Alejandro L. Madrid
Ohio State University
Email: almadrid68@hotmail.com

Shifting Role and Hegemonic Contestation. Center-Periphery Relations and the Migration of Nor-tec Music

When on March 25, 2000 a friend invited me to attend a concert of techno music at Mexico City's Zócalo, I was a little puzzled and did not know what to expect. A rave organized by the government of Mexico City and presented in the heart of the city's political life seemed bizarre. As it turned out, and in accordance with the history of the location, I was about to witness a true political act; not political in terms of overt "policy," but rather, in a broader Foucouldian sense, as an act that ratified the difficult power relations between Mexico City and the northern border of Mexico, an act that exposed and performed the complex interaction between center and periphery. The concert was the last event of the Tecnogeist 2000 Festival and presented Deejays from Germany -Dr. Motte, DJ Hell, Acid Maria, and Yannick- and Mexico -Linga, DJUnknown, and Borderline from Alcachofa Sound, and Fussible and Bostich from the Nor-tec collective- before an audience of 50,000 youngsters ready to dance, jump, and roll all night long. I was especially interested in the Nor-tec collective since my friends told me they considered them some of the most original musicians ever to come out of Tijuana. After two German Deejays opened the concert and prepared the crowd with the powerful, hypnotic driving rhythms of typical techno music, the circumstances seemed perfect for the presentation of Bostich. By the time the Tijuana musician finally appeared on stage I was excited and consumed with anticipation. The looser rhythmic patterns, slower melodic flow, and the sounds of güiro and tuba of Bostich's Synthakon quickly set a new pace and tempo for the party, and suddenly, the crowd, with the exception of a few individuals who seemed already familiar with the style, slowly stopped dancing and began booing the musician. I was distressed by what I felt was an unfair reception for rather interesting music, and in the days following the event could not stop thinking about the significance of that reaction.
When a year later I asked Pepe Mogt, one of the founders of the Nor-tec collective, to explain in a few sentences what Nor-tec was, he replied: "[Nor-tec] is being able to express, anywhere outside of Tijuana, everything you perceive when you go through the streets of Tijuana -sounds, music, colors, signs, forms-; in my case I do this through music" (Pepe Mogt, personal communication, November 4, 2001). Mogt's description emphasizes Nor-tec as a strategic tool of self-representation, as a way to re-write the identities of tijuanenses and present them to the world. Today, when I observe the current success of Nor-tec music in Mexico City, it seems clear to me that the reaction of Mexico City youngsters during the 2000 concert was informed by their unfulfilled expectations regarding both techno music and norteño identity; Nor-tec musicians did not satisfy their preconceptions of either techno nor norteño. This reaction suggests that important issues of representation and self-representation, of hegemony and agency, of center and periphery, lay at the core of both the production and the consumption of Nor-tec culture. In this article, I explore these questions under the specific conditions of globalization that allowed Nor-tec musicians to enter the mainstream music market. My work shows that, as a strategy in a struggle for hegemony, Nor-tec culture works as an institution that both challenges and reproduces dominant discourses of ethnicity and race, as well as national and local identity.
The Mexican underground writer Guillermo Fadanelli discusses Tijuana in the following terms:
"Tijuana is like a mirage, it is there only for those who can or want to see it. For most, however, [Tijuana] is transparent, it does not exist: our gaze, from this side of the border, travels across it to land on California, on the promised land, on the glamorous paradise of the dollar; the gaze of Californians, on the other hand, stops there to construct a false and mischievous image of Mexico; for us, Mexicans, it is transparent, for them it is a myth: two different ways of denying its reality, of rejecting its existence" (Fadanelli, without date, p. 31).
Fadanelli's description shows that the most popular representions of Tijuana -as a transient, uprooted culture; as a lawless city of drug dealers and prostitutes; as kitsch, ephemeral pastiche- have often been written from the outside, from the dominant centers that write it as marginal. Underneath Fadanelli's quotation is the fact that Tijuana is a site of multiple individual encounters and transnational interpenetration; a place where a multiplicity of ideologies collide, providing the grounds to construct a multiplicity of false identities of its people and culture. This condition forces local authors and intellectuals to negotiate their own sense of identity, in an attempt to challenge the multiplicity of discourses from Mexico and the United States that write them as marginal.
Homi Bhabha uses the concept of "in-betweeness" to analyze diasporic cultures, and conceives migration as a phenomenon that creates partial cultures, which are the connecting tissue between larger hegemonic cultures. These partial cultures are both alike and different from the dominant cultures they contain, they are culture's in-between (Bhabha, 1996, p. 54). Insofar as Tijuana has been created by successive migrations throughout the 20th century, hers became an "in-between" culture, regardless of actions from the Mexican state to strengthen its nationalist identity through a variety of political, social, and cultural programs. If understood in the context of "in-between" culture, the lifestyles of tijuanenses -and thus Nor-tec as a cultural manifestation born under these circumstances- become exercises in agency with at least two dominant ideological discourses, and most importantly, with several local ideologies (regional, transnational, fronteriza, etc.). People from Tijuana need to be able to navigate between American and Mexican ideologies, sometimes entering one, sometimes entering the other, and most of the time walking on the borderline. Tijuaneneses should be able to understand Mexican and American signifying practices if they want to be successful in their daily intercultural interactions.
Subjects living under the multi-ideological conditions of Tijuana experience a fragmentary reality where metanarratives have collapsed, leaving them unable to position themselves as part of ontologically defined groups, therefore forcing them to assume multiple identities in order to navigate and survive the complexity of dominant ideological discourses that construct them as peripheral. Chela Sandoval believes that the border between subjects and social discourses is a place between realities, a third site out of which "undecidable forms of being and original theories and practices for emancipation are produced" (Sandoval, 2000, p. 85). Mike Davis refers to these practices when he suggests that "tijuanenses are bricoleurs who have built a culturally vibrant metropolis from the bottom up, largely using recycled materials from the other side of the border" (Davis, 2000, p. 26). I suggest that Nor-tec is one such practice, one that allows Tijuana musicians to create a site of identification by appropriating musical trends from "the other side of the border," a complex practice that challenges some cultural stereotypes about Tijuana but reproduces others in an attempt to strategically position itself among dominant discourses of representation.
Michel Foucault says that no individual, social, or cultural relation is possible outside the influence of power, that power allows and shapes these relationships as they take place in society (Foucault, 1984, pp. 54-55). In this article, I propose a model for the study of identity construction that takes into account the pervasiveness of ideology, and that places agency as a central aspect for the continuation but also the transformation of the discourses it challenges. I am especially interested in a study of contestant identities that go beyond Hegel's master-slave dialectic. I believe that we need to revise the solidarity-resistance model that has often been used to explain hegemony, and therefore reconsider Foucault's notions of ideology and power as more than just institutions of repression. Anthony Giddens suggests that human choice, understood as action, is not only possible, but a necessary structural component of all social institutions (Giddens, 1993, p. 241). Agency with institutions of power establishes positions of solidarity, resistance, and solidarity-resistance that are necessary to reproduce ideology. Human choice depends on a chain of interrelations with other individuals, social groups, and discourses of power, and as such, it is an act of negotiation between different historical, individual, social, and cultural circumstances. Under these conditions, human agency has to be understood as a tool that allows individuals to reestablish a balance with the hegemonic forces that surround them. Agency is a complex process of equilibrium that permits individuals to claim a position of identity and in the end provides the foundation to reproduce ideology and power, and to reevaluate hegemony.
The model of interpretation I propose (see figure 1) is the result of my study of the development of Nor-tec music and culture taking into account the theoretical ideas discussed above. Nor-tec reflects the multi-ideological experience of people from the US-Mexico border and works as a catalyst that negotiates their individual relationship to the transnational discourses of power and identity represented by this web of ideologies. In the end, Nor-tec is a practice of self-representation that both contests and reproduces how dominant American and Mexican discourses traditionally represent Tijuana and tijuanenses. Nor-tec is then an exercise in agency that, by adopting some essentializing notions from dominant discourses, empowers tijuanense artists and allows them to rewrite their own marginal status.

Figure 1. Model of social change and cultural meaning.

NOR-TEC AS AGENCY

According to Pedro Gabriel Beas "Hiperboreal," it was in Tijuana, at a party celebrating the creation of a new local music magazine interested in both norteño and electronic music, that the "crazy" idea to unify these two worlds was born (Beas, 2001, 8). In 1999, in an effort to develop a "new sound," Pepe Mogt, a long time proponent of electronic music in Tijuana, recovered those ideas and combined the sounds of traditional norteña and tambora music with the aesthetic and the compositional techniques of techno music. Mogt visited a studio in Tijuana and got a disc with accordion, drum, and tuba outtakes. He then tried to convince some old friends to take those sounds and make music "with the only requirement of keeping the groove of [norteña] traditional music's rhythmic patterns" (Beas, 2001, p. 8). It was Pepe Mogt, Ramón Amezcua "Bostich," and Roberto Mendoza "Panóptica" who convinced "Hiperboreal," Fernando Corona "Terrestre," and Fritz Torres and Jorge Verdín from Clorofila, to join their experimental efforts. According to Hiperboreal, the idea was innovative, risky, and presented plenty of possibilities for experimentation (Pedro Gabriel Beas "Hiperboreal," personal communication, October 25, 2001). Two weeks after Mogt's invitation, Bostich finished Polaris, a piece that quickly became a hit in the underground rave scene of Tijuana (Tyrangiel, 2001, p. 77). Soon after, they started distributing their material through the Internet, and through the production of an independent CD and LP called "Nor-tec Sampler." Sometime later, Chris Blackwell, the owner of Palm Pictures got a hold of the material and decided to support the project, distributing the music in the United States, Mexico, South America, and Europe under the title of "Tijuana Sessions" (Fernando Corona "Terrestre," personal communication, October 25, 2001). Following the success of Nor-tec music, the members of Clorofila incorporated the ideas of Nor-tec into the visual arts. From album covers and posters to T-shirts and clothing style with original designs, the Nor-tec style has metamorphosized into something akin to a trademark that embraces and contests different aspects of the ideological discourses imposed on them from the cultural centers in Mexico and the United States. Countercultural features are evident in the literature and visual arts recognized as closely associated with the collective. Underground magazines and fanzines such as Nitro, Moho, Número X, Planeta X, P UB, propose new identities beyond constructions of nationalism, and support cultural genealogies alternative to the canon imposed through the school system and media by the hegemonic culture.
This countercultural character is also fundamental in the discourse of Nor-tec musicians. Nor-tec's experimental attitude and its underground origins help the movement position itself as an alternative subculture. The discourse of Nor-tec as an alternative subculture is based on its opposition to the dominant musical styles of both Mexican and American mainstream music. However, the position of Nor-tec as the manifestation of a multi-ideological community complicates a simple interpretation within the solidarity-resistance duality. As the model I propose suggests, agency with dominant discourses is central in understanding the development of Nor-tec music and culture. A discussion of cultural identity expressed and re-shaped through Nor-tec music can only start by analyzing how Nor-tec exercises agency with American, European, and Mexican ideologies.
A brief historical overview of individual stylistic developments among the members of the collective would quickly point out a similar experimental background. Bostich, known as the Godfather of Nor-tec (Ejival, without date, p. 13), has played for a long time a key role in the development of electronic music in Tijuana. Always considered an alternative artist, Bostich had transcended the city limits of Tijuana by the early 1990's, when he was invited to play at the most important rave parties throughout Mexico (Mendoza López, 1999, 137). In the mid 1990's, Pepe Mogt founded Artefakto, a postindustrial band heavily influenced by American and British music. The case of Terrestre is similar, before joining the Nor-tec movement, he worked with several acoustic and electronic bands, experimenting with the combination of acoustic and electronic instruments, and composing in styles that ranged from acid house to rock-jazz (Fernando Corona "Terrestre," personal communication, October 25, 2001). Panóptica has also a postindustrial past he shares with Mogt through their collaboration in bands like Synthesis and Artefakto (Mendoza López, 1999, p. 137). Needless to say, the music of these musicians was completely marginal to the mainstream supported by the Mexican media. They always positioned themselves as artists who developed new musical codes, contesting and resisting institutions of power in their country. However, it is important to notice that these musical expressions were the result of the particular geographic position of Tijuana. In the late 1980's when the hip rock bands in Mexico were influenced by Argentinean and Spanish groups such as Soda Stereo and Nacha Pop, Tijuana musicians were experiencing the music of Jeff Mills, 808 State, Fear Factory, Depeche Mode, etc. The close and unavoidable cultural relationship between Tijuana and San Diego, California, has traditionally allowed tijuaneneses to have immediate access to the latest national trends in the U.S. before they reach Mexico City, as Eric Zolov has noted in his study of rock music in Mexico (Zolov, 1999, pp. 93-94). In other words, the music of Bostich, Terrestre, Panóptica, and Pepe Mogt in the early 1990's is the result of their agency with American institutions of power. For them, to position themselves on the side of contestant American subcultures was also to position themselves as a subculture resistant to the dominant ideology in Mexico's musical mainstream, and paradoxically, as precursors of the musical developments that were to reach the capital of the country a few years later.
In the late 1990's Pepe Mogt and Melo Ruiz founded Fussible, a new group that experimented with techno and electronica. They sent their music to record companies in Mexico and Europe, always receiving the same response. Mogt says: "they kept telling us to make [our music] more pop or put vocals on. The European labels thought it was too old and unoriginal, because in Europe, you know, there are 300 guys doing break beats. The problem is that we were trying to sound just like them" (quoted in Tyrangiel, 2001, p. 77). These labels rejected the music not based on its musical quality, but rather because it did not sound the way it was supposed to sound. This music sounded too much like the European bands' and, according to the implicit logic, a Mexican band should not sound European. Clearly, a "European type of non-European music" would not be appealing to European audiences as they expect those cultural productions to display a distinguishable marker of Otherness. Mexican bands and their European counterparts, as well as the label owners from both regions, joined in on the common effort of constructing musical identities of themselves and exploiting their respective handle of the discourses of race and ethnicity.
As late as 1999 Mogt described the Fussible project using a rhetoric that emphasized its close relation to the European scene and bands such as Kraftwerk, without mentioning any reference to the Nor-tec project (See Pedro Gabriel Beas, 1999, p. 29). It was only after the European labels positioned Mogt and his music within a discourse of difference that clearly set him apart as the Other, that he stepped into the direction of Nor-tec and the use of "local" sounds. Pushed into a corner where the music he was composing did not have a place, Mogt chose to strategically position himself within the European discourse of difference, and from that position, develop a musical style that would allow him to enter the mainstream market network. And his move was successful, the "Mexican sounds" paid off, as James Lien's review of "The Tijuana Sessions" proves: "with underground practitioners like Fussible, Plasma and Modula 3 paving a new path for nortec, one can only hope there will be even more indigenous Mexican sounds and influences permeating the party" (Lien, 2001).

THE BORDER AND CULTURE'S IN-BETWEEN

Néstor García Canclini recognizes that multi-ideological conditions such as Tijuana's are a symptom of the globalization of borders, and suggests that they develop a system of multidirectional hegemonies that should be interpreted as a process more complex than the usual binary logic of development-underdevelopment or cosmopolitanism-nationalism (García Canclini, 1988, p. 130). Invoking Laclau's notion of contested hegemony allows an understanding of subjects as individuals conscious of their position within complex configurations of power relations, and also permits us to continuously redefine hegemony itself (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, pp. xvi-xvii). Laclau's idea of hegemony offers an avenue for the agency of individuals to become unique and powerful tools in the construction of sites of identification that reproduce while contesting that hegemony.
The fragmented and marginal, both postmodern and postcolonial condition of Tijuana described by Fadanelli is clearly the cultural context upon which Nor-tec, as a cultural manifestation, was developed. As we have learned from the larger discourses behind Pepe Mogt's own words, recognizing the conditions that reserve Mexican musicians a very specific, well-defined place as peripheral subjects within the market system, forced him and other Tijuana musicians to enter a process of agency that resulted in the development of their Nor-tec style. I have argued that the rejection from European labels unbalanced Pepe Mogt's and Bostich's self-identity as international musicians, and pushed them to mediate with European discourses of lo mexicano. However, the European was not the only discourse that set tijuanenses apart through the marking of difference; Mexican dominant discourses of ethnicity also classify them as "the other" due to their particular position as northerners. As Josh Kun states, the Mexican side frequently accuses Tijuana of lack of culture, due to its closeness to the U.S. and the fact that most people speak English as well as Spanish, and for being too out of touch with Mexican tradition and history (Kun, 2000). Under the Mexican national discourse, the hegemonic construction of Mexican northerners as non-sophisticated fellows is customarily exemplified by the northerner's favoring non-sophisticated music such as the norteña and the tambora styles. Compared with the rhythmic complexities and the richness of the improvisatory tradition in music from Central and South Mexico, the straight, uncomplicated rhythmic qualities of norteña and tambora music as well as its lack of complex improvisation, has translated into a homology that likens unsophisticated music with unsophisticated fellows. This construction has been pervasive in popular culture, and is reflected in sayings such as: La cultura acaba donde empieza la carne asada, a phrase revealingly attributed by vox populi to José Vasconcelos. Following this discourse, norteña and tambora are the musics northerners are supposed to hear, and Tijuana musicians had to face this stereotypical construction when negotiating their place in the Mexican music market.
Nor-tec is thus, the consequence of individuals entering into conflict but at the same time reproducing American, Mexican, and European ideologies. The construction of Nor-tec as both an aesthetic and a process of identification is the result of an agency process that originates in dominant ideologies and hegemonies -a style that, in a strategically essentialist move recognizes its Otherness in order to become visible-, enters in conflict with them, and ends up challenging them in order to reevaluate the subject's positions within those hegemonic systems. It is precisely at this intersection that Nor-tec challenges the traditional notions of both techno and norteño identity. Nor-tec's appropriation of techno, with its incorporation of rhythmic patterns different from those traditionally associated with techno, was a shock for Mexico City ravers, as it was the use of norteño timbres and sounds that had no meaning for them, not as part of their techno culture nor as part of their larger popular music baggage. The rejection that Bostich experienced at the Tecnogeist 2000 concert was the result of an audience that could make no sense of a music that challenged its expectations of techno music and norteño musicians.

NOR-TEC AND STYLE

Dick Hebdige says that style emphasizes the particular over the general, the subordinate over the dominant; for him, style is the arena where opposing ideologies quarrel and thus the site where a subcultural struggle for hegemony can be safely articulated. Style challenges hegemony indirectly, "the objections are lodged, the contradictions displayed […] at the profound level of signs" (Hebdige, 1979, pp. 91-92). I suggest that Nor-tec musicians construct individual styles by adopting strategies of cultural consumption that are hidden in the style of the music. Nor-tec music is never a copy, a mere consumption of American or European techno, nor an electronic recreation of norteña or tambora music. Nor-tec style is developed within the confines of the established syntax of techno music, but enriched with a highly individual use of new rhythmic patterns and timbres. I am interested in this theoretical framework since it interprets transculturation as the result of performative exercises of productive consumption.
The Nor-tec movement constructs itself as a subculture that transforms existing music codes -techno, norteña and tambora- by overcoding them. According to Umberto Eco, overcoding takes place when an individual or group transforms an already existing code to fit their personal expressive necessity (Eco, 1976, p. 134). In Nor-tec music, this process combines the "Mexican" sounds and rhythmic patterns of local norteña and tambora music with the codes of organization of global techno music producing a transculturated artifact. The use of norteña and tambora sounds obeys the tijuanenses' alignment with discourses of difference from the U.S., Europe, and Mexico, such principle allows them to enter these markets by positioning themselves within the limits of their ethnicity as it is written by those discourses. The overcoding operation rewrites the codes of norteña, tambora, and techno musics, and produces a style that reinforces the subcultural identity of Nor-tec musicians.
According to Terrestre, Nor-tec uses the daily sounds of life in Tijuana as the musical foundation of their style (Fernando Corona "Terrestre," personal communication, October 25, 2001). The use of local sounds follows the claims for authenticity requested by European labels, nevertheless, the sonic result in many Nor-tec pieces could not be further from the stereotypical construction of lo mexicano. In Bostich's Polaris, for example, we do not find recognizable melodies nor the simple A-B-A structures of norteño and tambora music. Polaris follows a rather complex principle of organization that resembles the cubist edifices of modernist composers like Silvestre Revueltas and Igor Stravinsky, and a principle of structural repetition typical of techno music that immediately reminds us of the early works of Steve Reich. Polaris is a collage of fragments ordered in balanced blocks that form obsessive, interlocking ostinati whose semiotic and cultural value is only apparent to those familiar with norteño and tambora music. In Polaris, like in most of the pieces included in the "Nor-tec Sampler," the Mexican sounds are not found in the surface of the music, but rather in the smaller constitutive fragments. In these musics, timbre is the smallest meaningful unit, and it is at this level that the cultural connections required by the European labels could be made. Polaris' fragmentary, yet cohesive nature seems to recall Mike Davis' description of tijuanenses as "true bricoleurs" that recycle and re-signify not only elements from "the other side of the border" (Davis, 2000, p. 26), but also those from their own tradition.
However, and although some of the identity markers required by European labels seem clear in Bostich's Polaris -among them the predominant cumbia norteña rhythms throughout the piece-, in many of the earlier examples of Nor-tec music, the local inflections may get lost in the obsessive rhythmic drive and the absence of melody that characterize techno music. Only an individual already familiar with the rhythmic patterns, sounds and timbres of norteña and tambora styles would be able to identify the accordion riffs and the güiro and redova accents within the array of sounds that inundate pieces like Fussible's Ventilador, Bostich's Synthakon, or Clorofila's Huatabampo 3am. As Stuart Hall proposes, meaning only has effect when it is articulated in practice; therefore, the moment of 'decoding' a cultural artifact is as determinant as the moment of 'encoding' it (Hall, 1993, 91). It is through their particularly shared ability to decode an event that a group enacts its collective identity and contests hegemony's ability to legitimate social and cultural order. When members of the Nor-tec culture identify the irony and the humor in the sounds and the images of the Nor-tec musicians and artists, they create a new social and cultural order that re-signifies those sounds and those images as theirs, beyond the meaning codified in them by the dominant culture. One can observe an example of this practice in Gerardo "Acamonchi" Yepiz's graffitto of Raúl Velasco, which in his rendition seems to exemplify Nor-tec's scornful disdain of hegemonic Mexican media culture (see figure 2).

Figure 2. TV host Raúl Velasco according to Acamonchi. Image courtesy of Gerardo Yépiz/ acamonchi.com

THE NOR-TEC COLLECTIVE

As a symbolic production, Nor-tec provides evidence of the process García Canclini calls reterritorialization, one that shows there is no "natural" relationship between culture and the geographic location where it is produced (García Canclini, 1989, p. 288). Indeed, within its local context of reception/consumption, Nor-tec's music entails a strong social bond with certain social sectors, in a phenomenon that conflicts with the common conceptions of Tijuana as a site of rootless migrants and transient populations without a sense of producing an identifiable local culture. Nor-tec artists consciously enunciate this discourse when they express their desire to show the Tijuana that does not occupy the newspaper's front pages with news about drug dealers and immigrants trying to cross the border; the Tijuana they experience on a daily basis instead of the Tijuana written by hegemonic discourses in Mexico and the United States (see Seiffert, 2002).
Nor-tec music is not only an articulation of their understanding of a given social reality, but it also reshapes the sense of identity of those who experience it. Many followers consider themselves part of the Nor-tec subculture. Writers like Ejival and Rafa Saavedra, and graphic designers like Acamonchi and Raúl Cárdenas have created fictional scenarios and visual landscapes for which the music is conceived as the ideal soundtrack. The partygoers identify themselves as part of a movement that has put Tijuana in the map of contemporary music. For once, it is "cool" to be a tijuanense, and one feels a sense of pride when speaking to them: "Nor-tec is something that had to happen, I have always considered the border as a place that has very interesting music, much better than in the rest of the country" (Enrique Jiménez in Seiffert, 2002).
When Terrestre pointed out that "Nor-tec [was] the soundtrack of the life in the Tijuana-San Diego border" (Fernando Corona "Terrestre," personal communication, October 25, 2001), he implied much more than a simple exercise in homology where music structures reflect the social structures of the community that produces it. In Terrestre's remarks the key word is "life," since it presupposes a complex process rather than a fixed, rigid structure. We must understand life on the border as a continuous process of agency between different ideologies. A process that mediates between group and individual self-representation and imposed dominant representations in an attempt to navigate a multi-ideological world. Moreover, Nor-tec's challenges to stereotypical American and Mexican assumptions about Tijuana and the border express specific exercises of agency and mediation with dominant ideologies. At the same time, it becomes a powerful performative experience that, as Simon Frith claims, "articulates in itself an understanding of both group relations and individuality, on the basis of which ethical codes and social ideologies are understood [by the members]" (Frith, 1996, p. 111). Judith Butler defines the performative as an act that is at the same time an enunciation and a way of conduct, the performative is "understood only in terms of the action that the speech performs (Butler, 1997, p. 72). If we read Nor-tec from Frith's and Butler's perspectives, we have to acknowledge that the music produced by the collective is a performative enunciation, one that enables musicians and listeners alike to establish a new relationship with the web of ideologies that define dominant discourses in the Tijuana-San Diego border. Nor-tec is a performative activity or enunciation that enables these musicians to overcome the racially and ethnically essentialist discourse of the European labels. It facilitates the negotiation of their position as individuals living in the multi-ideological context of the border between center and periphery. At the same time, the consumers of Nor-tec culture are able to reformulate and redefine their position as liminal individuals through a collective, while still local, experience. The production and consumption of Nor-tec music permit individual and collective agency through recognizing the multiplicity of ideologies and discourses that determine their existence as liminal and peripheric subjects, and especially by recognizing the contingency of such liminality, one that exists only in relation to the centered individuals that construct such discourses.
Nor-tec is a strategy invented to come in and out of the web created by the multi-ideological condition of post-modernity and post-coloniality, and as such, it shows us that individuals can also take strategic advantage of the discourses that determine their social and cultural marginality. Nor-tec artists find themselves not only at a physical border, but also en la línea between subjectivity and social discourses; such a place, marginal as it may be for the dominant culture, becomes the perfect site to launch a performative strategy that could re-signify the discourses of hegemony.