Before the 1846–48 war between Mexico and the United States, the southern tip of Texas and the states of Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas were all part of Mexico, forming a region with a cultural affinity that became transformed after the U.S. border separated the Texas Valley from these Mexican states. It is in this vast zone that Cathy Ragland focuses her study of música norteña, a musical style that features an ensemble of accordion, guitar, bass, bajo sexto (twelve-string bass guitar), and drum set. She follows folklorist Américo Paredes (1915–99) and ethnomusicologist Manuel Peña, who published the first studies of this music in what is now the U.S. Southwest.Footnote ¹ Unlike Peña and Paredes, however, Ragland aims to document how music produced in the Mexican northeast migrated into the United States. In this respect, the author is filling a void in scholarship on this music from south of the border.

Mexican culture on both sides of the border has long been susceptible to political and economic developments in both nations. Accordingly, issues of musical performance, songwriting, recording, and reception have reflected the contrasting environments of Mexican communities in Texas and northern Mexico. Ragland recognizes a divide in the emergence of two distinct but related genres: conjunto tejano (in Texas) and música norteña (in northeastern Mexico). From this standpoint, Ragland's contribution is significant, as she continues where Paredes and Peña stopped: beyond the U.S. Southwest. Ragland looks south of the border, examining how música norteña articulates the political and economic anxieties of both Mexicans and Mexican immigrants in the United States. According to the author, the genre not only addresses themes relevant to the political and economic marginality of these individuals, but also the immigrant experience itself, which helps fuel the development and popularity of this music. Using methodological approaches taken from some of the most authoritative scholarship in trans-border, Mexican, and Mexican American studies, Ragland analyzes themes such as mexicanidad (what it means to be Mexican), the subversions of authority by mythic heroes, drug trafficking, and the immigrant laborer experience; she also investigates the historical development of the corrido genre of narrative balladry.

Ragland's study relies heavily on her interviews with some of música norteña's best-known artists and groups, such as Los Alegres de Terán, Los Montañeses del Álamo, Ramón Ayala, Eulalio González (“El Piporro”), and Los Tigres del Norte. Her commentaries based on these interviews provide a historical contextualization of norteña music in relationship to socio-economic and political issues.

Although the division between Texas-Mexican conjunto music and Mexican música norteña might seem artificial, Ragland's analysis of their differences is compelling. For the author, norteña derives from a norteño culture localized in the north of Mexico in contrast to a Mexican American sensibility centered in Texas. The author argues that immigration and the political and economic marginality of immigrants are central components of a norteño mentality; that the corrido is one of this musical style's central vehicles for expression; and that the currency of social themes in the corrido has kept this form alive in música norteña.

Ragland further shows how these issues permeate the lives of norteña musicians and how they inform their music. It is for this reason that the author considers música norteña as “immigrant music” (24, 59). As she points out, it was due to marketing strategies targeting immigrants in the United States that the recording industry created separate conjunto tejano and música norteña record labels in the late 1940s. The latter aimed to identify communities that guaranteed a market via a touring network in the U.S. called the “Taco Circuit,” which extended from Texas as far north as Illinois, Ohio and Michigan (115–16). This strategy created a multi-million dollar industry on both sides of the border. However, due to the lack of available market data from the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, a city at the center of the development and marketing of norteña, it is not possible to assess the extent to which immigrant communities in Texas have been responsible for this development.

Ragland's analysis suggests that she views música norteña more from a Texas-Mexican, U.S. perspective than from a northern Mexican vantage point, especially with her emphasis on the importance of immigration to the United States in this musical repertory and style. Her reading of Eulalio Gónzalez, “El Piporro” (ca. 1921–2003), a singer and actor who was the quintessential representation of the norteño persona, is a case in point—the norteño dressed in folk attire typical of the state of Tamaulipas, often exclaiming, “¡Ajúa!” (Ah-who-ah!) in his performances as an expression of excitement. Referring to songs associated with him—such as “Chulas fronteras” (Beautiful Borders)—and to the films in which he starred—such as El terror de la frontera (The Terror of the Border, 1963), El bracero del año (The Farm Worker of the Year, 1964), and El pocho (The Border Guy, 1970)—Ragland argues that El Piporro's personality functions as an advocate of the Mexican norteño, whose identity is shaped by the experience of immigration and by ambivalent feelings about a Mexican national identity. Although the author's observation is valid, the reader may be led to believe that immigration is the defining aspect of norteño culture and identity. Immigration to the United States has long been an important issue in northern Mexico, but life there is far more nuanced and complex than this interpretation might suggest. For example, Ragland does not really consider the reception of El Piporro in Mexico. Specifically, she does not mention that the popularity of this performer and his character relied on his use and promotion of norteño symbols, such as the cuera tamaulipeca (the folk dress of the state of Tamaulipas) and his embrace of musical genres particularly important in norteño musical life beyond the corrido: the polka norteña, waltz, and chotis (schottische). Although Ragland's reading of El Piporro concentrates on his immigrant life in the United States, the character's reception in Mexico suggests a different interpretation of this persona and of norteño identity.

Indeed, Ragland places too much emphasis on immigration as a point of interpretation, something that puzzles the reader again when the author addresses the topic of consumption from the standpoint of musical sales. Specifically, her focus on the concerns and anxieties of immigrants seems to overlook the embrace of this music by other communities in Mexico that are not involved with the immigrant experience. For example, the consumption of música norteña by the Mexican middle class is also relevant to the understanding of the different notions of norteño identity, although this is not examined in this study. Ragland assumes that música norteña overtook much of the norteño musical market after artists such as Los Bukis and Bronco—performing in the cumbia norteña genre—lost popularity in the late 1980s (180). Here the reader may wonder why Ragland makes no mention of the current onda grupera phenomenon in Mexico and the United States and how immigrant communities might relate to this music vis à vis música norteña.Footnote ²

Considering Ragland's interest in notions of identity in música norteña, I wonder why the issue of reception does not figure more prominently in her study. Moreover, she suggests that this genre is particularly relevant to immigrant communities and to how the immigrant experience has shaped their lives. And yet, the reader does not hear the voices of such individuals in her ethnographic work. More importantly, given that conjunto tejano and música norteña share similar instrumental, harmonic, and melodic characteristics, one wonders why performance studies did not figure in Ragland's analysis. For instance, the author recognizes differences in performance approaches between conjunto and norteña musicians, such as the ways of strumming the strings on the bajo sexto or the emphasis on the downbeat on the drum set (128), which to her highlight distinctions between genres. Such distinctions suggest issues of appropriation and cultural claims to a performance practice by both conjunto and norteña musicians. In this light, conjunto/norteño music appears as a liminal arena, sensitive to a plurality of discourses, of which the immigrant experience is but one example.

Given Ragland's emphasis on oral history and musical and literary analysis, however, performance issues are clearly not the center of her inquiry. Rather, she seems most interested in documenting a Mexican musical tradition in relation to the textual elements that have characterized it historically, and in theorizing about its dissemination and reception in the United States. And if there is a critique to be placed on her assessment of música norteña as a musical border (for which performance studies could prove illuminating) it is only as a reaction to a study that directly engages the reader in the complexity of this music culture.