Nor-tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World (review)

Reviewed by: Nor-tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World Jesus A. Ramos-Kittrell Alejandro L. Madrid . Nor-tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World. New York, NY. Oxford University Press, 2008. Photos, notes, bibliography, discography, Internet sources, index, 254 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-534262-8. Alejandro L. Madrid’s book on electronic dance music from Tijuana is a cultural analysis that, buttressed in Jean Baudrillard’s and Fredric Jameson’s theories of simulacra and postmodernity, regards consumption as the main strategy in identity constructions of border subjects. For Madrid the border is an epistemic arena that, as an ontological imaginary for the people of Tijuana, represents a site for the production of meaning. In this context, the book analyzes one of cultural studies’ most sounded anxieties in the age of late capitalism: the effects of globalization in local constructions of identity and the crisis of the nation-state. According to Madrid, Nor-tec music—a simulacrum in which meaning and identity are performative acts in constant change—is a metaphor of Tijuana as a transient space that is always in a state of “becoming,” elusive and changing, unable to fix individuals in ontologically defined groups, and in which bi-national narratives collapse. Throughout the book, the author unfolds an analysis about postmodern practices of signification showing how simulacra—either sonic or graphic, since the graphic arts are also incorporated into the aesthetic sensibility of the Nor-tec experience—represent articulations of a desire for originality and cosmopolitanism as main catalysts of the Nor-tec scene. Chapter 1 establishes how processes of simulation are at the core of the Nor-tec experience. From the inability to account for a common myth of origin of this music to a kitsch re-interpretation of “roots” and tradition in music as an empowering source of identity, Madrid shows how the lack of a referent acts as main discursive element. Chapter 2, then, contextualizes this dynamic in the impossibility to account for grass-roots authenticity in popular music traditions from the north of Mexico, since banda, norteño, cumbia, and onda grupera sounds are themselves hybrid texts, the products of historical processes of appropriation and transculturation, thus suggesting that authenticity is constructed as a simulacrum as well. Chapter 3 goes further in problematizing the notion of reference by showing how the Nor-tec [End Page 268] scene is not necessarily produced in situ, but by unlocalized consumption using translocal and virtual distribution strategies through underground and virtual networks. Chapter 4 addresses the ways in which individuals—embracing a peripheral condition in their relationship to the capitalist asymmetries associated with the United States, and to nationalist narratives of identity associated with the center of the nation—appropriate the city as an act of territorial reclamation. In this respect, Nor-tec music is a reterritorializing metaphor that reclaims and reinterprets the city’s ideological discourses. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on consumption as a signifying strategy beyond dynamics of production. In this regard, Madrid shows how meaning is produced out of a dialogic negotiation between producers (artists) and consumers (audience). Performance (dance) is, therefore, understood as the embodiment of the object of desire: originality, authenticity, identity, and modernity. For the author, dancing (as an act of consumption) is critical in shaping the cultural meaning of the scene. One of Madrid’s most interesting contributions is his problematization (rescue?) of the concept of authenticity in light of postmodernism as a pervading cultural logic. Madrid’s criticism of Walter Benjamin’s notion of authenticity being lost as a result of mechanical reproduction points to a shift from the individual to the collective as a locus of cultural processes. The author argues that authenticity derives from a sense of control and independence within established dynamics of marketing and consumption. And therefore, it is the imaginative ways in which independent cultural projects use global technology and networks to empower themselves in otherwise imbalanced power relations what ultimately restores authenticity as a cultural possibility. Overall, Madrid’s analysis provides a good case study to consider border studies as a dynamic theoretical tool for the study of identity as a transient and changing strategy used

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