ABSTRACT
Son Jarocho is the music of the Mexican Sotavento Region, a region south of the Atlantic port of Veracruz consisting of the southern part of the state of the same name and extending up to the neighbouring states of Oaxaca and Tabasco. This chapter subsumes carnival under the idea of la fiesta, as the fandango is quite literally a fiesta, and Bakhtin’s and Paz’ ideas are in line with each other when it comes to the festive poetics and spaces as well as to the question of Otherness. But while, in the British Isles, ‘the topsy-turvydoms of faery glamour’ are ‘now beautiful, now quaintly grotesque’, the enchantment of El Sotavento seems to be dominated by fear; one falls prey to it and there is little beauty to be found in the stories of enchantment. ’El Pájaro Carpintero’, the song of the woodpecker, is a good example of the overlapping and de-bordering of culture and nature in son Jarocho lyricism.
