Manuel M. Ponce's Chapultepec and the Conflicted Representations of a Contested Space

• Published in: The Musical quarterly 2009-10, Vol.92 (3-4), p.279-328
• Main Author: Saavedra, Leonora
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Composers; Folk music; Identity; Latin American culture; Latin American history; Latin music; Melody; Music; Music composition; Musical motives; Musical performance; Musical rhythm; Poetry; Ponce, Manuel M; Popular music
• ISSN: 0027-4631; 1741-8399
• DOI: 10.1093/musqtl/gdp017

Saavedra suggests that the long and complex compositional history of Chapultepec, a re-presentation, or re-creation, of the emblematic woods and castle of Chapultepec park, now in Mexico City, is partly the result of Manuel M. Ponce's contestation of claims advanced by other historical agents to the representation of the national during the decades--long construction of the modern Mexican identity. Finally, as all shall see, Chapultepec was for Ponce also a means to work out what it is to be a Mexican composer of Western art music. The transformation of Mexico's national culture after the Revolution, or civil war, of 1910-20 has often been depicted as the sell-absorbed discovery of a national identity by a society that had just recently become aware of its own richness and its diverse origins. Yet, as she shall argues, the new identity was not the product of a discovery--the unveiling--of an essence, but of an invention: the socially and politically contested construction, across lines of class and ethnicity, of an identity that is, in fact, an unending relational process. This construction, and therefore that of the nation itself, was effected in part through the cultural representation of the national by personal and social agents that vied for the control of the national symbolic capital.