14 - Country-Loving Mexican Americans

Summary

This chapter derives from empirical research I conducted in Texas, California, and beyond, the first to investigate Mexican American fan relationships with country music. My Mexican American fan-interlocutors illuminated distinctive practices of country loving, in two senses of the phrase. Contrary to critical takes on patriotic US country songs as exclusionary, these listeners described cherished bicultural, binational engagements with them. Pointing to the Mexican origins of cowboys and the US Southwest and to country music’s expression of “Mexican values,” fans also attested not that country music affords belonging but that it belongs to Mexican American listeners, and they reckoned their love for it inevitable. Relatedly, I consider country music’s life as border culture, shaped by continual exchange at the 2,000-mile US-Mexico contact zone. Elaborating the hybridic, migratory, transcultural bases of music often termed “quintessentially American,” I argue that it is even more quintessentially American than has been imagined.