Grassland Geopoetics: Son Jarocho and the Black Sense of Place of Plantations and Pastures

This essay considers how the grasslands of the Mexican region of El Sotavento entangle with the history of racial capitalism and with traditional Sotaventine music. Throughout this text, I argue that son Jarocho music and its poetics counterpoint racist colonial discourses making space for ways of being beyond racial capitalism. I review the history of Sotaventine grasslands, counterpointing their historical becomings with ethnographic materials and current poetic expressions. I especially focus on two sones: La Caña, written in the 1990s by Patricio Hidalgo Belli regarding sugarcane, and the 18th century Toro Zacamandú that speaks of cowboying. Using scholarly writings on the plantation and plantation histories from McKittrick and Glissant, King's work on fungibility, scholarship on Maroon landscapes and marronage, and an array of writers who explore poetics and geopoetics, we shall see how racial capitalism and the historical becomings of plantations and pastures are reflected and overturned in Sotaventine sounds

Of ships and soundboxes: Contrapuntal explorations of hydrocoloniality and the materiality of music

In this paper I explore the relation between music, (enviro)materiality, and coloniality by examining son Jarocho, the music of the Mexican region of Sotavento in southeast Mexico. This essay brings together geography, blue humanities, and ecomusicology, using notions of hydropoetics and hydrocolonialism, building upon the material turn in music geographies. I approach the phenomenological confluence of Sotaventine cedar chordophones and ships using and critiquing Foucauldian theoretics, alongside Hofmeyr’s hydrocolonialism and Gilroy’s circumpelagic theories. I survey the regional histories of luthiery, shipyards and timber trade and their connections, counterpointing these histories with the poetics of son Jarocho and with materials gathered through interviews and music-making alongside musicians and luthiers in Sotavento. From this I propose that musical aesthetics emerge from navigations that are topophilic and imperial. I counterpoint the Sotaventine case with the history of violins and their link to pau-brasil exploitation in Brazil, following ecomusicological works. Surveying histories of cedar and pau-brasil I argue that exploitation and exploration are a univocal aspect of the hydrocolonial project that entangles the biological, geographical, military, and mercantile into the endeavour of the exploração and that this informs musical materialities, poetics, and aesthetics to this day. Lastly, I briefly consider the implications of the hydrocolonial history of musical matters in the context of the Anthropocene. Una versión en español de este texto está disponible en los materiales suplementarios

Musical Hydropoetics: Fluvial Inhabitings, Son Jarocho, and Anthroposcenes

This is a geopoetic exploration of riverine space through music. In this article, I build upon the nascent field of hydropoetics by approaching the space of rivers through musical ethnographic research. I draw upon post-colonial geopoetic approaches, blue humanities and oceanic studies, and the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard and Ivan Illich, as well as on the praxis of son Jarocho musicians. I reflect upon three vignettes of music in two rivers of Sotavento in southeast Mexico and in one British river, exploring the ways in which son Jarocho music is used to produce and transform space. These surveys disembogue into a consideration of the possibilities granted by musical hydropoetics in the context of the Anthropocene, thinking of landscapes as feral Anthroposcenes as per Tsing et al. and Matless’s works

‘Through forests of old / mahogany and cedar’: Geographies of the music of Sotavento

This thesis examines the ways in which music and space intertwine in the region of Sotavento in the Atlantic coast of Mexico. It explores son Jarocho — that is, Sotaventine music — from a cultural geographical perspective, considering geopoetic and ecomusicological approaches, and drawing upon Paz and Bakhtin’s literary theory, Lefebvrian principles of the production of space, and Bachelardian phenomenology. This work surveys Sotaventine music and different musical practices in relation to some important Sotaventine landscapes; namely grasslands, rivers, and forests. Through these explorations, questions of mobility, post-humanism and alternate ontologies, memory, colonialism, and race are interrogated, and the part played by music in their construction and deconstruction is interpreted. From these analyses I propose the notion of a son onto-epistemology that may help us understand this region and its music, but also places and sounds beyond. The arguments in this text are built upon ethnographic research undertaken in different sites in which son Jarocho is played — mostly in Sotavento — and are presented alongside my own reflections on positionality, including my doubts and critiques of the ethnographic method. This thesis builds upon the scholarship on musical and sound geographies by utilising the aforementioned theories to describe and analyse musical practices. It contributes to geopoetics and ecomusicology by adding a subaltern music to the already heterogeneous mix, taking this music style not only as an object of study, but also as a tool of analysis. It also adds to regional studies by approaching the Sotavento region through its music; and to son Jarocho by adding a geographical perspective to the study of this music. Lastly, this thesis includes musical excerpts and field recordings, mostly as files accessible online at Soundcloud, but also transcribed as sheet music. This too is an innovation for music geographies