Musicology Colloquium Series
Sponsored by The University of New Mexico Department of Music, The Department of Spanish and Portuguese & The Latin American and Iberian Institute
Ortega Hall Reading Room 335
Thursday September 19, 2019
2:00-3:30pm
“Reclaiming ‘the Border’ in Texas-Mexican Conjunto Heritage and Cultural Memory”
Name of presenter: Cathy Ragland
Talk Description:
The Texas border town of San Benito is the subject of this talk which examines how memory and legacy operate within a community of “self-appointed” cultural brokers and a local municipality inspired by capitalist notions of urban development, economic growth and cultural tourism. The legacy of two of the town’s “native sons” – Narciso Martínez, the “father of Tex-Mex conjunto music” and Baldemar Huerta (aka Freddy Fender), a Grammy-winning country rock artist – have been memorialized in two opposing positions to reclaim border music history in a context of globalization and hypermediacy that seeks to counter representations of a US-Mexico border perpetually “in crisis.”
Biography:
Cathy Ragland is associate professor of ethnomusicology in the College of Music at the University of North Texas. She is editor of the series Sonic Crossings for UNT Press, and author of the book Musica Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation between Nations along with several journal articles, book chapters, and public press articles. Her research and scholarship have focused on music and border politics, identity, immigration/migration, rurality, and gender relations. She is an experienced journalist, folklorist, and applied ethnomusicologist who has collaborated with Mexican immigrant partners in co-founding sustainable music and arts programs and organizations in New York City. She has directed public arts festivals, exhibits, and arts education programs in New York, Washington, Texas, and Mexico. These experiences have informed her scholarship and teaching.
Dr. José Luis Hurtado awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
Composer and pianist José Luis Hurtado, an associate professor in The University of New Mexico’s Department of Music in the College of Fine Arts, is one of the 2020 winners of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
You Can’t Tell It Like I Can: Black Women, Music, and the Struggle for Social Justice in America
This lecture/performance explores how black women have used music as a method of shaping the public rhetoric and sentiment surrounding the black civil rights struggle in America. Through a historical framework that moves through the height of the abolitionist movement, the Popular front during the 1930s and 1940s, the frontlines of the direct action campaigns of the 1960s, and the proliferation of the Black Power movement in the 1970s.
An Americanish Songbook: Linda Ronstadt’s “other” Country
This talk will consider performances and recordings by singer Linda Ronstadt to propose what I refer to as her Americanish musical songbook. The suffix “ish” here intends to accentuate the “somewhat” or “to some extent” of “American” that Ronstadt—Tucson born and raised—lived and sonically imagined through her extraordinary musical career.