The Guitar before Mexico and Flourishing Within It: A Brief Decolonial Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article employs a decolonial lens to analyze the historical and sociocultural trajectory of the guitar in New Spain and Mexico, interrogating its role as both a colonial imposition and a symbol of national identity. It argues that the introduction of the guitar during Spanish colonization constituted a long-term act of cultural violence that displaced Indigenous musical traditions, reinforced Eurocentric hegemony, and facilitated the erasure of Indigenous expression. Through historical analysis, critique of Eurocentric music documentation, and examination of oral traditions (refranes), the study reveals how colonial hierarchies persisted after independence, mythologizing mestizaje as a unifying force while perpetuating processes of de-indigenization and paving the way for Indigenous developments in guitar traditions. The article applies Víctor Hernández Vaca’s Ethnolutherie—a methodology centered on material culture and instrument-making—to recentralize marginalized narratives of the guitar’s integration into diverse communities. The text underscores the guitar’s dual legacy: its flourishing in Mexican folklore is intrinsically tied to colonial violence, even as its material and cultural development reflects Indigenous and mestizo agency. The conclusion calls for the decentering of Europe in music studies, greater recognition of colonial violence, and a reimagining of the guitar’s place in Mexican identity beyond Eurocentric frameworks, attending to less explored perspectives. By articulating historical critique with decolonial analysis, this article challenges romanticized narratives of cultural fusion, urging recognition of the lasting impacts of colonialism and suggesting new, less-explored avenues for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".