In almost every respect, this is a remarkable study of the globalization of a south Texas Mexican conjunto music, a study primarily focused on conjunto’s arguably foremost contemporary artist-exponent, Flaco Jiménez. Deeply and extensively researched and generally well-argued, it covers various and compelling facets of this globalization, including the domestic US (more on this latter domestic instance, later). Erin E. Bauer’s wide-ranging and very sophisticated analyses follow conjunto’s journey, not only to Europe—perhaps not entirely surprisingly, i.e., back to its ancestral roots—but also to Africa and the Middle East. This well-documented movement toward international performance contexts appears to go hand in hand with her equally well-informed assessment of stylistic and instrumental adoptions, adaptations, and transformations of traditional conjunto ensembles, sound, and composition, often considerable, with various international artists, including those of Mick Jagger’s Rolling Stones. The latter–musicality–is a welcome addition to the study of this genre since most who have commented onconjunto have not been formally trained in musicology, as Bauer very obviously has. Most such commentators are also ethnic Mexicans in the US. She does not appear to be such, but nevertheless shows an abundant respect and knowledge of the culture that sustains this music based on what appears to be reasonably long-term residence in Starr County, Texas, a very historical and culturally traditional area on the Texas-Mexican border. Nevertheless, while inspirational and an early introduction to her topic, such personal experience turns out not to be essential to her work since that largely interrogates a globalization process, by definition accessible to any interested scholar, although as noted, Bauer brings impressive musicological training to bear on it.
An equally knowledgeable recognition of the society and culture that first brought conjunto into being in Texas and other parts of the United States is less evident and a limitation on this otherwise impressive work. Also, less than impressive is her command and discussion of the scholarship that first identified and closely examined this emergence, especially at its high point between the end of World War II and roughly the 1980s. Bauer is very aware that this tradition has its primary origins and florescence in south Texas but is closely tied to northern Mexico, as south Texas has been for centuries. For her, however, the latter becomes a kind of residual tradition, in Raymond Williams’s terms, now past although obviously still active, albeit transformed in the global present that is her principal concern. Unlike Williams, however, she is less than attentive to this residual culture and also to the native scholarship that it engendered, including my own. Full disclosure: I am eighty years old, a Texas-Mexican, and was born and raised in south Texas during the heyday, indeed “golden age,” of conjunto, and became very familiar with several of its working-class dance hall venues. While I myself never went to the Midwest with south Texas agricultural workers, this migratory labor practice was well recognized in my home region as was the tradition of conjunto music that accompanied it to the Midwest. Thus, I find odd her characterization of Midwestern conjunto as “nostalgia” in chapter 3, pages 81 and 82, when the two U.S. experiences were actually quite coterminous in time, space, and cultures, and therefore not exactly an instance of the “global.” My personal “global” conjunto experience happened in the “old” Austin, Texas, when I was a student at UT. Austin’s (in)famous 6th Street was then in the early sixties a string of shops and cantinas with conjuntos largely for Austin’s Texas-Mexican working class and cotton pickers from the then rural areas around Austin. Later, as a professional PhD folklorist, I published articles and chapters on the subject. Only one of these appears in her bibliography and is minimally discussed. Also absent is arguably the very first scholarly assessment of this tradition, by José Reyna in 1975. However, as she certainly should be, she is far more aware of the much more extensive and intensive book-length work by the late Manuel Peña.
All of this previous scholarship focused on the conjunto world of the mid-to-late twentieth century and primarily in Texas, a period largely before the beginning of the globalization that this author so well documents and clearly admires. Because she is thus so invested in this global present, she sees our prior understanding of this earlier world, as “clinging to homologous notions of music as identity” which “lock Texas-Mexican people into a primitivist–and potentially racist–view that defines the border community as old-fashioned, folkloric, and outside the modern understandings of U.S. American culture” (10). Readers of this and other journals of folklore should note the particular negating deployment of “folkloric” that she will repeat several times. Peña and I both drew explicitly on Marxist cultural theory in our discussions of conjunto, and the interpretive yield was far from music as ethnic identity but rather one of class and of conjunto as a modern class dynamic, but one will not know this from this book. Indeed, such a Marxism could have been brought to bear on conjunto’s possible globalization as Peña in fact suggested (Música Tejana, pages 214-215). Her limited criticism of the alleged views of past scholars at times also bleeds over into characterizing past communities like that in which I grew up themselves as “folkloric” and “old-fashioned’ in comparison to the global worlds that she finds so interesting and frankly, more congenial. I think this is why toward the end of the study she feels compelled to say: “I in no way intend to criticize the working-class associations of the genre or its local practitioners. I also do not intend to imply that that global attention to the genre negates or in any way supersedes regional practices” (250). But, in my view, this is the elision that this book rhetorically produces for the understanding of conjunto music, absent a more substantial discussion of its past and its prior scholarly examination. That said, in her primary examination of conjunto’s global trajectory, this book is a welcome accomplishment.
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[Review length: 1002 words • Review posted on March 16, 2025]