Nor Tec Rifa

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Nor-tec phenomenon emerged from the border city of Tijuana and through the Internet, quickly conquered a global audience. Marketed as a kind of "ethnic" electronic dance music, Nor-tec samples sounds of traditional music from the north of Mexico, and transforms them through computer technology used in European and American techno music and electronica. Tijuana has media links to both Mexico and the United States, with peoples, currencies, and cultural goods--perhaps especially music--from both sides circulating intensely within the city. Older residents and their more mobile, cosmopolitan-minded children thus engage in a constant struggle with identity and nationality, appropriation and authenticity. Nor-tec music in its very composition encapsulates this city's struggle, resonating with issues felt on the global level, while holding vastly different meanings to the variety of communities that embrace it. With an impressive hybrid of musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural and performance studies, urbanism, and border studies, Nor-tec Rifa! offers compelling insights into the cultural production of Nor-tec as it stems from norte?a, banda, and grupera traditions. The book is also among the first to offer detailed accounts of Nor-tec music's composition process.

Marketed as a kind of 'ethnic' electronic dance music, Nor-tec samples sounds of traditional music from the north of Mexico transforming these sounds through computer technology used in European and American techno music and electronica. This is an account of this music and the city that fostered its birth.

Essays investigating and sparking new questions in experimental music

Through the study of a large variety of musical practices from the U.S.-Mexico border, Transnational Encounters seeks to provide a new perspective on the complex character of this geographic area. By focusing not only on norte?a, banda or conjunto musics (the most stereotypical musical traditions among Hispanics in the area) but also engaging a number of musical practices that have often been neglected in the study of this border's history and culture (indigenous musics, African American musical traditions, pop musics), the authors provide a glance into the diversity of ethnic groups that have encountered each other throughout the area's history. Against common misconceptions about the U.S.-Mexico border as a predominant Mexican area, this book argues that it is diversity and not homogeneity which characterizes it. From a wide variety of disciplinary and multidisciplinary enunciations, these essays explore the transnational connections that inform these musical cultures while keeping an eye on their powerful local significance, in an attempt to redefine notions like "border," "nation," "migration," "diaspora," etc. Looking at music and its performative power through the looking glass of cultural criticism allows this book to contribute to larger intellectual concerns and help redefine the field of U.S.-Mexico border studies beyond the North/South and American/Mexican dichotomies. Furthermore, the essays in this book problematize some of the widespread misconceptions about U.S.-Mexico border history and culture in the current debate about immigration.