Freddy Fender's Blackbrown Country Ecologies

Abstract

Country music has often been held together in dominant public narratives by binaries, such as Mexican-white or Black-white in an attempt to maintain a sense of authentic whiteness. A similar historiographical move occurs in Chicano/Mexican American Studies with regard to the binary brown/white. My focus then is to consider how we might listen to the Black musical sounds of country music through the performances of a brown country boy, Freddy Fender.