Música Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation between Nations is a rich and fascinating study of a popular music genre and the Mexican migrant experience in the United States. The first book to examine Norteña music in depth, Música Norteña is a detailed ethnomusicological analysis of this popular music genre and how it has come to express the ways in which travelling migrant labourers ‘live, remember and create’ a ‘nation between nations’.

As Ragland points out, the Mexican Diaspora is frequently viewed by outsiders as a homogenous community, while the music most widely promoted in the United States as representative of the Mexican ‘nation’ abroad is Mariachi and relatively little is known about other genres. This book seeks to redress this imbalance by offering an analysis of a popular music form that ‘is often excluded from being seriously considered “Mexican” music because the bulk of its audience and recording activity is located in the United States and the northernmost region of Mexico’ (p. 4).

Música Norteña is divided into five chapters with an introduction and a conclusion followed by a useful eight-page glossary and a three-page discography. It begins with a historical survey which puts the migrant worker experience into historical context and accounts for the emergence of a ‘border culture’ and Norteña music as a distinct genre with its own style. The book is concerned not with the Mexican American who focuses on ‘assimilation and acculturation’, nor with the Chicano who advocates an ‘ethnic revival with Marxist tendencies’. Rather, Ragland focuses on the bulk of the Mexican immigrant population which prefers to speak Spanish and to maintain regional folk traditions and religious practices. This latter group accepts or rejects elements of US culture and sees the US as an extension of Mexico, and it constitutes the primary audience for Norteña music. For these geographically dispersed Mexicans, Norteña creates and maintains a sense of identity and cohesion and is expressive of ambivalent attachments to both sides of the border. Examining the contributions of key artists from the first half of the 20th century such as Tony de la Rosa and groups such as Los Montañeses del Alamo and Los Alegres de Terán, Ragland sheds light on the ways in which Norteña music evolved amongst new Mexican immigrants in the US, many of them illegal and discriminated against by North American employers but also by upwardly mobile Chicano/Mexican American residents.

Supported and popularised by a recording industry that developed on the US side of the border, and by a touring network of artists, Norteña music has also been diffused since the 1950s by film. Ragland examines key film compositions and the popular film persona ‘El Piporro’ and shows how this set the stage for the commercialisation and transformation of Norteña music for migrating and working-class Mexicans on both sides of the border. Ragland also shows how Norteña has become the contemporary vehicle for the Mexican narrative ballad or corrido; she dedicates considerable space to a contemporary group, Los Tigres del Norte, whose narco-corridos and lyrics dealing with issues such as illegal border crossing, drug smuggling and the independence of woman have caused considerable controversy and led to Mexican government officials banning some songs from radio airplay. Ragland suggests that these contemporary Norteña songs are not so much about celebrating crime but about celebrating those who stand up to a perceived US intrusion taking the forms of a ‘war on drugs’ and a militarisation of the border region.

Taking a number of artists/groups and key compositions from the early 20th century to the present day as case studies, Ragland succeeds in providing a detailed analysis not only of the lyrics but also of the music and performance context of this genre. She describes how political changes have influenced the migrant labourer's experience and the evolution of Norteña music over time, and in doing so contributes towards the development of a greater understanding of a community which is widely marginalised and criminalised in the US mass media. Perhaps Ragland could have linked her study more closely to the concept of ‘hybridity’ as a strategy for ‘entering and leaving modernity’ (García Canclini Reference Canclini1995). However, in a context of increasing interest in globalisation and its consequences, this book offers a valuable insight into Norteña music, social, political, economic, cultural and communications issues, and the strategies that a much neglected community adopts to deal with these. This is a careful study of Norteña music, a genre rooted in the experiences of conflict, exploitation and marginalisation and constitutive of an ‘imagined community’ based on strong attachments to Mexican heritage and culture but not to Mexico as a geopolitical state. It succeeds in significantly widening the scope of popular music/cultural studies.