Page - 19 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Alejandro Miranda | Journeying with a musical practice 19 foundational for his future journeying with the practice. Travelling to fandangos in southeast Mexico was also an important part of Pedro’s learning and reproducing son jarocho. This jour- neying was also improvised to a certain extent since the necessary arrangements to make the trip possible were put together as the movement was conducted. In the course of the interview he recalled the unrehearsed ways in which he and other practitioners used to put information and material resources together to attend fandangos: “When we were starting [making son jarocho], there were not many fandangos in the cities, very few. Once someone told me ‘there is a fandango in Mecayapan’. ‘Where is Mecayapan?’ [Pedro asked], ‘In the sierra, you go up entering from Cosoleacaque…’ There was neither Internet, nor mobile phones at that time, so you only knew about fandangos when friends told you on the street ‘hey, there’s gonna be a fandango there…’ I was with the others from the group and we borrowed a car from a relative, and there we go! We went in a vochito [Volkswagen beetle], I remember it well, a red vochito […] We later asked somebody on the road ‘is this the way to Mecayapan?’; yes, it was some kilometres ahead. We then arrived at the town, but we had never been in that place before. We had met some musicians from that town in the past and but we hardly found people on the street. It was at around nine in the evening when we finally got to the house of an old jaranero (practitioner) we knew. ‘Hey, how are you guys doing?’, ‘We came to the fandango’, but there didn’t seem to be any. ‘No’, the man said, ‘the fandango was last night’. And we were so far away, it took us hours to get there! We couldn’t just go back immediately, so we had to stay for a bit chatting with the man. Only a bit because the next morning he was going to his farmland and we shouldn’t keep him awake.” Pedro’s description of a failed trip to attend a fandango recalls the necessary articulation of resources, competencies and information. As with any other form of travelling, taking part in fandangos requires putting together assorted elements, which in this case were gathered through face-to-face interactions as the trip was made. Far from being just a way to get to an event, regu- lar travelling to these events shaped the dynamics of the son jarocho practice in at least two ways. First, it formed a sense of conviviality among practitioners, enhanced by the fact that people from various locations and age groups shared the practice. Second, the regional travelling with the practice provided resources that gradually enabled the development of representations of a practice that was felt and defended as representative of one’s identity. These ways of linking with one another became the basis of particular forms of association among practitioners, which were later disseminated to geographically dispersed communities of practitioners. To explore this point it is important to address the upsurge of musical groups in the context of the recupe- ration of this tradition. The paradoxical emergence of groups In the development of his account, Pedro recurrently situated this journeying in reference to his experiences as a member of a professional son jarocho group. His group formed during the years in which he and other enthusiasts from southeast Mexico taught at workshops and attended