Blurring boundaries in Rosedale Park: The importance of the Tejano Conjunto festival on the transnational dissemination of traditional Texas-Mexican accordion music

Abstract

The contemporary transnational dissemination of Texas-Mexican accordion music has corresponded closely with the rise in prominence of the Tejano Conjunto Festival, sponsored by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio and, since 1982, held annually at Rosedale Park. In modern popular culture, the ease of transnational mobilization—here characterized by global participation in a local music festival—effectively blurs traditional boundaries of class, ethnicity, language, and location. However, this notion of inclusivity masks problematic and long-lasting hegemonies. Simultaneously, it shifts the historiographic narrative of conjunto as cultural resistance (within a tightly constrained notion of Texas-Mexican culture).