Writing modernist and avant-garde music in Mexico: Performativity, transculturation and identity after the Revolution, 1920--1930 (Julian Carrillo, Carlos Chavez, Manuel M. Ponce)

In my dissertation I study the traditional rhetoric of Mexican cultural history that interprets post-revolutionary artistic manifestations as a "natural," almost teleological outcome of the Mexican Revolution. As with every historical narrative, this revolutionary hegemonic discourse developed out of a "myth of origin" which homologated the identity of the nation with the ideology of the new state. As part of this process, the modernist and avant-garde works of Julian Carrillo (1875--1965), Carlos Chavez (1899--1978), and Manuel M. Ponce (1882--1948) were written into the "official" discourse of the Mexican Revolution by adjusting them (as imitation of European styles, and nationalist and proto-nationalist musics respectively) to its ideological requirements. I propose an alternative reading that recognizes the complex social and cultural construction of that ideology and the uncertainties created by this process. To study these events I develop a model of identity construction that emphasizes agency and choice as individual action within changing ideologies. Under this paradigm, I analyze the artistic activities of Carrillo, Chavez, and Ponce in the 1920s as the result of individual action confronting power and struggling for hegemony, and consider their musical styles as sites of individual ideological struggle.; My work re-enacts a double performative exercise. First, the composers' self-representation and identification through musical style, and second, the composer's role in the construction and execution of a hegemonic discourse that re-wrote them a posteriori, according to the nationalist principles of the dominant regime.