Page - 22 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

22 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Alejandro Miranda | Journeying with a musical practice than the long pieces played at fandangos. More interestingly, however, the establishment of a clear distinction between a passive audience and active performers ironically resembled the previous folklorisation of the practice. Son jarocho enthusiasts advanced these festivals as a way to promote the traditional culture of southeast Mexico. A major achievement was the involvement of a public radio station in Mexico City4 in the broadcasting and recording of the performances at the festivals, which were subsequently produced by an independent music label and distributed in the form of cas- sette-tapes and, later, as CDs.5 The transmission and distribution of these materials constituted an unprecedented incorporation of traditional son jarocho in the media. However, the most important point for the current analysis is that these festivals motivated the creation of groups as they were the basic form for presenting performers on stage. At this point, the question is how exactly a number of musicians who occasionally met at fandangos became part of groups of traditional music. Here, in addressing the phenomenon, a senior practitioner (Nieves 2009) describes how his group was created under these new circumstances: “I went back to Aguapinole [a small town in southeast Mexico] and there was where [the group] ‘Los Panaderos’ (‘The Bakers’) was born. […] Here you couldn’t hear that [tradi- tional son jarocho], all that was lost. San Juan [Evangelista] was a noticeable town for its fandangos […], very good fandangos. There were some ladies that organised them every week. When I came back I started hanging out with those people and then we made a little group. We started growing as a group and that was the moment in which we made ‘Los Panaderos’, because Noé [an enthusiastic promoter of the son jarocho practice] invited me to Minatitlán. I had never been at a Encuentro de Jaraneros (Festival of Jaraneros), and I think that was the time when they started organising them. He came and invited me. Back then I had an oven, I baked bread in Aguapinole, and he came because his parents-in-law are from there, we’ve known each other for a long time, and then he said ‘I want you to go to play in Mina [Minatitlán], you go with your group, I only want you to get white shoes, white pants, guayabera [a traditional type of shirt], white hat’. Then I said to my fellow musicians: ‘do you want to venture there and make the effort of buying those things?’ and we did it, and we went [to the festival]. He [Noé] said ‘name your group’, and I said ‘what name are we going to give it?’ ‘Don’t worry! You go and by the time you arrive there, you’ll have a name. I’m going to tell you what name your group is going to have’. And he came up with the name of ‘Los Panaderos’. Some time ago they announced us as ‘Los Panaderos de Aguapinole’, but because the thing went on and on, soon after that [the group] was divided again, but I continued, I never stopped having a group.” 6 In this account, the senior practitioner first situates the creation of his group in relation to a tradition that ‘was lost’, and then goes on to refer to their participation in a festival and the way in which the group acquired a name. The mere fact of getting together to play was not sufficient 4 Its name is ‚Radio Educación‘. This radio station still broadcasts some son jarocho events, such as the annual ‘Fiesta de la Candelaria‘ in Tlacotalpan, Veracruz, every February 2. 5 Various performers, Encuentro de Jaraneros, [CD] (México: Discos Pentagrama), Volume 1-5. 6 Interview in the accompanying CD booklet in Nieves (2009). Author‘s translation.