Beautiful Politics of Music: Trova in Yucatán, Mexico

By Gabriela Vargas-Cetina

An exploration into the history and practice of trova, a genre of music that is the soul of Yucatán.
 
Yucatecan trova is a music genre comprising a type of romantic song that is considered “the soul of Yucatán and Yucatecans.” This first book on Yucatecan trova offers an insider’s view of the history and practice of a treasured cultural heritage. A central theme of Gabriela Vargas-Cetina’s ethnography is what she refers to as the “beautiful politics of music” practiced by Yucatecan trova patrons and organizations, which is a way of asserting the importance of groups and issues through nonconfrontational means.
 
Trova emerged on the peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century and continues to be part of the general urban soundscape in the states of Yucatán and Campeche. Until the 1920s, this music was little known outside Yucatán and became absorbed into the larger Latin American Bolero genre, making it difficult to perceive its uniqueness and relation to life in Yucatán.
 
Vargas-Cetina, a native Yucatecan and trova musician, offers ethnographic insight into the local music scene. With family connections, she embedded herself as a trovadora, and her fieldwork—singing, playing the guitar in a trova group, and extensively researching the genre and talking with fellow enthusiasts and experts—ensued. Trova, like other types of artistic endeavors, is the result of collaboration and social milieu. She describes the dedicated trova clubs, cultural institutions, the Yucatecan economy of agricultural exports, and identity politics that helped the music come about and have maintained it today.
 
Positioned in the larger context of the music of Mexico and Latin America and engaging with theories of modernity and cosmopolitanism, experimental ethnography, and the anthropology of organizations, Beautiful Politics of Music consists of rigorous scholarship. It is also a warm tribute to performers and songs that have inspired many people around the world for more than two centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9780817391478

Book preview

BEAUTIFUL POLITICS OF MUSIC

BEAUTIFUL POLITICS OF MUSIC

Trova in Yucatán, Mexico

GABRIELA VARGAS-CETINA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Garamond

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover image: Statue of one of the three greats of trova—Augusto Cárdenas Pinelo, known as Guty Cárdenas—at the entrance of the Museum of the Yucatan Song, Merida; photograph by Gabriela Vargas-Cetina and reproduced with permission of the Museo de la Canción Yucatec, A.C.

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1962-5

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9147-8

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Music, Identity, and the Yucatecan Puzzle

1. Beautiful Politics of Music: The Fight for Trova as the Classical Music of a Cosmopolitan Yucatán

2. Yucatecan Trova: The Music of a Cosmopolitan Modernity

3. Music, Love, and Politics: Trova and the Mexicanization of Yucatán

4. Organized Romance: Bohemians, Organization, and Yucatecan Trova Music

Conclusions: Vernacular Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and the Beautiful Politics of Music

Notes

Glossary

References

Discography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

Figure I.1. Exhibit on Guty Cárdenas Pinelo at the Museum of the Yucatecan Song

Figure 1.1. Rondalla Yucatán of the Museum of the Yucatecan Song, the night of its debut, December 5, 2002

Figure 1.2. Rondalla Yucatán guitar choir serenades Doña Charito Cáceres at her home, 2004

Figure 1.3. Concert of the Rondalla Yucatán at the Museum of the Yucatecan Song, 2007

Figure 1.4. Main theater at the Teatro Mérida complex, now renamed Teatro Armando Manzanero

Figure 2.1. Thinking of Yucatán as a station along sea routes

Figure 2.2. Ports sustaining commercial exchange with Yucatán at the beginning of the twentieth century

Figure 2.3. Railroad network in 1913

Figure 2.4. Teatro Peon Contreras, the main theater of Yucatán

Figure 2.5. Inside Teatro Peon Contreras, showing a section of the balconies

Figure 3.1. Ejidatarios process henequen leaves into fiber at San Antonio Teuitz, a Yucatán collective ejido, 1983

Figure 3.2. Statues of the three greats of trova, Guty Cárdenas Pinelo, Ricardo Palmerín Pavía, and Pepe Domínguez Zaldívar, at the entrance of the Museum of the Yucatecan Song, in Mérida

Figure 4.1. Monument to motherhood, commissioned, funded, and brought in the 1920s by the League of Social Action from France to Mérida, where it is the center of the municipal celebrations for Mother’s Day every year on May 10

Figure 4.2. Plaza of the Yucatecan Trova, in the Plaza of Santa Lucía, downtown Mérida, with the statues of trova poets and music composers

Figure 4.3. Inside the patio of the Museum of the Yucatecan Song, in Mérida

Figure 4.4. Monument to the Creators of the Yucatecan Song, also known as the Rotunda of the Trovadores, at the General Cemetery of Mérida

Figure 4.5. Some trova CDs from the local music market, Mérida

TABLE

Table 1.1. Augusto Lara Villanueva’s Guitar Chord Equivalents

Acknowledgments

Funding for my research for this book has been generously provided through many years by the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY) and by two programs funded by the Secretary of Public Education of Mexico (SEP): Programa de Mejoramiento del Profesorado Universitario (PROMEP), and the Programa Integral de Fortalecimiento Institutional (PIFI). I also received funds from Group Research Grant 156796 of the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT) during part of my research. I thank UADY and these agencies for their generous support.

I have published different versions of the ideas in this book elsewhere. In particular, for chapters 2 and 3, I have drawn on ideas already presented in Una música en el mundo: La trova yucateca (Vargas-Cetina 2010a), in Consumos Globales: De México para el mundo, edited by Carmen Bueno Castellanos and Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz (copublished by Universidad Iberoamericana and Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán). Parts of chapter 4 derive from Through the Othering Gaze: Yucatecan Trova and ‘The Tourist’ in Yucatán, Mexico (Vargas-Cetina 2009), in Cultural Tourism in Latin America: The Politics of Space and Imagery, edited by Michiel Baud and Annelou Ypeij (published by the Center for Latin American Research and Documentation [CEDLA] of the University of Amsterdam and Brill). I thank the editors of these volumes and the publishers for letting me reuse my published work.

I have many other important debts: A book like this could not have been written without access to major libraries and the help of many librarians, along with the book collection my husband and colleague, Steffan Igor Ayora, and I have built at home. Most chapters have benefited from research conducted at the libraries at the Autonomous University of Yucatán; the Biblioteca Virtual de Yucatán, sponsored and maintained online by the Institute of Culture of the state of Yucatán (www.bibliotecavirtualdeyucatan.com.mx); the library of the former Centro Cultural y Recreativo La Ibérica and today the Centro Regional de Investigación Documentación y Difusión Musical Gerónimo Baqueiro Fóster); and the online library services of the University of Buffalo (part of the State University of New York system) and of San Diego State University. My colleagues at UADY graciously opened their home libraries to me: Chapters 2 and 3 were helped by book loans and references from Genny Negroe Sierra, Guadalupe Cámara Gutiérrez, and Pilar Zavala Aguirre. Additionally, I undertook most of the original library research for chapters 2 and 3 at the libraries of Cornell University; the University of California, Irvine; Brown University; and Indiana University Bloomington. Thanks also to James Butterworth and all the participants in the symposium Love and Sentimentalism in Popular Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2013. The ideas, the data on other types of music, and the generous discussions encountered there have certainly enriched my view of trova music in Yucatán and of love songs worldwide, and the considerations about technology in chapter 3 owe much to our collective brainstorming at the symposium.

I started writing this book in 2006–2007 at the Society for the Humanities of Cornell University. Brett deBary and Timothy Murray created a wonderful climate of intellectual excitement and friendship. Besides my husband, Igor, Frederic Gleach, Vilma Irizarry, and Micol Seigel were my most constant friends and interlocutors at Cornell. I thank them and all the other Fellows for a year of exciting discussions and warm conviviality. My colleagues at UADY have listened to me patiently, directed me to key sources, and even argued with me over trova and Yucatán during what were meant to be mainly social occasions. Francisco Fernández Repetto, Genny Negroe Sierra, Pilar Zavala Aguirre, Lilia Fernández Souza, Arehmi Mendiburu Moguel, Eugenia Iturriaga Acevedo, Diana Arízaga, Lucy González Domínguez, Marie-France Labrecque, and Ramona Perez have been integral parts of both my research and my social life during this time. Thanks also to Wendi Schnaufer at the University of Alabama Press for believing in my book project and helping it happen and to the generous anonymous reviewers who took their task to heart and helped me shape this into a better book.

Thank you to the many friends I made in trova circuits for letting me into their lives. Through them I was able to be in contact with hundreds of people who were part of different ensembles, organizations, and attendees at public trova events. They helped me gain access to many venues, to many people, and even to official culture-related projects funded by national, state, and municipal government agencies. I thank all the trova musicians with whom I came in contact during my research, particularly those at the Rondalla Yucatán of the Museum of the Yucatecan Song. Heartfelt thanks also go to the patrons and staff of the Museum of the Yucatecan Song, who have created a wonderful home for Yucatecan trova in the city of Mérida. Thanks to Rosita Caballero, Augusto Lara, Rodolfo Magaña, and Angelita Uribe, who were my direct trova teachers, and to the late Rosario Cáceres Baqueiro (Doña Charito), who initially founded and funded the Museum of the Yucatecan Song and then the guitar group through which I entered the world of Yucatecan trova.

My husband and fellow anthropologist, Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz, accompanied me all these years, put up with my many absences from our home, listened to many hours of my disquisitions on noise and music, as well as on Lem’s Solaris, and gave me continuous feedback (sometimes against his own piece of mind) on my writings on this subject. I am grateful for his support, love, company, and intellectual conversation. I also thank George Marcus for helping Igor convince me that my original ideas for this book were almost incomprehensible and that I should write a more classic ethnography. Thanks to María José Quintal Ávila, Ashanti Rosado Novelo, and Yurana Palomo Ordaz, who were my research assistants for this long project. My sister Gissell Vargas-Cetina, my sister-in-law Roxanna Chavarria Caro, and my nephew Alan Chavarría Vargas did more things for me than I can ever recount, all so I could follow the call of academia and the guitar within Yucatán and abroad without worries. My family, including my late father, Eduardo Vargas y Vargas, my mother, Rosa del Alba Cetina Quiñones, my sisters Faby and Naloy and their families, and my aunt Gloria Vargas y Vargas were not only sources of emotional support but also important contacts, often facilitating my access to privileged information. My parents and my aunt were decisive influences through their love for trova. I lost my father, Eduardo, my aunt Gloria, Maestra Rosita, and Doña Charito during the time it took me to do the research and write this book. However, they all led fabulous lives, full of music and poetry, and I thank the trova community of Yucatán for having helped me to appreciate that.

Eminent trova scholars Enrique Martín Briceño, Álvaro Vega Díaz, Luis Pérez Sabido, Beatriz Heredia de Pau, and Roberto McSweeney Salgado are very much part of this book. I have discussed with them most of my ideas about trova and have been fortunate to learn from their works, their public presentations, and their dedication to this music and to the culture of Yucatán. Don Roberto has not written trova books (yet), but he is a great lover and connoisseur of romantic music who through the years has happily shared with me and with hundreds of radio listeners, concertgoers, newsreaders, and music lovers in Yucatán and throughout the world his wealth of knowledge and information. Many books have been written thanks to him.

I dedicate this book to them all, musicians and trova lovers past, present, and future, as well as to my husband, Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz, and my mother, Rosa del Alba Cetina Quiñones. This book’s strengths are due to all of them, but all its failings should be attributed solely to me.

Introduction

Music, Identity, and the Yucatecan Puzzle

This book is about Yucatecan trova, a music genre comprising a particular type of romantic song that is often called the soul of Yucatán and Yucatecans, and about how this music has become an important cultural representation of Yucatecanness. Trova first emerged as a music genre in Santiago, Cuba, at the end of the nineteenth century. It is considered the result of the constant musical exchange between Yucatán and Cuba between then and the 1930s, incorporating elements from diverse European and Caribbean rhythms. The romantic songs incorporate poetic lyrics to convey sweet feelings for one’s loved ones and for the beauty of the land and scenery. After the 1930s, Yucatecan musicians began to migrate to Mexico City and abroad in search of opportunity and fame, and this music became known as Yucatecan trova, the name with which it is identified within Mexico to this day. During the twentieth century, the main rhythms of trova music were Cuban bolero, Colombian bambuco, Yucatecan clave, and Yucatecan jarana. This music was the genre that sparked the bolero movement, which started in Mexico in the 1930s and subsequently reached all corners of Latin America through commercial radio, recordings, movies, and television.

Yucatecan trova has lasted because artists, local organizations in Yucatán, and the leaders of these organizations have worked continuously for more than a century to compile its many songs into a single recognizable corpus, keep it alive, promote it, and maintain its status as the music that best reflects the soul of Yucatecans. At the same time, this organizational infrastructure and its effectiveness have been made possible by the members of the Yucatecan trova community, who see their music as a vernacular form of cosmopolitanism and believe that it can be universally understood as beautiful, poetic, and worthwhile. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, I was able to witness the mobilization of these organizations for the protection and defense of their cherished music. Their reaction showcased not only their values of cosmopolitanism and their belief in a universal musicality but also the trova community’s strong regional identity as Yucatecans and their desire to be able to move continuously into and out of several perceived frames of musical modernity. I am calling this type of political action, which was directed at the authorities of the state of Yucatán and of the Mérida municipality, the beautiful politics, because they were designed by trova music patrons and entrepreneurs as an alternative avenue to what they called ugly politics, or the politics of open confrontation.

Yucatecan trova is seen locally as having emerged at the end of the 1800s. Even today, it remains part of the general urban soundscape in the states of Yucatán and Campeche in the peninsula of Yucatán. For most outsiders it is very difficult to distinguish Yucatecan trova from other types of Mexican romantic music. Many Yucatecan trova songs, such as Somos novios, which was recorded in English by Perry Como in 1970 as It Is Impossible, Peregrina, which has been adopted for a Holy Week procession march in Spain, or Usted es la culpable, which was made into an international hit in 1990 by Luis Miguel, appear as so many other Mexican boleros to the general public, both in Mexico and abroad.¹

It is now easy to surf YouTube or find CDs or digital music file collections from online vendors and hear countless examples of this music, either as recorded in the past or as played today in Yucatán and elsewhere (see the discography in this book), but this ease of access is a relatively recent phenomenon. Up until the 1920s, this music was little known outside Yucatán, and then, almost as soon as it began to be heard outside the peninsula, became absorbed into the larger Latin American Bolero genre, thus making it difficult to perceive its uniqueness and its particular relation to life in Yucatán.

This book opens with the story of how Yucatecan trova held its ground as an important, regionally identified music genre in this state of Mexico when threatened in the early decades of the twenty-first century and then describes the historical and social context that made such action possible and legitimate. Emerging from a sea of music, trova became Yucatecan thanks to Yucatán’s regional economy of agricultural exports, such as sisal, between the 1880s and the 1930s. The riches derived from the sisal allowed Yucatecans to claim and uphold a distinct regional identity. Like other forms of romantic song that sprang into the world at the same time, through the airwaves and through commercial recordings (Gray 2013; Yano 2002), the swift consolidation of Yucatecan trova as a regional music genre resulted from the second industrial revolution at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Along with the intensification of sea and land transport and the emergence of air transport came the development of telecommunications, sound amplification, and sound recording technologies (see chapter 3).

In 2001, when I first entered trova music circles, there were several groups of young people carrying the Yucatecan trova torch, but in general it was a type of music enjoyed mainly by adults in their fifties and older. Today there are trova music concerts and presentations almost every day in parks, theaters, and restaurants across Yucatán and Campeche. In the capital city of Mérida there are bars and nightclubs also featuring trova music. Even if the audience for this music is now mostly elderly and often versed in the stories surrounding it, at most of the important events featuring Yucatecan trova, those attending hear brief biographies of the artists who wrote the lyrics and the music of each song. Among musicians and music aficionados, each song is discussed in terms of the original place of its rhythm or rhythms, the year in which it was written and by whom, the first time it was recorded and by what record company (e.g., Peerless, Columbia Records, RCA Victor), and sometimes even which songs it has influenced and how. This local sense of history infuses trova music with a special glow. Also, unlike the separation that Turino (2000) found between recording studio music and live music, here recordings are very much part of the archive that informs live performances and of the general allure surrounding each song, including the songbooks or scores where it was printed, the other works of the poets and composers, and the list of artists who have played live or recorded that particular song (Figure I.1). Trova music, then, is not only a type of music but also a way of being Yucatecan through the enjoyment of the past in the present. This book mimics to some extent this local understanding of trova music as part of a larger historical narrative and also as having a history of its own. I have compiled a discography of some of the compact discs mentioned or illustrated throughout the book, which nevertheless represents only a fraction of the many recordings of this music. However, most of the bibliography to date, and especially the books and articles produced in Yucatán, discuss LP records, so I hope that my list can supplement existing references.²

The Republic of Yucatán Identity Surge

At the beginning of 1999 my husband, Igor, and I applied to research and teaching positions at the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY). We were then full-time researchers in the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico, where we had been hired in 1993 when we were finishing our PhD degrees in anthropology at McGill University in Canada. We are originally from Valladolid, a small city in eastern Yucatán. In the 1980s, when we left, the city of Mérida had around 250,000 inhabitants, but by the end of 1999, when we returned to Yucatán as anthropology professors, it had grown to close to one million inhabitants. This population boom was partly the result of the full-employment policies of Governor Victor Cervera Pacheco (1984–1988 and 1995–2001). Through an aggressive program of job creation, which included the invitation to foreign fashion and apparel transnational companies to set up maquiladora factories in rural Yucatán, Cervera Pacheco managed to make Yucatán’s unemployment rate very low (under 4 percent). In addition, he captured federal funding for megaprojects of regional infrastructure, including the enhancement of the commercial port in the city of Progreso, the creation of an oil pipeline that reached Mérida and Valladolid, and the construction of large public sports facilities and gardens throughout the state (Línea Recta 2013; Navarrete Muñoz 2014). At the end of his mandate, in 2001, large billboards around the city of Mérida advertised that the unemployment rate in the state of Yucatán was negative 3 percent; that is, there were more jobs in Yucatán than people of working age. I have not found official figures (census figures, for example) supporting that claim, but almost everyone believed that Yucatán had reached close to full employment. Many of the available jobs were rather precarious and involved difficult working conditions (Labrecque 2005; Torres Góngora 2010). Other jobs were in the service industry, especially in the dozens of new franchise branches of fast food, retail, and fashion whose head offices are in central Mexico, the United States, or Europe but are now a regular part of the Yucatecan landscape. The apparent economic stability of the state attracted hundreds of Mexicans from outside Yucatán, and many non-Mexicans, who moved to take up residence in the state, particularly in Mérida.³

Between 1994 and 1999 we had visited our families at least twice a year and had found them and their friends discussing constantly what being Yucatecan was about. Many people in Yucatán thought that droves of foreigners from other parts of Mexico and abroad were invading Yucatán and corrupting local culture, including relations between neighbors, ways of driving, use of public spaces, Yucatecan food, Yucatecan music, Yucatecan theater, Yucatecan Spanish, and Yucatecan life in general. All this was very puzzling to us; growing up in Yucatán we had never felt the need to identify with accuracy what was Yucatecan music, food, or anything. I, for one, had always thought that regional music (as jarana dance music and Yucatecan songs were locally called) was simply part of music in general. No one had told me during my childhood and adolescence that these had to be protected from other music. In the past, Yucatecan Spanish was, in fact, a source of constant embarrassment for Yucatecans who traveled to other parts of Mexico and abroad and found it hard to communicate with Spanish speakers outside of Yucatán. We all used to laugh at the misunderstandings and told them as jokes when we came back home, but in the 1990s things changed radically. Yucatecans started reclaiming their Maya-inflected Spanish as part of who they were and using it to show how different they were from others. They thought that foreigners in Yucatán were making fun of Yucatecan Spanish, imposing their own idioms, and being generally disrespectful of Yucatecans.

At social events, some Yucatecans expressed their wish for a fence that would surround the Yucatán Peninsula, to keep it for Yucatecans only. We often heard that Yucatán should secede from Mexico once more, like it did in the 1800s, and join with Quintana Roo and Campeche (which presumably wanted to separate from Mexico too) to form the Republic of Yucatán. Many Yucatecans wore T-shirts and baseball caps featuring the Yucatecan flag accompanied by the legend República de Yucatán. Many automobiles sported Republic of Yucatán stickers, and hotels and public buildings carried the flag of Yucatán along with the Mexican flag. Furthermore, between 1999 and 2006, Yucatecan flags were sold around the city during Mexican Independence Day, and they competed in visibility with the Mexican flags (see Ayora-Diaz 2012, 33–75).

In the Yucatán of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s I felt embarrassed over what seemed unwarranted aggressions toward those who had chosen recently to come and live in this state. On the radio we often heard the following admonition, which always made me cringe: Traveler who has decided to make Yucatán your home: Do not intend to change the customs you find here and impose yours. Respect our land and our people and become one of us, a proud Yucatecan. The newcomers were being asked to leave their own ways of life behind simply because they had chosen to move to Yucatán! Also, during our search for a house to rent, in 2000, we were systematically asked if we were Yucatecans or had relatives in Yucatán, because the foreigners were considered untrustworthy. We often had to give the names of our parents and some of our relatives before we were quoted rent prices.

Sometimes, however, I could understand why Yucatecans were beginning to feel like second-class citizens at home. For example, a real estate agent who had come from central Mexico told us that she and her husband had opened a restaurant in order to teach Yucatecans how to eat, since Yucatecan food is too unhealthy. We also heard a woman at a shopping mall in northern Mérida ask for a non-Yucatecan driver to take her newly bought furniture to her house because, she said, Yucatecans are lazy and inefficient. Even the saleswoman, who had a very foreign accent from northern Mexico and thus seemed to have arrived shortly before then, asked her to stop judging all Yucatecans in a negative light. On that occasion I wondered why the woman buying furniture would want to live in Yucatán if she disliked Yucatecan people.

To us, as anthropologists, the surge of Yucatecan identity politics looked like a promising research topic. I have played the guitar since high school, so I decided to combine my love for music with my love for anthropology and study what was happening with Yucatecan music, how it was being defined, who was in charge of defining it, and whether it was truly under attack. Igor, a fellow anthropologist, loves to cook, so he decided to study what people thought was happening to Yucatecan food. Together we embarked on research into Yucatecanness, to the embarrassment of some of our colleagues and a few of our relatives, who thought that the Yucatecan identity movement should not be paid attention to because it was a form of navel gazing. In spite of this opposition, we soon realized we were not alone: At the UADY we found other colleagues who had started research projects on the upsurge of Yucatecanness that was palpable all around. These included Margaret Shrimpton, a professor of Latin American literature at the Anthropological Sciences Faculty, and Melchor Campos García, a historian at the Center for Social Research of the Hideyo Noguchi Institute, the main research wing of UADY (Campos García 1999, 2002; Shrimpton 2006). They directed us to existing literature on Yucatecan regionalism. Also, our anthropologist colleagues Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola, Francisco Fernández Repetto, and Quetzil Castañeda directed us to literature regarding the debates around the indigenousness of Maya speakers in Yucatán. We found soon enough that our respective research projects on music and food seemed to go together naturally, and we started to see in parallel manifestations (food, music, literature, theater, language, dress) how people were trying to turn conceptually different aspects of life in Yucatán into symbolic complexes of an identity that was uniquely Yucatecan.

After deciding to do research on Yucatecan music I soon gained entry to a Yucatecan rondalla (guitar choir) (see chapter 1). This was a guitar and voice ensemble based at the Museum of the Yucatecan Song. As a member of the rondalla I was able to access other trova circles. This book is based on my life in the world of Yucatecan trova between 2001 and 2007, my subsequent activities as one of the acknowledged local experts in Yucatecan music in the city of Mérida, and some of my recent data on music and technology in Yucatán.⁴ What I have found after all these years is that Yucatecan trova is continuously supported and defended by many local organizations of different types, including civic and volunteer associations, church groups, and government offices at different levels. Through Yucatecan trova I discovered a world of organized groups that was ready to come to the rescue of Yucatecan culture when needed. The activities of these local and regional organizations result in the continuous creation and maintenance of church buildings, libraries, museums, homes for the elderly, rehabilitation facilities and programs, schools, sports facilities, hurricane relief brigades, carnival celebrations, education scholarships, monuments, and even modifications to the general urban layout and functionality of the cities and villages of the state. During my time as a trova musician I could observe up close the works of these associations in their relation with local music and the way in which they are the interpreters of local music, the