Musica Tejana

Texas-Mexican music or música tejana is not one single music but several musical and musico-literary genres ensembles and their styles encompassing the corrido canción and what author Manuel Peña calls the canción-corrido. Música tejana also includes two major regional ensembles and their styles-the conjunto and the Texas-Mexican version of the orquesta. A more recent crop of synthesizer-driven ensembles and their styles known since the mid-eighties as Tejano is another representative of música tejana.Despite their diversity these various ensembles genres and styles share two fundamental characteristics: they are all homegrown and they all speak after their own fashion to fundamental social processes shaping Texas-Mexican society. As Peña persuasively argues they represent a transforming cultural economy and its effects on Texas-Mexicans.Peña traces the history of música tejana from the fandangos and bailes of the nineteenth century through the canción ranchera and the politically informed corrido to the most recent forms of Tejano music. In the beginning he argues musicmaking was a function of use-value-its symbolic power linked to the social processes of which it was an organic part. As música tejana was swept into the commercial market it added a second less culturally grounded dimension-exchange-value-whereby it cameunder the culturally weakening influence of the commercial market. Since the 1940s the music has oscillated between the extremes of use- and exchange-value though it has never lost its power to speak to issues of identity difference and social change.Música Tejana thus gives not only a detailed overview of música tejana but also analyzes the social and economic implications of the music. The breadth depth and clarity with which Peña has treated this subject make this a most useful text for those interested in ethnomusicology folklore ethnic studies and Mexican American culture.Manuel Peña who received his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and folklore from the University of Texas has been a professor of anthropology and music at the University of Texas at Austin and California State University Fresno. He is the author of The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music and The Mexican American Orquesta: Music Culture and the Dialectic of Conflict.