The confluence of singers, composers and audiences within contemporary Mexican culture, produces a "bolero effect" in which the bolero tradition of the popular love song is established as a complex network of relationships between actors and spaces. The relationships between public discourses about romance, courtship and self identities, is produced and secured by the deployment of a variety of codes and languages that together constitute love as a shared memory. Collective and personal memory are strongly related. The process of interpreting and responding to the bolero is rooted· not only in individual biography but also in the life of the community to which a person belongs, and which provides him/her with frames of reference within which to organise memory, a kind of mental map drawn up by language. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the complex and contradictory interplay between the public presentation and proliferation of the bolero, and the intimate, unique, experience of love. The first part of the thesis explores the public culture of the bolero as it travels along trajectories linking live performance to radio, cinema, records and television. The second part explores the experiences and responses of male and female subjects from two contrasting class locations in contemporary Mexico City.

This dissertation investigates how Regional Mexican radio in the U.S. tracks and drives changes in Mexican-American identity by combining different musical genres to create composite portraits of its audiences. Regional Mexican radio, which plays a mixture of ranchera, norteño, banda, and other regional Mexican genres to target a largely working-class audience of recent immigrants, is currently the most popular Spanish-language format in the U.S. Programmers for these stations act as mediators, navigating the public relation between notions of Latino identity constructed by national Spanish-language media conglomerates and local demographics. By modifying the generic composition of their playlists to strike a compromise between the two, they both monitor and produce the sociomusical categories that distinguish their listenership. Ethnographic research at Regional Mexican radio stations in Austin and San Antonio demonstrate the role that institutional organization plays in creating programming. National conglomerates that increasingly own these stations determine the broad outline of the industry, but local programmers make most decisions about programming content. Based on a historical review of Tejano radio, I argue that the musical mixtures created by Spanish-language programmers have responded to both past and present social and economic challenges facing Mexican-American immigrants. Through detailed analysis programming at five Regional Mexican stations, I argue that each variety of music played signifies regional, generational and gendered variations of Mexican-American identity that stations combine in different proportions to reflect local listenership. I also explore the role of station-sponsored events in gathering information about listeners. Events encourage listeners to embody their status as part of the Regional Mexican audience, a concept ultimately constructed by the radio stations. Ultimately, this dissertation adds to existing literatures on Spanish-language media, radio and Mexican-American music. / text