Music and Tradition in Tijuana

The music tradition in Tijuana is rich and deep. However, the Nor-tec music and the evolution gives a clearer picture of music evolution than any other. It articulates three well differentiated musical traditions that have been appropriated for decades by the Mexican Northerners. These are the Nortena, banda sinaloense and the Onda grupera. Historically, these music traditions were associated with the lower class who resided in the unsophisticated countryside and the banda and Nortena specifically were associated with the older generations.
The development of nor-tec was shaped by aspects of class, ethnicity, race as well as nationality. The particular artistic and musical styles in Tijuana expressed the local desires and this also informed the development of Nor-tec style. The nortena music was a way of identity for the northeastern Mexicans who used it to distinguish themselves from the Mexicans from the centre of the country. The towns, neighborhoods that were mentioned in the lyrics clearly set out to establish an identity for northeasterners.
The nortena, banda and onda grupera are seen as three different musical traditions but are interconnected, complex as share one common feature that they are not just hybrid music genres that were embraced on both sides of the Mexico-USA border, but that represent real transnational traditions in their source and development. These US-Latino music further developed in the 1990s when the mainstream Mexican media and the music industry therein capitalized on the transnational banda phenomena. It was during this period that the banda music, musicians and fans were granted access to the primetime mainstream shows. They also earned recognition trough billboards, the Latin Music Awards, the Latin Grammy as well as the specially created prizes.
Another notable event that perpetuated the development of nortena and conjunto music was the economic boom at the end of the 19 Century in the northeastern Mexican city of Monterrey with the trade ties that it had with Mexican towns and to other small American towns like San Antonio and Loredo also proved to be instrumental in dissemination of norteno and conjunto music to the American Southwest and Mexican Northeast. This background shows that the Mexican/Mexican – American style developed as a hybrid of Mexican, border and European traditions.however, this too kept changing with the norteno and conjunto traditions kept changing with the changing economic conditions of their audience on both sides of the border, as the them migration, racial discrimination, illegal trafficking and inter-genre influences popularized by the US and Mexican media through the 1950s and the 1960s.
Later on in the 1970s there came up bands that experimented with musical sounds that later came to be referred to as grupero. These bands started off their careers doing covers of US and British rock bands but eventually developed more personal repertoire that included elements from the balada pop tradition, the cumbia tropical and most outstanding the inclusion of romantic melodies and cumbia rhytms.
These events indicate that the trend in banda and nortena music are a culmination of historical processes of globalization, cultural colonialism, local musicians’ active practices of negotiation with the pressures of hegemonic cultures. It is worth noting that the socal mobility and migration also played a significant part in the national and transnational dissemination of banda, nortena and onda grupera in the stylistic changes experienced by each of the traditions herein and in the adoption of the same as Tijuana’s musical icons.