In the wake of an ever-expanding global network, attention is often focused on cultural intersections and juxtapositions set in motion by financial or technological interests. Relying on frameworks that place people and societies into binary (e.g., oppressed and oppressor, influenced and influencer, etc.) or hierarchical relationships (e.g., First World and Third world, developed and developing, etc.), scholars in the humanities and social sciences continue to grapple with the ramifications of rapid inter-cultural processes active across the globe. Hierarchical and hegemonic frameworks fail to account for the reciprocal nature of inter-cultural exchange occurring within such frameworks. With respect to Latin American music, such intra-hierarchical exchange has been ubiquitous, constant, and necessary for the development of a plethora of musical genres across Latin America and the United States. In the last fifty years, these interactions have been exacerbated by the speed at which technology makes inter-cultural interaction ever more instantaneous, pervasive, and intensely creative in contemporary contexts. How might a methodology focused on exchange between musicians in Latin America and the United States yield a more nuanced understanding of inter-cultural dynamics in a contemporary context? Utilizing ethnography focused on musicians who have forged careers from the confluence of disparate musical genres, this project explores the relationship Latin American musicians share with each other and with musicians in the United States as a means to better understand inter-cultural dynamics within a network consisting of multiple cultures, situated within different nations, and in diverse socio-economic standings. The result will be a study aimed at understanding how individuals consume foreign cultural influences by grounding themselves in familiar cultural realities, how polycultural identities are forged in such a process, and how this process is crystallized in the music of select artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Untied States.

Drawing from anthropological fieldwork in three jazz clubs, this dissertation explores the global scale of contemporary jazz practice through an examination of the communities that sustain them in Los Angeles, California; Santiago, Chile; and Novosibirsk, Siberia. These spaces, which bear striking similarities to one another both in terms of architectural aesthetics and community practices despite the vast distance between them, are investigated as instantiations of jazz space informed by logics of jazz listening, and as sites of jazz practice—a process that I call jazz anthropology. It argues that to understand why jazz practices continue to manifest anywhere, we must understand what they mean to people elsewhere—that is, beyond the music’s geographical centers of production on the U.S. East Coast. By attending to these peripheries, we can hear the music as a manifestation of jazz consciousness, as tendrils of black radical modes of thinking transposed to far-flung geographies—even ones that very few black people inhabit. To situate these practices in a longer genealogical timespan, the dissertation also includes brief historical sketches of jazz practice in each of the three locations in 1917, 1959, and 1990, demonstrating the long local histories that inform the music in each locale. Each subsequent chapter focuses on a different club, as well as a distinctive aspect of global jazz world-making. Taken together, they tell a story of how people around the world share a sense of meaning and emplacement in ideas of Jazz as a universal signifier.

This dissertation studies traditional and popular music of the Wixárika (a.k.a. Huichol) people of western Mexico, focusing especially on the phenomenon of Wixárika musicians who intentionally represent themselves as indigenous “Huichol” people yet perform popular Mexican music primarily for non-indigenous audiences. This phenomenon markets ethnic identity within regional and transnational music industries, following in the footsteps of Wixárika people who have successfully inserted their arts and crafts into global markets. The process of becoming indigenous cosmopolitan capitalists is partly the result of direct assimilatory projects directed by early Mexican anthropologists and the indirect outcome of over a century of Huichol identity construction for consumption, aided greatly by foreign ethnographers and other outsiders. On one hand, the commodification of identity through handicrafts, art, and music generates income for the Wixárika people, and the resultant visibility—sometimes international in scale—may strengthen them politically as Indigenous people. Conversely, the process simultaneously supplants some of the very elements they consider central to Wixárika culture. Musicians often leave their homelands to pursue their craft, making it difficult or impossible to participate in community affairs and ceremonies, and leaving their children bereft of Wixárika language and “customs.” Such people who represent the “customs” but do not practice them are sometimes disparaged as “half disqualified” or “Huichol de pirata” (pirated Huichol), illuminating identity’s commodity form. As the first English-language study of Wixárika music, this dissertation examines the paradox of identity commodification, developing a tripartite model of identity that shows the vital (albeit sometimes inadvertent) role of ethnography in defining the essence of the commodity form of Huichol identity.