Musical Convergence in Mexico City: A Conversation from a Geographical and Historical Perspective

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine Abstract Music is one of the most important elements of culture. When we tend to analyze the music of one place in the world, we can understand some of their cultural and social dynamics. In big cities, like Mexico City, we can notice that these processes happen in an accelerated mood, with many musical exchanges and sound mixtures that create new sociocultural ways of living in the city. The following text comes from some seminars about Mexican music. Participants in relevant Mexican researchers in music history, music anthropology, and cultural promoters have a long experience working with traditional folk musicians and have strong knowledge of Mexican musical traditions. The seminars were organized through cultural regions of Mexico, divided into cardinal points and the center, represented by Mexico City. We recovered this last chapter to re-create the conversation of how the country’s capital became a magnet for music from all around the country and many other places of Latin America. The discussion took us through important sociocultural matters that affect music, like immigration, political centralization, language, international exchanges, and cultural affinity. This work aims to create an analytic frame to understand cities’ soundscapes, where music from different origins makes convergence and shares some of their sounds, values, and forms, moving through musical hybridizations that create new cultural values and musical genres that citizens appropriate, creating new social practices to live and to love cities. Mexico City is just one of many other large urban systems where music is more dynamic than typical urban characteristics, such as people, streets, and spaces. Integrating history, geography, urbanism, and art, these interdisciplinary works could help mobilize cities into more inclusive spaces where convergence could be the axis for culture in big cities.Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine is an open-access, biannual, and peer-reviewed online magazine that aims to bundle cultural diversity. All values of cultures are shown in their varieties of art. Beyond the importance of the medium, form, and context in which art takes its characteristics, art is considered the significance of socio-cultural, historical, and market influence