This collection documents conjunto music, drawing attention to the life and work of a female conjunto performer, Linda Escobar. Many have written and talked about conjunto: some as a working class sound; some as a marker of la raza claiming their identity; others as a generic type of music; and others as a form of cultural hybridity. In this collection, the ethnographer would like to draw your attention to its role in cultural hybridity because this experience is one that marks the Mexican American experience in Texas, or for that matter, the experience of many borderlanders or as Gloria Anzaldúa famously theorized the "mestizaje" experience of "gente de la frontera" (people of the border), and like Anzaldúa—a Rio Grande Valley native—invites us, this collection pushes viewers to understand this experience as beyond binaries and one that creates new imaginaries.

Many Texas Mexicans, as noted in these interviews, share the experience of feeling like they belong neither here nor there, neither in Texas nor in Mexico. As individuals in that unique position of not readily belonging to a nation, they tend to be more open to the cultural practices of other outside groups. This experience has tragic elements. Listen, for instance, to Escobar talk of her desire to make it as country-western star. This lack of belonging, whether it be a woman in a male dominated industry and/or a Mexican American in an Anglo dominated environment, at the same time, creates space for novel configurations of identity and language—and in the case of this collection—of music. Conjunto music's clearest marker, the accordion, testifies to that tradition. Mexican Americans borrowed the accordion from German, Czech and Slovak Americans and made it their own and invented a music that, today, is more popular than its Bohemian predecessor. When we speak of conjunto music today, we continue to observe that mixing: you see the brilliant accordionist Mingo Saldivar translate Johnny Cash's country western music into conjunto. The landscape of conjunto musicians, fans and dancers has changed vastly over the past half century. The Lower Rio Grande Valley, for instance, transformed from a series of rural hamlets into one of the fastest growing metropolitan region in the United States—for almost a decade. In addition, the region shifted from one dominated by Anglos to one in which almost all of the elected office holders have Spanish surnames and where innumerable numbers of Mexican Americans wield power. What began as a music primarily performed by rural working class people, today is music also performed, danced and listened to by urban professionals. Conjunto music today, essentially, has evolved beyond being bicultural or bilingual: it is transnational. At the same time, conjunto continues to be a marker of past and present Mexican American experiences and appears to be shifting along with that creating new syntheses as witnessed in this collection (see, for example, Conjunto J, Song 1 "El Burro Pardo" (The Roan Donkey)).

My collection can productively be divided into three units.

• The first unit, Event 1, features what many consider to be the most important Tejano Conjunto event: the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center's Tejano Conjunto Festival.
  
  
• The second unit, Events 2-3, contains an open-ended conversation with Tejano Conjunto Diva Linda Escobar about her life history.
  
  
• The third unit, Event 4, draws your attention to a defining feature of conjunto music, the dancers. In Event 4, the ethnographer interviews, Ram and Stefanie Escobar, a couple who loves to dance to conjunto music.

Overall, this video archive is meaningful because it provides a resource on what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated arena and illuminating contextaulization of the songs performed at the festival (e.g., conditions of production, explanation of lyrics, perspective of dancers). Both the interview and Escobar's performance at the festival are highly significant because many scholars have studied and documented Tejano conjunto music but few have focused on women, transnational ties, the military and sexuality. In addition to this feminist perspective, my collection takes into account the cosmopolitan.

This collection is currently in production and is not yet available to the public.

Margaret Dorsey earned her dual PhD in Anthropology and Communication & Culture with an outside minor in Ethnomusicology and Folklore from Indiana University. Dorsey is a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dorsey studied conjunto music, attended conjunto festivals and has known Linda Escobar for the past tens years. Dorsey visited South Texas whenever possible during this period, and during these visits—some for extended ethnographic study, others for brief periods to conduct preinvestigative fieldwork—she devoted part of her attention to the musical traditions of Mexican-Americans, particularly focused on their role in animating social change. On her trips in 2006, her domestic partner, Miguel Díaz-Barriga, acted as videographer. Díaz-Barriga is a visual anthropologist who focuses on social movements in the Americas at Swarthmore College.

Dorsey, a native of South Texas, has long been attracted to the music and politics of the region. It was not until she read about George W. Bush campaigning for governor with Tejano star Emilio Naviara that she fully connected the links. That campaign initiated her first full-length ethnographic project. After studying the convergence of conservative politics with corporate power and Mexican American music, she conducted pre-investigative fieldwork in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Female political activists taught her about their distinctive musico-political tradition of pachangas, where the music of the region—corridos, conjunto—converged with transforming the Anglo and patriarchal power structures. Dorsey's focuses on that growing convergence between politics, transnational marketing, and borderlands music in her book, Pachangas: Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics, and Transnational Marketing (University of Texas Press 2006).