Speaker 1:	Good afternoon, everybody. My name's Tom Whitman. I teach in the Department of Music and Dance here. I want to welcome you to the annual Peter Gram Swing Lecture. Peter Gram Swing was a founder of this department and he was a mentor, one of my great mentors in my life as a student at Swarthmore. I'm particularly delighted to say that Elizabeth and Hamlin Swing are here today for this lecture. We're very honored that they're able to come. 
	It's a special pleasure for me, and also an honor for me, to introduce Marie Abe, who was a student of mine here, as you can see and will see, has gone on to do some absolutely extraordinary things. Marie holds an MA and PhD in Ethnic Musicology from the University of California Berkeley and a degree in Sociology, Anthropology and Ethnomusicology from Swarthmore College, is what it says on her website. 
	Musicology explores politics of space and sound, critical cultural theory, and Japanese popular performing arts. Other research interests include cultural advocacy, ritual music in Bali and Thailand, the global circulation of tango, the accordion in immigrant communities in California, anti-nuclear movement in music in Japan, and Afrofuturisim in the United States. 
	Before coming to Boston University, Professor Abe taught in the Department of Music and Asian Studies program at UC Berkeley and in the Department of Anthropology of Harvard University, where she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. She is currently working on a book-length ethnographic analysis of chindon-ya, a live musical advertisement practice in Japan. She's also a co producer of the NPR radio documentary, Squeezebox Stories, premiering Fall 2011, which tells stories from California immigration history using the accordion as a common trove. 
	Marie is an active performer of the accordion and piano ... By the way she was a student of Marcanotnio Bronaise when she was here and one of the most memorable senior recitals we've ever had at my time at Swarthmore College, before she moved onto the accordion. 
	With the frequent concert tours and collaborations with recording artists from the United States and Japan, she is currently performing with the Boston-based Ethiopian Groove Collective, Debo Band, sub-pop/next ambience, which has been featured in the New York Times, Rolling Stone Magazine, NPR, and other media. She's going to talk to us today about Ethnomusicology on air, accordion, cultural advocacy, and immigrant experiences in California. Please welcome Marie.
Speaker 2:	Thank you, Tom, for a most generous introduction. Thank you, also, to Andrew and Bernadette for coordinating all the logistics to make my visit possible. I also wanted to thank all my mentors, Jerry, Tom, and Tony from this department, and also Steve from religion and from anthropology, all of whose guidance has all the more made me who I am today as a scholar. It's a great honor to be here. Thank you so much. And, of course, the Department of Music and Dance, thank you for inviting me. 
	It's truly an honor to be given this opportunity to speak today at this annual Peter Gram Swing Lecture in this concert hall where I have a lot fond memories of dancing to [inaudible 00:03:30]. I don't know if I can say this. I think he's almost 15 years old working on counterpointed spcies assignments on that organ. Late night hours. Would everyone agree? Also, plainsman recital here. So it's a really special place for me to be speaking to you from here today.
	The trajectory of my intellectual and creative life has been profoundly formed by my time at Swarthmore. I'm thinking about all the times I spent in this building as a special major in Ethnomusicology and Kohlberg as a Sociology major, a semester abroad in Bali, and summer in Thailand, volunteering in the North Square neighborhood project, performing with a couple of bands, and working at WSRN as a radio DJ. Without these experiences and guidance from my mentors, I would not be here to share with you my work as an Ethnomusicologist. 
	As I look up to acknowledge this influence at Swarthmore and to give you a context in which to position the particular topic of this speaking about today, I want to share with you, briefly, how I've come to the discipline of Ethnomusicology before I delve into this particular topic. 
	As a native Japanese who grew up living on several continents, I've cultivated an ethnographic sensitivity to social difference and transnational dynamics since early childhood. These experiences have led me to work with issues of cultural diversity, geography and multiculturalism in much of my work as a scholar. I also have been a big music fan since I was three, when I started taking piano lessons. As I have navigated a bronch of geographical and social cultural lines, music has always been a window through which I've reflected on my place in society, related with others in profound ways, and learned about their stories. While some stories carry traces of inequality and violence, music can also be a powerful instrument to challenge the status quo. It's this insight that I strive to instill in my work as an Ethnomusicologist, educator and a musician.  
	How engaged and critical listening helps us hear invisible social relations, silenced memories, and distant places. And how active performance and musical interactions with others inspire creative social intervention. The seeds for these insights were planted right here at Swarthmore. It was at Swarthmore where I found ways to integrate parts of me that I felt to be fragmented from growing up in different parts of the world. While I was here, I learned to synthesize my diverse interests that initially seemed incommensurable. To appreciate the productive tension within the intersection of being an artist and an academic, and to conceive scholarly projects as a form of public engagement. 
	So it seems only fitting to me that I'm presenting today on a project that took me outside of my primary expertise, which is politics of sound and affect of public space in Japan. And instead, I'd like to share with you my work today on this ethnographically informed public radio documentary that I collaboratively produced with a radio journalist, which pushed me outside of my comfort zone, challenged me to integrate new loads of creative and scholarly expressions, and engage with new audiences. So let me begin with playing you a short excerpt.
Speaker 3:	I'm Marco Werman of PRI's The World. Welcome to Squeezebox Stories, a musical and social history of the accordion. In the next hour, we'll visit Zydeco Dance Halls and Mexican Norteno clubs, punk rock apprentices, and Arabic master musicians. All to discover what's behind the surprisingly wide appeal of this ultimate people's instrument. 
Speaker 4:	With the accordion, that's the only instrument you hug. It becomes part of your body. When I carry my accordion, all my shyness goes away.
Speaker 5:	The accordion, it's not just that it's in different hands or played differently by different people, it's been the meeting place, it's been the crossroads.
Speaker 6:	Man, that sound just hits you.
Speaker 3:	Join us for a musical journey with the accordion. First, this news.
Speaker 2:	How's the volume? So this is a 60 minute public radio documentary that I produced in collaboration with journalist and great friend of mine, Julie Caine, titled Squeezebox Stories. Squeezebox Stories tells five different stories about immigration histories in California using the accordion as a common trove. And my talk today will focus exclusively on the last of the five stories. 
	To give you a quick overview of the entire hour, the first story profiles Vince Cirelli and the Italian-American accordion repairman in his nineties, and Skyler Fell, a women in her early thirties who is apprenticing with him to learn the craft. 
	The second story highlights a TV host and accordionist, Lawrence Welk, whose show simultaneously popularized and stigmatized the instrument. This story shows how accordion, at first, became a tool for a simulation, a symbol of whiteness, and subsequently stigmatized objects sitting [inaudible 00:09:02]. 
	The third story, about African Creole musician, Andre Thierry, tells how Zydeco traveled all the way across the country from Louisiana to California, together with the internal migration of the Creoles in the 1950s, and how this accordion-driven dance music provides a home away form home for them living in Richmond, California. 
	The fourth story is about the Lebanese classical accordionist, Elias Lammam, for who accordion isn't a folk instrument, but an instrument of prestige that requires a lifetime to master. In this story I also talk about how he physically has to modify the instrument so that he can play the quarter tones in Arabic scale. 
	Our last Squeezebox story, a segment I will be expanding on later today, is from California Central Valley. A vast agricultural region where many indigenous and Mexicans from the state of Oaxaca, have recently immigrated to find work in fields. This is also the area where there is a major drought happening right now in the news. It shows how the accordion provides a new creative facet for Oaxaca workers to negotiate a sense of self in the new land, within the indigenous Oaxacan community, Mexican community, and within the United States.  
	Some of you may be wondering how I came to conceive of this project. Even more people might be wondering why the accordion. I'm curious who here plays the accordion? Look at this. This is great. Obviously, some fans. Some haters? It's okay. Okay. I'm in a safe place today. I'm sure some of you may also have some accordion stories. Uncle plays the accordion or you have an accordion in an attic, something like that. 
	Well the radio documentary, for me, was born when I first met the collaborator, Julie Caine, at a dinner. Upon finding out that I am an accordionist, she asked me, "Okay, I have to ask. Why is the accordion everywhere?" While many Americans may associate the accordion with Polka or whiteness, Julie as an avid fan of vernacular music from around the world, knew that the accordion indeed is a global instrument. 
	The accordion in its contemporary form was first created in New York in the early 1800s. Accordions were originally developed as a much cheaper alternative-
	There is some dispute over exactly where the first accordion was made and who invented it. But an instrument called accordion was first patented by a man called Cyrillus Damian in 1829 in Austria. This is a photo of an accordion, sort of similar, not exactly the one he invented but similar, from that time. The accordion was the musical instrument of the industrial revolution. Accordion was mass produced, making it much more accessible to individuals. Instruction books could be sold so the forms of playing it could be regularized and standardized. You didn't need to have networks of apprenticeship and instruction for the accordion. So in some ways it had both the standardizing but also the democratizing teachers of the industrial age. 
	Since its inception, it has spread throughout the world through the forces of European expansion, Colonialism, and migration in the following century. The accordion was an ideal instrument for the mass migrations of the 19th century. The instrument was portable, loud, and relatively easy to play. It also worked as a one man band, playing melody and harmony at once. As people left Europe for the New World, they brought their accordions with them. Consequently, the United States quickly became the main importer of accordions in the world. Today, you can find the instrument in places from Madagascar, South Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt, Lebanon, Afghanistan, China, Columbia, Brazil, North America, along with Western and Eastern Europe, and beyond. 
	Just to show you the variety of accordions, this is the kind of ... This is the button accordion, most common in Mexican norteno music or in Columbia, and it's diatonic in that depending on which way you're billowing, the same button makes two different notes, pitches.
	This is a very typical Cajun accordion, also diatonic. 
	This one is very popular in France. This is chromatic but the right hand is all buttons. 
	This might be the one that's most familiar to you. It's a piano accordion and either way you're billowing, the same key produces the same pitch. 
	This is another piano accordion. One thing to notice that in the 1930s, accordion wasn't as widely available. It was still something that you would see on vaudeville stage. It was really ornate. It was really well decorated. The little curly sides were very characteristic of this era but soon after that it became more cheaply produced but also widely available and that's how we came to this black and a little bit more minimum design to make.
	So the dinner conversation about the history of the accordion with Julie led to more exchanges, collaborative research, and eventually a grant from the California Council for the Humanities, a state branch of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 
	To produce a radio documentary, we spent two years doing field work. We interviewed over 100 people who were accordion people in one way or another across California. Including musicians, fans, and a few haters, repairmen and women, teachers, and festival romancers. It only took us a few months before we started to see various narrative patterns emerge. Some had their bag of accordion jokes ready and I'm sure many of you have read these cartoons. Can you read them? These are very popular sentiment and there are many more accordion jokes. I'm happy to share more with you afterwards, if you're interested. 
	Some hated the accordion passionately because it was imposed on them as a child against their will. I also heard a few lost accordion stories where people told of painful and unfortunate separations from their instruments, and miraculous reunion with their beloved object in the years later, sometimes decades later. Some people called it the devil's instrument, an instrument that has magical power to lure certain people. 
	Another recurring theme was closet stories. Many of the great musicians we met along the way shared with us how they felt an inexplicable attraction to the instrument, which was forbidden or supposed to be somebody else's job in the family. As a result, they snuck around, practiced in secrecy, sometimes literally while hiding in a closet, until they eventually gained recognition as a passionate and accomplished accordionist.
	From these stories we started to wonder, what is it about this instrument that produces these narratives? Why is there this mythical quality about these narratives about the accordion? One thing was clear, this musical instrument, this sturdy material object made of wood and thousands of intricate parts made of metal, beeswax, and deer leather, does something to people. It elicits affective responses, memories, and creative expressions from the performers, listeners, and instrument makers. 
	In his recent article, Ethnomusicologist Elliot Bates, takes on this precise question about the materiality and agency of musical instruments. He asks, "How do we think about the musical instrument as not only central to human social networks, but also an actor with a kind of agency? Showing how certain musical instruments not only facilitate, prevent, or mediate social interactions, but also create desire and affect." Bates draws your attention to musical instruments can passably for action, rather than this idea that musical instruments as simply passive artifacts from which sound emanates. Bates calls for a study of the social life of musical instruments that examines "the performative and integrative capacity of things to help make what we call society." So this is what he's calling the social life of musical instruments. 
	So he does this by expanding what the social means. He theorizes the social to include people, animals, material objects, spaces, and ideas and causes. In other words, going beyond a semiotic mode of analysis of material culture, Bates is advocating for relational analysis of musical instruments as agentful actors, within the paradigm that encompasses the full range of possible "human object divine relations." I find Bates's claim very compelling. His rather provocative model certainly resonates with many of the stories, narratives, and interactions I witnessed in the course of producing the documentary. However, I maintain a certain level of reservation, also. Broadly speaking, various theories to inform Bates's ideas has the world view that erases the divide between human subjectivity and object. And in this object-orientated ontology, human's subjectivities and objects are flattened on to the same terrain. While this view allows us to pay attention to how objects have affected impact on us beyond the dispersive realm, implicit in it is an anti-humanist commitment that risks negating the process of signification. 
	How do we reconcile these desires to privilege both the agency of objects and humanist impulse to encode objects with meanings? How can we pay attention to the social life of the accordion without discounting human subjectivities and cultural poetics at the same time? I'd like to hold onto this question and tension as I move through my talk today and I'll revisit it at the end.
	So these theoretical questions aside, as some of the accordion narratives demonstrated, the stories in the documentary are ethnographic testament to these active capacities of the instrument in a shaky social and cultural life, from distinct cultural contexts. The accordion became more than a mere instrument, metaphorical trove, or narrative device. The accordion became a powerful object through which to examine immigration histories and memories, shifting discourse of ethnic identities in the US, and cultural imaginaries of their senses of belonging. So now, let me tell you more about the Oaxacan story from the documentary in order to think through the social life of the musical instrument, and examine how the accordion has produced new creative and political possibilities among the Oaxacan migrant communities in the Cental Valley, California.
Speaker 3:	In many parts of the United States, when you scan the radio, you're very likely going to hear something like this. This is norteno music and it's a big part of mainstream Mexican culture in the United States. Flashing button accordions are always a centerpiece and it's what many people from Mexico listen to. The face of Mexican immigration is changing, however, and the music is changing along with it. The latest wave of immigrant farm workers in California, are indigenous people from the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Many of this most recent wave of immigrants don't even speak Spanish as their first language. Producers Julie Caine and Marie Abe went to California's Central Valley in search of a new kind of accordion music.
Speaker 2:	So begins the last segment of the documentary. As [Righthooter's 00:21:21] 2010 collaboration with a Mexican group, [foreign language 00:21:25], raised the profile of norteno music in mainstream US popular imagination, the accordion has reaffirmed its status as the musical signifier of not only the genre of norteno, but also the Mexican population in the US at large. 
	In light of such a monolithic conception of Mexican-American population in the US, are the recent waves of indigenous migrants from Oaxaca, South Mexico, for whom the accordion has little to do with their regional pride. 
	Starting in the 1970s and particularly since the 1990s, indigenous people from Oaxaca, such as Mixtecs and Zapotecs, migrated in large waves to the US and an overwhelming majority of Oaxaca migrants chose Southern California as their destination. Although, some others found themselves in the Midwest and Northeast. But by the 1990s, an estimated 50,000 Mixtec farm workers resided in California, particularly concentrated in the Central Valley, leading to the term, Oaxaca-California to refer to the transnational space occupied by indigenous Oaxacans living in the state. 
	According to the indigenous farm workers study, indigenous Oaxacans are the fastest growing farm worker population in California, and the most recent estimated figure places the minimum population between 100,000 and 150,000, representing between 20% and 30% of California's entire farm labor force. This is sort of a typical view of the field that they work on. It's this vast monocultural field and this is for the grapes to produce raisins. 
	Both in the US and Mexico, indigenous Oaxacans find themselves marginalized economically, socially, and politically, as migrants and as indigenous people. In addition to the well known obstacles that confront cross water migrants in the US, especially those without documentation, indigenous Oaxacans also face entrenched racist attitudes and discrimination from other Mexicans, who mock them for their rural ways, their heavily accented Spanish, or inability to speak, and their low level of education. 
	For many of these migrants from Oaxaca, one of the things that provide them with a sense of home is Chilena, the region's beloved musical style. One of our top inter lockers, Carlos Mendoza, expressed this sentiment when speaking of the musical genre to us: "In Oaxaca, we have many regions but there's one thing that unites all Oaxacans, that we all have the same love for this kind of music." Meaning Chilena. "We all identify ourselves with this kind of music." 
	Chilena is believed to have been introduced to Oaxacans by Chilean sailors who came through Oaxaca on their way to seek fortune in American gold rush. I'm going to play you an example.
	So fast [inaudible 00:24:33] characterize the genre, which has traditionally been performed on string instruments, such as violin and guitar. Just like the one that you heard. But never on the accordion. Featured prominently in music of norteno and conjunto music, both of which are rooted in the US and Mexico border region, the accordion is seen as an instrument of the North by the Oaxacans. Thus, combination of the accordion with Chilena, the musical emblem of the Souther state of Oaxaca, was perceived as a rather scandalous pairing. Carlos Mendoza recalled, "When I was 20 and I wanted to play Chilena music on the accordion, where I'm from, they almost chased me out of town." 
	Recently, however, Oaxaca farm workers in Central Valley have started to embrace the instrument in their interpretation of Chilena. This emerging musical trend circulates among the local audiences through home recordings, light performances, and radio. Even reaching their home communities in South Mexico via satellite broadcasts. How did this improbable combination of the Oaxacan traditional genre of Chilena, sonic index of the Southern state, and the accordion, sonic signifier of Northern Mexico become possible? What kind of histories and relations during the migration process across the border created conditions in which this unthinkable sounds become audible? Musical practices like Chilena provide a great platform from where to understand the formation of diasporas objectivity.
	However, I'm less interested today in providing a larger narrative of the formation of Oaxacan collective identity. Instead, I'm more interested in teasing out the diverse and sometimes conflicting creative, social, and economic aspirations among Oaxacan farm workers who play and dance to these renditions of Chilena on the accordion. So to do so, I will focus on three actors who play central roles in the emergence of this musical phenomenon. A radio DJ and activist, an accordionist/producer, and a Chilena band, all of whom live near Fresno, California.
	So the first actor, Filemon Lopez came into the US during the 1980s, part of one of the earliest waves of Oaxacan migration. Now in his late sixties, he speaks Spanish with a Mixtec accent. In 1995, Lopez started a first and only Mixtec language weekly radio program in the US called La Hora Mixteca, the Mixtec Hour. In order to "Orient and organize the Mixtec community and foster indigenous identity." The show has now grown into a full hour program broadcast on the US's only Spanish public radio station, Radio Billingue. Translated from Fresno to locations throughout the US and many parts of Mexico. 
	La Hora Mixteca was groundbreaking in several ways: for one, under Mexico's ban on the public display of indigenous languages, which lasted from the Spanish colonization in the 16th century until the early 1990s, gaining Mixtec presence on the airways was an achievement in itself. Going beyond the politics of recognition, La Hora Mixteca also facilitated communication between migrant workers and their families divided by the border, and among fragmented Mixtec speaking migrant communities, promoting access to resources and information to seek better housing, employment, and medical support. The show also became a central note in the network of local Oaxaca musicians, providing opportunities and exposure. Carlos Mendoza attested to this, "Yes, La Hora Mixteca was like a window through which we saw everyone. Not all of us are lucky enough to have been picked but they give us a chance to play. There's not a musician here in the Central Valley who doesn't know Filemon Lopez. We all know him."
	As Lopez's show gained popularity, more requests for Chilena started to trickle in. But Chilena was danced at home gatherings to a live band and had not been recorded much either in Oaxaca or the US, until the last decade. Lopez encouraged local musicians to come in and record Chilena and over time, new innovative forms of Chilena music started to appear. As Lopez expressed to me, "La Hora Mixteca was a first firefly of the spark of Chilena music in California." Now Chilena music dominates the majority of the airtime. When I visited the Radio Billingue studio in Fresno during broadcasting of the show, dozens of requests for Chilena songs came through the phone. Lopez cried out, "Oh, it has to be Chilena. If I play something else, listeners will call in and complain." Lopez's radio show then produced a significant unintended consequence, it gave rise to the local Chilena scene and through the heavy airplay alone on Mixteca, Chilena gained traction as a sonic emblem of Oaxaca heritage, along with the sound of the indigenous language.
	Now I turn to two figures within this emerging network of musicians to examine the variety of creative, economic, and political aspirations, articulated through the culture point of Chilena music on the accordion. Carlos Mendoza, a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer, was the first person in the Central Valley to produce a full-length album of Chilena songs. A radically innovative concept at the time. Mendoza is short and stout, with a broad smile and an easy laugh. He came to California about 25 years ago to work in the fields. Now in his early fifties, he lives in a modest house with his wife and his seven children. 
	So next to him is my collaborator, Julie Caine, and this is Ashley, his grandchild. He's built a recording studio in his garage where he's produced seven all Chilena albums, as well as several albums of norteno music. His innovative first all Chilena album featured the saxophone as the melody instrument, yet another original move. Although it met with some criticism at first, the album became a sensation locally. CDs sold well around the area and requests for Mendoza's Chilena came in constantly at La Hora Mixteca. It was not until several years later, in the early 2000s, when Mendoza decided to release another all Chilena album, this time on the accordion. 
	So the unusual mix of the accordion and Chilena in Mendoza's album, is best understood in light of his biography. Like many Oaxaca farm workers, Mendoza has migrated in search of work most of his life. First within Mexico and later in the US. Although born to Oaxacan parents, Mendoza does not speak Mixtec, as he grew up migrating through various Northwestern regions of Mexico while his parents worked in the field. Mendoza grew up listening to norteno music on the accordion while his parents listened to Chilena while longing for their home state. By the time he and his brothers formed a band when he was eight, the natural choice of music was norteno music, not Chilena. After arriving in the US in the late 1980s, he spent a decade gigging after long hours in the field, playing norteno music for the non indigenous Mexicans who speak Spanish as their first language. I call them mainstream Mexicans for the lack of a better word. Under the group named [foreign language 00:32:34], as if to claim authenticity of the music from Northern Mexico, or perhaps to downplay his Southern roots. 
	A shift happened gradually, however, in the past 10 years. As his longing for Oaxaca and regional pride grew stronger, Mendoza became committed to reintegrating and producing Chilena music under the monitor [foreign language 00:32:55] Oaxaca. Taking pride in his musical promotion of indigenous Oaxaca identity. For him, whose sense of Oaxacan heritage is grounded in the constant migration movement in South, reintegrating Chilena, a genre that is also inherently migrant from Chile, to Oaxaca, to California, with the accordion was a creative process in which he musically negotiated and articulated the complex sense of belonging and longing as a migrant Oaxacan living in the US. 
	The success of Mendoza's innovative interpretations of Chilena music has allowed him to retire from the field and now he makes his living as a home studio recording engineer and producer during the weekdays, while performing at parties and venues on the weekends. Mendoza recognizes the importance of music making not only as a means of expressing identity politics, but also a means of livelihood. "And we do it so they'll but it too because music doesn't live just by grace. We have to earn enough for our hamburgers. We don't have the fortune to be famous but if I eat a piece of bread or drink soda, I owe all of it to music."
	The formation of newly reinterpretation of Chilena allowed Mendoza to fulfill both his creative and economic aspirations, while asserting his renewed sense of Oaxacan identity in the face of doubly marginalized social reception he has endured in decades of working in the field in the US.  
	Moving on to the last actor. But not all Chilena musicians who followed suit have the same view of the accordion in Chilena music, nor did they achieve similar kinds of success. A family band consisting of brothers and nephews, most Latinos are of a different generation from Lopez and Mendoza. Mostly in their mid twenties and early thirties, the band members arrived in the Central Valley only six years ago from the Oaxacan village, [foreign language 00:34:50]. Farm workers by day and gigging musicians by night, Los Yukinos play a variety of gigs from mainstream Mexican nightclubs to Oaxacan family functions. Mendoza has been producing Los Yukinos Chilena albums in the past few years and thy have been getting a lot of airtime on La Hora Mixteca. I'll play you a track, quickly. No auto tuning there. Got to appreciate that.
	Unlike Mendoza, whose constant migrations within Mexico exposed him to norteno music early in life, Los Yukinos came directly from their village to California. The accordion wasn't a sound inherent to the migrant experiences. Rather, it was a sound of mainstream Mexico and the US and they chose to embrace it strategically. Los Yukinos picked up the accordion and norteno repertoire to expand their gigging opportunities after arriving in California. 
	I first heard Los Yukinos if February of 2009, at the nightclub Aldo's, in Fresno. Inside, a big dance floor was surrounded by shiny mirrors, red lines and the reflections of a spinning disco ball. It was a Saturday night and people were there to dance. The women wore high heels and short skirts. Almost all men wore cowboy hats, perfect jeans, and dressy cowboy boots with very pointy toes. They're catering to the predominantly middle class Mexicans. Los Yukinos performed a primarily norteno repertoire. 
	The accordion was front and center, it's red and green billows expanding and contracting rapidly, rhinestones glittering under the flashing lights. At one point during the first set, conscience of our presence, the journalists, the band announced that they would perform a Chilena song, Cancion Mixtec. But this was not a Oaxacan crowd, perhaps not with the leader of Mextic language or the dance style to go with the triple feel of Chilena music.
	The crowd stayed seated and silent for the song. It was not until Los Yukinos switched back to a norteno tune that couples got up to dance. Hands on waists, cowboy boots tapping, high heels twirling in the norteno set. This event highlighted the demarcation between Oaxacan field workers and the mainstream, Mexican middle class crowd at Aldo's, for whom the unfamiliar beats of Chilena and Mixtec language, embodied both class and ethnic differences. While this anecdote shows Chilena as a potential sonic marker of difference, Chilena on the accordion has also given rise to an unexpected alliance among field workers from various regions. 
	Fast forward two years. On my visit back to Fresno in September 2011, Los Yukinos was playing quite a different gig. [foreign language 00:38:12], the 25 year old accordionist of the band, organized a dance party for the local farmers in an open air community space behind a humble Oaxacan family home on the outskirt of Fresno. It was a fundraising event here the proceeds were to be donated to the local church in the hometown village in Oaxaca. Los Yukinos opened the night to be followed by three more bands playing an assortment of Chilena, norteno, Cumbia, and other genres. 
	Around 180 people were in attendance, the majority of whom were men, from teenagers to those in their sixties. Delicious homemade [foreign language 00:38:50] and tamales were served and as the night progressed, dozens of empty beer cans filled tabletops along with cut lines that accompanied heavy tequila drinking. Bastiez told me that they were all field workers, mainly from Oaxaca, but also from other regions including Guerrero, Sinaloa, and Michoacan. Bastiez spoke to the crowd in Spanish throughout the night, instead of Mixtec, and gave a shout out to Mexican states represented in the crowd by creating a call and response. Raise your hands if you're from Oaxaca, from Michoacan, and etcetera. 
	What we witnessed that night was quite the opposite of the club event at Aldo's. Whenever the band switched to norteno, Cumbia, or another dance to Chilena, a score of people got up to the floor and danced. Chilena isn't a couple's dance. Dancers are scattered across the dance floor, digging heels into the dirt ground with a rhythmic bounce in your knees, and Chilena beats and accordion sounds got people dancing, not just Oaxacans. Fernando Pablo, the guitarist and the leader of Los Yukinos noted, "Yes, a lot of people from other states of the Mexican Republic are now getting familiar with Chilena music here, because now it's coming in stronger. The people from other states discriminated against us for being Oaxacans, for being small or not speaking Spanish well and all that. But now it's changed a bit. It's favoring the people from Oaxaca for our music. Yeah, it's also kind of music that people from other states like." 
	Just within two years, between my first visit and more recent visit, Chilena has taken root not just among Oaxacans but their fellow field workers from other regions of Mexico. Mendoza's words may help explain Chilena's growing popularity I witnessed, "Because the accordion is for us, it's more universal. The accordion in the world of norteno music is the same from Texas to Oaxaca. So in bringing the Chilena to the accordion, I apply them to people from all over Mexico." In other words, although Chilena itself may be explicitly Oaxaca, the sound of the accordion became a common denominator for farm workers from various regions of Mexico, making Chilena more accessible to non-Oaxacans. To put it in ethnomusicologst [inaudible 00:41:04] terms, the reintegrated Chilena is a sound that bridges farm workers from various regions, going beyond community of descent, as in communities that were historically ground of collective identity, and producing a community of authenity, as in social proximity forged through individual preferences, through the sound of the accordion. 
	So that's the Los Yukinos playing and those are the dancers.
	In these three stories that I just told you, we just saw how reinterpretation and circulation of new Chilena articulates diverse experiences and aspirations of Oaxaca migrant workers in the Central Valley. Lopez hears accordion based Chilena as the sonic signifier of his pride for ingenious Oaxacan identity. A musical symbol for his cultural advocacy at work. Mendoza, for whom the sound of the accordion is constitutive of his migrant identity, performed his sense of belonging as a Oaxacan on constant migration through his accordion based Chilena. Los Yukinos strategically incorporated the accordion to embrace and appeal to mainstream Mexican American-ness. The instrument affords Los Yukinos the economic opportunities to flexibly cater to various musical demands on weekend nights while also enabling them to organize a community of Mexican field workers from various regions to raise funds to support their hometown on the other side of the border. 
	Here, in the process of rendering the Oaxacan regional music of Chilena on the accordion, we hear three forces at work. First, through Oaxacans working alongside other Mexicans who identify with norteno music, and being held as Mexican, at large, by the US society. Incorporating the accordion into their music meant an embracing of the sonic index of mainstream Mexican-ness. Secondly, for indigenous Oaxacans who are racialized and discriminated against by the mainstream Mexicans in the US, performance of Chilena amplified the sense of belonging as an indigenous Oaxacan. Third, at the same time, Chilena has also taken on new meanings as a sonic emblem of the recent migrant farm workers of other areas of Mexico whose regional differences have been articulated through the sound of newly rendered Chilena, forging a new sense of affective alliance. 
	The network of listening audiences expanded across the border too. The transnational network of listeners of norteno across the US and in Mexico have been listening to and requesting to the new Chilena produced in the Central Valley. A question emerges here, though, about whether and how the emergence of reintegrated Chilena has changed the social reception of Oaxacans. Echoing the positive outlook of Fernando Pablo of Los Yukinos, who saw the popularity of Chelina as a sign of wider acceptance of Oaxacan indigency in the Mexican community. 
	Lopez also gave me a hopeful answer to my question about the political efficacy of Chilena as a musical form of culture advocacy. Lopez believed that the increased cultural visibility and on ability of Oaxaca-ness in reintegrated Chilena on his radio show changed the social status of the indigenous population, and sees possibilities for more change. Lopez said, "Unfortunately, the discrimination that we face is from our Mexican brothers. That's what we face down there in our village, and let's say we came up here and it's the same thing we face. Here it's with our fellow Mexicans that we have to educate. We have to mold them so they see the colorful indigenous cultures in Mexico today, but we've eradicated a minimum part of discrimination through the radio and the music." 
	Unlike Lopez and Los Yukinos, Mendoza has a rather skeptical attitude. For him, the increased popularity of Chilena has not made a socially marginalized position of indigenous Oaxacans any better. Mendoza, reflecting on the harsh discrimination that he faced back in Mexico, saw Chilena as simply a means of negotiating a sense of self, a sonic index of their Oaxaca-ness. But not a politically effective tool in gaining more recognition. Mendoza said, "But Chilena on the accordion hasn't even benefited us in regard to discrimination. Chilena music simply identifies us. That's all. That we're more identifiable because there's our music, we listen to it here, they listen to it there, and that's it." 
	The disagreement between Mendoza and Lopez went beyond their view of the political efficacy of Chilena's culture work. Lopez has organized a first Chilena contest, inviting groups from the Central Valley and Oregon. But Mendoza remained critical. Mendoza declined Lopez's request to be the judge at the contest, critiquing the calcifying tendencies of such events that simply provide commercial showcase for the norteno bands that barely play Chilena music. There were aesthetic disagreements as well. Lopez, while showing ample respect, considered Mendoza's Chilena to have too much norteno flavor in his accordion adaptation, and this is also a slight jab act at Mendoza's inability to speak Mixtec because he grew up mostly in Northern Mexico.
	While recognizing Mendoza's contribution as the initial catalyst to the budding Chilena scene in the Central Valley, Lopez creates the latest Los Yukinos old Chilena album, which did not feature the accordion. Just within two years, I sense the change in the inclination for both Los Yukinos and Lopez to prefer the classic instrument fusion of violin and guitar, over accordion in either interpretation of Chilena. 
	These constantly shifting discourses, aesthetics, and sentiments generated by the newly reintegrated Chilena highlight the contradictions and frictions, as well as new possibilities produced through the accordion in the lived realities of the Oaxacan migrants, who are creatively reimagining their heritage through the instrument. The unique articulation of Chilena, the accordion, and the airway has had profound and varying affective, social, and economic effects of Oaxacan migrant workers precisely because it's meaning and sounds are malleable and contestable as it's developing. What we are witnessing here is a generativity of cultural practices in the state of emergence. First of the three broader points I'd like to highlight as I zoom out and recapitulate my talk.
	As an anthropologist, Kathleen Stewart, calls our attention to tracking the cultural poetics of the vitality of a moving object. In this talk, I hope to have captured the dynamic nature of newly rendered Chilena, a musical practice constantly in the process of transnational circulation, reinterpretation, and reemergence, as it animates the social and cultural lives of Oaxaca field workers in California. In its early stage of formation, Chilena on the accordion has enabled not simply a mode of expression of multireader subjectivity, but also a provisional and ever shifting network of actors and audiences that have given rise to forms of cultural advocacy, new economic opportunities, and new affective alliances among the field workers.
	It's precisely the state of being emergent that enable a form of cultural politics that articulated the diverse and sometimes conflicting creative, social, and economic aspirations among the Oaxacan farm workers. These new renditions of Chilena on the accordion of all who play and dance to these new renditions of Chilena on the accordion.
	Literary critic and cultural theorist, Raymond Williams, calls this redactive but unstable and malleable moment when the meanings have not socially been coded the politics of the emerging. Although Chilena has not gained presence in a mainstream radio or record industries, tending ethnographically to the cultural politics and poetics of these emergent moments allows us to hear the creative expressions and contradictions of the lives of the Oaxaca migrants in the US.
	A second, broader point I'd like to comment on is the format of this project. I want to offer a few reflections on the process of producing this documentary and its efficacy as a kind of musical advocacy at the intersection of musicology and journalism, and one might call it applied musicology or public musicology. Although radio documentary has not been widely accepted as a major mode of scholarly engagement for anthromusicologists since the time of Alan Lomax, I have found this format to be a generative mode of scholarly and public engagement, which fosters collaborative relationships among scholars, journalists, and communities. I can't overemphasize the values of the collaborative processes in the productions knowledge. 
	The funding agency required that our project involved humanities advisors. Thus, we were in close contact with scholars such as George Lipsitz, Josh Croon, Alejandro Rodriquez, Scott Marthis, Deborah Wong, and Mark Duwitt, all specialized in various accordion musics or issues that we featured. To ensure that the documentary has "intellectual depth." And this is the language of the funding agent. The constant feedback I received from them guided the collaborative production process between co producer and myself. This point asked to the debate on the value of coauthor scholarship in humanities academic culture, where a single authorship is still the norm. And also the question of whether and how such public musicology projects in nontraditional medium should be evaluated in academia. 
	Methodologically, this radio documentary project provided a productive opportunity for me to recalibrate the role sound plays in the process of analyzing ethnographic data. This project gave me an opportunity to tackle some of the key issues that anthropologist Steven Feld raises in order to "do anthropology of sound in sound." Making the sound do the work of raising questions, letting themes emerge, and producing your argument in sound was an extremely challenging and creatively fulfilling process that has consequently informed the way I think through my other projects in general. 
	Keeping the wider outreach to the general public in mind while producing this documentary, challenged me to stay vigilant in our responsibilities to render the knowledge accessible, so that it can beat back into the communities we featured. The ethical question of what to do with the knowledge produced through field work within the community has long been a subject of debate in anthromusicology as well as in anthropology. 
	The society of ethnomusicology has identified a branch of the discipline called applied ethnomusicology, which is defined as working ethnomusicology that puts music to use in a variety of context, academic and otherwise, including education, cultural policy, conflict resolution, medicine, arts programming, and community music. I personally prefer public ethnomusicology, rather than applied musicology as a term. The term applied assumes a false divide that keeps unprefixed ethnomusicology away from the real world. When field work and pedanting are always inherently enough wide practice. 
	The international council of the traditional music pushes the definition of applied or public musicology further. For them, it is an approach guided by principles of social responsibility, which extends the usual academic goal of broadening and deepening knowledge and understanding towards solving concrete problems and towards working in both insight and beyond typical academic context. The ICTM study group on applied ethnomusicology, advocates the use of ethnomusicology on knowledge in influencing social interaction and course of culture change. In other words, applied or public ethnomusicology involves the production of knowledge and recirculation of that knowledge back into the community studied, often in a way that seeks to advance community defined goals. Hence, public ethnomusicology might be understood as both a discipline and ethical point of view, which results in knowledge as well as in action.
	In this light, our documentary project falls short of meeting this goal. While the documentary has distributed knowledge about the musical and social nuances and dynamics of community whose voice is otherwise underrepresented, and raised awareness of the issues and struggles some of these communities faced, it has not accomplished enough to engage deeply with the local communities. It was our goal to have our documentary dubbed in Spanish and put on air on Radio Billingue, which unfortunately, faced financial constraints and has not happened. In small ways we may have also contributed to individual success, as in Carlos Mendoza, he got more exposed to other audiences and he said that he's been selling more CDs. We invited him to also speak with us at California Historical Society in San Francisco and he had a chance to exchange with music and dialogues with the public in San Francisco, who may not have had any idea about his music or his community.
	In order to practice the kind of public musicology that ICTM's definition aspires to, there's much work to be done. I'd advocate for more sustained, long term relationships with members and organizations of the Oaxacan communities to affect cultural changes that they have identified. 
	Last and final point, the notion of social life of musical instruments. I hope that this ethnographic analysis of the accordion among Oaxacan migrant workers has highlighted how the accordion is not incidental to, but rather constitutive of, social interactions and relations. For them, the accordion is not only a symbol of Oaxacan or Mexican identities, but also a force that propelled the emergence of a new transcultural creative practices, enabling some Oaxaca musicians to negotiate and reshape the complex transnational forces that inform their every day life. 
	In revisiting the question I posed earlier about how to account for the agents of objects without undermining human subjectivities, I align myself with ethnomusicologist, Maria Sadovsky's call for critical organology, which enables us to think with and through sound making objects, ethnographically and culturally specific contexts. I particularly find her formulation of sounds making object as simultaneously extra corporeal and metaphorically an extension of one's body and voice to be helpful.
	The musical instrument, as both external and internal to the performer's body, can at once be conceived as an agent for objects, an embodiment of symbolic meanings and histories, and a notable point of social relations. By considering musical instruments as in the road of analysis of sound makers and listeners, and by taking its material presences and affect of force as seriously as symbolic dispersive affects, we can gain new and insights into the cultural poetics and material presence of the musical instruments. 
	In closing, I'd like to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from our commentator, George Lipsitz, "In some ways witnesses have to speak. Testimonies have to be heard. People cannot remain totally silent but they often don't have citizenship. They don't have the English language and they don't have the ability to write. They work with the tools that are open to them in the arenas that they can access. So an instrument, and especially an instrument like the accordion, which is an incredible storehouse of memory, many different emotions and many different ways of being and thinking about the world is a logical form to express those contradictions of immigrant life."
	Thank you.