A Borerlands Imperative: Music, Mestizaje, and US Religious History

This paper explores the Spanish-American-Mexican Borderlands as a location, a geography but most importantly a lens through which to come to terms with the present. Our failure to take the borderlands seriously undermines the welfare of our society both in terms of what we don’t know and admit about our past, but also in terms of how people are affected by that cultural whitewashing. Rather than a specter of the past, the borderlands continue to be a dynamic space of conflict, collaboration and cultural gestation in the world today. In particular, the North American borderlands have tremendous influence on the culture, religion, and even the epistemology and rhetoric of our era while simultaneously being misrepresented and poorly understood in popular culture and everyday interactions. I will explore this directly though Spanish language (*banda*) music on the radio, and the role it plays in preserving and expressing the borderlands perspective.