"Más Bonita Calladita ": Silencing the Female Voice in Mariachi

“Más Bonita Calladita”: Silencing the Female Voice in Mariachi José R. Torres, University of North Texas The following paper is a draft of research conducted for a course on “The Anthropology of Sound.” The paper is being revised from its current form. Future revised drafts will be uploaded when completed. Introduction Many years ago, during my formative years as a student of mariachi, I remember walking into my teacher’s studio for a group rehearsal and hearing a very deep resonating voice singing ranchera (mariachi) songs. I was struck by the dark timbre, rich texture, and emotive interpretation. I also noticed something in the inflection of the voice that I could not quite place. I asked my teacher, “Who is this guy singing?” My teacher laughed loudly saying, “it’s not a man, it is a woman!” I remember being shocked in disbelief as the voice sounded very masculine. “Seriously, that’s a woman? I don’t believe you!” “Everyone says that the first time they hear Lucha sing,” he replied. As the years passed, I continued my career as a student and performer of mariachi, becoming quite familiar with the vocal styling of Lucha Villa, one of the most renowned female voices in Mexican música ranchera. In consideration of Judith Butler’s (1988) conceptions of gender performativity, Lucha Villa embodied a performance of feminine gender that conformed to traditional Mexican social norms, particularly through her colorful costumes articulated by vibrant colors, make-up and hair styles. However, this visual image was juxtaposed by the sonic affect of her deep voice accentuated by a dark and heavy texture that signified a masculine ethos indexing Mexican machismo, which historically valorizes maleness within society while minimizing femaleness. For this paper, I draw upon perceptions of authentic mariachi masculinity sonically and performatively materialized as a simultaneous icon of Mexican machismo, which I theorize as “mariachismo.” I analyze a phenomenology of the female voice metaphorically construed through a soundscape mariachismo. The voice is a central Silencing the Female Voice p. 2 phenomenon to humans as it bears our language and constructs our perceptions. It can also serve as a metaphoric perspective, by which we understand part of the world itself (Ihde, 2007:189). Merleau-Ponty writes that, “like a charade, language is understood only through the interaction of signs, each of which taken separately, is equivocal or banal and makes sense only by being combined with others” (1993:79). I extend this notion to the sonority of vocal timbres, which combined with song (as language) characterize particular forms of gender through performativity. Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier (2014) discusses a notion of “silence,” constituted in political language to imply an active politics of domination and nonparticipation. It is the opposite of “having a voice,” which is rendered as a sign of identity and presence of the subject (2014:183). Raewyn Connell writes, that semiotic approaches abandon the level of personality, defining maleness through a system of symbolic difference contrasting gender such that, “Masculinity is, in effect, defined as not-femininity” (2005:70). Therefore I construct an analysis of language and vocal sonority in order to reveal how gender is musically constituted in mariachi performance. Sparse scholarship exists specifically on mariachi vocal performance, particularly perspectives that are grounded in a notion of the “voice as embodied practice shaped by, and embedded in, culturally and historically specific social relations” (Weidmann, 2014). From a phenomenological perspective, the voice centralizes cultural and social life by linking material practices with subjectivity, and embodied sound with collectively signified meanings. It becomes a crucial site where the realms of the cultural and social link to the individual, where shared discourses, values, affect, and aesthetics are manifested and contested through embodied practice. The fact that the voice is both a set of sonic, material, and literary practices shaped by culturally and historically specific moments as well as a discursive category invoked about personal agency, cultural authenticity, and political power, lends weight to its productivity as an analytical Silencing the Female Voice p. 3 category. In this paper, I investigate a phenomenology of the female voice through a notion of “silencing,” as one way in which the soundscape mariachismo is indexed. First, I discuss how constructions of masculine subjectivity were historically conflated as machismo, becoming aesthetic tropes within modern mariachi instrumental and vocal performance. Secondly, I conceptualize the metaphor of silencing within a phenomenological framework of multistability. Thirdly, I explore the soundscape of mariachismo through both lyrical text and vocal styling, illustrating how these voiced affects invert femininity, musically and metaphorically silencing the female voice. Finally, I discuss how women performers reflexively reinforce, contest, and/or negotiate suppressions of femininity within mariachi vocal performance practices. El Charro Macho As one of Mexico’s most representative folk music traditions, mariachi is historically celebrated in two forms. The mariachi tradicional, dating back to the colonial period, is the peasant string ensemble, which still exists and is performed today in remote rural areas in Western Mexico. The modern mariachi is a commercial appropriation of the peasant tradition, re-invented for mass consumption and globally signified through the musical presence of the trumpet, as well as the uniformed suit of the charro (horseman) worn by its musicians. The performance of masculinity within the modern mariachi was historically tied to a larger sociocultural project of modernization and identity construction during Mexico’s post-revolutionary period, specifically between 1940 and 1970, when the country underwent the transformations shaping its contemporary features. The socialized suppression of womanhood in Mexican society is rooted within its patriarchal social norms tied to its Spanish colonial heritage. Scholarship on Mexican social cultural history documents a male narrative that originated shortly after the revolution and pervaded in the national discourse. Literature and cinema of the post- Silencing the Female Voice p. 4 revolutionary period reshaped the national imaginary, organizing history as a male-centered narrative, commercially mediated through popular traditions including the charro (landowner) and the modern mariachi (Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, 2007). Historically, the charrería tradition represented the Mexican male as a brave, hardworking man defending his family and country however, the popularized post-revolutionary image of the charro popularized on film during Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema (1939-1959), “exaggerated the paternalistic masculine traits through a notion of Mexican machismo, which was then disseminated through media and performance, naturalizing a collective social identity” that further subdued the ‘presence’ of women in society (Nájera-Ramírez, 1994). Deeply imbedded within Mexican culture, the conflation of masculinity and devaluation of effeminacy traces its roots back to the Aztec Empire (Tate, 2013). As a socio-historical phenomenon, the gender binary constructed through a notion of “machismo,” has preoccupied sociologists, philosophers, historians, poets, and folklorists (Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, 2007; Nájera-Ramírez, 1994; Paredes, 1971; Paz, 1985[1961]; Ramos, 1975[1962]; Tate, 2013). Many scholars have analyzed it as the psycho-historical product of Mexico’s traumatic Spanish conquest with a specific semiotic density resulting from colonial and postcolonial processes (Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, 2007; Paredes, 1971; Paz, 1985[1961]; Ramos, 1975[1962]). In his well-known series of essays on Mexican identity, Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz wrote that a strict gender binary was a defining aspect of the Mexican character. According to Paz, it is the closed or impenetrable nature of men that protects them from the domination or conquest to which women are subject by nature, meaning that the male who allows himself to be penetrated, or assumes a feminine position, is considered less than a man (1985:30). Américo Paredes (1971) argued that folksongs were the most useful analytical lens for examining Mexico’s notions of Silencing the Female Voice p. 5 masculinity, citing the Mexican folklorist Vicente T. Mendoza’s categories of “authentic” and “false” machismo (18). The former, characterized by true courage, generosity, stoicism, heroism, and bravery, the latter by presumptuous boasts, bravado, and double-talk concealing an inferiority complex. Through processes of commercialized nationalism, reflected in popular media such as films, a blurring of the lines between the authentic and false categories occurred, synthesizing an ideal of machismo eventually becoming a normative gendered trope of masculinity performance naturalized through repeated enactment in popular culture expressions that were central to modern mariachi performance and expression. In the literature, mariachi’s gender performance is easily and most often analyzed through visual imagery. This is understandable considering the strong masculine imagery experienced through both the uniform and physicality of the charro. However, what is often overlooked are the accompanying masculine instrumental and vocal sonorities indexing machismo, that when analyzed by Western musicologists, are often conceived of as poor musicianship due to the informal training and oral nature of the tradition. This reductionist view can be traced to the Cartesian influence–splitting the rational mind from the emotional body, characterized emotions as animalistic tendencies to be controlled in order to assert specifically Westernized notions of masculinity. Music as the cultural material of emotion was historically feminized, particularly in Anglophone countries. Although a Western influenced mestizo-hybrid musical form, mariachi performance practice when construed through a socio-historical understanding of Mexican machismo can be understood as a rejection of Cartesian oppositions, embracing a holistic sound-body experience of masculinity. The reified values of machismo—aggression, dominance, independence, and strength enacted through a stoic dissociation from feminine perceptions—became iconic musical affects Silencing the Female Voice p. 6 of the modern mariachi, which I argue performatively synthesized as mariachismo. Symbolizing authentic musicality within performance practice, mariachismo is measured by a musician’s ability to embody the qualities of machismo both through vocal/instrumental execution, and with performative gestures acting not only as forms of social interaction, but also reflecting a way of musically-being-in-the-world. Within this musical space, technique is not a matter of formalized systematic methods, but rather musicality flows from normative social values echoing a masculine notion that to be Mexican means, “not to back down.” Playing the violin in a mariachi means that rather than perform with a polished, smooth, sound as is done in the classical music tradition, a mariachi musician plays the instrument with a masculine character embodied in a heavier bow articulation, penetrating tone, and louder volume. Vocally, masculinity is indexed by singing from the chest register, with a belted projection that provides a heavier texture. Traditionally women adopted this same style of vocal performance often singing in the same male vocal key or shifting just one step higher, forcing the average female to sing lower than what their normal range would be. Biologically, in an adult male, the vocal folds are usually 1723 mm long, and 12.5 -17 mm in an adult female (Kaplan, 1971:246). The male speaking voice averages about 125 Hz while the female voice averages about 210 Hz and children's voices average over 300 Hz (Sundberg, 1977:82). For women, this style of vocal execution suppresses the natural characteristics of the female voice becoming a “sung” signifier of the soundscape of mariachismo while metaphorically suppressing the feminine experience through Gautier’s notion of “silencing.” Más Bonita Calladita: Phenomenology of Silencing In the 1970s and 1980s, some of the most influential theoretical accounts of women’s relationship to discourse in general, and high-status public discourse in particular, were Silencing the Female Voice p. 7 conceptualized as part of “grand narratives” (Cameron, 2006:13). Shirley Ardener promoted an idea of women as a “muted group” postulating that culturally ratified forms of symbolic representation were generated by dominant male gender-groups on the basis of their own experience (1978). However, although women’s experiences were different they were compelled to represent them in terms constructed by men. Consequently, women’s reality was “muted,” experienced privately but unable to find public expression. Similar arguments were developed in Dale Spender’s Man Made Language (1980), however the public/private distinction was more between the inter-subjective realm of culture and that of subjective female experience, which remained private because it could not be verbalized in a “man made language.” Women’s intersubjective experience as a “muted group” can be culturally referenced through the popular Mexican dicho (saying) “te ves más bonita calladita” (you look more beautiful when you are quiet). So common is the phrase that even Mexican women use it among themselves in conversation, as a social commentary on the patriarchal values that pervade social life. The notion, that to be beautiful is to be seen and not heard semantically encapsulates a sounded signifier of the social norms deeply embedded within Mexican society privileging maleness over femininity. Language “is itself perceptually situated, embodied in receptive and expressive senses and bound to this primordial attachment to the world” (Ihde, 2007:185). As a sounded icon, language not only structures perceptions of reality but also normalizes them. Thomas Turino notes the idea that general icons and iconic substitution influence a relative foregrounding and backgrounding of specific signs in listening, as well as in all types of experience (2014:294). Using the phenomenon of multi-stable possibilities reveals how the musical silencing of the female voice occurs. Multi-stable possibilities, simultaneously open yet structured, allow for an inversion of our sensory perceptions. Silencing the Female Voice p. 8 One of the well-known reversible drawings illustrates this phenomenon visually (see fig. 1). In this example, the illustration may be visually foregrounded as a “hallway” in which the central configuration is seen as “rearward” appearing with the vantage downward as it were from Figure 1. Multistable Image its position, or it may also be foregrounded as a topless pyramid with the central configuration upward or forward facing with the vantage now elevated into a more apparent birds eye position (Ihde, 2007). In the auditory version of multistability, each possibility can potentially be actualized as experience, yet the listening process of foregrounding one possibility simultaneously backgrounds or “silences” the other possibilities, which although equally present to be discovered, are subsequently not experienced. The soundscape of mariachismo is a multistable phenomenon inverting various possibilities of gendered sonority. For example, in the mariachi tradicional, high-pitched nasal tones were valued as indexical of authentic masculine sentiment. However, in the modern mariachi, this aesthetic of masculinity was inverted as a consequence of commercialization, when the operatic bel canto1 tenor style of singing, as modeled by Jorge Negrete and Javier Solis, became indexical of authentic vocal styling. Likewise, the espousal of dark and heavy vocal timbres, by women performers, inverted traditional sonic characteristics connoting the modern masculine aesthetic. As language, song lyrics also played a crucial role in the inversion of women’s performance of gender in mariachi. 1 Bel canto as generally understood today, refers to the Italian-originated vocal style that prevailed throughout most of Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Silencing the Female Voice p. 9 Soundscape of Mariachismo: Silencing The Female Poetic Persona Leticia Soto Flores describes “poetic persona,” as the point-of-view of a singer with lyrical texts as either gender neutral or marked, either from a male, or less commonly, from a female perspective (2015:338). In her analysis of mariachi lyrics, Cándida Jácquez notes that the lexical meaning of the words in ranchera music, foreground a quality of ‘manliness,’ through a male-centered ‘voice,’ (what Soto would characterize as the poetic persona). This voice traverses dominant themes of lost love, amorous injustice, women’s beauty, and regional or national pride, while frequently appealing to lo ranchero (the ranch life), an interpretation of country life as a masculinized sphere of influence, that romanticized mariachi’s rural origins (Jácquez, 2002:172). Traditionally, when women artists such as Lucha Villa sang ranchera songs, the lyrical text would remain from the male poetic persona, inverting the experience by metaphorically silencing the female poetic persona. Phenomenologically, musical lyrics naturalize the social order, since as language, they bring “the voices of the world, into a familiarity that identifies and structures our expectations” (Ihde, 2007:187). According to Jácquez, this notion of naturalized suppression originated with the song’s genesis by dominant male composers including José Alfredo Jiménez, Tomás Mendez, Felipe Valdés Leal, Manuel Ezquivel, and José Ángel Espinoza (known as Ferrusquilla), and is carried on through vocal styling that privilege the male poetic persona who dominates the narrative. The songs of José Alfredo Jiménez (one of Mexico’s most renowned and prolific ranchera songwriters) intimated an extreme view of the disparity in life and romanticized death, alcoholism, fatalism, and machismo, signifying what some suggest is a contiguous reality of Mexico (Andrade, 1997). In a significant number of songs, José Alfredo uses the language of machismo as a compositional style of conquest, in so much as the poetic persona expresses a Silencing the Female Voice p. 10 fondness for fighting, aggression in displays of courage, along with an attitude of valor, honor, strength and virility in all relationships. Mostly semi-autobiographical, his lyrics project machismo as a form of superiority over females, as well as over other men who are often portrayed as having effeminate traits. His construction of machismo includes displays of stubbornness suggesting only the macho is right under any circumstances, and that females or anyone with feminine characteristics, cannot be right or better than the man. In the song, “El Rey” (the King), José Alfredo demarcates a self-centered narcissist tone. Con dinero y sin dinero, hago siempre lo With money or without money, I always do que quiero, y mi palabra es la ley what I want and my word is the law The poetic persona expresses a fighting aggression, sense of superiority, and an underpinning stubbornness iconic of mariachismo. In the song, “Serenata Huasteca” (Huastecan Serenade), bravado is even more pronounced. Dicen que ando muy errado que despierte They say I am in error that I should awaken de mi sueño, from my dream Pero se hallan equivocado porque yo he de But they have been mistaken because I will be ser tu dueño your master In Spanish, the word dueño is also connoted as master, relating the poetic persona’s allconsuming selfishness and desire to have his own way in spite of advice from friends, or Silencing the Female Voice p. 11 perceptions of what is just. Finally, in “La Media Vuelta” (The Half Turn), José Alfredo again articulates a typified narcissism: Te vas porque yo quiero que te vayas A la You leave me because I want you to leave At hora que yo quiera te detengo Yo se que mi the moment I want to stop you I can do it I cariño te hace falta, porque quieras o no, yo know you need my love because, whether you soy tu dueño like it or not, I am your master The entire verse signifies a male mastery of ownership over the woman’s will including a total control over her life. José Alfredo also finds women constantly guilty of hurting men by abusing their trust, and breaking their promises of love to gullible men. In the song “Cuando Llegue al Albur” (When I Get There), the female breaks with her man and, in the process, becoming worthless and seen as a woman of questionable morals: Si en un tiempo supiste ser buena, hoy vas If once you knew how to be a good woman, now por el mundo buscando placer you go through the world seeking pleasures The woman’s morals may be in question but not her right to do what she had done. Patriarchal social norms are also indexed in the songs of José Alfredo through MayDecember romances, often with a large age disparity demonstrating the ability of elderly men to secure young women as lovers. The songs “Cuando Tenía Tú Edad” (When I was your age), “Cuando Vivas Conmigo” (When you live with me), and “Yo Debía Enamorarme de tu Madre” (I Should Have Fallen In Love With Your Mother) index these ideas. Machismo’s sexual Silencing the Female Voice p. 12 conquest is indexed through the male poetic persona’s braggadocio about his ability to carry out his desires and dominate the younger woman. Whether through a paternal lyrics like, “y te voy a enseñar a querer, porque tu no has querido (and I am going to teach you to love because you have never loved before),” or narcissist ones, i.e. “dame un beso delante de la gente, dame un beso delante de tu madre (kiss me in the presence of the people, kiss me in the presence of your mother),” the male voice is sounded and the female is silenced. According to Paz, the ideal of manliness for Mexicans is never to back down and those who open themselves up are considered weak. The feminine connotation of opening oneself relates to one of Mexico’s most well known dichos (sayings) “no te rajes,” which in polite language means, “don’t back down.” However, a raja in Spanish literally translates to a “slit” or “slice,” metaphorically symbolizing the female sexual organ, which is penetrated by the male. To “rajar” (verb) is to open oneself to penetration (as in sexual) demonstrating a perceived weakness of the female sex (Andrade, 1997). This notion is further pronounced in the saying, “los hombres no se dejan,” meaning “the men don’t give in” (to penetration). The song “Ay Jalisco No Te Rajes” (Oh Jalisco Don’t Open Yourself), written by Manuel Esperón and Ernesto Cortázar, along with the subsequent 1941 film of the same name, re-imagined the saying as an adage popularizing the stereotype of Jalisco as a paradigm for Mexicanidad within the social imaginary (Rama and Frye, 2012). Since then, many ranchera songs contain the grito (yell) of “no te rajes Jalisco” or similar derivatives i.e., “los de Jalisco nunca se rajan” (those from Jalisco never open up). The lexical meanings in mariachi songs combined with thematic symbolism construct gender relationships into an idealized and normalized dynamic, wherein the male poetic persona is asserted while the female assumes a passive role. Woman’s passivity is also constructed sonically through the rejection of vocal timbres perceived as feminine. Silencing the Female Voice p. 13 Soundscape of Silence: Voicing Mariachismo Judith Butler (1988) illustrates how the social construction of gender leveraged a scientific explanation of biological sex, subsequently associating social characteristics with femininity and masculinity, the former associated with being submissive, weak, and relegated to the domestic space. Latina feminist Marysol W. Asencio suggests that definitions of masculinity incorporate concepts such as dominance, toughness, or male honor and that these systems of beliefs have an effect on the traditional gender role socializations (1999:108). Associating these qualities with one’s biological sex is an essentialist and socialized way of understanding the gendered physical body. As embodied sound, the voice signifies a gendered sonority, often through perceived distinctions of timbre or vocal inflection. Traditionally in modern Western society, woman’s voices are perceived as lighter in texture and higher in pitch than males. In fact, scientific research supports these perceptions through measurements of the vocal folds illustrating how woman’s voices are normally constituted by a ratio of 2-1 head to chest voice while in men, the ratio is inverted 1-2. Yet in mariachi vocal styling, female performers adopt the deeper chest registers as authenticate affects, ‘inverting’ a biological characteristic in favor of the modern mariachi aesthetic. Therefore “voicing” masculinity constitutes vocal timbres that are darker, guttural, resonating from the chest and evocative of a harsher more aggressive style of interpretation, rather than the higher, lighter tones traditionally associated with women’s voices. I offer the case of Lucha Villa as an example of the metaphoric inverted masculine-feminine voice. Born in Camargo, Chihuahua, Luz Elena Ruíz Bejarano was given her pseudonym “Lucha Villa” by television producer Luis G. Dillon—“Lucha,” being a hypocorism for Luz Elena and “Villa,” in honor of Pancho Villa. Her career took off through a recorded version of Silencing the Female Voice p. 14 José Alfredo’s “La Media Vuelta,” and after several minor film roles, she became a star with the 1965 film feature El Gallo de Oro (The Gold Cock). During the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, she recorded dozens of albums while appearing in dozens of films, becoming an icon in the ranchera music industry. Lucha’s naturally deep voice lent itself to ranchera singing and over the years her voice deepened both in live performance and recordings. While her earlier recordings demonstrated a lighter softer tone quality, later albums embraced a much darker color that often left uninitiated listeners (like myself in this paper’s opening narrative) questioning the gender of the vocalist. So deep was her voice that often when singing duets, she would accept the harmony voiced a lower third from her male vocal partner. Rafael Palomar, renowned ex-guitarist and featured tenor voice for Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, recounted the story of the first live performance that he sang with Lucha. During a pre-show rehearsal, she asked Rafael to sing in duet with her, the higher pitched harmony, for the chorus of the José Alfredo Jiménez song, “Palabra de Hombre” (Word of the Man). Rafael expressed his surprise at this request responding, “how can you expect me, a man, to sing higher over you the woman?” She responded that it was fine with her since she could not comfortably sing the higher range as voiced for the song. This would characterize hundreds of subsequent live performances between the two where Rafael would sing the upper register harmony and Lucha, the lower (Palomar, personal communication, 11/15/2006). In modern mariachi vocal styling, there is an inversion of aesthetic where men are valued for their ability to sing in higher male registers in the bel canto style (chest voice), while women must sing in lower registers in order to resonate the same timbre. With the example of Lucha Villa, we see a sonic and metaphoric inversion of possibilities representing the multistability of mariachi performance. Rafael demonstrates his Silencing the Female Voice p. 15 male vocal superiority over Lucha, who silences the female voice by musically embracing the masculine aesthetic. There is no doubt that Lucha Villa’s own personal lifestyle contributed to the deepening of her voice, which in turn signified her masculine persona. Lucha Villa very much espoused the lifestyle she projected on film and in recordings, including hard drinking and carousing with musicians and other male artists. As a former member of the professional mariachi troupe Campanas de America (bells of America), I remember participating in a summer tour of California headlined by Mariachi Vargas with Lucha Villa as a featured act. During a rehearsal with Vargas in her hotel room, I remember Lucha setting out bottles of tequila, with lime, salt, and shot glasses that she consumed along with the other musicians while running through her set list. In her work with punk vocalists in Mexico City, Kelley Tatro discusses how a hard-living rock-and-roll lifestyle constructs a vocalization that conflates the singer’s bodily experience and persona (Tatro, 2014:436). Inverting a masculine ideal, Lucha’s hard living lifestyle constructed a vocalization conflated her bodily persona while suppressing her femininity. As a notion of authenticity, the suppression of female-ness among women performers of mariachi is negotiated through various means. Negotiating the Feminine Perspective Women who perform mariachi utilize various possibilities for negotiating the perceptions of authenticity through mariachismo. I will frame these possibilities sonically and textually through two contexts, first the mariachi ensemble, both mixed (consisting of male and female musicians) and all female, then through the perspective of the solo artist. With regards to tonal registers, the most often utilized possibility is for women to sing in what are traditionally conceived of as masculine keys. This is especially true for mixed-ensembles where men and Silencing the Female Voice p. 16 women share vocal responsibilities. Referencing again my own experiences as a mariachi musician, performing with Campanas as well as other professional groups, if the song was sung in chorus, the female(s) would normally take the higher harmony, normally sung by the tenor voices. If it was a solo song, then easily the woman would sing in whatever register was most comfortable, but this rarely if ever was in a key that utilized a higher feminine color of voice. Within all female groups, I have observed a variation of possibilities, in some cases based on the song type. Because all-female groups not only sing but also play instruments, the negotiation of keys for chorus-style singing can be quite challenging. First off, the vihuela (small tenor guitar) and guitarrón (bass guitar) are not materially constructed to perform in all keys chromatically. Rather they can be considered as more of diatonic instruments where only certain keys are practical. Mariachi groups normally play in sharp keys, however depending on the vocal register for females, this may vary. Compounding this may be trumpet registers, which are sometimes inverted to maintain the traditional counterpoint, which often may affect technical range of the musician. Female groups directed by experienced musical arrangers can often find very creative solutions to these issues, that allow women to sing in higher registers while preserving counterpoint and also the masculine aesthetic. However, there are female groups, particularly those I have observed in South Texas, that simply perform all songs in their original keys and often will invert the counterpoint of a intervals of a 7th of the chords and parallel movement which sound extremely foreign to their original conception through Western harmony. Again, we can conceive of a multistable inversion both materially and metaphorically in order to preserve an existing instrumental social order at the expense of the feminine. Vocal artists, when negotiating tonal registers, will sing in the keys most comfortable to their range, likewise often remaining in the darker chest voice. What becomes challenging is the Silencing the Female Voice p. 17 choice to either voice or silence the female poetic voice. If the text of a song is simply written from “yo” (I) to “tú” (you), then the song is considered neutral since it reveals neither the narrator nor the subject's gender. In other songs, the nouns, pronouns, and adjectives identify a narrator's gender. Any changes to these properties necessarily affects the natural perspective and, thereby, the structure and tone of the poem. As such, language can reveal, embody and sustain or reject attitudes towards gender. Leticia Soto offer three possibilities for a woman, if she wants to sing songs written from a male poetic persona: (1) sing it without modifying the text for the sake of “tradition” and to be respectful to the original work; (2) adapt the text to a woman's point of view, thereby avoiding gender implications linked to certain roles or identities, as when a song written originally for men acquire homosexual implications if sung by women; or (3) leave the text unchanged when, in performance context, she purposefully sings it to another woman, even when the song was conceived originally to be sung by a man (Soto, 2015:340). The negotiation of personas is often dependent on the song as is again illustrated by Lucha Villa. Having recorded songbook tributes to Jiménez and Juan Gabriel, Lucha recorded a version of La Media Vuelta that is sung from the feminine poetic persona allowable due to the minimal change to the lyric needed in order to accommodate the female voice. There is only one line in the entire song that explicitly sounds the gender of the singer and that is on the word dueño, the “o” suffix in Spanish denoting male gender. Lucha sings it as dueña to denote female gender. However, when singing the Jiménez standard “El Rey,” the lyrics are sung entirely as composed from the male persona. Among the women who perform either in mixed or all female groups, the same approach has been observed. Certain songs, like certain films are inherently male personified and changing the language (like changing the script), would nullify its ontology. To re-write Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” (1980) or Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky” (1976) with Silencing the Female Voice p. 18 a female character in the role of a boxer would defy imagination and reality. However, re-writing Rob Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally” (1989) to “When Sally Met Harry,” metaphorically emphasizing the feminine perspective (assumedly within the film’s narrative as well) would not cause great outcry. In order to preserve notions of authenticity, the soundscape of mariachismo, must maintain the unequal balance between the male and female persona. Conclusion Leonor Xochitl Pérez writes that the inclusion of women in a traditionally male dominated genre not only “empowers women but also highlights the transitional and often confusing gender roles assigned to female mariachi musicians” (Pérez, 2002:145). My conceptualization of mariachismo, characterizes authentic mariachi musicality through a “sounded” and embodied icon of machismo. Vocally this means that women in mariachi adopt a masculine poetic persona that is embodied through the inversion of lyrics sung from a male perspective as well as the adoption of lower tonal registers indexing maleness. Through these processes, the female voice as a metaphoric perspective is silenced in order to accommodate the dominant male persona valued as authentic and tied to larger patriarchal norms historically and socially embedded in society. Women performers closely socialized within traditional Mexican values tend to invert the feminine in order to honor the male perspective, while females with an enculturation positioning them farther away from Mexico, tend to develop new aesthetic tropes rejecting the conservative values traditionally reified in performance. 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