New generations, older bodies: danzón, age and ‘cultural rescue’ in the Port of Veracruz, Mexico

Understandings and discourses about age have tended to be instrumental to popular music in terms of production, promotion and consumption, and many studies of popular music have taken younger people, and especially ‘youth’ cultures, as their subject matter. Where older people have been considered, the focus has mostly been retrospective, that is on their experiences when young and their attitudes to contemporary ‘youth’ cultures, rather than relationships between the temporal dimension of the life course and music. As the case of danzón illustrates, stereotypes that older people are resistant to novelty, change and possibility are ill founded. Moreover, where age is used to justify rescuing ‘cultural traditions’, caution may be called for and analysis required to assess what lies behind such claims and why. In Veracruz, the older age of the majority of danzón performers is evoked to ‘authenticate’ this local ‘tradition’, and justify its ‘rescue’ and promotion by Veracruz’s culture industries. Yet, older people are not considered repositories of ‘tradition’ or sought out as ‘authentic’ practitioners. Instead, many older performers are new to danzón. There are countless examples, spanning the globe, of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s wellknown concept of the ‘invented tradition’ (1983); examples relating to music, dance, material culture, language, ritual and other practices. The notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘invented tradition’ have often intersected with understandings and discourses around age. For example, the demise of traditions has been allied to fears of practices, genres and practitioners becoming ‘old’ and ‘dying out’. In this article, I consider a popular music-dance form which bears many of the characteristics of an invented tradition and that is predominantly performed by people aged between 50 and 80-plus.1 Far from dying out, however, the popular Cuban music-dance form danzón is flourishing, particularly in Mexico. Drawing from ethnographic data, I explore why local culture industries in the Port of Veracruz (Mexico) frame danzón as an ‘older’ people’s music-dance form and to what ends.2 My focus here is predominantly danzón dancers, the main consumers of this music, who gather for an hour most evenings in Veracruz’s principal square (or nearby plazas) to dance to the Municipal Band or local danzoneras (danzón music ensembles).3 I suggest that the older age of many danzón practitioners is used by Veracruz’s culture industries to ‘authenticate’ this practice as a local ‘tradition’, to justify its ‘rescue’ and its promotion to younger generations. However this creates a tension since many of these older performers are new to danzón: they form the new generations of this partly invented tradition, disturbing notions of older people assuring the continuity of Popular Music (2012) Volume 31/2. © Cambridge University Press 2012, pp. 217–230 doi:10.1017/S0261143012000062