This is a comprehensive, reflexive ethnographic / historical analysis of “the human experience through forms of cultural expression,” and of “how race, gender, and citizenship continue to shape” the daily lives of huapango arribeño musicians (p. 1) as they and many others experience a crushing need to go north across the US–Mexico border to survive. Huapango arribeño is an improvisatory dialogic song competition. Likely a syncretic art that combines Mexican values of rhetoric and metaphor deeply rooted in pre-Columbian artistic practices, it features improvised song duelling brought with colonialism, and autochthonous and African-rooted percussive dance. Like many other complex hybrid cultural traditions, the genre is understudied; Chávez focuses on the practices of people out-migrating from Xichú, Guanajuato north across the border or to Mexico City. “Huapango arribeño flows in these moments as a way of giving voice to the connections (with others) that matter most: the ‘life between all of us,’…irrespective of where people are, where they go, or which people they return to” (p. 322). The theme of crossing America’s “borders—literal and figurative” (p. 4) becomes a metaphorical method to describe not only the back and forth dialogical musical conversation, but also related social realities, among them the harsh and frequently fatal migratory crossings.

Chapter 1, “Aurality and the Long American Century,” foreshadows a general tendency throughout the book to incorporate bits of Mexican political history, often in juxtaposition with US policies that have directly affected Mexico. The aurality of aesthetic labour’s subversive potential (p. 5) is also a theme throughout. Chávez aspires to uncover how music-making “refigures the sociopolitical and economic terms of migration through aesthetic means” (p. 18). He goes beyond the Eurocentric formulation that affect delivers the power in “aesthetic” (commonly defined as “beautiful”) forms of expression, by emphasising the importance of place (“emplacement” or “spatiality”), interaffectivity, and Mexican poetics. He elaborates on the three essential elements of the musical tradition: reglamento, or conventions and rules that apply to the event (the tablados) as a whole; fundamento, or the thematic elaboration and rhetorical logic to which musicians of huapango arribeño adhere; and el Destino (the Calling), or “the reflexive theory linking the domains of aesthetics and sociability” (p. 21). Musicians believe they are called to perform, and the skills necessary can seem to generate themselves. Chávez relates a poignant account attributed to Subcomandante Marcos (of the Zapatista National Liberation Army) and the healer Don António about the “unbinding that is central to intimacy and that brings us full circle to the connections between music and hope, between performance and politics, between poetics and material realities…” (p. 196).

In practice, the three elements, reglamento, fundamento, and el Destino, are expressed within decimals, Spanish-rooted ten-line verse forms—the most familiar of which is the espinela décima with content introduced in an initial four-line glosa, each line of which completes four consecutive verses. The skill needed to elaborate on the content while commenting on immediate community concerns and individuals is indeed impressive. Musical transcriptions and full decimal texts with English translations enhance the reader’s understanding.

I will address a few weaknesses, although meant to be instructive, rather than overtly critical. The author deploys “trans in the sense of active crossing and thereby attend[s] also to the correlative social decentering of the space of the nation-state. This paradigmatic shift bypasses nationalist and essentialist models that cling to an ‘originary Mexican space’” (p. 22). Among the models Chávez critiques is Américo Paredes’s concept of Greater Mexico, which nonetheless introduced the idea of a “sensitised area where two cultures or two political systems come face to face” (Paredes cited on p. 198). This idea is at the core of Chávez’s extended theoretical framework of the border as both “place and presencing” (p. 325). In addition, Chávez relies heavily on the work of scholars who display impressively erudite theoretical discourse in a “refined” academic style. This limits the possibility that those who create the expressive culture will be able to read much of the work, a contemporary dilemma that challenges the hegemony of print media. Ideally, the author should turn the book into a documentary film accessible to a much larger “readership.”

This study turns on its head Porfirio Díaz’s famous quote: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” Rather, we begin to find “God” inside the musical practice, synergising in improvised musical duels the means to revive the community and generate the moral strength people must have to continue. Having grown up in Chicago as the son of Mexican immigrants, Chávez reveals a deeply felt sensitivity to his field consultants. Among the book’s myriad strengths, the author, also a musician and scholar, is a very thoughtful writer. He introduces the reader to a complex tradition with remarkable socio-musical and intellectual breadth—a landmark contribution. The interdisciplinary focus lends itself to a variety of scholarly areas, including Mexican American studies, ethnomusicology, folklore, dance studies, anthropology, ethnic studies, and political science.