Theorizing a Rasquachismo Music History
This is the introduction to a talk I gave at the University of Northern Colorado in May 2023
I have been mulling over a question for a while now:
How do we salvage materials from our inherited histories in order to reorient ourselves in the present and create new trajectories into the future that “work.”
This question has been haunting me for a few reasons. First, I’ve been thinking of the “making” of history as a mechanical activity. What is history, if not a thing that is meant to “work,” a mechanism that produces the self-determination of an individual, family, nation, planet. Second, as a musicologist, I am constantly thinking about musical materials—about music as its own kind of material thing, but also as a thing that impacts our material lives. And this is where it becomes a personal question for me—because in working towards my own self-actualization, the fragmented gears don’t always seem to line up. My identity as a Chicana who grew up in the borderland of El Paso, Texas sometimes chafes with my identity as a scholar trained in the ivory tower. And the musical materials I carry with me comprise a cluttered jumble that moves across the national and artistic borders with which I identify, Josquin jostling against cumbia, a-tonal analysis fighting for mental space with embodied choreomusicality.
From a bird’s eye view, our history machine is perpetually breaking down, its social gears jamming up on war, colonization, subjugation, and exploitation. Academia, too, is struggling with tensions between material precarity, social relevance, and social justice. But history and its institutions are made-up things that try to make sense of embodied things. And so in my small corner, I want to turn the gears of music history in a way that eases the physical weathering experienced by those who live in bodies traumatized by that same history. This is a tall order, I know. What I offer today is the seed of an idea and some threads of possibility.
A place to start is with the observation that everything I’ve just described has been through the lens of metaphor. Specifically, a mechanical metaphor. Mechanical metaphors feel right to me as a Chicana and scholar. As a scholar, my work explores the ways that music participates in Chicanx speculative discourse, from science fiction to political commentary. In that work, I lean on a foundational premise—one that I’ll discuss in this paper—that is Samuel Delaney’s assertion that every fully-functioning metaphor is a cyborg. In other words, metaphor is a meaning-making process that is at once mechanical and organic, embodied and process-oriented. This idea is integral to Chicanx speculative culture, not least because of that overarching duality of the U.S./Mexico border, in the shadow of which, we define our selfhood. Music too, is a cyborgian metaphor. Through music we embody an interface—between the public, mechanical continuities of history and the private, organic discontinuities of recollection. Chicanx music in particular invokes a slippage between the materials of lived reality and the significance of imagined places, scientific possibilities, and social utopia. As Ernest Hogan put it in his “Chicanonautica Manifesto,” “Chicano is a science fiction state of being.”
This paper is a meditation on metaphors. In Part I, I offer a story from the El Paso, TX/Ciudad Juarez borderland that illuminates a musical metaphor at play in the socio-economic history of that space. In Part II I introduce the concept of speculative rasquachismo. I argue that harnessed as a theory, this terminology and material history can help to understand Chicanx music history, and in so doing, it offers a way of reassessing and reconfiguring European and history-making.
…
Contact me for the full paper.
