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Duke Ellington, El Rey del Jazz and the Mexico City Massacre of 1968

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2022

León F. García Corona
León F. García Corona*
Affiliation:
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, USA
*
Email: Leon.Garcia-Corona@nau.edu
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Abstract

From September 24 to October 2, 1968, two apparently unrelated events took place in an area of less than two square miles in downtown Mexico City: Duke Ellington performed in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and the Mexican army massacred hundreds of protesting students. The student-driven movement of 1968 attracted people from different backgrounds in Mexican society. Their desire for freedom of speech and civil liberties echoed the struggles of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Received as El rey del jazz (the King of Jazz), Ellington's visit to Mexico constituted a musical place of cultural encounters. In this essay, I explore the connections between jazz, cultural diplomacy, race, and social justice. I argue that neither paradoxes nor seeming contradictions account for the fluidity of social activism on both sides of the border and its connections with playing and listening practices of jazz; rather I look at this social phenomenon as an example of an audiotopia, borrowing Josh Kun's term for a musical space of differences where contradictions and conflicts don't cancel each other out—a kind of identificatory contact zone. I do so by setting aside nationalistic approaches to music and viewing jazz as more than an emblem of U.S. national identity; rather, I explore the transnational aspects of the cultural artifacts resulting from these exchanges and the dynamic processes that took place in Ellington's visit with and among Mexicans.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 69 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music

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Footnotes

This project grew out of an interest in my own family's participation in Mexico's student movement of the late 1960s. My father was present at the Tlatelolco massacre on October 2, 1968, and I would like to express gratitude to him for being willing to speak about the events of that day. I also want to express special gratitude to the reviewers who made this article significantly better, including: Emily Abrams Ansari, David F. García, Carol A. Hess, Ana Alonso Minutti, and Stephanie Stallings, as well as the journal's anonymous reviewers.

References

References

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Allier-Montaño, Eugenia. “Memory and History of Mexico ‘68.” European Review of Latin American & Caribbean Studies 102 (2016): 7–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corona, Ignacio, and Madrid, Alejandro L.. Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.Google Scholar
Dance, Stanley. The World of Duke Ellington. New York: C. Scribner, 1970.Google Scholar
Daughtry, J. Martin. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derbez, Alain. El jazz en México, Datos para una historia. México, D.F.: Fondo de cultura económica, 2001.Google Scholar
Draper, Susana. 1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Ellington, Duke. Music is My Mistress. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.Google Scholar
Fosler-Lussier, Danielle. “Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism.” Diplomatic History 36, no. 1 (2012): 53–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fosler-Lussier, Danielle. Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
García Corona, León F. “Music, Politics, and Sentimentalism in Bolero.” Latin American Music Review 40, no. 2 (2019): 138–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
García, David F. Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's Origins. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Lambert, Eddie. Duke Ellington: A Listener's Guide. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Monson, Ingrid. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Navarro, Aaron W. Political Intelligence and the Creation of Modern Mexico, 1938-1954. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Ochoa Gautier, Ana Maria. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poniatowska, Elena. La noche de tlatelolco: Testimonios de historia oral. México, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1998.Google Scholar
Radano, Ronald M. and Bohlman, Philip V., eds. Music and the Racial Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert. Music in Mexico: A Historical Survey. Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, 1952.Google Scholar
Sue, Christina A. Land of the Cosmic Race: Race, Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sullivan, W.C. to Wannall, W.R.. “Olympic Games, Mexico City, Mexico,” memorandum, September 26, 1968, The National Security Archive, Washington, D.C. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB10/docs/doc13.pdf. Accessed January 17, 2020.Google Scholar
Von Eschen, Penny M. Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Zolov, Eric. The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
García Pedroza, Felipe de Jesus. Interview with the author. Mexico City, June 3, 2010.Google Scholar
García Pedroza, Felipe de Jesus. Interview with the author. Mexico City, August 2, 2018.Google Scholar
Reynoso, Esmeralda. Interview with the author. Mexico City, March 15, 2013.Google Scholar