Son Jarocho

By the late 1600s, regional cultures and distinctive forms of musical expression were taking shape in New Spain, the Spanish colonial-era (1519–1810) core of what is now Mexico. By the late 1700s, son commonly denoted these endemic musical expressions, and jarocho, likely stemming from the jara lance used by dark-skinned militia and herders, denoted the rural inhabitants of the region known as Sotavento (windward), approximately the southern two thirds of today’s state of Veracruz. This regional cultural crucible saw the southern Spanish legacy of music, instruments, dance, poetry, and social customs blend with the aesthetic sensibilities of African slaves and their descendants as well as pockets of Indigenous peoples, who were otherwise decimated by disease and abuse, to form a new baseline cultural platform. Colonial maritime connections with other circum-Caribbean locales—Cuba, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Colombia in particular—reinforced this New World profile. The 1810 cry for independence saw regional sones take on the added mantles of resistance to Spanish rule and identifiers of specific regional identities. Mexico’s 1910–1920 revolution set the stage for a half century of nationalist codification of regional Mexican customs—one of which was the son jarocho—which in turn was capitalized upon by a burgeoning media industry from the 1930s onward. By the 1970s, the pervasive, profit-driven film, radio, and recording industries moved on to new products, and their content became more globalized, bringing a deluge of foreign sounds and vogues competing with homegrown Mexican traditions. This left the son jarocho spiraling toward desuetude, as its rural presence was displaced by popular culture and its professional musicians found themselves in an ever-narrower market niche. This nadir both saw concerned recordists devote themselves to documenting waning rural traditions and coincided with the nueva canción–driven South American urban folk music revival bringing foreign “folk” sounds to Mexican popular media. This new model caught the attention of Mexicans, some of whom emulated a parallel approach to Mexican styles, especially those that had gained a foothold in the national consciousness. Commencing in the late 1970s, the group Mono Blanco created the recipe for a resurgence of the son jarocho, drawing from elderly rural practitioners to offer public performances and workshops and organizing traditional fandango events, the preeminent social vehicle for communal son jarocho performance. The Jaranero Movement (named after the jarana guitar) ensued, and by the twenty-first century, a new model based on old practice of the communal, participatory approach of the fandango spread the son jarocho throughout Sotavento and beyond, reaching urban areas of Mexico, the United States, and Europe. In sum, the events of the past two centuries saw the son jarocho gel from a conglomeration of imported legacy practices, to a broadly congruent regional set of music practices, to a typecast emblem of a regionally diverse Mexican nation, to a folk revival simultaneously preserving old ways and offering opportunity for new creativity. This has left a broad range of son jarocho–related performance and social presence, as rural, professional, and creative models coexist.