Page - 17 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Alejandro Miranda | Journeying with a musical practice 17 the baroque guitar (see Pareyón 2007, 532). During the following months, I ran into him at workshops that he gave in various cities in Mexico and the US, at some informal gatherings with other musicians, and also at a couple of fandangos (first in southeast Mexico, then in California). Fandango, the most representative event in this tradition, is a type of celebration in which music and dance are performed. Workshops and fandangos constitute the main spaces in which people learn and share this practice. I was introduced to Pedro and many other practitioners at these events while conducting fieldwork in the US and Mexico. I spent half a year as a son jarocho apprentice, pursuing the spaces in which this practice is enacted. My gradual immersion into this musical tradition was marked by everyday activities such as travelling with practitioners to and from events, busking with them at markets, recalling festivities in casual conversations and taking part in workshops, fandangos, rehearsals and performances. On several occasions Pedro and I briefly talked about the revival of traditional son jarocho, the vicissitudes of making a living as a musician, and music making in general. Those conversations were fragmented because of the agreeable messiness that prevails at festivities and workshops. Yet, one day he found time in his busy schedule to have a more focused conversation about his activities as a professional son jarocho practitioner. The day of the interview I picked him up at the house in which he was hosted and we then went to have lunch. As we were sitting at a small table of a conventional taquería (a restaurant in which tacos are served), a large TV screen at the end of the room featured a soccer match that we ignored because our conversation went straight to the topic of music making. The meeting was in some way a continuation of the truncated conversations that we’d had before, with the only difference that this time a digital recorder was placed on the table, sitting between bowls of salsa, slices of lime and our greasy plastic plates. We were in southern California. Pedro was hosted at the house of a group of practitioners who regularly receive visitors from other cities while they attend workshops and fandangos. As I entered the house earlier that day I saw tools and pieces of polished wood scattered around the living room. These wooden pieces were about to be glued together to form a new instrument – a jarana. Pedro usually finishes his instruments as he travels in the US. The craftwork starts in his workshop in southern Ver- acruz, where he cuts the main bodies from solid pieces of cedar, carves them out,1 and makes the fretboards and tuning pegs. He then packs these pieces when they are almost finished and assembles them as he travels. This combination of activities is not casual: his main sources of income come from selling these instruments, teaching at workshops and performing with other musicians. From the outset, the development of Pedro’s craft of instrument making has been inse- parable from that of teaching and performing. In the 1980s he joined a group of son jarocho enthusiasts who organised fandangos and workshops in southeast Mexico. During these years he dropped out of university because he ‘didn’t like the [teaching] system’ and decided to dedicate 1 The body of the jarana and other son jarocho instruments is carved from one solid piece of wood. This is a technique for making stringed instruments that is embedded in a history of mobile technologies as it was used, for example, in the middle ages to make fiddles (Campbell and Campbell 2010, 302), renaissance lutes (Spring 2001, 5) and the Chinese p‘i-p‘a (Fletcher and Rossing 1998, 266).