Association for Feminist Anthropology

Retrospective - Oral Presentation Session

Challenging Gender Stereotypes Through the Canción Ranchera

Presenter(s)

• ON

  Olga Najera-Ramirez

  University of California at Santa Cruz

This presentation focuses on a highly popular genre of Mexican music referred to as “La Canción Ranchera,” an expressive musical form intimately associated with Mexican cultural identity. For years, early scholarship on this genre tended to base their interpretations on literal readings of the ranchera texts and produced a view of Mexican men as overly passionate, irrational, macho, alcoholic, and fatalistic. Moreover, they failed to account for women's participation as performers, composers, and consumers of rancheras.

Inspired and informed by Beverly Stoelje’s distinguished scholarship on the intersection of power, performance, and the nation, I offer an alternative more nuanced interpretation of the ranchera. I argue that the ranchera embodies a poetics that resists facile and essentialist interpretations. Specifically, I show how the ranchera may be considered a form of melodrama—a discursive space characterized by the intensity of emotion in which issues of profound social concern may be addressed. Second, I explore several ways in which women and men have deployed the ranchera as a site through which they may make challenge traditional gender roles.