Idaho Mexican Music Project
First set to motion in 2017, the Idaho Mexican Music Project is an evolving, long-term effort to document musicians and musical traditions throughout southern Idaho. Inspired by a similar project from 1982, the project is focused on the agricultural region of the Snake River Plain where, 35 years later, Mexican communities have established themselves as economic and workforce contributors yet, in terms of cultural and social benefactors, remain hidden from plain sight. Documentation from the summer of 2019—audio/video interviews and performances—provided ample material for the Idaho Commission on the Arts to engage with this often-underrepresented community. Stressing that fieldwork shouldn’t be an end unto itself, the Idaho Mexican Music Project attempts both to spotlight a significant but relatively removed from the mainstream cultural community, and to elicit engagement between the community and a state government arts organization.
Few to none of the participants in the Idaho Mexican Music Project are professional musicians. However, all of the participants provide a critical service to their community: the need for live music, social interaction, and communitas. In the interviews and informal performances, what the short films demonstrate, though not explicitly intended, is that identity is created as a result of community-mindedness and a collective, shared responsibility to the health and welfare of the greater whole. Live music as an element of community-mindedness and as a component of a specific social, cultural, economic, and occupational culture, was something very much missing and absent for a couple years following the summer of 2019.
