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In February of 2023, Yucatec Maya rapper and cultural promoter Pat Boy invited me to collaborate on music for a commercial. CidraMex—a prominent soda brand in Mexico and a subsidiary of the Coca-Cola company—launched an ad campaign centered on the theme, “a pesar de todo.” It highlighted the stories of individuals who, “despite everything, are here”. In the ad campaign, “here” was not a geographic location, but any place that people are told they shouldn’t be: a working class teenager from the outskirts of a city attending a private school in the urban center, a woman fútbol referee, a middle-aged man selling CidraMex on the street, a taquería run by women wearing huipiles. Despite their differences, these individuals’ stories were unified by both their experiences overcoming adversity and by their locality. Behind the characters was an urban montage of heavy traffic, busy streets and shops, and the chaotic sounds of city life. But more than urban stories and experiences, the characters in the ad campaign were filtered through a nationalist lens, examples of Mexico’s economic and social advancement.
As the ad’s creators explained, Pat Boy was the ideal musical voice for this commercial. In the past decade, Pat had released four studio albums, founded and directed the ADN Maya Colectivo, recently featured in the Marvel: Black Panther soundtrack, toured across the Americas, and garnered numerous awards and national grants for his work promoting Yucatec Maya language and culture. Born in Maria Jose Pino Suarez, Quintana Roo—a community of about 300 people—Pat’s journey to international recognition closely aligned with the narrative of “a pesar de todo.”
However, when making the music for this commercial, things quickly became disjointed. As Pat relayed to me over WhatsApp voice note, the representatives of CidraMex thought we needed to make something that sounded “menos autóctono” and “más urbano”—“less autochthonous” and “more urban.” Anthropologists will find this a familiar, if troubling, distinction dating back to the origins of the discipline, where researchers looked to understand a rural ‘other’ stuck in the past (or lagging behind the present) for universal rules governing a singular human condition. The CidraMex representatives were likely unfamiliar with this intellectual legacy and were no doubt acting in good faith by working to include indigenous peoples in the brand’s national campaign. Yet the distinction remained clear: listening to our music in their urban workplace, the representatives did not hear it as an expression of contemporary Mayaness. Rather, it sounded too autochthonous, not urban enough to be Mexican. But what makes a sound “urban” or “autochthonous”?
This was the question that Pat Boy and I attempted to answer in different ways as we worked to align the music with what the brand representatives wanted. In doing this, we weren’t just making music. We were producing a signal flow, both musically and socio-culturally. As it is used by audio engineers and musicians, signal flow describes the path taken by a signal (the waves that make up a recorded sound) from the initial sounding object (e.g., a musical instrument) to a set of musical technologies and media (e.g., a computer or mixing console) to the final sounding object (e.g., speakers or headphones). Musically, discussions often begin by asking: What effects do you want to happen first in your signal chain? This definition is still relevant, but here, I use signal flow to encompass a broader set of meaning-making processes that link sound, music, and language. In interactions like the one between me, Pat Boy, and the CidraMex representatives, we see how the listening logics of neoliberal multiculturalism create narrow and exclusionary regimes of recognition in which state-recognized cultural groups (i.e., indigenous communities) are selectively integrated into (trans)national projects of economic development. Within this kind of signal chain, how do individuals and groups engage in the real-time work of identifying, extracting, and refining sound for commodified circulation within regimes of neoliberal multiculturalism?
“NO SÉ NADA DE MÚSICA…”
On my journey to become an anthropologist, I had to become comfortable with inconsistencies, frustrations, and not knowing. Ambiguous descriptions of sound as “urban” or “autochthonous” were difficult to interpret: Pat Boy and I knew our first attempt did not fit the imagined world of the commercial, but we did not know exactly which sounds were too “autochthonous” and why. The ambiguities were further compounded by the fact that I was not only an anthropologist but a musical co-creator and collaborator with Pat Boy, who was unconcerned by the commentary. He responded with a shrug, saying, “It’s what they want.” I could not find a definitive answer for the question of what an urban or autochthonous sound is, but I realized that attending to ambiguity and mis(sed)information as a musician was useful for attuning my anthropological ear to constructions of indigeneity, sound, and language at the level of (trans)national discourse.
The project was off to an inauspicious start beyond the vague judgment that the music was “too autochthonous.” Our project began with a case of mistaken identity, as the advertising executives mistook a song by a completely different artist for Pat Boy. This became apparent through a confused and frantic set of WhatsApp messages:
Isabel (Advertising Executive): Hello!! We were thinking that we would use the musical base of “Fuerza Vocal” like we have put in the edit
Our suggestion was to use this song / lyric and adapt it to incorporate nuances.
But based on the edit
Roberto (Advertising Executive): The song Fuerza Vocal functions [well] for us in terms of tone, rhythm and energy we have for the images in the edit we presented. We’d like to use that piece and adapt it to the edition.
Isabel: I suggest having a call to get on the same page–
Pat Boy: We aren’t–
Isabel: –including [Publicity Company Name]
Pat Boy: You didn’t tell us that
Also,–
Isabel: Yes, I myself told you when we sent you the edit. The song is even in the edit.
Pat Boy: –but it’s not our song.
Isabel: –But to all be aligned
We have been saying this since the beginning … 🥺
Isabel: [image of Pat Boy’s Spotify Page]
Pat Boy: But we didn’t send the song
To you all
Isabel: Because we see it here [referencing the image]
Pat Boy: We sent you songs to which we have the rights.
Isabel: That’s what we asked from the beginning if it was possible
Claudia (Advertising Executive): Team, look, relax
Everyone
Gives us a few minutes to review everything
Pat Boy: We already structured the song that we sent to the video
Isabel: Would everyone have a chance to talk for 10-15 minutes? Just a quick call to get things straight.
The conversation was more “noise” than “signal,” partly due to the nature of WhatsApp messaging, but also due to the multiple levels of miscommunication about what the advertising executives had sent to us, what Pat Boy had sent the representatives, and who had the rights to a song. Deconstructing some of that noise ended up being a crucial part of both the music process and my analytical work as an anthropologist.
The advertising executives’ misrecognition of the song Fuerza Vocal as Pat Boy raised several questions about the sound of indigenous languages. The song is by Mixe rapper Mixe Represente, featuring Pat Boy and Serí Comcac artist Zara Monrroy. While Pat raps on it—hence why the song is on his Spotify page—he does not have the rights. And although they included the song in the edit they sent us, the part they used was Mixe Represente’s verse. It’s unclear whether they thought Pat Boy was rapping or not in that section, since their descriptions of “tone, energy, and rhythm” were vague. I was also unclear whether or not they understood that what they sent us was in Mixe and not in Maaya.
Maayat’aan (shortened to Maaya and often referred to somewhat incorrectly as Yucatec Maya) is the only originary language of the Yucatan Peninsula. While it is considered an “endangered” language, it boasts more than 700,000 speakers and has extensive revitalization and revindication programs. It is one of the most widely spoken and written languages in Mexico, a country where indigenous languages hold a central place in definitions of indigeneity.Mixe is a distinct language from a different family and region of Mexico. It has distinct formal gestures, vocabularies, cultural histories, and relationships with the nation-state.
In the advertising brief, CidraMex required that we use Maaya phrases (or Spanish phrases from the commercial that Pat was told to translate into Maaya). Because indigeneity and language are defined together by the neoliberal state, this requirement is unsurprising. But I was surprised that the indigenous language and the label, “too autochthonous” (a somewhat uncommon synonym of indigenous), were decoupled in the advertising executives’ commentary.
The lack of focus on the language itself made clear what was being treated as the same: both languages’ status as indigenous languages defined by the state. From the noise of these (mis)recognitions, I understood that indigeneity (or autochtony) needed to be a generalized concept rather than a specific lived experience. The sound of a non-Spanish language—likely unintelligible to the majority of audiences—was not meant to signal a specific people or place. That would risk centering one group’s experience above the national experience of indigeneity. Instead, for the multinational corporation, indigenous language was only recognizable as a broad category experienced by the listener through its unintelligibility, which thus made it possible to integrate indigenous language into Mexico’s neoliberal multicultural discourse. One aspect of an “urban” sound, then, was related to a broad, cosmopolitan notion of indigeneity in contrast to the specificity of “autochthonous” sound.
“Autochthonous” and “urban” are not self-evident categories, however, but exist as moments in a signal chain. In this view, the ears of listeners working in multinational corporations and the ambiguous adjectives used to describe what they heard were not conditions, but processes that converted music into autochthonous noise. Even seemingly neutral words like “movido,” “positivo,” and “alegre” (“upbeat,” “positive,” and “happy”) similarly revealed an affect that the representatives wanted to link to a generalized notion of a national (urban) indigenous subject. To me, these ambiguous descriptions signaled different orientations to the sounding of indigeneity, though the descriptions were often focused on a speaker’s knowledge about music. This became particularly apparent when we tried to clarify what a representative meant:
Ben: For you, what does urban or positive mean in music? Or how can we make it sound more urban?
Isabel: Well, I know nothing about music… Here, when you hear…
There was a brief pause as the representative looked down and chuckled in embarrassment.
Isabel: It’s just that don’t know anything about music
Ben: No worries, can you voice out the part you’re referring to?
Isabel: Here, the part that sounds like…*woomph*
Pat: (turning to me) It’s the kick!
Ben: …or maybe a riser?
At one level, Isabel meant they didn’t have a technical language of music (e.g., of chords, notes, meter, tempo) to articulate what they wanted. Yet they did have a knowledge of music, one set in the logic of neoliberal multiculturalism. Their ambiguous descriptions reflected the need for the sound to be broadly appealing, for the concept of an indigenous rapper to be palatable to national discourses and audiences who aren’t in contact with the specificity of an “autochthonous” people and place. The closest we got to expressing something specific about the sound itself—and not some more contextual significance of indigeneity or urbanism—was when we prompted them to sound out a section of the music with their voice. While this was still slightly unclear, it led us to specific parts of the piece that gave the kind of energy they wanted for this broad appeal.
“… que es un sonido urbano?”
If the language itself was not “too autochthonous,” the remaining culprit was the beat—the instrumental music Pat rapped over. At the start, we melded instruments from the peninsula with hip-hop-style drums, a common technique among indigenous rappers. This was initially Pat’s idea. Upon hearing my first draft of the beat, he replied on WhatsApp: “Well, I like it. But I want something more Maya…I don’t know…It’s my style.” Pat’s music is shaped by his efforts to articulate his geographic attachments as an originary inhabitant of the peninsula, and this is reflected in how he samples music from the region.
Pat requested two instruments, the tunkul and chirimía. These instruments have particularly strong associations with Mayaness in the peninsula and indigeneity in Mexico more broadly. The tunkul (known as the ‘tun’ in Guatemala or the teponaztli in many other parts of Mexico) is an important ceremonial instrument. It is a wooden drum, carved to have two keys which are struck with mallets. In the past, the instrument was often played at major religious or governmental events, and such uses continue today. The chirimía, an import from the Middle East by way of Spain, is an oboe-like instrument. It was rapidly adopted by many groups across Latin America and served as a material and sonic interface of colonial power and religious syncretism. It is (in)famous for having a nasally and somewhat grating sonic character. Though slightly less used, in Yucatan, this instrument shares a similar place as the tunkul in Maya worlds.
After further deliberation and discussion, Pat and I decided that these were the “too autochthonous” sounds. As an anthropologist, I had many questions that I ultimately could never answer: Was it simply an association of these instruments with indigenous peoples that was too autochthonous? Was it something about their timbre and harmonic possibilities that was heard as exotic? Was it the amount of space we gave the instruments in the song, highlighting them too much? In trying to identify the sound that was too autochthonous, we weren’t just focusing on the music. We were also trying to identify what the phrase even meant in relation to the textural and discursive relationships between instrumental sounds and the concept of indigeneity. Even the word “autochthonous” was part of the puzzle, as this term is primarily used by academics or other “elites” and is considerably less popular outside of those spaces than the term indigenous or originary. As used by the executives, to me, this word signaled a conception of an indigenous “then” and “there” in a distant, folkloric past, far away from a modernizing center.
Beyond the instruments themselves as tokens of an indigenous-coded type, the way Pat and I used them departed significantly from their traditional uses in ceremonial or Maya governmental events. But how we used them also departed from the cosmological concepts into which the instruments are embedded. Independent researcher and instrument maker Don Ricardo told me that the instruments have two tones because of the nature of duality in Maya cosmologies, a sentiment that cultural promoters and Maya academics expressed to me consistently throughout my fieldwork.
The music samples Pat and I used in the song were recorded by Don Ricardo on instruments he made. Our signal chaining—facilitated through sampling and digital technologies—started with the two-note cosmology Don Ricardo told me about, but ultimately departed from it. Our departure was partly driven by our choice of technology. We used a Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, a highly adaptable data output system. A MIDI keyboard has no sound output. Unlike an electric piano, pressing a key won’t send a message to a speaker to produce a sound. Rather, upon pressing a key, a MIDI keyboard sends various information to other systems (e.g., pitch, loudness, duration). These signals are sent simultaneously to a computer, allowing a musician to play a wide variety of instruments and sounds with an exceptional degree of control over various parameters. Such a program interprets the noise of raw data into music through a chain of music technologies. One crucial technology in this chain is a sampler, an interface that facilitates the repurposing of sounds and can be controlled by MIDI keyboards. To operate a sampler, a user chooses an audio recording and isolates one section to be replayed. As part of our beatmaking process, Pat and I isolated a single note that Don Ricardo played on each instrument and loaded it into the sampler, allowing us to play the keyboard and sound out the tunkul and chirimía at frequencies different from the original.
By using the instruments in this way, we challenged the assumptions and stereotypes about indigenous peoples that were latent in the branding of “autochthonous.” In other words, we departed from traditional instrumental techniques through an assemblage of musical technologies and shifted the contexts of the instruments’ use from ceremonial settings to globally circulating popular music genres (hip hop) and forms (a “song”). This move wasn’t unique to me or Pat Boy, but is a common technique used by indigenous peoples to continuously articulate their vitality against the grain of myths that they are disappearing, backwards, and unchanging. And yet it wasn’t heard in this way. Without this context, the representatives sensed the signal as an indication of a folkloric indigeneity rooted in the past. In this signal chain, the fundamental processes were grounded in (mis)recognitions and unknowns.
Conclusion
I don’t think the representatives were particularly thrilled with our final product, and neither was I. In the version of the commercial they aired, the CidraMex team added some more background notes and sounds (electronic orchestral chords) to fill out the texture they wanted. Under the Spanish language overlay and the manufactured urban soundscape, Pat’s voice was barely legible. For Pat, the job was complete: his music spread internationally, and he got paid for his participation. His position as a vocational artist and promoter of Mayaness meant that he had to conform to the discourses and systems that, however problematically, elevated his message and his people to national and international recognition. As he saw it, his task was to change signals in ways that promote and expand Maayat’aan’s usage; multicultural neoliberalism and regimes of recognition are thus powerful technologies in his signal chain.
I have since gone back to try and find the commercial again, mainly to read comments on the YouTube video and Instagram post. But at the time of writing this, the only version of the commercial I can find is the 20-second version on CidraMex’s Facebook page. Moreover, the company is the legal owner of all the music and the accompanying video, so I cannot link to it or otherwise circulate it. It’s impossible to know for sure what the reception to this commercial was or understand how people responded to notions of urbanism, indigeneity, nationalism, and so on. Yet by tracing the flow of these signals from our musical production to the final product, we can still partially understand how neoliberal multiculturalism works to limit indigenous expression while simultaneously providing monetary and structural backing for those same expressions.
Note: Because of a non-disclosure agreement with the client, I have used a pseudonym for the brand name.
Joshua Babcock is the section contributing editor for the General Anthropology Division.