ABSTRACT
This chapter touches on a variety of topics, ranging from the origins and development of Chicana/o forms or styles and their transformations to observations through sociocultural analyses of issues, such as marginality, identity, intercultural conflict and aesthetics, reinterpretation, postnationalism, and mestizaje, the mixing of race and culture. In assessing Chicana/o musical expression, the chapter also critiques various contexts representing the music industry, major representative artists, the African diaspora, and globalization. In the numerous and diverse urban settings throughout the United States, musicians and their followers of Mexican descent have nurtured musical forms reflecting the contradictions of tradition, nationalism, assimilation, innovation, reinterpretation, and hybridity. The latter term is reminiscent of the Mexican/Latin American notion of mestizaje, the mixing of race and culture, and the evolutionary process that emerges from such interaction. Teresa Covarrubias and Alicia Armendariz epitomize what George Lipsitz has conceptualized as a postmodern musical enterprise.
