It has now been more than 50 years since I conducted ethnographic research for my PhD dissertation in San Jerónimo Amanalco, a bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish speaking community high in the central highlands of Mexico. Just 50 miles from Mexico City, Amanalco is situated in the municipal district of Texcoco, and is one of three Indigenous communities in the high mountain that lies high above that urban center. When people from Amanalco interacted with these city residents they tried to hide their Indigenous identity the best they could, as they might hear themselves being referred to in whispers, behind their backs, as “ esos indios sucios” (“those dirty Indians”).

Even before I had lived there, I learned that the people of Amanalco were known as the toughest defenders of the mountain forest and water springs upon which their economy depended. Any unwanted intrusion into these places, I was told, could be met with a shower of stones or even bullets. Eventually, I found that such tenacious efforts to retain control over land, water springs, and mountain forest resources gave Amanalco some economic space and flexibility to absorb certain aspects of globalization without the undue disruption of its culture. Over decades, I witnessed the transformation of this relatively small, isolated, agrarian village (2,000 people) with no reliable motor transport into a globalized, multilocal town (11,000 people), with a cell tower off the central plaza (since 2006), resident taxi drivers, mini-cell phone shops, pizza stores, and a minibus service that runs every 15 minutes to the surrounding region. 

In continuing to examine the impact of such changes over time, I was surprised by the importance of music in the transition to a different kind of community, as well as the profoundly positive transformation of how Amanalco was viewed from regional zones outside its boundaries. This also intersected with a growing local ecological consciousness and Indigenous ethnic pride even as the community dramatically moved away from dependence on agrarian pursuits. My last visit there in 2018 and frequent contact since that time via various forms of social media, especially Facebook, has enabled a better understanding of the cultural context I first encountered decades ago.

Shifting family structures

Key to understanding how, in 1972, residents of Amanalco constructed ideas about late life and generational relations was that virtually all men or women referred to themselves as campesinos/as—those with an economic and social way of life centered on growing crops, tending animals, and living a domestic life around the hearth. In late adulthood, as long as persons were physically able, they worked alongside younger kin in their multigenerational, patrilineal, patrilocal house compounds. During that time, the logistical, practical, and emotional structure of family systems was quite authoritarian, dominated by the elder couple, especially the men. This was marked by hand-kissing, bowing, and other deferential respect gestures within extended kin networks. 

During the early 1970s, the most important activities culturally—from economic to ritual/religious production—were led by older men and women. These older women and men also constructed their lives around a more expansive bilateral kin network linked to both husband and wife, as well as to sets of fictive kin—called compadres (co-parents)—that they had acquired as they and their children went through various lifecourse rituals, such as baptism and marriage. As I tracked such things over subsequent decades, I noted a shift away from the familial labor of agricultural self-sustenance that was brought on by village population growth and the globalization of the regional and local economies. This slowly transformed generational household relations. One visible aspect of that impact was the changed displays of respect, as seen in the short video below. 

Change in traditional kin respect ritual. Video by the author.

The obvious difference in the second example is the casual kiss given to the grandparent, which has now become the norm. Although the boy in the video and most of his generational peers live in house-compounds alongside their grandparents or great-grandparents, there is an underlying transformation taking place in the shift from authoritarian family structures that exhibit clear kin/age boundaries to a more egalitarian structure, ideally marked by overt affection and respectful love (at least from the perspective of the young). 

Ritual transformations and long-term ethnographic relations

I am writing this in hindsight, from my perspective in 2024—more than half a century and 12 research visits after I first lived in Amanalco. Over the past decade, I have also been in constant communication with my key interlocutors—people whom I consider family as well as a wide array of residents, including young adults who are just taking leadership in the community. Thanks to social media, I have been able to keep up with changing cultural details of the place. In March 2023, I virtually participated, via livestream, in my grand-goddaughter’s quinceañera (15th birthday) celebration. This was facilitated by a resident videographer who was employed by Facebook and had married into the community.

Frequent social media contact with interlocutors and community members in Amanalco has allowed me to explore changes in generational relations, in and out of the family, and its interplay with the dramatic rise of music as an occupation. My last research visit to Amanalco in 2018 was bittersweet; it had caused me to reflect on the passage of time and the power of relations forged in and through ethnographic fieldwork. While I looked forward to exploring shifting generational relations with a newly formed group connecting older adults and ecologically concerned youth, I also had to come to terms with the death of my compadre the prior year, a person I had known since he was six years old. 

It was a cool, sunny first day of October when I drove toward “Buena Vista” (beautiful view), the housing compound where I had always lived since my first contact with Amanalco. This time, seeking to learn about new changes in the community, I was back for El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead celebration, largely to pay respect to the memory of my compadre, Juan Velázquez, who died the previous year at age 52 from untreated complications of diabetes, as had his father, 20 years earlier. Driving into Amanalco, I observed the numerous trails of bright yellow marigold petals (cempaspuchitl in Nahuatl) snaking from the roadside through household doors, up to the family altars. It is believed that the scent of the flowers can entice the spirits of dead relatives to visit the house altars, where they would appreciate this intense, colorful conjunction of devotion and memory. Family altars were festooned with more yellow flowers sprinkled across mounds of food, chocolate death heads, smoking copal incense, tequila, new articles of clothing, and photos of the recently departed family member. 

I sobbed uncontrollably with Juan’s widow Anastacia, his married daughters, Rosalba and Elizabeth, and his 82-year-old mother, Doña Concha. We all hoped that Juan’s spirit would find its way back into Buena Vista that day. Yet, by midday, we collectively sought to lure Juan’s spirit out of the house as we walked to the cemetery with fresh flowers. Before we entered that space, somewhat to my surprise, we passed a new, large, symphonic band, with its multigenerational musicians playing us into the grave site. 

Seen throughout Mexico, variations of this beautiful ritual for the dead centered around briefly enticing spirits to the family altar and then back again to the cemetery, where kin refurbished the grave with fresh flowers and food. This is an especially powerful way of seeking, at least temporarily, a profound material and spiritual union between generations alive and dead.

Día de los Muertos Celebration in Amanalco. Video by the author.

Such ritual belies profound changes in the emotional and practical relationship between generations and the very construction of the life course since my first connection with this community.¹  Central to what I came to more fully understand, especially in the presence of the multigenerational orchestra, was how central music was to the changes I was seeing.

Music as a Touchstone for Cultural Renaissance

Over the past 25 years, Amanalco has experienced a shift from predominantly agricultural labor to a variety of paid work. Most people in the community now earn wages as musicians, bus and taxi drivers, textile manufacturers, urban flower vendors, or, more recently, as bilingual teachers inside and outside the community. I have also observed the emergence of multigenerational orchestras, mentioned above, and thought about how various forms of music are interwoven with renewed community pride and aspirations.  

In recent years, such sentiments have morphed into alternative cultural spaces for bringing together generations. Certainly, since 2015, I have heard youth bad-mouthing older folks as out of touch. Elders have countered that “kids these days they don’t know how to work like we do.” Yet, a key existential point stressed by young adult residents is that even though they are now making their living as musicians, bus drivers, clothes makers, and even, sometimes, as videographers, they remain just as devoted to their community and their saints’ fiestas as their campesino grandparents. 

Central to such occupational shifts has been the professionalization of music performance. In the 1970s, Amanalco had a number of small bands that provided music for the annual cycle of fiesta rituals celebrating the community’s favored saints.  This musical style was primarily military or John Phillip Sousa-style marching sounds. Local musicians, when performing in Amanalco, were not given money, but were well fed during the events and received honor in the eyes of the community and the saints. A few of the better bands would earn small amounts of money to play in other communities. Typically, fathers or grandfathers taught youth the basics, although some young adults drafted into the military opted to become members of large military bands, and brought these enhanced musical skills back to the community. As radio and television became widely accessible in a majority of households by the late 1980s, youth became exposed to the amazing array of global music. The idea also arose that one could support a family as a musician, and pursuing a career in music came to be seen as an economic option. By 2010, Amanalco was awash with garage bands, some of which were making enough money to rent large trucks and convert the vehicles’ beds into stages. These bands, which often played at weddings and quinceñeras, performed far and wide in the region.

Over the past two decades music has also promoted a more positive regional view of Amanalco’s residents, as their bands have become popular in the area. A few older musicians have come to be known as excellent music teachers, and one man of 40 has made a name for himself as a recording artist. Such activities have become the subject of newspaper articles highlighting the community’s growing cultural and economic importance. For example, in 2011, a regional newspaper profiled Lidio Durán, an Amanalco resident who teaches the French horn at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, where he had previously studied. Durán had founded the “Children’s Band of Amanalco” in his house, and the article took note of the first regional “Festival of Symphonic Bands,” which was held the following year in the center of Amanalco. The article also quoted Durán as saying the following: “when politicians arrive we always receive them with music; in the past we might have received them with rocks” (El Universal 2011). 

What I suggest here is that newer forms of musical performance connect closely to the pattern of intergenerational engagement that is prominent in traditional ritual performances. Despite the growing experiential gap in the worlds of youth and elders, these new developments offer a novel framework for the intergenerational and broader regional sharing of Indigenous knowledge. This has also become manifest in newly created multigenerational cultural institutions and groups. One, called Tepeyollomeh—literally “heart of the mountain,” in Nahuatl—was founded by young adults several months before my visit in 2018, with a key leader being a flutist in a Mexico City symphonic orchestra. The following year, a member of this group proudly sent me the photo below, which shows elders teaching youth critical information about their mountain forest and water springs. This group was also integral in bringing to the town, since 2020, an annual Nahuatl Festival, promoting Indigenous knowledge and language.

One of the elders in this photo was a widely respected elder musician and instructor who, when he was mayor of Amanalco in 2010, focused his efforts on preserving their Indigenous language and promoting the protection and appreciation of their ecological resources. In 2016, he worked with regional officials to organize the first annual music Festival Vientos de la Montaña  (Festival of the Mountain Wind). This involved musicians from many communities in the region, including the urban center of Texcoco. The festival culminated with him leading a wind instrument ensemble playing to the mountain spirits, at 14,000 feet, atop the ruins of a pre-Hispanic temple to the rain god Tlaloc.

Notes

[1] I have tried to make sense of these transformations, in collaboration with the community, through varied digital documentation, increasingly done in collaboration with community members.  These have become part of a community-generated multimodal record, embedded within and expanding upon my 2015 multimedia ethnography Indigenous Mexico Engages the 21st Century. Increasingly, this includes visual materials created by community members themselves as part of the book’s bilingual webpage (https://indigenousmexicobook.com/).

References

El Universal. 2011. “La cantera de la música de viento.” In El Newspaper, Texcoco, August 28, http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/cultura/66229.html (accessed July 1, 2013).

Sokolovky, Jay. 2015. Indigenous Mexico Engages the 21st Century. A Multimedia Ethnography. New York: Routledge. 

Sokolovsky, Jay. 2020. “Indigenous Mexican Elders Engage the 21st Century.” In The Cultural Context of Aging. 4th edition, edited by Jay Sokolovsky, 277-303. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Jay Sokolovsky is Emeritus Professor of An