Mediating Nostalgia: The Meaning of Ranchera Music at a Mexican Community Radio Station

This study investigates a battle over music and identity at Radio Zapotitlán, a community radio station in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. An analysis of over 20 interviews with station organizers, volunteers and listeners conducted in 2009 and 2010 indicates that while organizers and older listeners celebrated Ranchera music as the station’s predominant musical content, younger listeners fought to broadcast contemporary Banda music. An historical and theoretical analysis of Ranchera music explores its cultural role in mediating experiences of migration and nostalgia. This study finds that Radio Zapotitlán organizers promoted Ranchera music in order to engage the national and transnational nostalgia of Zapotitlán’s displaced migrants, and to meet the expectations of government regulators and transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It concludes that local, regional, national and transnational interests cannot be disentangled in musical articulations of identity at Radio Zapotitlán.