Seite - 20 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 2/2016

20 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Alejandro Miranda | Journeying with a musical practice fandangos. They gradually developed proficiency at music making and became part of networks of musicians and cultural promoters that operated in various cities in Mexico. The support of these networks allowed them to break into the emergent niche market of so-called ‘world music’ during the last decades of the 20th century. They released two relatively successful studio recor- dings and performed in several local and international festivals. Their success was, in fact, embedded in a wider process through which several groups performing traditional son jarocho emerged from the recuperation of this practice. The upsurge of groups appears paradoxical in the first instance because contemporary practitioners establish a sharp differentiation between the folklorisation of son jarocho and the cultivation of a regional tradition. Distinguishing bet- ween these two musical practices has been pivotal to the contemporary mobilities of son jarocho. To understand it, it is necessary briefly to look at its changes throughout the past century. During the first half of the 20th century fandango, the traditional celebration in which son jarocho is performed, became less common in southeast Mexico. This decline is linked to a series of transformations in the region, such as the intense internal migration from rural areas to emerging cities in Mexico, as well as transnational migration from Mexico to the US (Pérez 2003). Yet, this popular celebration was significantly reshaped when its music and dance were used by the Mexican state to produce nationalistic propaganda based on regional folklore. In its intention to produce an ideal of ‘Mexicanity’, the bureaucracy of the Mexican government took fragmented elements of the regional practices to produce stereotyped representations of the ‘typically Mexican’ (Pérez Montfort 1999). The music and dance performed at fandangos were used in film, radio and TV productions, but not before an intense process of stylisation took place. Regional music and dance in the cinema, for instance, was often represented through orchestral arrangements, resulting in a lack of coherence between the images displayed (in this case consisting of rural musicians playing guitar-like instruments) and the musical background (an orchestral arrangement) (Barahona 2013). The development of nationalist, folklorised representations in the media created new ‘niches’ for the performance of son jarocho: musicians from rural southeast Mexico who migrated to Mexico City and the port of Veracruz could make a living out of performing son jarocho music. These musicians were mostly male, knew how to play son jarocho because that was part of the everyday life in southeast Mexico and, later, became reliant on their capacity to perform music to earn a living in urban contexts. They occasionally performed on the radio and television, but their main source of income came from performing at restaurants, bars, nightclubs and cabarets (Figueroa 2007; Cardona 2011). Serenading customers at their own table became an important part of their daily routine. The transition from practitioners engaging in the popular celebra- tion of fandango to entertainers forced to play for an audience to earn a living is a crucial shift that produced a particular kind of folklorised son jarocho. Since the 1930s there has been an upsurge of musical groups specialising in the performance of son jarocho. As this activity became a ‘way of life’, son jarocho musicians started dressing in distinctive costumes and adopted group names to attract clients. Flexible in repertoire and improvisation, capable of physically moving inside restaurants and across the city, these groups proved to be remarkably adaptable to the new circumstances of performance, navigating com- plex urban settings and generating a living based on the performance of this newly contextua-