Technobanda music is loud and brassy, and anyone who watches Mexican television or has lived in the borderlands region would recognize its distinctive sound and signature dance style, the quebradita. Its roots lie in the banda music of rural Sinaloa in northwestern Mexico, updated in the 1990s with electric amplification and synthesizers, a bold attitude, flashy clothes, and heavy marketing. In the early 1990s, technobanda exploded onto the scene in Los Angeles. Ethnomusicologist Helen Simonett’s Banda offers an engaging and insightful analysis of this music and dance craze. She argues that the music offered working-class Mexican Americans and Mexican migrants more than an opportunity to catapult their favorite a radio station to number one in Los Angeles; it empowered them with an entire lifestyle that included new dance steps, vaquero outfits, and a connection to their Mexican heritage.
To understand the craze, Simonett argues, one must confront it as...
