‘This song is a map’: sonic pathways of enclosure and dwelling

Abstract

Many popular songs describe journeys to the Ajusco mountain range, south of Mexico City, sentimentally extolling the region’s colours and natural abundance. The connection between music and place is so close that songs are frequently described as ‘maps’ or ‘guides’. This article explores these songs-as-maps in relation to a distinction between expressivities which are complicit in enclosure, and those involved in dwelling; and it argues for an understanding of songs-as-maps as palimpsestic, over-layered compositions of matter, meaning and sonority on the pathways traversed through Ajusco. In some cases, songs-as-maps describe journeys with an end goal – often the appropriation of a landscape presumed empty – and in others, these songs focus on and enact the process of walking and path-making. At a time when the extension of paths and roads from Mexico City into the Ajusco region has drastically impacted patterns of land tenure – with implications, in turn, for the viability of a densely forested region commonly described as the ‘lungs of Mexico City’ – the affordances of popular song for distinct spatialities is a subject of great importance. We cannot research spatially dynamic musicianship, it is argued here, while sitting still.

Sonic pathway #1

Partway through our interview, Cleotilde and her son Arturo offer to play a song, ‘Ajusco en la historia’ (Ajusco In History). Written by Cleotilde’s late husband Lorenzo, it describes a journey from the centre of Mexico City to the mountainside of Ajusco. They conclude, and then she turns to me. ‘I used to say to my husband’, she says, ‘this isn’t a song. It’s a map’.

*****

Many popular songs describe journeys to the forests of the Ajusco mountain range, to the south of Mexico City, where I have been conducting field research since 2021. Inspired by its ‘majestic landscapes’ ¹ and written in several genres – corridos, música ranchera, huapangos – these songs extol the region’s colours and natural abundance, and portray it as a site for romance. In particular, a wave of songs about Ajusco followed the mid-20th century authorship of the ranchera song ‘Caminito de Contreras’, written by Severiano Briseño and most notably performed by the Guadalajaran singer Lucha Reyes, which traces a journey past the town of Magdalena Contreras to the Ajusco mountains:

Caminito de Contreras,
subidita del Ajusco
De las verdes magueyeras
De allí se me viene el gusto,
subo corriendo el Ajusco
Sólo por venirte a ver Contreras pathway,
the slope up to Ajusco [subidita del Ajusco],
Place of the green maguey plants
From there my desire rises,
and I go running to Ajusco
Just to see your face

This song may be positioned within a wider tradition, within ranchera music, of songs that cultivate an often intimate sense of place through singing about physical movement through them, especially on foot. ² It maps Ajusco as a site of desire, of movement, and – finally – of appropriation. The protagonist of ‘Caminito de Contreras’ looks up to the mountain from the city; he has ‘a little piece of land/To make you your little house/covered in creepers’. As the following excerpt makes clear, a (barely) sublimated racial politics is also at play in the song:

Se miran rojos los campos
Y más blanca tu casita
A donde quiero llegar
En la montaña se ve
Una casita blanquear
Y a su ventana se asoma
Tu carita angelical The fields look red
And your little house is whiter
where I want to go
And in the mountains you can see
A whitewashed house
And there looks out of your window
Your angelic face

Here, colour also relates to visual aesthetic enjoyment: the ‘reddness’ of the fields substitutes for the biological specificities of one of Central Mexico’s most biodiverse settings.

The desires of ‘Caminito de Contreras’ reflect one of the most significant social trends in Ajusco since the 20th century: the zone has become economically dominated by urban travel outwards into it, in the form of tourism, land purchases by wealthy urbanites, and the mass-scale appropriation of land by the state. ³ Over time, land on the Ajusco Sierra has become increasingly enclosed in ways that have benefited the wealthier classes, and made it harder to walk paths through this terrain. This trend is related to a pattern of severe deforestation: forest loss is caused by enclosure and appropriation, and serves as a pretext for state appropriation of territory. Lucha Reyes recorded ‘Caminito de Contreras’ 6 years after the 1936 creation of a natural reserve in the Ajusco region that stripped the local Indigenous community of the majority of its communally held land, with the intention of stimulating tourism to the region and of protecting the area’s forests. ⁴ In the present, this connection is solidified at the entrance of Parque Ejidal San Nicolás Totolapan, one of the most successful ecotourism ventures in this region, where the name of one of the park’s restaurants, Subidita del Ajusco, is prominently displayed on a metre-tall canvas.

This article intends to make two interventions. A range of scholarship across human geography, music studies, and sound studies has challenged visual-centric cartographical logics by gesturing towards sound and the notion of aural cartographies. ⁵ ‘Songs-as-maps’, as performed within the contested territories of Ajusco, complexly imbricate the sonorous and spatial. At the same time, I respond to ecomusicologists’ tendency to connect music with a posture of care towards natural spaces. Nancy Guy’s pioneering research, for example, connects a decline in the sentimental connections drawn by composers of popular song with Taiwan’s Tamsui River with the environmental degradation of the river itself. ⁶ The first intervention made in this article is to challenge the frame through which musical regard for ecosystems or landscapes is equated with practical care towards the same. Resisting the simple equation of music and sound with spatial counter-hegemony, I emphasize instead contrasting modalities of spatial ordering present in popular song, built on Ingold’s distinction between static ‘enclosure’, and active ‘dwelling’:

It is a mistake to equate dwelling with rest or stasis. For being at home in the world entails action and perception, and to act and perceive one must move about. But enclosure blocks movement, converting the places that people inhabit to containers in which they are imprisoned. ⁷

Ingold proposes this theoretical contrast in order to untie the concept of ‘dwelling’ from its apolitical conceptual inheritance, and undo the concept’s association with human exceptionalism.

Both of these modalities, I argue, are reflected in popular songs about Ajusco. Songs such as ‘Caminito de Contreras’ symbolically empty Ajusco’s forested mountainscapes, performing intellectual work in favour of the politics of enclosure. Equally, the mobility of music, sound, and listening practices complicates any effort to separate acoustic cartographies from human movement. In this sense, songs-as-maps may also challenge the notion of land as empty, static property and bear witness to the region’s shifting spatialities. ⁸ These popular songs help inhabitants assert presence in Ajusco not through ownership, but through movement, responding to this zone’s complex, divisive local history of land ownership, fragmentation and dispossession. To make this argument, I emphasize that within music, dwelling and enclosure are often practically differentiated only very subtly, through musicians’ nuanced and specific creative choices. In this sense, the argument made here constitutes a response to geographical work which locates radical politics in the tracing of post-Euclidian shapes, spaces and routes, ⁹ by showing how songs-as-maps tracing the same routes may be imbricated in both (fluid) dwelling and (bounded) enclosure.

The second intervention made here is to conceptualize and re-enact songs-as-maps in material terms, showing how songs and sonorities are imbricated in the material creation of specific pathways and routes. I argue for a perspective on songs-as-paths as palimpsests: layers of materiality and signification. I seek to extend Daughtry’s reimagining of musical compositions as palimpsests, resulting from ‘erasure, effacement, occupation, displacement, collaboration, and reinscription’. ¹⁰ Pace Daughtry’s anxieties about the apparently static, bounded nature of the palimpsest, the songs-as-maps analyzed here are composed of past and present movement; continuously reinscribed pathways composed over centuries of movement, matter and sound.

My work here is partly historical, informed by archival research and accounts of musical, acoustic, and geographical change in semi-structured interviews with c.55 residents from the Ajusco zone. Equally, inspired by the work of several music and sound scholars, ¹¹ I have used walking as a participatory research method. Acoustic ecologists have long practiced sound or listening walks as a method for discovering soundscapes. ¹² For ethnomusicologists, walking is both central within fieldwork, and important to musical creativity itself. ¹³ Walking may heighten the sensory links between the natural environment and land, and the communities that emerge in contact with them. Aduonum, for example, claims in the context of fieldwork in Ghana that walking ‘connected me to the land and community’, allowing the scholar to create ‘ritual paths that would later become my cultural map of the society’. ¹⁴ In the context of Ajusco, walking suggests decolonial spatialities: there is a contrast between the recently built roads linking urban and rural, and the winding, almost imperceptible paths through the mountains that local inhabitants walked to reach nearby towns.

At the same time, walking is not innocent. There is a contrast between walking that is purposive, planned and direct, and walking which is explorative, speculative, adaptive. ¹⁵ Walks may facilitate the social construction of space, and the fluid affects of dwelling; but they also aid boundary-drawing and the claiming of territory. Distinguishing these modalities of walking requires attention to power relations. Where the devastating forest loss witnessed in Ajusco in recent decades has often been blamed on local populations, it is also driven by the expansion of tourism throughout Ajusco – often taking the form of hiking – and the large-scale enclosure of land for sale to wealthy elites seeking leisure and rural ‘escape’. ¹⁶ In this sense, it is important that the expansion of road infrastructure upon which the area’s tourism and property boom depends is also a consistent global driver of deforestation; ¹⁷ and that the link between expanding transport infrastructure and deforestation continues to drive controversy in Mexico, such as in the case of the Tren Maya (‘Maya Train’) in the Yucatan peninsula. ¹⁸

In this article I engage both excursions to the Ajusco Sierra which implicate sound, and musically mediated accounts of such excursions, arguing for their relevance to local patterns of dispossession and environmental degradation. Besides the theoretical interventions described above, I am motivated by the task of appropriately listening to the music of a local composer: the late author of the song cited at the opening of this article, Lorenzo García, whose work has much to say about musical dwelling. I also aim to bring out the ways that sound walks in Ajusco continuously invoke traces of past sound- and land-scapes, which may be partially recovered through archival and musical accounts of travel to this region uncovered by other research methods; and which are marked by resonant traces of dispossession. As such, this article is structured in palimpsestic fashion: it presents seven ‘sonic pathways’ (the first of which is found above), traced over very similar routes in the Ajusco Sierra, which successively layer onto one another mutually entangled sonority, meaning and materiality. These pathways first trace the sonic and musical resonances of excursions to Ajusco in the colonial and independence periods, demonstrating different kinds of sonic colonialities imbricated in processes of dispossession and enclosure, before addressing the unsettled sonic pathways of tourism in the 20th century. To conclude, based on a series of participatory sound walks I carried out in the zone, the final pathway responds to those that preceded it, exploring how these histories resound in performances of the music of Lorenzo García.

Sonic pathway #2: sound, land and colonialism

The Ajusco Sierra was first inhabited by the Cuicuilco people until the eruption of the Xitle volcano in the 3rd or 4th century CE covered the region with lava, with long-term negative consequences for agriculture; even in the 19th century, the traveller Frances Erskine described ‘a great tract of black lava, sterile, bleak, and entirely destitute of vegetation’ in the area (1843: 315). ¹⁹ When the Spanish arrived Ajusco was inhabited by Tepanecs, who had fled successive 15th-century military defeats to the Aztec Triple Alliance, bargaining for their lives with the Mexica by offering regular tribute of timber and stone. ²⁰ Tepanecs formed a settlement, Axochco (‘place where the water flourishes’), which is today divided into two conjoined towns, San Miguel Ajusco and Santo Tomás Ajusco. In this article, I use ‘Ajusco’ to describe the broader mountainous region, and ‘the town of Ajusco’ to describe this settlement, comprised of two towns.

Due to the poor agricultural quality of the land owned by the town of Ajusco, its population has been economically dependent on logging since pre-Hispanic times, establishing a strong cultural association with the forest. ²¹ The palo volador [flying pole] tradition was practiced by Xochimilca visitors to Ajusco who ‘chose a tall, straight tree from the forests of Ajusco, erected it in a sacred place, and four men would lower themselves from the top into the space below’; in August and September, Tepanec inhabitants of Ajusco would fell the largest tree in the forest, place it at the entrance to their settlement, and venerate it with songs, dances, and offerings as part of a child protection ritual. ²²

The land rights of the Tepanecs inhabiting Ajusco are asserted in two so-called ‘primordial titles’ from the 16th and 17th centuries. The term título primordial, ‘primordial title’, is used to refer to written documents put together by Indigenous communities themselves in order to validate their claims to land before the Spanish Crown. Those pertaining to Ajusco, documents dating to 1531 and 1609, are particularly valuable for their richness and detail. ²³ Within these documents, the zone’s inhabitants reduced their territorial claims as part of negotiations with Spanish invaders; ²⁴ the 1609 primordial title, for example, is a translated version of a Nahuatl-language speech by the leader of the town. Where Astorga Poblete takes these titles to show that ‘in pre-Hispanic America [Euclidean] space did not exist’, ²⁵ it is more accurate to say that these titles construct space through walking. The 1609 title opens by criticizing the violence and greed of the ‘people from Castilla’, before asserting the existence of a town: ²⁶

But despite all, my heart cheers

and I agree to form a town here;

at the foot of this hill of Axochco Xalticpac

only because from down there to here

It is the seat of the Axochpaneco men

The address calls for the town’s inhabitants to convert to Christianity in order to avoid being slaughtered, telling the hearer that ‘It is convenient that we be baptized [. . .] to see if they do not kill us’ (the latter phrase is a refrain) and ‘It is convenient that we reduce our boundaries’. The town’s new, reduced boundaries are described as a walk around the community territory’s edges, punctuated by shared sensory references:

  Then now, I cut and reduce our lands

   which are to be, and my will is,

   that our boundaries should begin

    where the sun rises

 They will start where they call Tzictecomatitlan.

   We’ll go looking where the cold always comes from.

  We will arrive where they call Tzipictitlan.

  We will look where the beautiful sun sets.

  We will arrive where they call Nopaltitlan.

   We go where they call Atlmiyatiloyan

  We will arrive where they call Cacalotl Ineman.

   Here we will turn, where the sun sets

    We will look where the star shines.

 We will arrive by where they call Tlatlatiloyan.

   We go where they say Tecuanatlan.

    We go where they say Tlecuilco

   here on the side of the south star.

   We will go looking for the sunrise.

 We will arrive by where they say Tochtepec.

   We go where they say Ahuacatitlan.

    We go where they say Micaoztoc.

    We go where they say Iztactlali

   then here, our conclusive limits will be closed

 that will surround the hill called Axochco Zacapan Xalan.

   I calculate that for that little land

    maybe they won’t kill us.

In seeking to responsibly interpret this text, two points ought to be acknowledged: first, engaging with texts produced during colonial encounter often requires imagination (Fourie and Haggett, 2022: 636); ²⁷ second, both the binary division between speech and song (e.g. Tomlinson, 2007) ²⁸ and the silenced logocentrism of contemporary legal texts (e.g. Robinson, 2020) ²⁹ are colonial in origin. Against this background, it is notable that the linguistic formulae and repetition of this text may be legible to contemporary readers as poetry; the text’s locutionary function in establishing boundaries under duress suggests a form of heightened, performative speech; and the text enacts a common experience of movement. These features of the town’s primordial titles were accentuated at a contemporary reading of the text during a cultural event held on the bandstand in the centre of the town of Ajusco in October 2023, during which a resident of the town wept as he read out the titles’ account of the slaughter of the town’s early inhabitants. This reading was unusually emotionally direct, when compared to the majority of the more formal musical and literary performances taking place on this site; but it also reclaimed the sense of these primordial titles precisely as performance to assert a town’s unity, shared identity, and sovereignty. ³⁰

After the town was recognized by the Spanish Crown with a coat-of-arms, a canvas map of the town’s territory was produced. ³¹ Percheron ³² astutely observes that granting Indigenous towns legal recognition legitimized the appropriation of land by Spanish colonialists in the areas surrounding them; thus, a number of powerful haciendas were created in the area which, on the basis of legally questionable activity and the use of force, progressively encroached onto Indigenous communal land throughout the colonial era. As a consequence, although in 1747 the Spanish Crown conceded to the residents of Ajusco the right to fell trees on their territory, in the 19th century many inhabitants were forced to sign contracts with nearby haciendas to cut down timber. ³³

Sonic pathway #3: belliphonic excursions

The early 19th century presented bellicose motives for travel to Ajusco during the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1820) that overthrew Spanish colonial rule. Rebels – often described by Royalist writers as ‘bandits’ and ‘wrongdoers’ [malvados], but likely of Indigenous origin – hid in Ajusco’s mountainous terrain, and letters from successive viceroys of New Spain continuously appealed to military leaders in the area to conduct dangerous expeditions to capture them. Soldiers were often reluctant to participate, many complaining about the exhaustion suffered by the horses used on these expeditions, desertions, their salaries, ³⁴ and the weather. ³⁵

The rebels in Ajusco sought to disrupt supplies arriving in protected convoys between Mexico City and the nearby city of Cuernavaca, on a route later turned into a railway. Given the support they enjoyed from the local population, ³⁶ the fight against the rebels became an increasingly miserable experience throughout the War of Independence. On multiple occasions, expeditions encountered the hanged bodies of royalists; one lasted 26 hours, with some soldiers walking barefoot, in heavy rain, with little food. ³⁷

Through downbeat letters describing the ongoing difficulties (and eventual failure) of the counter-insurgency, we read how these soldiers learned to listen to the mountain’s soundscapes during war. We read how, from afar, the viceroy Francisco Javier Venegas instructed his subordinates in sigilo – ‘silence’ or ‘stealth’ – so as to ‘fall on enemies quickly and unexpectedly’; ³⁸ but also how soldiers learned from experience to decipher belliphonic sounds. One soldier repeatedly heard volleys of two gunshots while passing the foot of the mountain, on the first occasion followed by two insurgents fleeing on horseback, and an intense battle between the insurgents and the royalists. The second occasion was after dark, when he interpreted the two-gunshot sound as ‘probably signs of their withdrawal, since at the break of day the following day not a single man was seen in the entire camp’. ³⁹ The royalists later began, similarly, to use gunshots as a signal coordinating attacks on the rebels. ⁴⁰ Knowledge about the insurgents’ musical and ritual lives also came to be useful for the royalists. On one occasion, a soldier named Mariano de Navas wrote to a commander of the army that he witnessed 60 rebels ‘most of them with uniforms, caja (snare drum) and banner’. However, de Navas informed, the rebels did not ‘have Music, as some have said: their entry was beating a march to the evening prayers’ ⁴¹ (we may infer that the category ‘music’ here refers to instrumental music). Knowledge of this ritual life was useful for the counterinsurgency; one successful raid on a feast day [día festivo] in a town in the Ajusco mountains occurred after soldiers were informed that ‘días festivos are the ones that the damned insurgents have entered most frequently’. ⁴²

Such efforts were in vain – the rebels prevailed, and the colonial authorities forced to flee. The sounds of the counterinsurgency, while distant in local memory, nonetheless vicariously resonate through the delinquent sonorities of later times – the chainsaws of armed clandestine loggers; or the raucous sounds of firecrackers during festivities, the subject of continual complaints by urban newcomers – through which the zone is constructed as the dangerous periphery of an urban power centre.

Sonic pathway #4: turtledoves

By the mid-19th century, 69% of families in Ajusco lived from producing and selling charcoal, with 13% more who survived from selling firewood; ⁴³ yet an increasing number of families did so on others’ land. The land reform of 1856 aimed to create a popular smallholding class, although it was only implemented in Ajusco in the 1870s. The direct result of its implementation was that during the Porfiriato dictatorship (1876–1911), much of the communal land of Ajusco was sold as smallholdings. ⁴⁴ These processes were interrupted by the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), during which the population of the town of Ajusco first allied with the rebel Zapatistas, then fled to the mountains as the troops of Venustiano Carranza burned down their town in 1913. First-hand accounts of this time describe attempts to maintain community cultural life while fleeing government troops, including holding Mass; ⁴⁵ many other accounts describe the slow process of reconstructing and re-establishing community life in the town of Ajusco in the wake of the Revolution, including replacing church bells that had been stolen by Carranza’s forces. ⁴⁶

Where one of the major consequences of the Revolution was redistributive land reform, in Ajusco this failed to occur: the people of the town were unable to reclaim their terrain under the post-revolutionary land reform, because the owner of a local estate stole their primordial land titles. ⁴⁷ Indeed, the town of Ajusco lost the majority of its land when in 1936, the government of Lázaro Cárdenas created the Cumbres del Ajusco National Park, which incorporated and reforested much terrain belonging to the town of Ajusco by decree. This reflected the ingrained presumption that rural communities threatened ‘[natural] equilibrium, in the way that they exploited forested reserves without moderation and practiced excessive, uncontrolled logging’. ⁴⁸ The community of Ajusco recuperated much of this land only decades later, through a 1974 presidential decree.

Elite imaginaries during both the repressive Porfiriato dictatorship (1876–1911) and the period during and after the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) constructed Ajusco as uninhabited space. Land was increasingly thought in ways amenable to elite dispositions, interests and desires; urbanites’ ability to travel to and through Ajusco was facilitated by the Porfiriato-era construction of the railway line mentioned just above, which operated from 1897 until the late 20th century. These trends become audible in Julio Sesto’s La tórtola del Ajusco (1915), ⁴⁹ a novel written during the Revolution which criticizes the possibility of democratic rule. Its protagonist, a woman taking the nickname ‘Fémina’, is both from a poor family and of Spanish descent; she and her mother are taken in by a wealthy porfirista benefactor with a large estate on the slope of the Ajusco mountain range. Fémina is known for her beautiful voice, and nurtures a singing career as the novel’s titular ‘Ajusco turtle-dove’ before a tragic death characteristic of Porfiriato-era novels, imputed to be at the hands of Zapatista revolutionaries.

Notably, the novel enacts a colonization of Ajusco through sound. In La tórtola del Ajusco noise is associated with urbanity and silence with rurality, and given local geography this translates straightforwardly onto altitude: as characters move further up the mountain’s slopes, the environment is quietened. This silencing of Ajusco’s complex nature-cultures is dramatized in a scene in which Fémina is taken for an aeroplane ride with a Belgian aviator, Rolando (a stand-in for Roland Garros): their height above the mountain is characterized by stillness and transcendent visual beauty. Elite musicality is then layered over this silence. Fémina’s ‘turtledove’ singing covers for the absence of birdsong itself: Fémina is celebrated for voicing the muted landscape as she walks through her wealthy benefactor’s estate, singing as she goes.

In the 1960s, La tórtola del Ajusco was adapted into a film with the same title by the Spanish-Mexican director Juan Orol – a notoriously poor director of musical ‘rumberas’ films who has drawn occasional comparisons to Ed Wood. Orol picks up on the acoustically rich descriptions of the original novel: Fémina’s excursions through her benefactor’s estate are now taken as an opportunity for song, featuring a brief pastoral ranchera entitled ‘Caminito del Ajusco’. It describes a journey up the slope to the Ajusco mountain, past the communities of Tlalpan and Magdalena Contreras:

 Entre caminos de flores,
 los caminos del Ajusco,
 donde cantan mis amores
 hay allí una luz primera,
 un festín de primavera,
 que me alegra el corazón
 las veredas del Ajusco,
ya me van guiando a Contreras
 entre maíz, calor y surcos
y hasta las fuentes de Tlalpan,
 me dirijo sin tardanza,
 voy en busca de mi amor
Fuentes Brotantes de Tlalpan,
 dejé toda mi pasión
 en su agua cristalina,
 reflejaste una ilusión
cuéntame algo, mutuo amigo,
 tu canción aquí no niego,
  porque te vas tan solito
  aquí dejas tus amores,
  alimento y ruiseñores,
 voy subiendo tu canción   Between paths of flowers,
   the pathways of Ajusco,
   where my loves sing
   there is a first light
    a spring feast
   that gladdens my heart
   the pathways of Ajusco
  guide me to [Magdalena] Contreras
   amidst corn, rays and furrows
   and to the sources of Tlalpan
    I go without delay,
   I go in search of my love
Fuentes Brotantes [gushing springs] of Tlalpan,
   there I left all my passion
   in its crystalline water,
   you reflected an illusion
  tell me something, mutual friend,
    your song I do not deny,
   why are you leaving so alone?
    here you leave your loves,
    food and nightingales,
    I go lifting up your song

Like the earlier ‘Caminito de Contreras’, this song sentimentally intertwines landscape, desire and travel – although it is, if anything, even more pastoral and descriptive. At the same time, the inhabitants these regions in towns such as Santo Tomás Ajusco, San Miguel Ajusco, San Nicolas Totolapan and San Miguel Topilejo are erased within ‘Caminito del Ajusco’. In perpetuating an elite, domesticated, aestheticized notion of the natural world, this song obscures the ongoing appropriation of Ajusco’s forestscapes, and naturalizes the gaze of the urban visitor.

Sonic pathway #5: the snowy mountain peak

The first months of 1980 saw what has become an increasingly rare occurrence: snow on Ajusco’s peak. This phenomenon, occurring once every few years, is referenced in a 1993 song by goth rock outfit Santa Sabina entitled ‘Ajusco Nevado’, whose oblique lyrics – ‘These days of clarity/they only made me think/that your power is stronger/than endless search’ – may be only speculatively connected to the ostensible subject matter, especially given the untimely death of the band’s singer Rita Guerrero in 2011. The band’s bassist, Poncho Figueroa, later gave me his interpretation of Guerrero’s intention for the song: it responded to the ‘spiritual shock’ of seeing the Ajusco mountain from within a polluted capital (personal communication, May 2023):

Let’s say that this is a semi-ecological track. It was not intended to raise awareness, but it is a landscape of a landscape. You know, Mexico City is very polluted, and normally you don’t see the volcanoes, you don’t see anything.

We can, perhaps, take this song to replicate the urban gaze, engaging Ajusco as a distanced object of desire.

In February 1980, images of snowfall on the Ajusco peak were exciting enough to local residents to draw a significant queue of traffic on the roads from the capital to the mountain. Pictures of the snowy mountaintop were published in newspapers such as the daily Unomásuno, which even reported from the mountaintop. As the newspaper’s intrepid reporter described, one boy was sufficiently inspired by the snow to sing a Christmas song – ‘Feliz navidad, feliz navidad’ – and an Italian opera singer hired by the National Fund for Social Activities began to sing, before being silenced by an unnamed ‘highly educated neurotic’: ‘“Vaffanculo, miserable sow!” they answered in his language. And the artist closed his beak like an obedient little bird’. ⁵⁰ This account is indicative of government and media attempts to beautify Ajusco’s public image, so as to draw urbanites to visit and move to the zone.

Sonic pathway #6: settlers and clearances

The ostensibly unremarkable background to Unomásuno’s story was the expansion of transport and energy infrastructure into the Ajusco mountainscape. In 1975 and 1976 a highway was constructed from Mexico City, past Ajusco, to Cuernavaca in the south, catalyzing a series of connected processes: the expansion of tourism, so-called paracaidismo – ‘parachuting’ – by poor migrant communities, generally called cólonos (‘settlers’), who would suddenly descend en masse on uninhabited terrain, and ever further elite purchases of formerly communally held smallholdings. ⁵¹ As local property prices rose, many sold their land to settle on cheaper property further up the mountain. The rapid expansion of this property market created possibilities for both intentional and unintentional fraud – especially in the cases of settlers who sold property rights they mistakenly assumed to be legitimate. In turn, the collapse of the agrarian economy that followed cuts to agricultural subsidies in the 1980s and 1990s accelerated these trends. A conflictive cycle emerged in which settlers from rural areas repeatedly occupied informal, self-built housing they had constructed on unoccupied land, continually returning after violent police displacement; they created community organizations to lobby local governments; and local governments eventually agreed to legal ‘regularization’ of their land. ⁵²

The capital government invoked environmental regulations as a way to gain support from middle- and upper-class ecologists for large-scale, violent police clearances of poor settler communities. ⁵³ Equally, settlers’ community mobilization became a cause celebre in cosmopolitan activist circles. This was reflected in music performed at community meetings, where genres such as nueva canción and rock resounded. The pathbreaking Mexican rock band Botellita de Jerez, and the longstanding parody protest song act Los Nakos, performed on several occasions as part of a close, activist engagement with these community groups. ⁵⁴ Members of the anarchist theatre group CLETA (Free Centre of Theatrical and Artistic Expression) also described how, in solidarity with the communities of migrants seeking to settle in the zone, they performed ‘choral poetry with some texts of Leopoldo Ayala and the songs of [Mexican protest singer] Judith Reyes’. ⁵⁵

Sonic pathway #7: the music of Lorenzo García

‘This song is a map’; a phrase, opening this piece of writing above, which has aided me on multiple walks in the Ajusco mountains with friends from the nearby town. On several occasions, these walks have involved songs composed by the late Lorenzo García, an originario from Ajusco, who wrote several songs in praise of the town. Respondents have sung García’s songs a capella while ascending the Pico del Águila; they have played recordings of these songs at this mountain’s peak; and they have challenged me to remember and sing back the lyrics. These ‘songs-as-maps’ carry layers of meaning accumulated from the resonant histories of encounter and dispossession described above.

Musical place-making in the mountainscape is part of wider attempts to popularize songs both thematically connected to Ajusco and authored by nearby residents. As in Mexico City in general, a number of towns in the region (Santo Tomás Ajusco, San Miguel Ajusco, Lomás de Tepemecatl, San Miguel Topilejo) are afforded rights due to their status as originario (‘originary’). Governance of these towns’ territories is ceded to families who can trace back ancestry to the colonial era, who are represented by the inherited status of comunero. Nonetheless, in recent years the capital government has asserted the legal power to award and remove ‘originary’ status; indeed, San Miguel Xicalco lost this status for a time before the members of the town, on the basis of their primordial land titles, reasserted ancestral rights to their territory in 2018. ⁵⁶ Originary status is also threatened by urban expansion, especially as younger originarios pursue higher education outside of their communities, and as richer urbanites move to small countryside towns, newly connected to the capital by expanding road infrastructure, where land is cheaper. In the town of Ajusco originarios are now outnumbered by these outsiders, who they have begun to call avecindados, and who are both socially advantaged and excluded from the town’s originary system of governance. ⁵⁷ Here, the challenges of urban expansion are experienced through tensions between originarios and avecindados. Walks through Ajusco can attract allegations of territorial appropriation: during research I became aware of local controversy over some avecindados earning money by taking paying groups from Mexico City on walks through Ajusco’s mountains. Inhabitants also complain about the effects of increased numbers of tourists – especially through the reduced wildlife populations nearby paths through Ajusco, and a resulting lack of sonic richness during walks through this terrain.

In such a context, popular song is incorporated within wider strategies for pueblos originarios to maintain ‘their cohesion, their uses and customs [usos y costumbres], their organizational traditions and their values, as well as their territories and natural resources’ in a context of urban expansion. ⁵⁸ Towns may assert originario status by demonstrating the existence of cultural traditions handed down between generations, especially amidst the recognition of the ways that social and cultural reproduction is threatened by mass urban incursion into their terrain. In this way, popular songs which reflect latter-day mobilities are also used to respond to present-day patterns of movement and travel.

As part of my research with the inhabitants of Ajusco, I carried out a series of community sound walks. Influenced by Participatory Action Research (PAR), these sound walks saw members of the community trace routes through their surroundings, and explore the soundscapes they moved through in the process. Amanda Gutiérrez suggests that soundwalking in groups allows for greater reflexivity and awareness of different listening positionalities. ⁵⁹ Similarly, the sound walks I organized were carried out in groups. These routes were traced both through the town of Ajusco and through the surrounding mountainscape; the physical paths taken were noted down, and the soundscapes of these routes were recorded, alongside participants’ reflections on their life experiences, their town’s history, and the changes they had witnessed. This method deepened my understanding of Ajusco’s changing soundscapes, but it also reflected presumptions about sound and listening as connected to wellbeing, and the importance of the transmission of auditory (sonic and musical) knowledge between generations.

Although this methodology most closely resembled a shared ‘listening walk’, ⁶⁰ participants often chose an active role, singing and sounding with our surroundings. These spontaneous musicalities have often reflected complex proximities with varied ‘dwellings’ and ‘enclosures’. In the Ajusco mountains, participants described how features of the changing soundscape could aid movement: for instance, listening to certain bird calls could help to provide advance warning of rain. This aural attunement to the myriad pathways winding through the mountains was, as in other contexts, associated with originario or Indigenous identity. ⁶¹ Many participants recounted enjoyment of the sound and the sensation of the wind; the feeling of one’s body being enveloped and one’s other senses being overwhelmed. One evoked Ingold’s description of wind as ‘an experience of feeling, just as the brilliance or cloudiness of the sky is an experience of light’, ⁶² in describing how ‘the sensation of feeling the air on your face, it moves you, right? It envelops your body. But the sound the wind makes, the sound of the trees, the leaves, is incredible. It seems that they’re playing a melody for you’ (Interview, Susana, June 2022).

Songs by Lorenzo García became present on a number of sound walks up the Pico del Águila (Eagle’s Peak). García was a composer of popular song who performed in a trio with his cousin and wife since the 1950s, before his untimely death in the early 1990s. Although he was an originario from the town of Ajusco, he worked as an itinerant musician; his sons, who mostly live in nearby Tlalpan, still perform many of his songs together in an ensemble, Los Hermanos García. As two of his sons put it during interviews, their father was a very ‘descriptive’ person; his songs continually reflect the mobilities of their author who, as his wife described to me later, was continually on the move:

Because we were rehearsing, because we were on tour, we couldn’t have a stable job. And my husband even had several jobs too. But he couldn’t go without rehearsing and without going to sing here or there where they invited us. It was more about finding where they would listen to us, and, well, if they paid us all the better to support our family. My husband [. . .] would tell me “look, this guy, his daughter is going to turn 15 and he doesn’t have any money [to pay for musicians]. Come on, let’s sing for her!” That’s how he was (Interview, July 2022).

The lyrics of Lorenzo García’s huapango ‘Ajusco en la historia’ – sung to me by his widow and son during an interview while his picture hung on the wall – thus present a dynamic spatiality which contrasts radically to ‘Caminito de Contreras’. Indeed, this contrast can help to explain ambivalence about the latter song on the part of residents of the town of Ajusco. Written in 1961, ‘Ajusco en la historia’ describes a journey to the town:

  Para llegar al Ajusco, se cruza la capital.
 Esa ciudad primorosa del Distrito Federal.
Por la calzada de Tlalpan, al centro de la ciudad.
A un lado está Xochimilco, y del otro Coyoacán.
  De Tlalpan sigue San Pedro,
   San Andrés Totoltepec.
Chicalco y la Magdalena, pueblitos que cruzaré.
Escribieron en la historia cuando la revolución.
Por eso Ajusco querido, te llevo en el corazón.
Caminito de Contreras que vas por San Nicolás.
  No pases por Montealegre,
  que me muero al recordar.
Vete cruzando veredas, igual que el Ferrocarril
 hasta llegar al Ajusco, tierra donde yo nací.
Bonito tu panorama, tus hembras son puro amor
 también tus hombres son nobles, y amigos de corazón.
Viva el patrón de mi pueblo, apóstol Santo Tomás.
 También San Miguel Arcángel, y aquí acabo mi cantar.   To get to Ajusco, you cross the capital
 It is the beautiful city of the Federal District
along the Tlalpan road, from the centre of the city
on one side is Xochimilco and the other, Coyoacán
  From Tlalpan there follows San Pedro,
   San Andrés Totoltepec
Chicalco and La Magdalena, little towns I will cross
  Written into history, during the revolution
That’s why, dear Ajusco, I carry you in my heart
Contreras pathway, that goes through San Nicolás
   Don’t go through Monte Alegre,
   which I’m dying to remember.
  Go crossing paths, just like the railway
until you reach Ajusco, the land where I was born
your panorama is beautiful, your women, pure love
  men are also men, and friends at heart
 long live the saint of my people, Apostle Saint Thomas
Also Saint Michael the Archangel, and so ends my song.

‘Ajusco en la historia’ is not just a valuable document of this zone’s past; it is also, simultaneously, productive of particular mobilities and routes. The song’s opening description of these places reflects the bus route that began to operate in the 1940s between La Merced in central Mexico City and the town of Ajusco, operated by an originario family. Many who grew up in Ajusco are also drawn to this song’s description of the train line that passed through it on the way to Cuernavaca (along the long-standing colonial supply route the royalists, above, sought to defend) which closed in 1992. While it operated, the train was a key part of the soundscape of the town of Ajusco, passing daily at 4pm; many recall the piercing whistle of the approaching train as a synecdoche for childhood, nostalgia, and lost rural innocence.

Equally, even after its composition ‘Ajusco en la historia’ provoked movement. Cleotilde and Lorenzo performed the song as part of the pair’s support for social programmes among communities of settlers [cólonos]:

they took groceries, they took deliveries of food [despensas], they also took doctors, nurses, vaccines, all that the people who were settling needed. Because it was just people who, well, had nowhere to live and lived where they could live and build their homes. They began to make their stone houses on top. Others just cardboard sheets, and that’s all, small, simple huts. And we used to go to give some cheer at meetings that the delegación (local government of Tlapan) had [with settlers]. To help those people.

Since travel to such settlements [colonias] was complicated by the fact that often ‘there weren’t even paths’, ‘Ajusco en la historia’ thus both documented some pathways and motivated the creation of others: paths created through sounding. At no point, therefore, is this song-as-map static. Rather, it is a ‘map of dwelling’ engaging social flux and movement, amidst the rapid urbanization of the 20th century, which replays poet Antonio Machado’s assertion that se hace el camino al andar (‘the road is made by walking’).

On one sound walk, I was accompanied up the Eagle’s Peak by Miriam, who runs a local community media project called Axochco, donde florece el agua (Axochco, where the water flourishes); her collaborator on the programme, Ramiro; and her brother Antonio, a member of their family’s successful mariachi band, the first to be founded in the town of Ajusco in 1942, by his grandfather. On the way, Miriam and Ramiro began to sing songs together a capella to pass the time, such as Valentín Elizalde’s ‘Mi Yaquesita’: ‘ay mi yaquesita, ay mi yaquesita, you have a beautiful body, that of a mermaid’. Nearing the peak, Miriam began to sing ‘Los Altos del Ajusco’, Lorenzo García’s eulogy for the Ajusco mountain range:

 Esos altos del Ajusco
que re chulos que bonitos,
 yo sé que son sin igual
 donde llega mucha gente
 sólo por subir al cerro
 donde está el águila real
 Ay pero que linda tierra
con tu cielo y tus estrellas,
y tus hembras, puro amor,
 arrullado por las aves
 entre flores y maizales
y al oriente tus Volcanes
 puro Ajusco, sí Señor.   Those heights of Ajusco
  how cute, how beautiful,
I know they are without equal
 where many people arrive
  just to climb the hill
 where the golden eagle lives
 Ay, but what a beautiful land
 with your sky and your stars,
 and your women, pure love,
  lulled by the birds
between flowers and cornfields
and to the east your volcanoes
 pure Ajusco, yes sir.

When we reached the mountain peak and start to cook a barbecue meal, Ramiro played a recording of this song from his phone, followed by ‘Ajusco en la historia’.

Composed in 1957, ‘Los Altos del Ajusco’ was a milestone, the first song about Ajusco written by someone from the town. When it was first performed for the town’s population, it proved wildly popular. ‘Every time we named Ajusco’, Cleotilde said, ‘they applauded and didn’t let us sing it. We had to repeat [“Los Altos del Ajusco”] three times’ (Interview, Cleotilde, September 2023). Its lyrics speak to a time when, from the mid-20th century, people in the town of Ajusco were becoming accustomed to the presence of hikers, from the city and elsewhere. ‘Los Altos del Ajusco’ negotiates a world in which the beauty of the Ajusco mountains is validated by outsiders’ complex desires to climb it, entangled in the affects of leisure, longing and appropriation.

At the same time, this song has become incorporated into wider cultural work which responds to the ambivalent effects of urbanization encroachment into the zone. Singing ‘Los Altos del Ajusco’ on our walk was a conscious act of musical place-making which extended the work of Axochco, donde florece el agua. This project seeks to platform and ‘recuperate’ local traditions: so, Miriam and Ramiro have run features on groups from Santo Tomás Ajusco – including an hour-long programme on the town’s rich mariachi tradition (initiated in the 1940s by Miriam’s grandfather, Alberto Pasalagua); via Facebook live, they broadcast live from community festivities, such as the fiesta patronal (patron-saint festival) of Santo Tomás Ajusco and the towns nearby; and they also run cultural events which place songs about Ajusco side-by-side with resonances that recall Ajusco’s colonial and pre-colonial histories, such as live readings of the town’s primordial titles. Miriam, who is especially invested in the town’s musical history, has also broadcast an in-depth interview with Lorenzo’s sons and Cleotilde, featuring several performances of his songs.

Miriam told me, as we climbed the mountain, that these songs constituted ‘a way to guide you when you come to Ajusco’. Yet these songs-as-maps performed a complex role not limited to describing space or place. The performance of this song on our walk up the Pico del Águila was invested in the ways that this changing mountainscape was understood and used; it simultaneously claimed, created and shaped pathways through this forest space. Both ‘Ajusco en la historia’ and ‘Los Altos del Ajusco’ are thickly layered with spatial and intertextual meaning, and in performance become central to a dynamic, mobile and thoroughly political form of ‘dwelling’, which participates in the continual construction of place. The latter song, in particular, has accumulated layers of contradicting meaning. In some ways it replicates the distanced urban gaze of ‘Caminito de Contreras’ and valorizes the mid-20th-century tourist boom by celebrating the ‘many people’ who ‘arrive just to climb the hill’. Yet this song’s performance by Miriam and Ramiro also implicated it in path-making within Ajusco which, in recent years, has become framed in terms of intra-community tensions between originarios and ‘avecindado’ newcomers. ‘Los Altos del Ajusco’ both reflects the desires of urban encroachment, and is entangled in the practices of responding to them; it is, in other words, implicated in the making and claiming of pathways.

Concluding remarks

At stake across of the musical examples discussed here are the expressive modalities through which place is constructed. Musical accounts of Ajusco both constantly implicate travel, and produce sentimental connections with landscape. Yet this observation does not, by itself, provide insight into these songs’ environmental affordances and implications. Popular song is complicit both in processes of enclosure and in the construction of dwelling. There is no static position from which to measure the contrast between these two kinds of musical potentialities.

Songs-as-maps are explored here as both a social reality – a concept through which a deceased local composer’s work is remembered by his loved ones – and a material one. Songs-as-maps are palimpsestic: they layer over the same routes, traced by different people through diverse historical times. Songs-as-maps thus entangle the symbolic with the material and the sonorous. We may not have songs-as-maps without movement, without pathways and without matter.

Walks through the Ajusco mountain range raise ambivalent precedents. Civilizational crises are layered upon each other – one at the end of the Spanish Empire, and another at the environmental twilight of post-colonial capitalism. We can walk through such crises in many different ways that implicate music and sound. It remains vital to attend to the social processes and modalities of land distribution in which these distinct ways of (sound) walking may be complicit. The stakes of the aesthetic, here, are high: judgements about the environmental implications of different kinds of musical and sonic expression are rooted in fine-grained creative choices. Concluding, I respectfully suggest the following summary of the music of the composer, Lorenzo García, focused on here: that landscapes sound different when we are moving.