Vicente Fernández, Not Just for Latinx Students but for All
“Y Volver, Volver~, Volver!” (And Come Back, Come Back~, Come Back!): as the explosive chorus of his signature song still mourns, Vicente Fernández Gómez, known as Chente, died on 12 December 2021 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, after 60 prolific years as a singer, actor, and film producer. The English-language press, which rarely covered Fernández’s activities during his lifetime, has since rushed to follow his life and legacy as the “king of ranchera music.” Culturally and commercially responding to his global audiences, a couple of Spanish-language biopic drama series, El Último Rey (The Last King) and El Rey, Vicente Fernández (The King, Vicente Fernández), retraced his journey of humble beginnings to stardom. The Grammy Awards honored him a fourth time for Best Regional Mexican Music Album in 2022.
Even before this recent, posthumous publicity, Chente was a familiar figure in my undergraduate music history courses at the University of Northern Colorado, an emerging Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), which, as of Spring 2023, enrolls 25.4% of the undergraduate population identifying as Latinx/Hispanic (mostly Mexican), 41% as first-generation, and 29% as low-income (Pell Grant recipients). Across our work together, from short essays on a regional music tradition to informal classroom conversations about music at home, my students of Mexican descent, many women, had often brought up Fernández as someone I should know about. They detailed their childhood memories and his songs among their fathers’ favorites. Dispelling the myth that there may not have been much “music” or “music education,” these students grew up listening to Chente’s songs, watching his films with their families, and learning about their roots in history, culture, and language, which they perceived to have little to no place outside their homes and beyond their tight-knit communities in the United States.
As a pedagogue, I believe that ranchera music (música ranchera, literally “music from the ranch”) deserves a place in postsecondary classrooms as a genre of expressive culture and community. Though the traditional mariachi ensemble receives honorable mention as a genre representing Mexican culture in introductory music history textbooks and courses, for my students it is not mariachi itself but the repertoire of ranchera music—accompanied by a mariachi band—that evokes heartache and an unbearable longing for home. Chente’s nostalgic serenade, marked with his assertive vocality in a semi-operatic style and composure in full charro regalia, touches on their and their parents’ immigrant experiences. His appearance in the media contributes to the restoration of forgotten pride and love for their country of origin and makes visible and audible their presence in an adopted homeland.
In recognizing Chente as a key figure for access to music education, however, I note that we must also engage critically with his music, artistic persona, and the values they convey. Like the idols of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema from the 1930s–50s (Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, and Javier Solís), Chente embodies traditional norms of masculinity and manhood. Behaviors that are regularly projected as belonging to the “ranchero” in his movies, telenovelas, and music videos subjugate and oppress women. Above all, the homophobic remarks Fernández made two years before his passing clash with many Gen-Z students’ relationships to gender, sexuality, and identity. Some students of Mexican descent question whether he and his music can still resonate with their cultures and communities.
When contemporary discourse problematizes ranchera’s underlying values of hypermasculinity, sexism, and gender inequality, the tradition can be a difficult and high-stakes topic for undergraduate students in general, and for Latinx students in particular. Moreover, for the instructor, guiding a critique about musical worlds as an outsider is a challenging and complex task. In designing and managing a one-week unit of ranchera music in an introductory Latin American music course I developed and taught in Fall 2022, I utilized the basic principles and strategies of autoethnography as pedagogical tools. I told the story of my own experience in relation to the topic and also shared some Latinx writers’ experience and research, along with an in-class discussion with an analysis of media representation and an online post-class student reflection essay.
Popular in the social sciences, ethnomusicology, communication studies, and, more recently, academic music history pedagogy, autoethnography concerns activities like free-writing, blogging, and journaling. It is a form of ethnographic, qualitative research/writing in which an author self-reflexively connects personal, lived experiences with broader cultural, social, and political meanings. By researching—visiting sites and interviewing people relevant to the topic—the author questions existing knowledge and biases, deepening knowledge rather than acquiring it. By emphasizing experience, emotion, subjectivity, and creativity, the process of autoethnography helps destabilize what has been considered “academic” within the Western and Westernized systems of reason-based, scientific teaching and learning. In particular, the central tenet of autoethnography—vulnerability—defies what sexism and ableism have conspired to construct as normative in the history of music studies.
I do not share many identity categories with my Mexican American students—or with most of the students at my institution. As a person of color, a cisgender woman, and a Korean American, however, I have a personal experience with a cultural environment that has what I understand as a similarly strong attachment to family values and traditions, particularly built upon patriarchal, Confucian social principles. I was born and raised in South Korea in the 1970s–90s, when that country underwent rapid economic and cultural modernization and social mobilization. I certainly experienced and benefited from growing opportunities for women in education and profession, but witnessed media that continuously project traditional caregiving and sacrifice for men, children, and family as an ideal role for women. Throughout my upbringing, devotion to family, respect for elders, and loyalty to the homeland were viewed as utmost, often overbearing, virtues.
In the classroom, I shared a considerable part of my birth culture and candidly confessed that my own cultural norms would consciously and subconsciously affect my view, decision-making process, and identity for good or bad. I think this disclosure and self-reflection helped me engage my Fall 2022 students in conversation. I also think that the fact that Latinx students outnumbered non-Latinx in the class, unusual for introductory non-major-friendly music courses at my institution, made students
even more comfortable sharing their personal stories and problems.
With a content warning, I explored how novels, films, and songs in or about Mexico can deliver monolithic images of masculinity and femininity. They sometimes implicitly and explicitly promote heavy drinking, womanizing, and emotional outbursts turning into domestic violence perpetrated by working-class straight Mexican men. In contrast, women—as manifested in the female body and objectified by the male gaze—are represented primarily as the symbols of piety, beauty, and sacrifice. By telling and retelling the archetypes of woman as “mother,” such as La Llorona, La Malinche, and La Virgen de Guadalupe, the popular culture of machismo has supported a virgin-whore cultural dichotomy. Within the boundaries of femininity defined by heteronormative constructions of Mexican womanhood, a woman who fails to fulfill her duty is readily discounted as immoral, dangerous, and even useless, with plots frequently involving the destruction of her sexuality or the disposal of her humanity altogether by death. To mitigate the intensity of the content, I also incorporated stories and studies of machismo by Latinx writers, who engage with the communal experiences of masculinity and hypermasculinity from various angles of immigrant family realities and family dynamics.
Our study of ranchera applied this context to a reading of Fernández’s song “Por Tu Maldito Amor” (“Because of Your Damn Love,” 1989) that included an analysis of the visual discourse of its music video. The introductory cinematic setup portrays the protagonist’s aggressive, “manly” demeanors. As the rooster symbolically breaks the morning, the protagonist walks into his home by calling out to his female counterpart, Patsy, with the patronizing term güereja (“blondie,” in reference to her blonde hair). He then violently throws a half-filled tequila bottle at her picture on the wall in response to her sudden goodbye note. Over time, however, we discover that Chente expresses his heartache rather candidly, in what might be considered an “unmanly” manner. His own sobbing replaces the conventional grito (“yell” or “cry”) that usually offers commentary from a third person or some of the band members. Breaking the norm of Latino hypermasculinity, Chente recounts his struggles with memory, failure in love, the pain of loss, and shame. Although heartache and loss are tropes in Latino songs by self-identified normative masculine men, it was Chente who had begun to dissociate the protagonist from the traditional portrayal of an unapologetic, incorrigible, perfect man in ranchera music. This dissociation started in his song “Volver, Volver” (“Come Back, Come Back,” 1972), and its popularity spread the new image of macho to an unprecedented degree. Correspondingly, in the music video of “Por Tu Maldito Amor,” Patsy’s refusal to conform to the role of wife/lover, and the fact that she has left him of her own will, subverts the narrative of marianismo. Her “presence” of absence opens a space where my students and I bring critical inquiry to bear on traditional stories. The song’s gender unspecific lyrics serve as an aperture for queer readings and invite many other accounts of life to explore diverse narratives in ranchera music.
Of the many examples of non-conformist singers and acts in twenty-first-century Mexican folk and popular musics I shared in the classroom, Rosario Guerrero’s tearful performance of “Por Tu Maldito Amor” in the telenovela La Hija del Mariachi (The Daughter of the Mariachi, 2006) stands out. Released almost twenty years ago, it may seem a historical artifact to some of my students. However, in contrast to the traditional setup of a Mexican serenata, which is usually delivered from a possessive male to a submissive female, Guerrero’s performance hints at changes in the cultural norms and power dynamics of relationships, courtship, and marriage in Mexican communities. Singing assertively to her man while leading an all-male mariachi band, Guerrero encourages global audiences to rethink how mariachi and ranchera have represented gender, sexuality, and authenticity.
Other artists and scholars have also participated in shifting the boundaries of regional Mexican music and its persona. Jenni Rivera’s disregard for “the rules of mujeres decentes (decent women),” through the male-dominated genre of banda music (Mexican wind, primarily brass band music), and Chavela Vargas’s performance of lesbian masculinity and bisexuality in her renditions of “La Llorona” both offer critiques of popular, homogenized perceptions of Mexican womanhood. Similarly, Juan Gabriel’s revitalization of ranchera music with the perceived notion of genre, gender, and sexual “ambivalence” questions a collective definition of Mexicanidad (the quality of being Mexican) that is built upon heteronormative, nationalist discourses. Deborah R. Vargas argues that grito can be more than a sonic disruption, instead a unique expression of Mexicanidad and its variability in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. The next time I teach this topic, I will show how Gabriela Ortiz’s opera, ¡Únicamente la verdad! (Only the Truth), and Alejandro L. Madrid’s methodical reading of this work disrupt the conventional themes, gender roles, and linear narrative of opera and the narcocorrido by liberating the female character and her role from male gaze, sexual desire, and other colonial power structures.
Image by Emna Mizouni (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Ranchera music, including its musical resonance of machismo, is an engaging and productive topic for the classroom. With the instructor’s willingness and efforts to build trust and self-vulnerability in teaching—getting to know the students’ experiences and utilizing them as frames of reference—ranchera music can help unpack and ease students’ personal and emotional concerns related to social stigmas, beliefs and practices of their families and friend groups, or in between. I closed last year’s unit on ranchera music with online reflection essays, inviting the students to read one another’s experiences and respond to at least one of them, as a practice of ungrading. In their exchanges, they drew various cultural parallels between ranchera music and other conventions, and demonstrated how they were also changing, as recent performers and audiences were empowered to explore diverse identities through music. It was my privilege to see many of them being challenged and some beginning to shift their perspectives and worldviews in emerging adulthood.
Ultimately ranchera music offers an invitation to any student to reflect on the cultural values with which they were raised and consider how they inflect daily interactions with others. As I notice a greater number of Latinx students entering my institution every semester (and I expect more in the School of Music for the newly launched Bachelor of Arts Latinx Music program), ranchera music, as a means of discussing Mexican identity, will remain an important topic in my classrooms. Continuing to work with new students and encouraging more instructors to join me, I hope to provide “a culturally enhancing, equitable experience” for all students. This pedagogical commitment, with a sincere attitude oriented to serving the learner community, has the potential to bring about a sense of belonging and healing, in which students can feel connected, cared about, and important in the classroom. Above all, I want them to realize that ranchera is beautiful and good music, not just for Mexican students but as a valuable experience for all.
I thank all my students who were involved in this process of research and particularly Brenda Vieyra Perez, a graduate of the Class of Spring 2022 from the University of Northern Colorado, for her advice from experience as an insider of Mexican American culture.
