Sonorous Remnants of the Past: The Phonograph and the Making of Mexican Aural Modernity, 1878-1913

Since its invention in 1877, the phonograph produced a torrent of speculation about its mechanism, capable of collecting and preserving the sounds that seemed lost forever. For the members of the Mexico’s industrial and political elites, this novel technology reinforced principles of modernization, cosmopolitanism, and progress that they sought to achieve in the country's capital. This thesis turns to the reception of the phonograph in Mexico City between 1878 and 1913 by examining how the new recording technology altered the aural texture of Mexico City, in the process transforming both auditory and cultural practices. How did the residents of Mexico City contest and reconfigure the user protocols and presumed meanings that companies from the Global North had developed for the phonograph in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries? What impact did the phonograph have on the reconfiguration of social and spatial listening practices in Mexico City? What, finally, can an emerging Mexican aural modernity tell us about the active adaptation of the talking machine to the social and economic practices of the urban poor between 1870 and 1913? As this study posits, the development of sound technology in Mexico between 1878 and 1913 did not, by itself, usher in an era of modern aurality. Rather, a Mexican aural modernity emerged from the aural practices and embodied knowledge with which members of the lettered elites, middle- and working-class inhabitants, petty entrepreneurs and musicians approached the phonograph. The meanings of this new technology were shaped by local ontologies of listening which refined the concept of usage of imported mechanical production of sound in a living act of syncretism with local aural expressions. Ostensibly modern, this emerging twentieth-century Mexican soundscape carried traditional acoustic dimensions; etched into it were the vocalities of indigenous, Afro-descended, and mestizo peoples. Sonorous Remnants of the Past thus contributes to the study of aurality and sound recording in the Global South by critically examining the role of technological transmission and its interaction with social and cultural dynamics that then shaped its innovation, meaning, and use