Convivencia as a Fandango Design Principle: Developing Community-led Son Jarocho Workshops

• In Event: Centering Relationality & Expanding Knowledge through Artistic Practice: Transdisciplinary Education Research and Arts Methodologies for Change

Abstract

Américo Paredes’ (1958) study of corridos as border ballads has served as inspiration for the work of many scholars across Chicane Studies and Ethnomusicology. While there is no doubt that his work has been foundational, Chicane music scholars have also pushed us to study a wider variety of musical genres, the role of minoritized voices in musical creation and documentation, and to move beyond the musical product as an object of study and look at process of making music as knowledge itself (e.g. Chávez, 2017; Vargas, 2012). Grounded in an approach to studying music that centers the role of non-dominant voices (both human and musical), this paper brings ethnomusicological theories into conversation with community-based design methods (Bang et al., 2016; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) to study the design of fandango workshops in a Latine intergenerational music collective in Northern California. The workshops discussed in this paper are part of an ongoing participatory design study (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) entering its sixth year.
The fandango is the communal celebration of son jarocho, a style of music stemming from African, Indigenous and European roots that came together as a result of settler colonial practices in what is now Veracruz, México. In recent decades, this musical practice of African and Indigenous resistance (Díaz-Sánchez & Hernández, 2013) has also been adopted by Latine and Chicane communities across the United States (Hernández-León, 2019). In fandangos, participants gather together to dance and improvise music and verses about their lives and experiences in an act of musical convivencia (conviviality).
This paper situates convivencia as a theory of relationality and guiding tenet of the fandango (Arce, 2020; Daria, 2021; Gonzalez, 2017). Grounded in community-based design methods that put a community’s “theories, practices, and structures of values, ethics, and aesthetics” at the forefront of the design and theorization (Bang et al., 2016, p. 29), in this paper I analyze how principles of convivencia guided the structural and pedagogical design of our community-led fandango workshops.
This paper traces how non-professional musicians across a variety of experience levels came together to design and iterate on fandango workshops in our community. By analyzing how the fandango is an ongoing process of musically coming together across skill levels without a formal final ‘product’ or ‘object’ to be studied, this paper responds to the call of ethnomusicologists to widen our study of Chicane musics. This paper highlights the role that relationality- and convivencia-centered fandango principles played both in the development of the study and the design of the workshops, enabling us to explore how knowledge is routinely made and remade through the act of collaborative learning and musicking, and through participatory design methods that allow community values to lie at the forefront.

Author

• Yared Portillo, University of California - Berkeley