholars are interested in including the voices of citizens in conversations about the political public sphere, then they need to take the roles of music, social gatherings, and the talk about music and social gatherings seriously. Many residents of Hidalgo County, voters and nonvoters alike, recognize the centrality of music and social gatherings in their daily experience. Those who do not consider music and social gatherings as defining features of their cultural surroundings ignore a crucial element in making democracy more realized in everyday life. In this study, I contribute generally to studies of contemporary society by specifying the process or dialectic between local and transnational marketers’ channeling of publics. More specifically, I add clarity to Greg Urban’s (2001) concept of metaculture and depth to interpretations of transnationalism (e.g., Rouse 1992, 1995) and flows of global public culture (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988). I advance this model in four ways: 1. I underscore the relevance of balancing particular rhetorics: the glitzy and the folksy, the familiar and the special, pleasure as subjectively experienced and as an object. 2. I explore the meaning of channeling these rhetorics in which certain elements and discourses are elided (Z. Bauman 1998)—as are the gatherings of certain publics (for example, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza). 3. I follow the process in which national corporate marketers learn how to build an “ethnic market.” Readers learn of their key terms (such as “buying power” and “population”), terms that resonate with traditional imperial projects and anthropological studies that came under meaningful critique in the postmodern turn. 4. I clearly articulate the process of channeling through latching, metaculture, generic intertextuality, entextualization, and spectatorship. It must be noted, however, that channeling is not a simple

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process of co-opting a cultural form with a tradition of resistance to “evil” corporate ends. Rather it is a dialogic process between producers, audiences, spectators, and each actor’s memories of past events. Given my discussion of borderlands music, United States politics, and transnational marketing, I will address two final issues. The first involves the special character of this local political community and its availability to commerce. The second concerns Hidalgo County’s retention of political memories through music—and whether they (music and memories) have become a form of empowerment in democratic terms or a form of empowerment in terms of a new consumer state at the local community level. Clearly many elements of Hidalgo County’s political culture are unique to this area—the profusion of political signs around election time (for example, car magnets) and the importance of actual personal associations working through the senses (e.g., gifting, their memories of John F. Kennedy, and the corrido melody). Almost anyone can adopt a popular local name, hire a composer to write a corrido, and transmit messages. The special elements of the local political community can be co-opted by transnational marketers, but it remains a great challenge for them to pull all of these elements together to create the kind of sensation fostered by Garza’s song for Judge Aparicio. The challenge is for marketers to be able to create a combination of these elements that works. Certain features of the local political process, such as the economy of the gift, often will make this an even greater challenge for someone primarily interested in democracy as a form of consumerism. Be it the economy of the gift, a block-walking strategy, or a car magnet with a locally associated name, something will invariably throw a monkey wrench into a marketer’s plan to borrow a special element from Hidalgo County’s political culture and to transform democracy into just another good sell. Aliseda’s corrido and the Democratic National Committee’s event provide evidence for this argument. An essential point is that these elements emerge locally, in conversation, and that word of mouth—gossip about a political candidate, family, or a candidate’s song— often works as a fulcrum for culture’s motion. At the same time, this study sends a significant message to both corporate marketers and nondominant groups (i.e., smaller, poorer organizations) alike: music is the key to grass-roots ties. As Garza’s song indicates, an organization does not necessarily need to spend a great deal of money to put a “catchy” tune into circulation. Actually, the success of Aparicio’s song shows that lo-

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cals can often do a much better job of using music to create bonding to an image than can transnational and ethnic political marketers. In fact, people trying to borrow transnational methods often get it wrong, because they are unable to translate the spirit of the encounter for people on the ground. Such cases point to the disconnect between local politics and transnational politics. Nonetheless, music has a special capacity to mediate relations and animate publics, and this special capacity of music and live-music events to excite and enshrine forms of democracy is elementary. For this reason, the ways in which music mediates relations is central. Sometimes music brings people together and at other times it pulls them apart (through channeling, “niching,” targeting). The subtle distinctions made in this text between various productions of music (and their failure) underscore the crucial role of style in understanding why some songs work to pull people together and some do not— and, equally important, why some music events segment groups. Based on the data presented, Hidalgo County’s retention of political memories through music remains a form of empowerment in democratic terms, not a form of empowerment in terms of a new consumer state. Hidalgo County’s political memories, embedded in and rearticulated through its corridos and pachangas, were and are susceptible to cooptation by a consumerist form of state interaction, but the cases provided here demonstrate that citizens of Hidalgo County are still able to be called into the public sphere and interact with politicians in their homes, neighborhoods, and at local parades. They also are quite able to discern a slick package and translate its meaning to their own ends. Corrido-like music and pachanga-like functions retain their resistant stance to the status quo, even if, at times, that resistance remains latent. The right campaign, with the right message and the right marketing, is still able to tap Hidalgo County’s proud tradition of democratic activism. Having said that and having spent a great deal of time thinking about Robert Peña’s presentation that reduces “Hispanic power” to “Hispanic buying power” (see Chapter 6), I also have reason to believe that it is highly possible that savvy marketers who operate like Peña are increasingly able to transform, elide, and narrow opportunities for empowerment in democratic terms. The tension between the appeal of a slick transnational and a folksy local package will not go away anytime soon, and Budweiser, Univision, and Ace’s ability to synthesize the two adds to my sense that this trend is here to stay. For that matter, their slick-but-folksy style has yet to cross over into Hidalgo County’s voting rhetoric. Perhaps this ability of corporate marketers to blur the differences between

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local and transnational marketing is a sign of things to come? The actions and commentary of the people of Hidalgo County indicate, though, that as long as democracy emerging from the grass roots is considered a legitimate form of political interaction, people will continue to create, latch onto, and talk about it in unique, novel, and exciting combinations. I opened this text with two vignettes. One featured Bush’s future supporter and then–Philip Morris performer, Navaira. The other told of a woman singing a campaign song while giving birth. In a similar vein, I believe that as hard as Philip Morris, Karl Rove, and Miller Brewing Company may try, citizens will continue producing their own politics.

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INTRODUCTION 1. Although the vast majority of the events were located inside Hidalgo County, I attended approximately ten in other parts of South Texas (Cameron, Duval, and Nueces Counties). 2. While I mean “global” in its literal sense—i.e., how Spanish speakers of various national orientations tend to apply the term —Limón (1989, 1994) beautifully evokes a sense of working-class male camaraderie at a pachanga in South Texas. He features a group of men in the countryside—at a ranchito (little ranch)—barbequing meat, drinking beer, and trading barbs. 3. I interviewed a cross-section of consultants about music, politics, pachangas, and marketing, the majority of whom are Tejanos (Texans of Mexican descent). Tejano, Mexicano, Hispanic, Chicano, Mexican American, and citizen of the United States of America are all labels residents of Hidalgo County use to describe themselves. Local residents rarely use the term Latino to describe themselves; hence the use of Latino often marks the speaker as an outsider or as speaking in the idiom of an outsider. Most residents of Hidalgo County recognize that the choice of label is a political act, and selection varies from person to person and equally often with setting. I decided to use the term Mexicano throughout the majority of the text because it appears to be used and accepted by many residents of Hidalgo County with the least amount of dismay. My usage of Mexicano refers to individuals and families with linguistic, cultural, or familial ties to Mexico. 4. “Non-White Hispanics” constitute the majority of the county’s population, forecast at approximately ninety percent for 2000 (Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts 2002). Many residents speak English, Spanish, and a combination of the two languages. Approximately eighty-one percent of the population speaks Span-

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ish at home, and fifty-three percent of that group does not speak English “very well” (U.S. Bureau of the Census DP-2 1990). In other words, approximately forty percent of Hidalgo County’s population is comfortable primarily speaking Spanish or perhaps a hybrid of Spanish and English. 5. These numbers are consistent with other data. For instance, the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1998) estimates that in 1998, 35.3 percent of Hidalgo County’s residents lived in poverty, and their 1990 census put the median household income at $16,703 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2000: 250). In Hidalgo County in 1998, the annual payroll per employee was forty percent below that of the national average at $18,568 (U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics, and Statistics 2001: 346). A study published by the Texas Secretary of State (2002) estimated Hidalgo County’s per capita annual income in 1994 at $8,899. The county’s unemployment rate in 2000 was 13.6 percent, one of the highest in the United States and in Texas. For more on poverty along the U.S.-Mexico border and in the region, see Saenz and Ballejos 1993; Stoddard and Hedderson 1989. The prevalence of poverty is further seen in the county’s high levels of substandard housing. Colonias, “rural and unincorporated subdivisions characterized by substandard housing, inadequate plumbing and sewage disposal systems, and inadequate access to clean water . . . physically and legally isolated from neighboring cities” (Salinas 1988), dot Hidalgo County’s landscape. As the definition offered by Exiquio Salinas indicates, these communities are isolated and difficult to see from major roads or when just driving around the county, but numerous colonias exist. For an excellent map that shows Hidalgo County’s colonias, see Texas Attorney General’s Office, Border Colonia Geography Online 2000. 6. In the colonias of Hidalgo, Cameron, and Willacy counties, eighty-seven percent of colonia residents own their own homes (Salinas 1988). The majority, sixty-one percent, were born in the United States and hence automatically qualify for U.S. citizenship. 7. For more detailed information on colonias, see Chapa and Eaton 1997a, 1997b, 1997c. 8. Across the entire county, less than half of the population graduated from high school (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1990), with forty percent of this group having less than a ninth-grade education. Approximately forty-six percent of its population operates at a level of literacy in which they can sign their name but cannot locate an intersection on a street map or enter background information on a social security card application (National Institute for Literacy 1998: 4). Several studies draw attention to the relationship between “Hispanic” education and its relationship to poverty in the United States (Chapa 1989–1990; Grossman 1984; Meier and Stewart 1991; Ortiz 1996; Shirley 2002). 9. These are the November 2000 early voting totals for Hidalgo County: Bush/Cheney received 17,523 votes during the early voting period, Gore/Lieberman 23,626. Murray Moore (R) received 18,156 votes and Letty Lopez (D) 24,372. Ernest Aliseda (R) received 18,156 votes, and Aida Salinas-Flores (D) 21,935. George

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Bush’s Texas affiliations probably skewed the number of votes in the Republicans’ favor. In Hidalgo County, rural voters tend to vote heavily Democratic, while the city of McAllen tends to go heavily Republican. 10. Hidalgo County’s elections administrator, Teresa R. Navarro, and her staff used early voting to increase access to the polls by offering a range of times and locations. Her office placed the vast majority of substations, ten, in small towns stretching across the county. More accessible to working people, officials opened them seven days a week, and during the final week they were open from 7:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. For residents for whom going to one of these substations may have been too much of a burden (such as elderly residents), Navarro’s office made mobile voting vans available to come to requested sites during the two weeks of early voting. Three mobile voting vans circulated throughout the county. As an Elections Department official explained, the voting vans go “wherever needed” (personal communication, November 2000). The only constraints placed on their schedule came from the office of the Texas Secretary of State, which requires them to submit a table of mobile voting times and places five to seven days before the election. Stopping for a few hours at each site, mobile voting cars travel to places like the local university and community college (University of Texas Pan American, South Texas Community College), supermarkets, hospitals, nursing homes, adult day-care centers, and retirement homes. On Sunday, they frequent churches and on Saturday, malls. The vans are no longer permitted to stop at highly popular shopping spots like Wal-Mart and K-mart; the multinational stores “threw out mobile vans” from their private lots because of congestion problems. The point remains: since 1992, three mobile voting vans have been circulating, according to an Elections Department official, “everywhere” in hopes to increase voter turnout. This statement reinforces the Election Department’s desire to make voting as accessible as possible to the citizens of Hidalgo County. 11. For discussions of a few different models of democracy, see Young (1993, 1996) on communicative; Frazer and Lacey (1993) on communitarian; Barber (1984), Bohman (1995), Cohen (1989), Fishkin (1991), Habermas (1991, 1995), Spragens (1990), and Sunstein (1988, 2001) on deliberative; and Eisenstein (1994) on radicalized in a context of racialized patriarchy. 12. These approaches to discourse (see Bauman and Briggs 1990) share a concern with the role of power in producing subjugation (Foucault 1980), and in this sense, have shared concerns with other studies of democracy (Gordon 1991; Mitchell 1991; Rose 1996) and detailed ethnographies of democracies as centrally concerned with controlling populations in neoliberal contexts (Nelson 1999; Schild 1998). 13. The term “political” has many meanings. I use it here in an ethnographically based understanding of the term: “the political” is not some “space,” “level,” “structure,” or “public square . . . that stands outside or above the realms where individuals consider their options and act. Rather, the power of political institutions must be understood as a component of people’s agency” (Greenhouse and Greenwood 1998: 10). As this definition underscores, individual agency is crucial to my interpretation of the political, and in this sense, I understand “political acts” as an emer-

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gent quality shaped in performance through form (Bauman and Briggs 1990)— for example, the corrido form as embedded in issues of ethnic conflict and manhood. This tension-between emergent qualities manipulated by performers, they showing their ability to decontextualize and recontextualize texts, and the meanings and expectations embedded in the form (of the text and performance)—underscores Foucault’s (1980) influence on my understanding of the political as constituted in relation to power. Power is a generative set of relations of force often reproducing domination by acting as a centralizing force. This action frequently manifests in the form or the given expectations built into the text, the performance, or, for instance, even the term “the political.” The strength of this definition of power is that it produces effects at the level of desire. This definition allows space to consider power as moving people to act centrifugally on people and texts that are trying to centralize into “the political” as a commodity, a thing possessed, and subjugate them. Simply put, I focus on political acts making certain political fields legitimate: the economic and political are not separate fields when approached from the perspective of an ethnographer observing daily life. Rather, they appear as a shared set of personal relations, unfolding as a series of acts seen in this book as the organization of and attendance at pachangas.

CHAPTER 1 1. See Pycior (1997) for an in-depth discussion of the ¡Viva Kennedy! campaign. 2. Foley (1997) offers an example of the newer scholarship on the borderlands region that focuses on identity as a nexus of color, culture, and class issues. 3. Wells was, in addition, clearly no friend to organized labor. Foley cites labor leaders who grouped Wells, along with Senator J. L. Slayden, among corrupt “bosses” and “land-hog politicians” (Hickey 1916, quoted in Foley 1997: 249, n.83). 4. On the northern edges of South Texas, in Duval County, Archie Parr’s distinct style of boss politics began to bud when Wells’s machine came into decline. Parr’s machine is the famous one Lyndon Johnson was known to tap during tight races, for instance in his senate race against “Coke” Stevens in which the dead were said to have voted—in alphabetical order. 5. One consultant, who wishes to remain anonymous, identified 1973 as the year in which this change occurred (personal communication, December 2000). 6. Alfonso Ramírez (personal communication, December 2000). 7. Red Mass dates back to thirteenth-century France and, generally speaking, celebrates the opening of the judicial session. For example, annually in Washington, D.C., members of the Supreme Court and congress attend a Red Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. 8. Unfortunately, I did not note the sequence of songs at Lopez’s pachanga, but at another dance-hall style pachanga like hers held around the same time, I did record the songs played. Los Canerios (The Canneries) performed “Una Página Más,” a cumbia called “Carmen,” a ranchera called “Ojitos Verdes,” a huapango called “Mi

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Tesoro,” a Norteño song, a cumbia called “El Año Viejo,” a rancherita called “No Te Puedes,” “El Toro del Pines,” “Aunque Tengo Razón,” a cumbia, “Rinconcito en el Cielo,” a huapango called “El Toro Moro,” “Tampico,” a cumbia, a polkita, a cumbia, a ranchera, and then a huapango. 9. I model this discussion after Herzfeld’s (1985: 212–220) identification of the act sequence of Cretan males’ sheep-raiding stories. 10. Cameron County borders Hidalgo County on the east. 11. Willie Lopez’s radio program is called “Chulas Fronteras,” and although it is broadcast from McAllen, it also plays on XEFD-590, XEOQ-1110 in Río Bravo, Mexico, and XEOR-1390, XEO-970 in Matamoros, Mexico. His business card includes a colored drawing of the Mexican and United States flags interlocked. The slogan reads: “UN SEGURO SERVIDOR DEL HOMBRE TRABAJADOR (A REAL FRIEND OF THE WORKING MAN).” 12. This is not to say that the migrant labor experience is not a salient one on the national scene. Here I have in mind Steinbeck’s epic The Grapes of Wrath and a more recent book (Larlham 2002), which uses a line from The Grapes of Wrath as its starting point in dramatically documenting the experiences of Latino migrant workers.

CHAPTER 2 1. Young men drank more than half of the 2.7 billion cases of beer sold in the United States last year (Armstrong 2001:38). 2. In fiscal year 2000, Anheuser-Busch and its distillers and brewers had a combined revenue exceeding $6 billion (Media General 2001). The company employed 23,725 workers. The chairman and CEO of Anheuser-Busch was paid $4,152,600 in 2000. 3. Signs posted at entry points of the city as well as in the town square proclaim Edinburg as the “All American City.” This award, from the National Civic League, is one that the city has received for numerous years contiguously, and it is an important point of civic pride for Mexicanos. At many rallies in which the audience was primarily Mexicano, speakers proudly proclaimed their joy in being in and or from the “All American City,” to which the audience would enthusiastically respond with applause and whistles. 4. This phenomenon is not unique to Budweiser in South Texas. See, for example, works by R. Foster (1999, 2002), who discusses the “semiotic merging of nation and corporation through the fortuitous manipulation of the colors in PNG’s [Papua New Guinea’s] flag—red, black, and gold—with the colors in Shell’s corporate logo” (2002: 122). 5. At the time of the event, Iman was under contract with the multinational media conglomerate BMG. 6. The filming lasted forty-five seconds.

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7. Robert also filmed for Univision at the event organized by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at McAllen’s Archer Park earlier in the autumn of 2000 (see chapter 5). He showed members of the DNC media team around Reynosa, across the border in Mexico, the night before the Archer Park rally. A member of the team hired Robert to film a few weeks later at Al Gore’s big rally in Albuquerque. Henry Cisneros, the former mayor of San Antonio who spoke at the Archer Park DNC rally, was also the president of Univision. Univision ran “get out the vote” spots throughout the presidential race. 8. More informal political pachangas at homes also lack this feeling of comfort mixed with excitement. 9. At the time of my ethnography, Univision owned three local radio stations. 10. I say this with a fond awareness for arguments (for example, Keane 1997) that advocate interpreting spoken language as an object transmitted between individuals. While perhaps my characterization (as person-to-person and person-to-object rather than as person-to-object-to-person and person-to-object) might be flawed, a difference in type of relationship does exist between two people communicating and a person and an object communicating. It is less dialogic; for example, a tape or a photograph will not respond directly to a comment or question you pose to it. 11. Their worth to the company is also reflected in their status as temporary, hourly, and easily replaceable employees. 12. While I limit the scope of this conversation to Budweiser marketing, these metaphoric associations abound in borderlands expressive culture. A notable example is the Texas Tornados song and music video “Guacamole.” 13. The image I have in mind for this sequential layering parallels Goffman’s (1986 [1974]) “laminations.”

CHAPTER 3 1. I observed such practices of keeping the poor out and allowing the rich in not only at pachangas but across the physical geography of South Texas. As ranchers of the nineteenth century watched barbed wire parcel and divide the landscape of Texas, so too I experienced rural dwellings and urban spaces increasingly guarded by gates and gatekeepers. This is not a trend limited to my observations in Hidalgo County. Other scholars have documented the increased forms of social exclusion in the forms of residential segregation across the United States, which they consider to be exacerbating existing social divisions. See Blakely and Snyder 1997, Higley 1995, Lang and Danielson 1997, and Marcuse 1997 for more in-depth discussions of this process. See Davis 1992, Devine 1996, Etzoni 1995, Guterson 1992, Judd 1995, Lofland 1998, Low 2001, and McKenzie 1994 for analysis of the spread of this trend into the middle classes and its effect of decreasing social interaction and tolerance. 2. While an understanding of property as a product of a field of social relationships has long been the norm in anthropological interpretations (see Mauss 1967), it is

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noteworthy that professionals in other fields, such as global economics and securities law, are now invoking such a formulation as well. 3. Budweiser’s flame on the invitation fits into low-rider car culture in northern New Mexico as portrayed by Bright (1998). She tells of the flame paint job on Victor Martinez’s ’50 Ford (600) and its evocations of “American” culture within a Chicano culture frame. While I do not recall seeing a flaming ’50 Ford in Hidalgo County, I did see low riders, and categorizing the invitation’s color scheme as borrowing from a low-rider aesthetic is plausible. In a similar way that it borrows from Spanish to intensify the invitation’s appeal, Budweiser might be drawing from a low-rider, Chicano aesthetic and mimicking it in its recontextualization in the form of an upper-class, exclusive event. If this is the case, then in this transaction Budweiser co-opts the politicized meaning often inherent in low-rider culture, resignifying it into a comfortable symbol primarily connoting fun. 4. Some readers might disagree with my interpretation of the way in which the eye moves across the text or the order in which I suggest a subject might read the text. This issue is interesting and important, but it is not central to proving nor does it distract from my point: persuasion functions to mitigate against risk, and this is a persuasive text that uses color to do so. Social scientists tend to fall into two primary schools concerning cognition and color semantics, the universalists (Kay 2000) and the relativists (Lucy and Shweder 1979; Saunders and van Brakel 1997). 5. See Peña 1985: 139. 6. Hill (1993: 173, note 32) borrows “pejoration” from Schulz (1975), who uses it to describe the semantic descent of women. For example, respectable hüswif becomes modern “hussy,” while “husband” retains a stable meaning; the same is true with “queen” and “king.” Schulz shows the systematic pejoration of women in English. 7. Hill (1993: 149) quotes Bakhtin (1984 [1929]: 194), who quotes L. Spitzer on this point. 8. You might think that I am stretching the point, because the individuals that primarily constitute the invitees to this party are upper-class Mexicanos and Anglos or because border crossing is not a salient feature of their lives. With checkpoints both on the nation-state border and sixty miles inside of the United States and Mexico, citizens are subject to searches even when traveling only within the United States; for example, driving from McAllen to Corpus Christi, one has to wait and pass through the tightly guarded Sarita checkpoint. Moreover, one constantly passes the green and white Ford Explorers of the Border Patrol on the way in and out of the Valley and can be subject to search at any time on this drive. The Border Patrol seems not to discriminate between rich and poor, prominent and ordinary Tejano citizens. For example, Federal District Judge Filemon Vela has been repeatedly pulled over and bothered by the Border Patrol on trips out of the Valley, to such an extent that he has filed a lawsuit. Even Anglos can be subject to the Border Patrol’s authority. This is something I experienced when crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. My friend’s entire car was searched, with the agent closely scrutinizing its contents.

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9. Herzfeld (1985: 25) discusses the role of rule-breaking as a form of effective performance in his study of the ways in which Cretan men demonstrate themselves to be men. 10. This emphasis on higher education ignores a very real problem in South Texas concerning students’ preparedness for education beyond primary school. The primary education system continually churns out a large body of students illiterate in basic math and reading skills and thus under-prepared for higher education. 11. See my conversation with Ace marketers (chapter 6) who understand philanthropy and community service to be excellent promotional strategies. 12. The Alabama narrative was repeated and extended in the program handed out at the event. The only divergence in that text from the themes I outline is that the program narrative explains the ways in which the members of Alabama are related. This emphasis on kinship ties is particularly illuminating because “family loyalty” translated into brand loyalty is a theme transnational marketers have utilized to reach “ethnic” markets. 13. I use event ideology in a similar manner to how Keane (1997) understands language ideology as indicative of “the speaker’s own assumptions and understandings about ‘the nature of language in the world’” (Rumsy (1990) as quoted in Keane: 97). 14. See Turow’s (1997: 11) study, which documents this relationship in the advertising and media world and argues that advertisers have power over the structure of the media system and drive the changes within it—for example, the new prominence of radio in relation to advertisers and their interest in target markets. 15. See Foster (2002: 164) for a discussion of corporate sponsorship, which focuses on the benevolence of business and their interest in creating “a good corporate citizen” in Papua New Guinea. 16. See Malkki (1997) and Alonso (1994) for in-depth discussions of the relationship between arboral metaphors, identity, and power. 17. The article quotes Flores as she repeats important statistics about education in South Texas: “only 40 percent graduate from high school . . . only 7 percent graduate with a [college] degree.” If these figures are accurate, only approximately 3 percent of the population educated in South Texas has a college degree. 18. Anthropological literature refers to individuals in such a situation as transnational. See, for instance, Rouse (1992, 1995). 19. This analysis borrows from Abrahams’ (1976: 98–105) discussion “Enactments: Types of Events We Look Forward To (Sometimes with Dread).”

CHAPTER 4 1. The last line also can be translated, “He leads us forward.” 2. This interpretation is similar to J. L. Austin’s (1994 [1962]) understanding of the locutionary force of speech acts.

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3. Appadurai’s (1986) interpretation of objects as having a “social life” and Kopytoff ’s (1986) of their “life histories” is similar to this formulation. 4. The local UFW chapter’s official name is César E. Chávez United Farm Workers of America AFL-CIO. The union’s colors are red and black with the Aztlán bird symbol. 5. For an in-depth discussion of Valley Interfaith’s political organizing and connections with the UFW, see Shirley (2002). 6. My analysis in this section draws heavily from the sharp insights in Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift, especially chapter 7, which opens with “Social relations are the objects of people’s dealings with one another” (1988: 172). 7. Skip to the discussion in “The Media Package” for an explanation of why I label “El Corrido del Juez” “corrido-like.” 8. Herrmann (1997) also sees this happening in U.S. garage sales. She states: “The garage sale encompasses acts of outright giving . . . and the connection of people through the spirit of the gift in which something of the original owner is passed along” (925). 9. Herrmann (ibid.) also argues, in the U.S. context, that gift exchanges are fundamentally about connecting people. 10. Again, my claim is supported by Herrmann’s study in which she also understands that as personal possessions, gifts already embed a web of social relations (1997: 910). 11. Interestingly enough, at a broader level, the validity of this primary election was contested formally by the loser in the sheriff ’s race. The sheriff won by 60 votes; officials later verified that hundreds of absentee ballots were stolen and other fraudulent practices occurred during the election. 12. Malinowski (1965 [1935]: 244) posits that one of the key elements in translating the meaning of magical utterances is understanding “that the words of magic are familiar to all of the community.” 13. Charro suits are those typically worn by mariachi ensembles and reference Mexican ranch roots. 14. Football is a central social activity in the lives of borderlanders; for instance, on Friday night during football season the community closes down because almost everyone is attending games or expected to be doing so. Only the smallest of political events occurred on Friday nights during football season. See Bissinger’s (2000) Friday Night Lights for an in-depth treatment of Texas high-school football. 15. This transformation occurs in three of the four video versions. 16. This issue is probably most dramatically presented in the film labeled, “B/ WColor” (Black-and-White to Color). The photos start rolling in black-and-white and shift to color after the candidate has become a judge. The color splash intensifies his transition from a regular citizen to “Your Honor.”

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17. We are all happy and pretty excited, and at moments the three of us are speaking, affirming and laughing at once. My rendering of this polyphony in a linear fashion fails to capture the pace and spirit of this conversation. 18. It is common for people to ride horses in parades. 19. My understanding of Carranza’s modern capitalist attitude draws from Weber’s formulation in which rationality stands at the core. According to Weber scholar Andreski (1983: 8), Weber’s use of rationality draws from Descartes’s understanding of it as “maximisation of profit in business consultancy” and Marx’s interpretation of it as part of the development in the forces of production. 20. (Paredes 1994: 210, 214) “Ya con esta me despido” [Now with this I say farewell]. 21. Weber (1983a: 131) recognized a “hostility toward magic” as an element of modern rational capitalism. 22. I would like to thank Cándida Jáquez for kindly sharing her knowledge of Mexicano musical sound. I am grateful to Ramiro Escobar for much help with transcription and translation. While I am solely responsible for the interpretation provided here, I want to acknowledge their assistance.

CHAPTER 5 1. His glitzy coat and boots are meaningful status markers. Ostrich skin signifies the act of conspicuous consumption. A conservative estimate would place the price of his coat at more than one thousand dollars, and his boots, depending on if they were manufactured in the United States or Mexico, between three hundred and seven hundred dollars. See Boon (1999: 17) for a discussion relating the extravagance of “show business,” commodification, and politics. 2. Joel Cano, the fellow in ostrich skin, ran for public office in western Hidalgo County. 3. See Peña (1999) for a discussion linking the visual orientation of Tejano music with younger tastes. 4. The only other political pachanga I attended approximating this size and level of band notoriety, yet with an older and more family-oriented crowd, was an event in San Benito hosted by the Cameron County Democratic Party. At the Cameron County event, the entrance fee was twenty dollars and sends an entirely different message: 1) we support the Democratic Party; and 2) we give them money, not the other way around. This approach transforms the interaction from patronage to a more egalitarian position. 5. This is a possible point of intertext with the ethnic marketing literature. This group with specialized knowledge glosses differences (e.g., of class, of education) within the culture group. Perhaps Puerto Rican DNC marketers thought that all Mexicanos were alike. Their attitude parallels that of a marketer for Ace Hardware, Lisa Lechtner, who was excited about music because it “transcends” the

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problems posed by the differences of language or internal Hispanic cultures. Aliseda’s marketer spoke in similar terms of a transcendence theme. 6. I purposely draw metaphors from behavior surrounding the Catholic mass because these actions and their socialization are intertextual. Most South Texans are practicing Catholics—they were raised in the Catholic Church and/or attended Catholic schools. This exodus parallels that of adherents receiving communion and the final blessing. 7. The local newspaper reported 750 people ( Julie Bisbee, McAllen Monitor, October 15, 2000). 8. I documented the temperature at the event at 88 degrees, without a humidity index. 9. Below is a partial genealogy of power and state formation: Durkheim’s (1954 [1915]) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life lays the foundation for theories of the state as constituted through symbolic actions that bind society together and of ritual’s power to transform objects and endow them with special meaning, and Turner (1977 [1969]) brought process to the agenda. Unlike many anthropologists studying social formation, Foucault (1980: 114) departs from this tradition in that he emphasizes power and motion over meaning. Abrams’ (1988 [1977]) theory understands the state as a temporary unity being reprocessed. The state is not a thing but an idea performed and projected as a coherent institution. Corrigan and Sayer (1991 [1985]) push Abrams’s idea of state creation as related to capitalism and patriarchy rendered a natural construct through ritual, routine, and process. Gupta (1995) studies corruption discourse as a local level actor’s “diagnostic” of the state and argues that it is a formation that “condenses” contradictions (Hall, quoted in Gupta 1995: 393). On discourse and Mexican state formation at the margins of the mountainous northern frontier, see Alonso (1995).

CHAPTER 6 1. The idea he expresses here, that the border is “easy to get across,” ties into Sassen’s (2000) discussion of globalization, particularly her understanding of a NAFTA / World Trade Organization (WTO) governmental paradox, which she explains in terms of competing epistemologies, which I think is more strategic. The paradox is encapsulated in NAFTA’s transnational/denationalizing goal of opening economic borders and the U.S. government’s nationalizing policy of more rigidly controlling borders. Here we see a strategic approach to the well-known fact that borders are wide open to those with plenty of money to spend. This displays a way in which the government’s policy is selective, favoring “the affluent, the wealthy” for entry. 2. A shopping pass is a special permit that allows Mexican nationals to enter the United States for a brief stay, usually three days in duration. 3. Since Channel 5 (KRGV-TV) is an English-language station, its primary audience is on this side of the border; nonetheless, it does reach residents of northern Mexico. For this reason, I label it a local/transborder station.

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4. Instruments like this suffuse Peña’s presentation. Political marketers and corporate marketers use them to create their own fictions. For a discussion concerning the use of polls and the types of realities they create, see Paley 2001a, 2001b. 5. I borrow the image of census and map from Anderson’s (1991 [1983]: 163–185) “Census, Map, Museum,” with the hope of reminding readers of marketing’s resonance with projects of state formation, colonization, and the control of subjects. 6. Another way to speak of this is in terms of Adam Smith’s concepts and recent attempts by scholars to rewrite common interpretations of “the father of economics” and “totemic ancestor of the free market idea itself ” (Mattick 2001). Scholars attribute these ideas to Smith, who is famous for his metaphor of the economy as an “invisible hand.” Advocating faith in the freedom of the market allows for equal freedom in society. The debated component of Smith’s work concerns whether or not he theorized the economy and the state to be intertwined or distinct spheres. Traditional interpretations are of the two as separate spheres, but a recent and controversial work by Rothschild (2001) posits that Smith saw the two as interdependent. 7. My concrete discussion of Peña’s presentation—borrowing from familiar cultural forms to construct a place—parallels a more abstract argument about the significance of such inventions in the context of “cultural globalization and transnational culture flows” for ethnographic analyses made by Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 5). 8. Peña explained that the meaning of the program’s title, Buscando a Las Estrellas, is a pun. It translates into English as “Looking at the Stars,” as in sitting around a campfire and looking at the stars gracing the skies of South Texas, but also as in “Watching for the Stars,” as with the television show Star Search, in that viewers are watching star musicians. 9. See Peña (1985) for a discussion of conjunto’s working-class origins and audience base. 10. I borrow this image from Alonso’s (1995) ethnohistory of the northern Mexican frontier, in which the residents of a mountain community refer to a ruling family of German descent as “hoarders” of substance. 11. See Jhally (1990) for a description of this dynamic.

CHAPTER 7 1. In colonial Mexico, Peninsulares, those born in Spain, were granted special privileges by the Crown. This caste division was strictly enforced and was one of the elements that led to early uprisings in Mexico. Across South Texas, you will still hear the term “Spanish” used to describe a person or their family. This signifies more than it denotes. The family described in that way could well have been in the New World for more than four hundred years. The word connotes an elite standing, marking this person or family off from regular people, more specifically, distinguishing them from mestizos, who have “Indian” blood. Perhaps the staunch preference in the region, especially among the upper and middle classes, for the

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label “Hispanic” rather than “Mexican American” is related to this. “Hispanic” sounds more like “Spanish,” and it supplants the Mexican /mestizo/Indian element. 2. Place played a prominent role in Roberto Pulido’s footing of the family as from both Texas and Mexico and in the mayor’s speech (Marciniak, The Monitor, November 2, 2000, 10C). 3. The décima, dating from sixteenth-century Spain, is a narrative form found universally in Hispanic oral tradition and is usually sung (Paredes 1993 [1987]: 248). See Paredes (1994 [1958]; 1993 [1987]) for analyses of the trajectory of the décima form and its usage in Greater Mexico. 4. I keep the speaker anonymous due to the sensitivity of the topic discussed. 5. See Pycior (1997) for an in-depth discussion of the ¡Viva Kennedy! campaign. 6. This discussion, particularly, my understanding of property as something more than a possession, borrows heavily from Strathern’s (1988) The Gender of the Gift, a study of political transactions in Melanesia. 7. See Keyssar (2000) for a chronicle of this occurrence.

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SONG LIST Carranza, Cali y Grupo Boss 2000 “Juez Aliseda es el Bueno.” Garza, Cecilio 2000 “Campaign Music for Judge Aparicio.” Montoya, Alfredo and Tony Padilla 1996 “El Corrido de Victor Morales—Para el Senado de Texas.” In Corridos Políticos. Vela, Rubén y su Conjunto 1999 “El Coco Rayado.” In Taquachito Nights: Conjunto Music from South Texas. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

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Aacker, David, 52 Abrams, Philip, 203n.9 Ace Hardware: and corporate pachangas, 5, 148; and Hispanic markets, 148– 151, 153–155, 157, 158, 165, 166; and live-music events, 20, 152, 153, 168–169; Peña’s presentation to, 154 –157, 165, 191, 204nn.4, 7; and Pulido’s television show, 159, 160 – 161, 166 –167 Aguirre, Willie, 154 Alabama (band), 73, 75, 78–80, 82, 85, 200n.12 Alaniz, Zorayda, 128 Aliseda, Ernest: campaign media package of, 116 –118; district court campaign of, 10, 14 –15, 32, 109, 132, 133; and Greg’s Ballroom pachanga, 69, 124 –134, 137, 141, 145, 146; hiring of Carranza, 110 –111, 114 –115; speeches of, 126 –127, 130, 131–132. See also “El Aliseda es el Bueno” (Campaign Music for Judge Aliseda) Alonso, Ana María, 134, 203n.9, 204n.10 Alonzo, Armando, 26 American G.I. Forum, 24

Anders, Evan, 26 –27, 28, 29, 176 Anderson, Benedict, 204n.5 Andreski, Stanislav, 202n.19 Anglo domination: and border ballads, 23; and political pachangas, 25–26, 31, 35; resistance to, 11, 12, 24, 31, 124; and Spanish language, 76 –77 Anheuser-Busch, 53, 55–56, 58, 64, 66, 78–81, 86, 197n.2 Aparicio, Edward: and block walking, 98, 103–106, 132, 137, 165; and campaign videos, 92, 95, 98–108, 201n.16; and grass-roots politics, 101, 103–109, 167; and metanarrative, 97–98, 106; and migrant farm work, 88, 89–91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99–100, 101, 163, 164; and personal contact, 103–109, 120; voters’ identification with, 185–186. See also “El Corrido del Juez” (The Song of the Judge) Appadurai, Arjun, 163, 189, 201n.3 Apter, Andrew, 16 Attlesey, Sam, 25 Aural media, 12, 13, 138 Austin, J. L., 200n.2 Austin, Texas, 150, 158

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Avila, P., 176 Ayala, Don Pedro, 36 Ayala, Ramon, 159 Bahktin, Mikhail, 77 Baker, A. Y., 97 Ballí family, 26 Bauman, Richard, 12, 16, 33, 66, 67, 195n.12, 196n.13 Bauman, Zygmunt, 15, 189 Beinart, Peter, 177 Block walking: and Aliseda’s pachangas, 117; and Aparicio, 98, 103–106, 132, 137, 165; and candidates, 7; and intimacy, 17, 106 Blue Club of Cameron County, 28 Boon, James, 202n.1 Border ballads, 23 Border crossing, 77, 151, 156 –157, 199n.8, 203n.1 Border factories (maquilas), 11, 155 Borderlands music, 2, 120 Boss politics, 26 –29, 30, 175–176 Bourdieu, Pierre, 33 Brand loyalty, 51, 52, 152, 166 Breckenridge, Carol A., 163, 189 Briggs, Charles, 12, 33, 66, 67, 195n.12, 196n.13 Bright, Brenda, 199n.3 Broadcast videos: and Aparicio’s campaign, 92, 95, 98–108, 201n.16; and constitution of publics, 53; and pachanga deportiva, 59, 61–65, 67, 73; and spectatorship, 19 Broadway Hardware: brand image of, 156; and corporate pachangas, 5, 148, 149, 151, 152–153, 166, 167, 203n.3; and Hispanic markets, 149–150, 153 Brownsville, Texas, 157, 158 Budgirls: and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, 69; and indexical continuity, 66 –67; interaction style, 60, 61, 64, 66, 198n.10; and pachanga deportiva, 18, 59–61, 63–68, 167 Budweiser: as “beer of the people,” 54,

56 –57; and brand loyalty, 52; and corporate pachangas, 5, 20, 53–55, 124; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, 53, 68, 77–85; and mass media, 81, 82–83, 86; and multimedia publicity, 146; and political pachangas, 124; and production of new publics, 13; public and brand image, 56 –58, 191; and Pulido’s event, 171, 172. See also Pachanga deportiva Burke, Kenneth, 13, 91, 91–92, 103, 120 Bush/Cheney ticket, 10 Bush, George W.: and Aliseda, 14, 32, 109; gubernatorial race, 1, 8, 110; leadership issues, 177–178; and Navaira, 1, 2, 110, 192 Business networks, 146 Business profits, 153 California market, 161 Cameron County, 35 Cameron County Democratic Party, 202n.4 Campaign spending, in Hidalgo County, 8 Candidate’s speeches: Aliseda’s speeches, 126 –127, 130, 131–132; and body of event, 37; and climax of event, 40 – 48; Lopez’s speeches, 40 – 41, 131; women’s speeches, 43– 48, 130 Candidate’s logos, 8, 37 Cano, Joel, 127–128 Cantú, Albert, 170, 171 Capitalism: and Aliseda’s campaign, 109, 110 –116, 120, 202n.19; and Aparicio’s campaign, 95; and capital accumulation, 164 –165, 167; and political pachangas, 124; and Protestant work ethic, 79; and recontextualized success, 85; and risk of status, 72 Carranza, Cali, 88, 110, 111–115, 117– 118, 186, 202n.19 Carter, Jimmy, 111 Catholicism, 27, 30, 203n.6 Cavazos, S., 176

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Ceballos, Miguel, 84 Cecilio Garza y Los Kasinos, 163 Channeling: and Aliseda’s campaign, 133; and circles of exclusion and inclusion, 14 –15; as dialogic process, 189–190; and intertextuality, 186, 189; and marketing practices, 13, 18; of pachangas, 12, 167; of publics, 187, 191; and snowballing discourse, 124; and spectatorship, 19; and transnational marketers, 20; and velocity of objects in motion, 123 Chapa brothers, 176 Chicago (band), 111 Cisneros, Henry, 135, 136, 139, 142, 144, 198n.7 Citizenship: and Aliseda’s campaign, 129, 130; and Aparicio’s campaign, 119, 129; and consumerism, 3, 187, 188; and corridos, 95; and deliberative democracy, 19, 186 –187, 188; heroic citizenship, 123; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza invitation, 82; importance of, 56; interest in, 137 Civil rights struggle, 79, 124 Class issues: and Aparicio’s campaign, 100, 101; and crossing borders, 157; and Democratic Party, 134; and DNC rally, 145; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, 76, 79, 82–86, 199n.8; and Lopez’s pachanga, 35–37, 41; and market segmentation, 19; and migrant farm work, 41– 42; and Peninsulares, 172, 204 –205n.1; and Pulido’s event, 169–172, 178, 179; and Pulido’s television show, 162–163, 166. See also Working-class orientation Cleveland, Grover, 28 Clinton, Bill, 136 Closner, John, 28 Colonias, 7, 93, 133, 135–136, 142, 177, 194n.5 Color, 36 –37, 73, 75, 85, 199n.3 Comaroff, Jean, 82

225

Comaroff, John L., 82 Conjunto, 23, 25, 34 –36, 162, 168, 171– 172 Consumerism, 3, 17, 130, 186 –188, 190 Control (band), 159 Corona beer, 55 Coronil, Fernando, 16 Corporate pachangas: and Broadway Hardware, 5, 148, 149, 151, 152– 153, 166, 167, 203n.3; and Budweiser, 5, 20, 53–55, 124; definition of, 3, 5, 52; and election of 2000, 10 – 11; and intertextuality, 19. See also Pachanga deportiva Corridos: and Cortina, 28; cultural resistance, 24; and Democratic primaries, 25; and intertextual gaps, 97; and Kennedy, 94; and political culture, 190; and political memory, 191; and political struggle, 88; production of, 111–113; shared values, 96 –97, 100 – 101; social/ political shifts, 23; song elements, 91, 95–96, 98–99, 101, 102 Corrigan, Philip, 203n.9 Cortez, Gregorio, 24, 97 Cortina, Juan, 28 Cosby, Bill, 73, 84, 85 Crossover, meaning of, 158 Cultural attitudes, 91–92 Cultural snowball effect, 14 Culture as transmission, 12–13 Dávila, Arlene, 54, 56, 165 Décimas, 172, 205n.3 Democracy: as consumerism, 190; deliberative, 19, 186 –187, 188; grass-roots model, 4, 15–20, 35, 190, 192; as identification, 15, 17; marketing of, 16; transnational model, 4, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 192 Democratic National Committee. See DNC Democratic Party: and Aliseda, 132; and American G.I. Forum, 24; and boss politics, 26 –29, 30, 175–176; and

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DNC’s rally, 135, 136, 137–138, 145; and early voting, 9, 10; and elections of 2000, 7; and García, 89; and minority communities, 9; and political alliances, 27–29; and political pachangas, 5; and Republicans, 133– 134; strength of, 110; and Texas gubernatorial race, 1, 7–8; and United Farm Workers, 93; and women, 32 Democratic publics, 2, 53 DeNora, Tia, 12, 13, 18, 96, 119 Dickey, Dan, 94 Discourse: and channeling, 124; and DNC’s rally, 139, 146; entextualization of, 33; and music, 188–189; and power relations, 3, 195n.12; of transnational marketers, 51–53; and velocity of objects in motion, 14 DNC, 93, 134, 202–203n.5 DNC’s rally: and advertising methods, 137, 138–140, 145; and democracy as consumerism, 190; and election of 2000, 33; event coordination, 137– 139, 141–145; filming of, 198n.7; fundraiser connected to, 135, 136, 144, 145; lack of attendance, 20, 72, 84 –86, 130, 134 –137, 145; music of, 135, 136, 139–140, 141, 144, 145; and Republican Party values, 133– 134; speakers for, 135, 136, 144 Dougherty, James, 30 Dukakis, Michael, 142, 143 Durkheim, Émile, 203n.9 Duval County, 42 Early voting, 8–10, 194 –195n.9, 195n.10 Edenkamp, Becky, 51 Edinburg, Texas, 4 –5, 56, 156, 157, 158, 197n.3 Education: and Aparicio’s campaign, 101, 129; and candidate’s speech, 43– 44, 45; and citizenship, 83; in Hidalgo County, 7, 194n.8; and literacy, 200n.10; and migrant farm work, 84; statistics on, 200n.17. See also His-

panic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza Edwards, Jim, 27 Eisenstein, Zillah, 129 “El Aliseda es el Bueno” (Campaign Music for Judge Aliseda): and Aliseda’s pachanga, 127; and commercialism, 20; and identification, 186, 190; and personal contact, 117– 118; production of, 87, 109–115, 118, 120; role of money, 132; translation of, 115–116 “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez,” 24, 188 “El Corrido del Juez” (The Song of the Judge): gifting of, 87–95, 111, 120, 129; and grass-roots democracy, 15; and identification, 92–94, 104 –105, 106, 111, 119, 190 –191; and latching, 18, 92, 96, 98, 99, 185–186; as local democratic idiom, 20; media package of, 95–109; and movement of text, 12–13; popularity of, 2, 106, 107–109, 118, 137, 167, 190; production of, 87, 91–92, 95, 110, 120; and shared history of struggle, 79; voters’ response to, 25; writing of, 18, 88– 92, 96 –99, 103, 111, 163, 185 Elite publics, 53, 73 Empowerment, 17 Entextualization: and Aparicio’s video, 102; of Broadway Hardware pachanga, 166; and channeling, 189; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza invitation, 84; meaning of, 33, 66, 186; and mixedgender dance-hall events, 33; of pachanga deportiva, 53, 66, 67, 160; and persuasive forms, 187 Escandón, José de, 26 Estefan, Gloria, 152 Estévez, Luis, 113–114, 118 Ethnic labels, 193n.3 Ethnic marketing strategies: and Ace Hardware, 153; and advertisers, 158; and campaign agents, 6; as discursive

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processes, 3; and intertextuality, 202– 203n.5; and live-music events, 51, 52, 124, 163, 166; and market segmentation, 19, 187–188; sound as element in, 12; and Spanish language, 51–52, 159; and transcendent marketing, 152; and transnational democracy model, 17–18, 20; and transnational marketing, 20, 189. See also Hispanic markets Family pachangas, definition of, 5–6 Family ties: and Aliseda’s campaign, 126; and Aparicio’s campaign, 99, 100 – 101, 104; and candidate support, 173–174, 175, 176 –177, 179–182; and DNC’s rally, 145; and Hispanic market, 51, 58, 147, 149, 151, 166, 200n.12; and iconizing surname, 164; and pachanga deportiva, 58, 65; and traditional authority, 176; and women’s candidate speeches, 46 – 48. See also Kinship Farrell, Thomas, 187 Ferguson, James, 83, 204n.7 Fitzgerald, Kate, 52 Flamenco music, 172 Flores, Margarita, 82, 83, 200n.17 Foley, Neil, 23 Football, 101, 201n.14 Foster, Robert J., 200n.15 Foucault, Michel, 195n.12, 196n.13, 203n.9 Freeman, Laurie, 52 Gal, Susan, 12 Galveston, Texas, 108 García, Héctor, 24 García, Mario, 23 García, Ramón, 70, 89, 97 Garza, Cecilio: gifting of corrido, 88, 89–90, 91, 92, 93–95, 111; and migrant farm work, 92, 93, 95; and popularity of corrido, 106, 108–109, 113; and power of music, 2, 98, 137; and Roberto Pulido, 163; writing of

227

corrido, 18, 88–92, 96 –99, 103, 111, 163, 185. See also “El Corrido del Juez” (The Song of the Judge) Gender: and fundraising, 129; and heroic citizenship, 123; and migrant farm work, 41; and pachanga deportiva, 52; and political pachangas, 31–32, 181; and segmented markets, 65. See also Mixed-gender small dance-hall events; Sexuality Generational boundaries, 12, 36, 41, 129, 150, 173, 178, 180 –181 George Washington Days, Laredo, 57 German Catholic settler-ranchers, 27, 30 Germany, 56 –57 Gifting: of Aparicio’s song, 87–95, 111, 120, 129; and connection, 201n.8; and identification, 187; and political culture, 190; of political pachangas, 33, 123, 124 Gilroy, Paul, 16, 17, 188 Globalization, 11–12, 154 –155, 165, 203n.1 Glover, Robert W., 84 Goffman, Erving, 198n.13 Gonzales, Manuel G., 26 Gordon, Colin, 195n.12 Gore, Al, 69, 105, 141, 143, 145, 177– 178, 198n.7 Gore/Lieberman ticket, 10, 134, 136, 139, 145 Grass-roots democracy model, 4, 15–20, 35, 190, 192 Grass-roots politics, 2, 93, 95, 101, 103– 109, 133, 167, 187 Grass-roots public, 18, 53, 57–58, 67– 68, 71, 84, 152 Greenhouse, Carol J., 16, 195n.13 Greenwood, Davydd J., 16, 195n.13 Greimel, Hans, 57 Grupo Modelo (Corona), 55 Guerra, Bobby, 132, 135, 139 Guerra, Manuel, 28 Gupta, Akhil, 83, 203n.9, 204n.7 Gutierrez, Roberto, 70

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Habermas, Jürgen, 16 –17, 187 Hacienda-style patróns, 27, 30, 163–165 Hall, Stuart, 174 –175, 180 Harlingen, Texas, 157 Herrmann, Gretchen, 201nn.8, 9, 10 Herzfeld, Michael, 197n.9, 200n.9 Hidalgo County: and Aparicio’s district court race, 2; characteristics of, 7–11, 193n.4; economic geography of, 157–158; education in, 7, 194n.8; and ethnic labels, 193n.3; fieldwork in, 4 –7; growth in, 11, 15, 154 –155, 185; and migrant farm work, 41– 43, 84; political bosses of, 28, 175–176; political culture of, 190; political pachangas in, 20, 25–26, 185; poverty level of, 7, 177, 194n.5; power elite of, 170; presidential election voting in, 9–10; Spanish-speaking population of, 7, 193–194n.4 Hidalgo County Democratic Party, 110, 134, 135, 138, 145 Hill, Jane, 76, 77, 199n.6 Hinojosa, Gilberto, 135 Hinojosa, Rubén, 135, 139 Hispanic identity, 76 Hispanic markets: and Ace Hardware, 148–151, 153–155, 157, 158, 165, 166; and Broadway Hardware, 149– 150, 153; and buying power, 158, 161–163, 165, 167, 189, 191; and DNC, 134, 202–203n.5; and family ties, 51, 58, 147, 149, 151, 166, 200n.12; and music, 147, 159, 161, 162–163, 167; and transnational marketers, 3, 51 Hispanic Scholarship Fund, 58 Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza: and Budweiser, 53, 68, 77–85; and class issues, 76, 79, 82– 86, 199n.8; and intertextuality, 18– 19; invitations, 18, 71, 73–82, 74, 84 –85, 199n.3; and patriotism, 56; and private exclusion, 71–72, 77, 78, 85, 86; timing of, 69–70 Home Depot, 152 Homeowners, 7, 133, 160, 166, 194n.6

Houston, Texas, 150 Huerta, Dolores, 135, 136 Identification: and Aliseda’s campaign, 110 –111, 113, 117, 130; and Aparicio’s campaign song, 92–94, 104 – 105, 106, 111, 119, 190 –191; and campaign songs, 3, 87–88; and cultural attitudes, 91–92; democracy as form of, 15, 17; and ethnic marketing strategies, 165; and latching, 13, 96, 98, 99, 104 –105, 108, 119–120, 185, 186; and migrant farm work, 92, 93, 95, 100, 187; and person /text relationship, 13; and women’s candidate speeches, 46 Iman (band), 60, 61, 67, 84, 171–172 Independent Party, 26, 29, 30 Internet, 188 Intertextuality: of Aliseda’s campaign, 14; of Aparicio’s campaign song, 18, 91, 97; and Catholicism, 203n.6; and channeling, 186, 189; and ethnic marketing strategies, 202–203n.5; and marketing strategies, 12; and persuasive forms, 187; and velocity of objects in motion, 123; and women’s candidate speeches, 47– 48 Intimacy, 3, 17, 106 Invitations: and constitution of publics, 18, 53, 68, 71; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, 71, 73–82, 74, 84 –85, 199n.3 Irish Catholic settler-ranchers, 27, 30 Irvine, Judith, 3, 12, 92 Jim Crow laws, 30, 31, 123, 176 Johnson, Benjamin H., 30 Johnson, Lyndon, 16, 20, 26, 176, 196n.4 Juárez, Rumaldo Z., 84 Kapferer, Jean-Noel, 52 Keane, Webb, 33, 119, 130, 131, 198n.10, 200n.13 Keil, Charles, 64 Kenedy, Mifflin, 27, 28

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Kennedy, John F., 16, 20, 24 –26, 60, 94, 176, 190 Keyssar, Alexander, 27, 30, 176 Khermouch, Gerry, 51 King, Richard, 27, 28, 29 Kinship, 16, 17, 20, 30, 108, 182, 200n.12. See also Family ties Kleberg, Caesar, 29 Kleiber, Pauline, 28 Kopytoff, Igor, 201n.3 Kuipers, Joel, 13, 15, 19 La Mafia, 113 LaMantia, Joseph, 54, 83 LaMantia, Val, 52, 54, 57, 80, 81, 83 LaMantia Budweiser, 57, 58, 69, 70, 72, 73, 80, 81, 82, 85–86 Land, 26, 27 Laredo, Texas, 57, 58, 157, 158 Larlham, Margaret, 197n.12 Latching: and actor’s relation to music, 19–20, 96, 119, 179, 185–186; and Aparicio’s campaign song, 18, 92, 96, 98, 99, 185–186; and channeling, 189; and identification, 13, 96, 98, 99, 104 –105, 108, 119–120, 185, 186; and persuasive forms, 187 Latifundia system, 27 Leafleting, 138, 139–140 Lechtner, Lisa, 152–153, 202–203n.5 Leo, Billy, 30 –31, 173, 177 Leo, Leo J., 30, 31, 175–177 Lewis, Rodd, 88–89, 92, 95, 98–103, 106 –107, 116, 137 Lieberman, Joseph, 30 –31, 93, 133, 135–136, 141, 177 Limón, José E., 11, 184, 193n.2 Literacy, 7, 28–30, 117, 138, 188, 194n.8, 200n.10 Little Joe y La Familia, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 144, 145 Live events, 3, 4 Live-music events: and channeling of publics, 187, 191; cost-effectiveness, 133; and election of 2000, 10; and ethnic marketing strategies, 51, 52, 124, 163, 166; risks of, 137, 145; time

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of week for, 141; and transnational marketers, 51, 124. See also Ace Hardware; Budweiser; DNC’s rally; Pulido, Eloy Local/global intersection, 6, 73, 83, 155–156, 191 Lopez, Letty: and DNC rally, 135; and election of 2000, 10; Salinas Sun Palace dance, 33–37, 40 – 41, 48, 123, 126, 128, 141, 196n.8; speeches of, 40 – 41, 131; and voters, 137 Lopez, Willie, 39– 40, 197n.11 Lorde, Audre, 175 Los Lobos (band), 113 Los Tigres del Norte (band), 113 Los Tucanes (band), 113 Low-rider car culture, 199n.3 Luis y Julian (band), 128, 133 Magon brothers, 30 Malcolm, Molly Beth, 135 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 15, 103, 201n.12 Mancias, Fernando, 134, 135 Marciniak, Sean, 83 Marketing practices: channeling as, 13; and Hidalgo County demographics, 7; and marketing of democracy, 16; and music, 18, 151, 184; and paradoxical formulations, 102; point-ofpurchase marketing, 54 –55; and political campaigns, 1, 2; and political networks, 3– 4; and political pachangas, 187; and sexuality, 13, 54, 66. See also Ethnic marketing strategies; Political marketers; Transnational marketers Marquez, Benjamin, 23 Mass communication, effect on democracy, 16 Mass marketing, 149 Mass media: and advertisers, 81, 200n.14; and Aparicio’s campaign song, 97; and Broadway Hardware pachanga, 151; effect on democracy, 16; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, 81, 82–83, 86. See also Television /radio messages

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Matamoros, Mexico, 156 Mattick, Paul, 204n.6 Maurer, Bill, 72 Mauro, Gary, 135 Mauss, Marcel, 94, 198n.2 McAllen, Texas, 157, 176. See also DNC’s rally McCumber, Brad, 116 McDowell, John H., 96 –97, 101 Mead, George Herbert, 180 Men-in-the-countryside gatherings: and Anglo domination, 25–26; and Aparicio/Garza meeting, 89–90, 92; and global public sphere, 124; prevalence of, 31; and Pulido’s television show, 160; as type of pachanga, 5, 11, 185 Menudo, 39 Metaconnection, 131 Metacultural process: and advertising, 147; and Aliseda’s pachanga, 133; and channeling, 186, 189; and constitution of publics, 13, 18, 53, 147; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, 73; and participant’s entrance, 36; and personal contact, 105; and persuasive forms, 187 Metamessage, 49, 130, 132, 169 Metanarrative, 97–98, 106 “Mexican” Other, 76, 77 Mexican Revolution of 1910, 30 Mexicano identity, 11, 12, 25–26, 39– 40, 188 Mexicanos: and boss politics, 28–29, 175–176; and class issues, 101; as consultants, 6 –7; as deterritorialized, 83–84; disenfranchised by Anglos, 27, 29, 30; disenfranchised from U.S. legal system, 23–24; and Edinburg, 97n.3; ethnic label, 193n.3; and heroic citizenship, 123; and Kennedy, 176; political dominance of, 185; political emergence of, 35; political rhetoric of, 29–30; and Spanish language, 76 Migrant farm work: and Aparicio, 88,

89–91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99–100, 101, 163, 164; and education, 84; in Hidalgo County, 41– 43, 84; and identification, 92, 93, 95, 100, 187; national salience of, 197n.12; shared experience of, 87; and Spanishspeaking ability, 43; and women, 42, 43, 48 Miller Brewing Company, 2, 54, 171, 192 Miller, Herbert, 176 Mission, Texas, 107, 137, 157, 176 Mitchell, Timothy, 195n.12 Mixed-gender small dance-hall events: body of event, 37– 40, 50; climax of event, 40 – 48, 50; cross-generational audience, 129; emergence of, 31, 32– 33; formal closure, 48– 49, 50; participant’s entrance, 34 –37, 50; patterns of, 33, 50; as type of pachanga, 5, 11, 185; women’s entry into politics, 181 Mobile voting vans, 9, 195n.10 Modernity, 174 –175, 181–182 Mondale, Walter, 142, 143 Montalvo, Leo, 172 Montejano, David, 26 Monterrey, Mexico, 150 –151, 156 Mooney, Charles, 72, 83, 180 Moore, Matt, 70 Moore, Murray, 10, 32, 65 Morales, Victor, 25, 94 Mouffe, Chantal, 17, 187 Movement of text, 12–13 Music: and advertising, 51; and animation of publics, 191; and bonds with cultural artifacts, 12; borderlands music, 2, 120; connections with politics and pachangas, 19–20, 169, 173– 174, 179, 182–184; dialect differences, 152, 166; flamenco music, 172; and formation of publics, 19–20, 188; and grass-roots publics, 86; and Hispanic markets, 147, 159, 161, 162–163, 167; and marketing strategies, 18, 151, 184; and mediation of

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relations, 17–20, 191; Norteño music industry, 129; orquesta sound, 35– 36, 168; person /text relationship, 13; relationship to politics, 7, 11; and social gatherings, 20, 188–189; Tejano music, 23, 128, 159–163, 202n.3. See also Conjunto; Livemusic events National marketers, 150 Navaira, Emilio, 1, 2, 110, 158, 192 Navarro, Teresa R., 195n.10 Nelson, Diane, 195n.12 Niche marketing, 54, 129 Norteño music industry, 129 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 11, 155, 157, 158, 203n.1 Nueces County, 42 Orozco, Cynthia, 23 Orquesta sound, 35–36, 168 O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas J., 16 Pachanga deportiva: broadcast videos, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 73; Budgirls, 18, 59–61, 63–68, 167; entextualization of, 18, 53, 66, 67, 160; and grass-roots public, 18, 53, 57–58, 67–68, 71, 84; as relaxing, 52, 62, 63, 66; and working-class aesthetic, 171– 172 Pachangas: as entextualized, 18; in Hidalgo County, 5; Hispanic market, 148; local/global intersection, 6; nodes of association, 4; political memory, 191; polysemic meaning of, 5, 193n.2; popularity of, 185; power relations, 175; Pulido’s television show, 159–161, 162; relationship with music and politics, 169, 173– 174, 179, 182–184; transformation of, 2–3, 184, 185; as visual spectacle, 12. See also Corporate pachangas; Political pachangas Paley, Julia, 16 Parallelism, 33

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Paredes, Américo, 11, 23, 24, 28, 77, 96, 97, 101, 184, 188, 205n.3 Parr, Archie, 196n.4 Participatory engagement, 151, 153 Patriotism, 56, 57 Patrón system, 27, 28, 30, 163–165, 175–177, 180 Peña, Essua, 101–103 Peña, Manuel, 11, 23, 25, 35, 78, 168, 184 Peña, Robert: Ace Hardware presentation, 154 –157, 165, 191, 204nn.4, 7; Hidalgo County economic geography, 157–158, 166; as Hidalgo County employee, 153–154, 166; and Hispanic markets, 161–163, 165, 167, 191; and migrant farm work, 164; and Pulido’s television show, 158–163, 166 –167, 204n.8 Peninsulares, 172, 204 –205n.1 Performance approach to democracy, 16 –17 Performance-enacted citizenship, 129 Performance of politics, 15–16 Person /text relationship, 13 Persuasion, 73, 82, 91, 187, 199n.4 Philip Morris, 1–2, 192 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 134 Plan de San Diego (1915), 30 Plascenia, Luis F. B., 84 Pledge of Allegiance, 40, 56 Poetics, relationship to democracy, 15 the Political, 146, 195–196n.13 Political authority, 11 Political institutions, 195–196n.13 Political marketers, 7, 8, 124, 168, 178– 182, 183 Political memory, 16, 17, 20, 24, 190, 191 Political networks, 3– 4 Political organizers, symbol use of, 2 Political pachangas: and Aparicio’s campaign, 106; block walking, 105; buying/selling votes, 6; election of 2000, 8–9, 10; estrangement, 3; gender, 31–32, 181; gifting of, 33, 123, 124;

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in Hidalgo County, 20, 25–26, 185; meaning of, 5, 11; nonthinking voters, 177; patterns of, 33, 140 –141; political memory, 16, 20; purpose of, 35; recontextualizing of, 165; and women, 181, 188. See also Men-inthe-countryside gatherings; Mixedgender small dance-hall events; Spectacle-style events Political players, 38–39, 70, 123 Political propaganda, 111 Political publics, 3, 11–14, 88, 95, 119– 120, 186 Politics as corruption, 83, 182, 185, 187 Poll taxes, 29, 30 Populism, 71, 134 Poverty, 7, 48, 177, 194n.5. See also Struggle against poverty, trope of Power relations: and boss system, 176; and corridos, 97; discourse in, 3, 195n.12; and family ties, 177, 180; and legitimations of domination, 174 –175, 181–182; and the political, 146, 196n.13; and publics, 187; and risk, 136 –137. See also Anglo domination Powers, Stephen, 27–28, 29 Prohibition, 56 Property, 72, 180 –181, 198–199n.2 Protestant settler-ranchers, 27 Public/private line, 19, 70, 81, 157, 183, 187 Publics: constitution of, 13, 18, 53, 68, 71, 147, 187; democratic, 2, 53; elite, 53, 73; formation of, 188–189; grassroots, 18, 53, 57–58, 67–68, 71, 84, 152; and markets, 6; political, 3, 11, 12–14, 88, 95, 119–120, 186; and spectatorship, 19; and texts, 53, 71– 72; voting, 123 Puerto Rico, 56, 57, 161 Pulido, Bobby, 159, 168, 172, 182 Pulido, Eloy: and Alisa’s Acres pachanga, 86, 154, 168–174, 178, 179, 181, 182–183; and Broadway Hardware event, 148; and Lopez’s pachanga, 34; and multimedia publicity, 146;

and Peña, 153–154; and voters, 165, 178 Pulido, Roberto: Broadway Hardware pachanga, 149, 152; and conjunto, 35–36; family ties, 151, 164; and Peña, 153, 159; Pulido as manager, 168; Pulido’s event, 172, 182; television show of, 155–156, 158, 159– 163, 165, 166 –167, 204n.8 Push cards, 8, 35, 37, 109, 120, 125, 132–133 Quintanilla, Selena, 158 Racial segregation, of politics, 29 Ramírez, Alfonso, 181 Red Mass, 34, 196n.7 Red Ribbon Week, 101, 129 Regional marketing, 150, 158 Repetition, 33, 103 Republican Party: and Aliseda, 109–110, 132; and clean politics, 26, 29; and Democrats, 133–134; and early voting, 10; and ethnic minorities, 30; and marginalized groups, 182; political pachangas, 5; Texas gubernatorial race, 1; women’s participation, 32 Reyna, E. B., 176 Reyna, Mauro, 2, 89, 93, 106, 137 Reynosa, Mexico, 156, 172 Richardson, Chad, 84 Rio Grande Valley, 23–24, 27, 93, 150, 153–156 Risk of status, 72, 73, 124, 130, 136 – 137, 199n.4 Rivas family, 58–60, 63, 67, 71 Roberto Pulido y Los Clasicos, 35, 89, 168 Roosevelt, Franklin, 56 Rose, Charlie, 177 Rose, Nikolas, 195n.12 Rothschild, Emma, 204n.6 Rouse, Roger, 189 Rove, Karl, 1–2, 192 Salinas, Exiquio, 194n.5 Salinas-Flores, Aída, 10, 109, 135

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San Benito, Texas, 157 San Marcos, Texas, 157 Sassen, Saskia, 155, 203n.1 Sayer, Derek, 203n.9 Schild, Veronica, 195n.12 Schmitt, Bernd, 52 Schulz, Muriel, 199n.6 Schunior, Nellie, 30, 177 Sexuality, 13, 54, 65, 66, 84, 127–128, 167 Sherryland, 170 Shopping passes, 151, 203n.2 Silverstein, Michael, 12 Simonson, Alex, 52 Sinder, Mike, 134, 137–145 Slayden, J. L., 196n.3 Smith, Adam, 204n.6 Social exclusion, 71–72, 77, 198n.1 Social gatherings, 12, 13, 19, 20, 186, 188–189 Songs, 3, 12–13, 87–88. See also “El Aliseda es el Bueno” (Campaign Music for Judge Aliseda); “El Corrido del Juez” (The Song of the Judge) Sound cars, 138, 139 South Texas culture: and Aparicio’s campaign, 108; and citizenship, 56; and marketing strategies, 13; and pachanga deportiva, 63; and pachangas, 6; and promptness, 78 South Texas poetics, 11–12 South Texas politics: characteristics of, 11–12, 100; and magical and rational, 102, 118; and migrant farm work, 42, 92 Spanish/English code switching, 43, 193–194n.4 Spanish language: dialects of, 52, 150; and DNC’s rally leaflets, 139; and ethnic marketing strategies, 51–52, 159; and formal closure, 49; and Hispanic markets, 150; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, 75–77, 85; and Miller beer, 54; parodic perjoration of, 76 –77, 85, 199n.6; Spanish-speaking population, 7, 43, 193–194n.4; and target

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marketing, 19, 159; transcendence of problems with, 152, 166, 202–203n.5 Spectacle-style events: and Aliseda’s pachanga, 14, 130, 137, 145, 146, 167; effectiveness of, 130 –135; and Pulido’s event, 148, 167; as type of pachanga, 5, 11, 12, 185 Spectatorship: and persuasive forms, 187; and social gatherings, 13, 19, 186, 189 Starr County, 28, 60 State/citizen interaction, 146, 188, 203n.9 Steinbeck, John, 197n.12 Stevens, “Coke,” 196n.4 Stoeltje, Beverly, 164 “Straight ticket” (una palanca) strategy, 7–8 Strathern, Marilyn, 82, 136, 205n.6 Struggle against poverty, trope of: and Aparicio’s campaign, 99, 100, 101; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, 78–79; and Lopez’s pachanga, 41; and women, 42; and women’s candidate speeches, 44, 46, 47 Sunstein, Cass, 187, 188 Symbolic manipulation, 2 Tannen, Deborah, 49 Target marketing, 17, 19, 149, 150, 158, 159, 166 Taylor, Zachary, 28 Tejano music, 23, 128, 159–163, 202n.3 Televisa, 155–156 Television /radio messages: of Aliseda campaign, 14, 116 –117, 146; of Aparicio’s campaign, 2, 92, 98, 99, 101–102; and Broadway Hardware pachanga, 152–153, 166, 203n.3; and DNC’s rally, 138; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, 83; and nodes of association, 4; and pachanga deportiva, 71; and pachangas, 160; and power relations, 81; and Pulido’s television show,

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155–156, 158, 159–163, 165, 166 – 167, 204n.8; radio’s advantages, 152; and velocity, 120 Texas market, 161 Texas-Mexico border, 24, 26 Texas Rangers, 24, 97 Texas Revolution of 1836, 24 Texas Tornados, 198n.12 Transcendent marketing, 152, 160 Transnational democracy model, 4, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 192 Transnational marketers: and Aliseda’s pachanga, 128, 134; and borderlands music, 2; and Budweiser, 57, 67; discourse of, 51–53; and globalization, 154 –155; and Hispanic markets, 3, 51; and live-music events, 51, 124, 146; and mass media, 81; and Robert Peña, 154; and political pachangas, 12; and production of new publics, 13; and reverse channels, 20; and sexuality, 66; use of pachangas, 185, 190 Transnational politics, 191 Transnational trade agreements, 15 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 24 Tripas, 39 Tripas Club pachanga, 31, 132, 181 Turner, Victor, 203n.9 Turow, Joseph, 149, 200n.14 Una palanca (straight ticket) strategy, 7–8 United Farm Workers, 37, 84, 93. See also Migrant farm work Univision: and brand loyalty, 52; broadcast reach of, 156; and corporate pachangas, 5; and folksy/transnational synthesis, 191; and Hispanic Scholarship Fund Fiesta Extravaganza, 70; and multimedia publicity, 146; and political pachangas, 124, 198n.7. See also Pachanga deportiva Urban, Greg, 12, 18, 119, 189 U.S. legal system, Mexicanos disenfranchised from, 23–24 U.S.-Mexican border, 151, 156 –157

Valdez-Cox, Juanita, 93 Valdez Garza, Letty, 149 Valley Interfaith, 93 Van Natta, Don, 1 Vela, Filemon, 199n.8 Velocity of objects in motion, 13, 14, 119–120, 123 Vila, E., 176 Visual media, 12 Vote buying/selling, 6 Voter participation, 9–10, 25, 194 – 195n.9, 195n.10 Voter registration, 9 Voters: and Aliseda’s pachanga, 133, 137, 146; and Aparicio’s campaign, 25, 185–186; autonomy of, 184; body of event, 38–39; family ties, 173–174, 175, 176 –177, 179–182; Hispanic vote, 1; and Lopez’s pachanga, 137; and music, 86; nonthinking voters, 177, 178, 179; personal contacts, 105, 106; and Pulido’s event, 178 Voting accessibility, 9 Voting as task, 49 Voting publics, 123 Wander, Philip, 178 Webb, Walter Prescott, 24 Weber, Max, 114, 174, 175, 202n.19 Wells, James B., 28–29, 30, 196nn.3, 4 Wells, Melanie, 51 Wilk, Richard, 6 Williams, Raymond, 76 Wolf, Eric, 163–164, 165 Women: and Aliseda’s pachanga, 127– 128; authority within patriarchal political tradition, 35, 42, 46, 181; and Budweiser, 54; and candidate’s speech, 43– 48, 130; community work of, 42, 43– 44; and connection, 49, 130, 131; as fundraising candidates, 129; image of women candidates, 65; and migrant farm work, 42, 43, 48; and pachanga deportiva, 65; and political pachangas, 181, 188. See also Gender; Sexuality

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Working-class orientation: of conjunto, 35–36, 162, 171–172; and Democratic Party, 134; and Lopez’s pachanga, 35–37, 41; and Pulido’s television show, 162, 166 World War II, 31, 123, 160, 181

Young Democrats, 34 Young, Iris Marion, 17, 187 Zapata, Emiliano, 134 Zate, Maria, 51 Zizek, Slavoj, 114, 115

235