Ethnomusicologist Peter J. García grew up in the North Valley of Albuquerque surrounded by the sounds of local musicians like Al Hurricane, Robert Griego, Eddie Garcia and the Emeralds, and the Purple Haze. More recently, Latin pop singer and celebrity songwriter Lorenzo Antonio and his sister’s female quartet Sparx perform New Mexico music for an international Spanish-speaking audience. Various artists, numerous ensemble types, and diverse genres, styles, and singers comprise what local deejays call "New Mexico music" today. The state’s diverse, historical, and eclectic music scene reflects the complexity and struggles facing the nation’s oldest native Hispanic residents asNuevo Mexicanos hold on to what’s left of their land grants, water and property rights, language, and native music-culture as transnational Mexican and international Latin American music-cultures are heard throughout the Land of Enchantment.
In this critical study, García traces how early folk music was first recorded, archived, and preserved by the Anglo artists like Charles Lummis, Mary Austin, and later music scholars like John Donald Robb. Situating New Mexican popular and folk musics within a broader history of U.S. neocolonialism, García examines New Mexico music as part of a larger cultural system of lived values, experiences, and meanings. Drawing on traditional music studies, popular culture, and folklore scholarship as well as using current ideas from U.S. third world feminism, decolonial theory, ethnomusicology, and critical geography, García’s study presents echoes of New Mexico’s indigenous Hispana/o descendants living within an unstable fragmented cultural system. Today’sNuevo Mexicanas/os continue to express a unique regional experience through more familiar commercial and modern styles like Mexican mariachi and trio musics, Tejano, conjunto and orquesta alongside more recent postmodern sounds like Hip Hop, salsa, flamenco, Latin pop, technocumbia and electronica. Following philosopher Jacques Attali, García views New Mexico music as prophecy because it makes audible the new world that will eventually become visible following what decolonial theorists call "after America."
