The body of English-language scholarship on regional and popular idioms of Mexican music has grown significantly in the twenty-first century. Noteworthy books by Alex Chávez on huapango arribeño, Helena Simonett on banda, Cathy Ragland on música norteña, Alejandro Miranda Nieto on son jarocho, John McDowell on the corridos of the Costa Chica, and Elijah Wald on the narcocorrido have accompanied an increase in Mexican music on US conference programs and in university curricula.Footnote ¹ To that list Gabriela Vargas-Cetina's Beautiful Politics of Music: Trova in Yucatán, Mexico forms a welcome addition, a deeply informed and broadly contextualized study of a regional tradition that laid the foundation for much of Mexican popular music.

Centered in Mérida, capital city of the Mexican state of Yucatán, trova yucateca introduced a number of Cuban and Colombian genres into Mexico starting around the time of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). Yucatecan composer-performers such as Ricardo Palmerín, Guty Cárdenas, and Pepe Dominguez transformed the habanera, guaracha, bambuco, pasillo, and, perhaps most importantly, the bolero (derived from the cinquillo rhythm) into distinctively Yucatecan genres, drawing also on opera, the zarzuela, dance hall music, and European art song. The Yucatecan trova repertory also incorporated local and transnational elements such as the clave rhythm—which Vargas-Cetina characterizes as “a local adaptation of the Cuban habanera” (100)—and jarana dance, their sesquiáltera polyrhythms, and changing meters closely related to those of imported genres.

Yucatecan trova pioneers reimagined these genres and styles in Mexican cultural and political settings, introducing them into mainstream Mexican entertainment through domestic migration and mass media. Guty Cárdenas, in particular, brought the Yucatecan bolero to Mexico City in the late 1920s and helped to disseminate the genre through recordings, radio, and movies. At the time of his tragic death in 1932, Cárdenas was perhaps Mexican music's biggest star. Yet despite the popularization of the bolero throughout Mexico and even into the United States and the rest of Latin America, trova remained a regional tradition in Yucatán, sustained by the establishment of cultural organizations and institutions and reflective of local political struggles.

Vargas-Cetina deftly navigates the complex and, at times, contradictory story of trova yucateca in four largely self-contained chapters that situate the tradition both historically and as a living musical culture. Eschewing a strictly chronological narrative, the author presents what she characterizes as “Chapters in Counterpoint” (18). In chapters 1 and 4, Vargas-Cetina takes an ethnographic approach, offering first-person accounts of her own experiences as a trovadora in Mérida beginning in 2001. The two intervening chapters are historical, emphasizing Yucatán's place “at the crossroads of diverse cultural flows and in . . . changing political and geographical contexts” (18). As a result of this hybrid structure, the reader might feel a sense of shifting gears moving from chapter to chapter, but it does not detract from the book's overall cohesion. Brief conclusions of each chapter help cement the author's primary ideas after fairly dense discussions, as do the book's more substantive introduction and conclusion.

Chapter 1 explores how trova yucateca became the site of a nonviolent political and cultural struggle following the election of Governor Patricio Patrón Laviada in 2000. Vargas-Cetina, a native of Valladolid whose family had been involved as leaders in Yucatecan cultural and civic life, had just returned to the state to take up an appointment at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán after living though an armed rebellion in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas. In Yucatán, she witnessed a more subtle, nonviolent form of political resistance in the trova movement, having determined to become a trovadora at the very moment that Governor Patrón Laviada launched a political attack on the institutions that sustained trova locally in Mérida. Through the author's personal accounts of learning to play and sing at the Museo de la Canción Yucateca and various cultural events, the reader is brought into the world of “beautiful politics,” a kind of grassroots-organized and nonviolent political activism that plays out through cultural heritage institutions.

The historical processes through which the Yucatecan trova became “The Music of a Cosmopolitan Modernity” by the time of the Mexican Revolution occupies chapter 2. Vargas-Cetina recounts early Spanish (and, by extension, Arab) influences on the region's culture, and describes Yucatán's centuries of trade with other commercial centers throughout the Gulf region and northern South America. She rightly emphasizes the central importance of the henequen (sisal) industry, which generated considerable wealth and created a class of cultural elites in Mérida during the nineteenth century. This discussion forms a necessary historical backdrop to understanding the influence of foreign musical genres, particularly those from Cuba and Colombia. Contrary to the common view, Vargas-Cetina argues that trova is not a Cuban genre formed there and then introduced into Yucatán, but “a music genre both Yucatecan and Cuban in origin” (82). Complicating her position, however, is the realization that trova is less a defined genre and more an amalgamation of specific genres, such as the bolero, which did in fact originate in Cuba (as the author points out on page 99).

In chapter 3, Vargas-Cetina describes the “Mexicanization” of trova in the early twentieth century, a direct reflection of the Mexicanization of the Yucatecan peninsula itself. She introduces readers to the three patriarchal figures of trova yucateca—Palmerin, Cárdenas, and Dominguez—along with key figures in the popularization of the bolero outside of Yucatán, such as the quintessential trio romántico, Los Panchos. The role of women in the proliferation of trova yucateca and the Mexican bolero is also addressed, albeit briefly, with particular attention paid to Las Hermanitas Núñez. The final portion of the chapter describes the decline of trova yucateca around mid-century and its revival, led by Sergio Esquivel, in the 1980s. This ambitious chapter thus covers the greater part of the genre's history, some of which deserves more meticulous and thorough treatment. Similarly, musicological readers may find themselves wishing for more analytical discussions of exactly how the figures under discussion transformed the style of the bolero from Cuban, to Yucatecan, to broadly Mexican. One wonders whether this chapter might have benefitted from expansion into two.

Chapter 4 guides the reader through the various types of civic, religious, cultural, and governmental organizations that support trova in Yucatán today. As in chapter 1, the discussion here interweaves the author's firsthand accounts, adding detail and insight to otherwise straightforward descriptions of clubs, societies, guilds, and various systems of arts sponsorship. What emerges is a picture of trova sustained by “individuals’ concerted participation in different groups and associations” (158), without which the music would probably not survive. Trova's importance to the maintenance of a Yucatecan cultural identity, in the face of its foreign origins and Mexicanized adaptations, forms a fascinating and instructive example of cultural sustainability.

Beautiful Politics of Music: Trova in Yucatán, Mexico offers a wide-ranging account of this rich Mexican regional tradition that effectively balances historiography and anthropology. Although the book's organization is somewhat unusual, and the author's emphasis on political and cultural contexts leaves less room for musical and historical detail, taken as a whole it is a useful introduction to the genre's formation and a compelling case study of its social, cultural, and political functions in the lives of Yucatecans today.