Page - 18 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

18 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Alejandro Miranda | Journeying with a musical practice his time to learning to make son jarocho instruments and to the workshops that he was already facilitating: “I was teaching zapateado (dancing) at [a cultural centre], but my students wanted to learn to play jarana and after we talked to the coordinators [of the cultural centre], we had some hours of jarana every week too. […] I was earning very little money and one day somebody brought a jarana that was broken and asked me if I could repair it. That was an oppor- tunity, a way to have an extra income. And then I just kept on going, I learnt by spoiling instruments. I tried many different ways. I was [recently] giving a workshop on building instruments very close to the Lake Michigan, and they [the students] didn’t have enough tools. That wasn’t a problem because I learnt on my own, using different tools and we made the instruments anyway […] When I started, I didn’t have a drill press and used a normal drill to carve out the body of the instruments. I hung that drill with a piece of wire so I could have the right distance to carve out the wood without perforating the instrument beyond that mark. But sometimes the wire broke and I perforated the body of the jarana. I learnt in that way, trying, looking for ways to do it using whatever I had at hand.” 2 Improvising with the resources at hand has been a recurrent pattern in Pedro’s process of lear- ning the craft of instrument making, teaching and performing. This capacity to adapt to dif- ferent circumstances became a collaborative skill as these forms of improvisation took place in a community of practitioners. Teaching at workshops had a significant role in this process. The workshops at the cultural centre continued for five years until the institution lacked the resources to pay his salary. The classes were then transferred to his own house and the attendees paid a small fee. There were about twelve regular families at these workshops: at first, most of the participants were children and adolescents, although there was a rotation over the years as their parents also joined in and their children moved to larger cities to continue with their studies. This small community of practitioners reunited when the young practitioners travelled back home to attend a monthly fandango. During our conversation Pedro expressed how these activities were occasions that enhanced family conviviality and helped ‘to keep this culture alive, otherwise, nobody would do it’. While these workshops constituted a modest, yet con- stant source of income, Pedro emphasised that these workshops and fandangos were crucial to ‘keep this culture alive’. The recurrent enactment of these events was decisive for the emergence of meanings of authenticity and belonging to a valuable tradition that was in apparent risk of disappearance. At the beginning, these workshops were characterised by the absence of a method to struc- ture the sessions: they simply met to dance and play a few pieces of the traditional repertoire. But over the years these experiences were formative as Pedro gradually adopted more effec- tive routines. Long and complex sequences of action were divided into small exercises such as simplified dance steps or strumming patterns in the jaranas. During these years, he and other practitioners teaching at workshops in southeast Mexico attained a series of competencies for organising and circulating tacit knowledge. For Pedro the attainment of these skills was 2 Unless stated otherwise, all the subsequent quotes are excerpts from the transcript of an interview conducted with an anonymous practitioner in California, July 30, 2013. Author’s translation.