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Pena traces the history of musica tejana from the fandangos and bailes of the nineteenth century through the cancion ranchera and the politically informed corrido to the most recent forms of Tejano music.

Where the Ox Does Not Plow, an autobiographical ethnography, consists of twenty-six life episodes that chronicle Manuel Peña’s transformative journey from an impoverished migrant worker to a career in academia. Inspired by his experiences and those of the people around him in Texas and California, Peña reflects on a wide range of issues arising from the historically marginalized condition of Mexicans and other Latinos in the United States. The narrative will engage readers with a broad range of human experiences, from race relations and economic exploitation to the intimacy of familial and romantic love.

Around 1930, a highly popular and distinctive type of accordion music, commonly known as conjunto, emerged among Texas-Mexicans. Manuel Peña's The Texas-Mexican Con;unto is the first comprehensive study of this unique folk style. The author's exhaustive fieldwork and personal interviews with performers, disc jockeys, dance promoters, recording company owners, and conjunto music lovers provide the crucial connection between an analysis of the music itself and the richness of the culture from which it sprang. Using an approach that integrates musicological, historical, and sociological methods of analysis, Peña traces the development of the conjunto from its tentative beginnings to its preeminence as a full-blown style by the early 1960s. Biographical sketches of such major early performers as Narciso Martínez (El Huracán del Valle), Santiago Jiménez (El Flaco), Pedro Ayala, Valerio Longoria, Tony de la Rosa, and Paulino Bernal, along with detailed transcriptions of representative compositions, illustrate the various phases of conjunto evolution. Peña also probes the vital connection between conjunto's emergence as a powerful symbolic expression and the transformation of Texas-Mexican society from a pre-industrial folk group to a community with increasingly divergent socioeconomic classes and ideologies. Of concern throughout the study is the interplay between ethnicity, class, and culture, and Peña's use of methods and theories from a variety of scholarly disciplines enables him to tell the story of conjunto in a manner both engaging and enlightening. This important study will be of interest to all students of Mexican American culture, ethnomusicology, and folklore.

American Mythologies examines eleven myths that form part of the storehouse of present-day American mythologies, elucidating the nature of contemporary myths by investigating their ideological sub-terrain. Grounded in a semiological approach, which explores the displacement of information and the transformation of signs that characterise mythic communication, this book sheds light on the socio-economic, gendered, national and racial interests that lie behind myth-making. Presenting rich case studies from popular culture and public discourse, it demonstrates the manner in which these myths, and American mythology in general, promote the core values of everyday life under capitalism: rugged individualism, the unfettered right to accumulate wealth, the superior moral character of free-enterprise democracy, and its abundant opportunities for every citizen. By the same token, that same mythology negates the corruption endemic to the capitalist social order, an order that also promotes inescapable class, racial, and gender inequalities which confine the majority of Americans to a life of constant economic struggle. A fresh critique of the foundations of American culture, American Mythologies will appeal to those with interests in sociology, social and cultural theory, and cultural and media studies.

Chapter one of this recital document focuses on an analysis of the first movement of Manuel Maria Ponce's Sonata III, Allegro moderato (1927). In my analysis, I interpret two specific agencies: external and internal. These agencies express a dialogue within the rather straightforward sonata form and give meaning to the piece. Chapter two discusses Federico Moreno Torroba's views regarding nationalism and special attention will be paid to two of his guitar works: Nocturño (1926) and Madroños (1954). Chapter three explores Leo Brouwer's first period of compositional style through a detailed analysis of Tres Apuntes (1959). Finally, chapter four focuses on historical information about J. S. Bach's lute works, particularly the Prelude from BWV 998.

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