The US-Mexican Border and Music as a "Border Crosser"

The ever-changing, always porous Mexican-U.S. border region has long been the site of intense and productive cultural and political exchange of every kind, particularly with respect to music. Today, mariachi performance in the United States provides a counternarrative to the discourse of anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican hate language deployed by Donald Trump and his supporters. Accordingly, the rapid spread of interest and proficiency in the production of mariachi music performed by Latino and non-Latino students in schools across the Southwest and as far northeast as New England can be thought of as a kind of social movement. Two case studies-the first a program developed by a Mexican American instructor working predominantly with Mexican American children in an overwhelmingly Anglo town in Connecticut and the second serving an ethnically diverse elementary school in Central New York State where neither the instructor nor more than a few current students are Latino-suggest the potential of this movement for breaking down ethnic and racial barriers.