1. The representation of Chávez’s music as essentially Mexican is given ample treatment in Robert Stevenson’s and Gerard Béhague’s surveys of music in Mexico and Latin America, although their skepticism may be read between the lines: Stevenson, Music in Mexico, 1–7, 241–43, 250; Béhague, Music in Latin America, 129–43, but also 232–33, 246–52. This image informs, in almost obligatory fashion, most commentary on his music. See, for example, Antokoletz, Twentieth-Century Music, 221–27, and Oja, Making Music Modern, 275. All translations in this article, whether of a few words or full passages, are mine.
2. The Mexican Revolution was a pro-democratic civil war that set in motion a transformation of Mexican culture and the formation of modern Mexico. The literature on the Revolution and its consequences is vast. For a comprehensive study, see Knight, Mexican Revolution.
3. In Mexico, slavery and legal segregation were abolished with Independence, and race is currently not a category in census gathering. The current indigenous population is defined in terms of kinship and linguistic practices. With political nationalism, Mexican culture as a whole was defined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as “mestizo,” a product of the mestizaje, or mixture, of those ethnicities and cultures that came together in the country in the sixteenth century. The mestizo ethnicity is considered more than the sum of its parts. In Chávez’s time, it was assumed that the ethnicities mixed in mestizaje were the European and the indigenous (the African heritage was recognized only recently). Chávez and his family were mestizo; in 1924 he referred to himself as “semi-European”: see Chávez, “El Cruti hindú,” 27.
4. See, among others, Copland, “Carlos Chavez,” and Rosenfeld, “Americanism of Carlos Chavez.” See also Saavedra, “Of Selves and Others,” 158–72. I first presented my research on this topic in “Carlos Chávez and the USA: The Construction of a Strategic Otherness,” a paper given at the American Musicological Society conference, Boston, 1998.
5. Chávez used fragments of Copland’s and Rosenfeld’s essays as program notes and press releases in the early years of his Orquesta Sinfónica de México; see Saavedra, “Of Selves and Others,” 288, 296, and Barajas, “Crónicas musicales,” as quoted in Saavedra, “Of Selves and Others,” 293.