The Roots: The Music of the Three Worlds (Pre-Hispanic–1800)

Pre-Hispanic music was not entertainment in the modern sense: it was sacred technology. Instruments were objects of power that summoned the gods, marked the cycles of time, accompanied sacrifices, celebrated military victories, and guided the dead to the underworld. The teponaztli — the wooden drum with two tongues that produced two different pitches — and the huehuetl — the large vertical drum of stretched skin — were the rhythmic axes of Mesoamerican civilization. Clay flutes and sea conchs completed a sound universe that archaeologists continue to unearth and study.

Music was so central to Mesoamerican civilizations that it had its own god: Xochipilli, the Prince of Flowers, deity of music, dance, games, and beauty. His statue, found in Tlamanalco and now in the National Museum of Anthropology, shows the god in ecstasy, sitting on a pedestal covered with psychoactive flowers. He was the patron of musicians and of those who altered consciousness to draw closer to the divine.

The Clash of Worlds: 1519

The Spanish conquest was also a sonic conquest. The Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian friars who arrived after the military quickly understood that music was the most direct path to evangelization: if they could replace indigenous ritual chants with Catholic sacred music, they would be replacing one cosmological system with another.

What happened was more complex and more interesting than that plan. The indigenous people adopted European music with a speed that surprised the missionaries themselves — and at the same time transformed it from within. The friars taught Gregorian chant; the indigenous people sang it with their own accents, ornaments, and rhythmic sensibilities. European instruments — the guitar, harp, violin, vihuela — arrived and were immediately appropriated and modified: the jarana veracruzana, the requinto jarocho, the leona are string instruments that emerged from this colonial hybridization, recognizable as descendants of the Spanish guitar but irreducible to it.

To this mix of pre-Hispanic and Spanish elements, a third world was added: the African. Slavery brought thousands of Africans from different regions of the continent — mainly from present-day Angola, Congo, Nigeria, and Senegal — to the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, whose rhythmic and vocal traditions mixed with the indigenous and Spanish ones to produce genres that did not exist in any of the three original worlds.

The Son: The Creole Synthesis

The most important result of this triple synthesis was the Mexican son — not a genre but a family of genres that developed differently in each region of the territory, following the geographical, demographic, and cultural particularities of each place.

The son jarocho from Veracruz — of which "La Bamba" is the most globally known example — is the most African expression of the family: it combines roots from the Baroque Andalusian fandango, West African music, and indigenous Mexican music, with instruments like the requinto, jarana, jarocha harp, leona, pandero, quijada, and marimbol. The fandango — the community gathering of dance and song around the platform — is the central social institution of the son jarocho: not a spectacle but a collective practice where there is no separation between musicians and audience.

The son huasteco or huapango — from the region that includes parts of Veracruz, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas, and Hidalgo — is more indigenous in its rhythmic base, with the violin as the dominant instrument and a falsetto vocal style that can reach extraordinary heights. Typical jarocho ensembles generally use a large diatonic harp with 32 strings and no pedals, a four-string requinto, and a jarana — a small guitar with five, eight, or 12 strings, allowing for octaving that gives a deeper harmonic sensation.

The son jalisciense — from Jalisco and the neighboring western states — would be the one to achieve the greatest national and international projection, as from it emerged the mariachi in the 19th century.

The Mariachi: From the Ranch Wedding to the National Symbol

The origin of the mariachi is one of the most persistent debates in Mexican ethnomusicology. The most popular — and most discredited — theory says that the name comes from the French word mariage (marriage), introduced during the French intervention of the 19th century. More recent research points to an origin in indigenous languages of western Mexico, possibly from coca or Nahuatl.

What is clear is that the mariachi in its original form was a rural group from western Mexico — Jalisco, Colima, Michoacán, Nayarit — that played at weddings, baptisms, patron saint festivals, and community gatherings with violins, guitarrones, vihuelas, and harps. The mariachi is characterized by the use of violins, trumpets, guitars, vihuelas, and guitarrones, creating a unique mix of rhythms and melodies that evoke both joy and melancholy.

The trumpets arrived later — already in the 20th century, when the urban mariachi of Mexico City replaced the harp with brass to compete with the noise of the capital's cabarets and tents. That transformation — from the rural and acoustic ensemble to the electric and urban band — is the story of how Mexico turned a regional genre into a national identity.

The Singers of the Sacred: Colonial Religious Music

Parallel to the popular sounds and dances, New Spain developed a high-level sacred music tradition that contemporary critics have begun to rescue from oblivion. The cathedrals of Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca were centers of musical activity during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, where Renaissance counterpoint, late Baroque, and hybrid genres such as the villancico—which in Mexico adopted local characteristics with lyrics in Nahuatl or Spanish with African rhythms, very different from the European villancico—were cultivated.

Manuel de Zumaya—born in Mexico City around 1678, the first opera composer in North America with his Parténope (1711)—was the most important figure of that period. His work, which mixes European counterpoint with sensibilities derived from New Spanish popular music, anticipates the synthesis that all subsequent Mexican music would carry out with different materials.

The Dance of Conquest: Memory in the Body

One of the most powerful and least studied legacies of that period is the tradition of indigenous ritual dances that survived the conquest by adapting their external form — adopting European clothing, incorporating the narrative of the Christian conquest over Islam — while preserving their internal function of connecting with the sacred and with collective memory.

The Dance of the Concheros — still practiced today in the Zócalo square of Mexico City — is the most visible example: dancers with feathered headdresses, armadillo shells as rhythmic instruments, movements that reproduce Mesoamerican cosmic patterns, all in the very center of colonial and modern power. The memory that could not be erased found in dance its way to persist.

Editorial Note: Mexico is the country in the Americas with the greatest diversity of living traditional musical genres — not as museum folklore but as everyday community practice. The fandango jarocho in Veracruz, the huapango in the Huasteca, the wind bands in Oaxaca, the marimba music in Chiapas, the ritual songs in indigenous languages in dozens of communities across the country: this universe exists in parallel with the airport mariachi and the reggaeton on the radios, without contradiction. Mexico does not have a musical tradition: it has dozens, each with its own history and vitality. What this chapter tells is just the starting point of a journey that would fill an entire library.