Professional Documents
Culture Documents
NATALIA BIELETTO-BUENO
Universidad de Guanajuato
Noise, soundscape
and heritage: Sound
cartographies and urban
segregation in twenty-
first-century Mexico City
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
By means of an auto-ethnography, I problematize the category of ‘noise’ in the soundscape
context of Iztapalapa, a stigmatized borough of Mexico City. Informed by the noise
interdisciplinary fields of sound studies, aural studies and urbanism, I propose sound cartographies
a comparison of two sound maps: the ‘First Map of Noise for the Metropolitan aural experiences
Area of Mexico’s Valley’ and ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’. I argue that the creation of urban segregation
both maps is a symbolic instrument that assists processes of social classification. I cultural tourism
historicize the concepts of ‘noise’ and ‘soundscape’ and analyse their uses in official intangible heritage
discourses. Paying attention to the concept of ‘sonic heritage’, I discuss the role of
official institutions in educating and managing forms of aurality. My investigation
is informed by the concept ‘division of aural labour’ to explain asymmetries between
people’s urban, aural experiences. I conclude that these two maps add to the social
stigma that burdens certain areas historically marginalized by the model of urban
segregation.
107
After years of graduate studies in the United States, I was surprised by how
my aural experience of Mexico City, my home city, affected me upon my
return. My new sensibility to what I characterized as ‘noise’ was in part due
to the contrast between the two neighbourhoods I inhabited in each place.
In Los Angeles, I lived in a quiet Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood located
near the intersection of Pico and Robertson Boulevard. In Mexico City, I
settled in Iztapalapa, an industrial-oriented borough located in the east of the
city. I lived in a house at the intersection of Eje 3 and Eje 8, a transportation
hub congested with heavy trucks and trailers en route to the highway that
connects the city with the state of Puebla.
This new environment required me to modify my daily schedule and
habits: the roar of traffic and blaring car horns normally woke me around
4 a.m. At 7 a.m., the car-repair business adjacent to my front door would
commence its activities accompanied by a repertoire of cumbias and reggae-
ton. In LA, I used to take my five-month old baby for a stroll around La
Cienega Park. Hoping to continue this habit, I asked directions to the near-
est park in Iztapalapa, which turned out to be located in a traffic island in the
middle of the heavily transited Eje 3. Willing to readjust in my home town, I
sought more alternatives. I walked in the opposite direction but my experience
was no less frustrating: powerful speakers with loud music and horns accom-
panied my walk. If at night I found some time to read, my neighbour’s loud
TV made it impossible for me to concentrate. My sense of aural displacement
became all the more perplexing when I broached the subject with others. I
asked my neighbour if the noise outside affected her sleep: ‘quite the oppo-
site!’ she said. ‘When I go to the beach, I can hardly sleep. It is too quiet there
and that makes me nervous’.
As a cultural musicologist familiarized with the field of sound studies, I was
constantly self-reminded that my interpretations of sounds as ‘bothersome’,
‘annoying’ or ‘aggressive’ were not objective, but rather the result of a series of
strictly subjective value judgments. I repeated to myself that what I interpret as
‘noise’ is closely correlated to discrepancies between my expectations of uses of
the space, and the actual activities that I am able to perform in it. My designa-
tion of certain sounds as ‘undesirable intruders’ was therefore a direct result of
such discrepancies (Dominguez Ruiz 2011, 2015a, 2015b). And yet, my discom-
fort was undeniable. I asked myself why sound regulation in Mexico City was
so lax, noise control initiatives so scarce, instruments to enforce them so inef-
ficient and my neighbour’s tolerance to noise so high. I tried to recall my past
experiences in other regions in Mexico City prior to my decade-long absence.
Had the city changed or had I? Or, rather, had my living in this particular area
of the city exposed me to an urban experience I was unaware of?
My aural experience during those few months in Iztapalapa made me feel
vulnerable, but most of all, I felt ‘out of place’. At the time, my daily contact
with those sounds seemed incompatible with my habitus. It forced me to
modify my life while it also marked an estrangement with my home city.
Invoking Barry Truax’ terms, I was entering this acoustic community as an
outsider (Truax 2001) and I did not like it. Furthermore, living in Iztapalapa,
an area with severe problems of urban infrastructure and a socially stigma-
tized neighbourhood (Goffman 1974), forced me to confront my own sense of
class privilege directly and to interrogate the almost reflexive supposition that
‘I deserved a better place to live’. By momentarily suspending the meaning of
‘noise’, I recognized that the ‘annoying’ sounds I perceived in the city, as well
as the discomfort these sounds triggered throughout my body, stemmed not
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and embedded in institutional discourses, play an important role in producing
social representations of a city in which inhabitants are segregated by social
class. I finally sustain that by categorizing sounds and representing them
in space, these maps contribute to shape our aural experiences of the city,
and because such entextualizations grant different value to different hearing
cultures, they legitimize forms of aurality and thus condition the development
of subjectivities by indirectly shaping the meanings of the spaces we inhabit.
For example, Martina Löw addresses the connections between processes
of categorization, institutionalization and habit and how these translate into
meaningful experiences of the city for its inhabitants: ‘a city is the product
of current and past action and as such is objectified, that is, named, typi-
fied, institutionalized and habitualized’ (2013: 900). I follow her in claiming
that the institutionalization of cultural practices, hearing in this case, acts as
a mediator of the urban experience, thus contributing to the reproduction of
what she calls, the ‘city’s intrinsic logic’ – a way for inhabitants to make sense
of how the city is materially and socially structured. Löw elaborates:
The ‘provinces of meaning’, referred to by Löw, are more than mere meta-
phors for what others have termed the ‘mental maps’ of a city (Lynch 1960;
Jiang 2012). Rather, they account for why people living in a city tend to
habitualize and eventually naturalize to: reiterative classifications of places,
people or stimuli; criteria to structure a city into important and less impor-
tant regions; and social practices and the people performing them. As she
describes it, institutionalization acts as a mediator in how we make sense of
urban experiences and in the social relations between people living in the city.
To this end, Löw states,
In the following pages, I will describe how the two aforementioned sound
cartographies contribute to this institutionalization of the aural experience of
Mexico City and how, in turn, they habitualize inhabitants to Mexico City’s
intrinsic logics as a segregated city.
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favourable, environments have unequal effects or coincide with the different
levels of socio-economic status of its inhabitants’ (2007: 600).
Despite their good intentions, the approaches taken by both Moreno
Jiménez in the city of Madrid and the UAM’s 1st MRZMVM in Mexico City
illustrate some of the ways in which ‘solutions’ conceived from single disci-
plines are incapable of elucidating the complexities of noise as a cultural
phenomenon. The alleged problem of perceived noise in cities has typically
been addressed through the utilization of acoustic and geographic criteria and
with instruments to measure, map, diagnose and ultimate solve noise pollution.
By strictly using quantitative criteria and by designating ‘noise’ as the
sound produced by the traffic of vehicles, the 1st MRZMVM identified the
areas most affected by traffic sounds but it did not consider the experiences,
social meanings and significance that such sounds provoke in listeners who
inhabit these so-called ‘affected’ areas. And while Jiménez is interested in the
social costs of ‘noise’ by finding the connections between social structures and
an unequal distribution of loud sounds in the urban space, the cause of his
concern mostly revolves around an acoustic phenomenon that he precon-
ceives as unjust. Dispensing with the aural element, both studies dissociate
sounds from the meanings they bear to listening subjects. What this shows is
that in attending to urgent problems such as the incontrollable increase of the
decibel levels in urban settings and its effects on people’s health, these schol-
ars dissect multifaceted problems into manageable pieces that run the risk of
generating oversimplified conclusions. Because the existing research concern-
ing noise abatement is often conceived from the centrality of well-established
disciplinary fields of knowledge, it also has the liability of disregarding the fact
that sound categorization is subject to intricate perceptual, social and cultural
processes.
If, by contrasts, the convergence of urban studies, sound studies, sociol-
ogy and anthropology of the senses seeks to understand the ways in which
the ‘unequal organization of cities grants its inhabitants unequal potential
for action and strategies for coping with adversity’ (Löw 2013: 900), such
an enquiry would only be possible given that certain stimuli are considered
adverse to specific groups of people – bearers of different aural cultures –
who live in the emplaced cultures of their smaller neighbourhoods. Such an
approach would imply first to renounce the methods that attempt to tackle
the city in all its extended geography and secondly, it requires acknowledge-
ment of the cultural variety inhabiting the various city’s regions.
Although the 1st MRZMVM ratified my internal conflict about the insalu-
brity of my neighbourhood, many questions still remained unanswered. For
instance, why did my neighbours seem so oblivious to the sonic, and hence,
social consequences of their domestic activities? Why did they look so unaf-
fected by the sounds that I found unbearable? What was it that helped them to
resignify their integral urban experiences into more than just troubling sounds
in ways that I could not? And most upsetting (at least to me), why was I so
distressed by my incapability to reintegrate into the society that was supposed
to be my community of birth? Clearly, my interpretation of noise forced me
to confront my countrymen and women, as well as the culture I was allegedly
a part of, anew. It also confirmed for me that class differences – understood
by the pioneers of cultural studies in terms of habitus – are often more socially
distancing than cultural differences stemming from citizenship. My recipro-
cal sense of belonging and distance to this local culture was mediated by the
specific ways in which the city is physically structured, evidenced by the fact
contains the contradictory forces of the natural and the cultural, the
fortuitous and the composed, the improvised and the deliberately
produced. […] constituted by cultural histories, ideologies, and practices
of seeing, soundscape implicates listening as a cultural practice.
(Samuels et al. 2010: 330)
As it can be noticed, the turn is not only lexical but also sensorial as it fosters
an introspective posture by listeners and encourages them to reposition
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themselves from passive recipients to active agents in sound interpretation.
Furthermore, as soundscape studies began to explore the specificity of sounds
in geographically located and physically emplaced cultures, they also unrav-
elled both the subjective factors at play in processes of sound categorization,
as well as the interrelational nature of space exemplified in social struggles
for the control of acoustic territories. Nowadays, a vigorous corpus of studies
in sound anthropology, with Steven Feld at the lead, compellingly describes
the sociocultural processes entailed in sound signification. Feld’s concept
of ‘acoustemology’ – a portmanteau of ‘epistemology’ and ‘acoustic’ – has
advanced efforts to elucidate the construction of knowledge through sound
and hearing, as well as the power differentials entailed in said construction.
The term ‘soundscape’ has indeed proven its import to several areas of
study including biology, ecology, geography, anthropology, linguistics, ethno-
musicology, history and sociology. In recent years, its use has expanded
beyond academic circles and it has made an entrance into areas such as
archive management and urbanism. Libraries have collaborated to digitize
and disseminate sound records from the most diverse eco-systems and urban-
ized habitats. Increasingly too the sound of the environment has become an
element at least considered by – and in cases incorporated to the work of –
architects and urban designers (see e.g. the Soundscape Park in Florida and
the many conferences on urbanism and urban planning organized around the
concept of soundscape).
And yet, the contributions of this subfield of academic research have not
been sufficiently incorporated to the area of public policy. In many cases, the
epistemological implications of the term ‘soundscape’ have been used discre-
tionally. I propose that the theoretical findings of sound studies that have
made it to the realm of public policy are few, and all tied to the commodifi-
cation of sound and soundscapes. In fact, rising public awareness about the
soundscape has facilitated the conception and implementation of Mexican
public policies to manage sound as ‘intangible heritage’, which is also to say,
as yet another element of Mexico’s cultural identity that has been repackaged
as a touristic commodity.
The hallmark of this Master Plan was to enrich the connections between culture
and tourism. If the tourism sector had gained traction during the adminis-
tration of Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000), it was during Fox’s presidency that
tourism was ratified by the government as the fastest growing industry and
thus was also posited as the most viable growth option for the country. Since
2000, and with the stated goal of transforming Mexico into a leading power
in international tourism by year 2025, the Mexican state has been invested in
increasing, diversifying and promoting traditional and non-traditional tourist
attractions, for both native and foreign visitors. Under Fox’s master plan, tour-
ism was identified as, the ‘strategic sector’ for national economic growth, and a
national priority that subsumed many other areas of public policy. As decreed
in official communication, ‘The National Program of Tourism 2001–06 would
be mandatorily observed by all governmental dependencies and Federal
Public Management entities in their respective areas of competence’ (second
article of the National Program of Tourism: Anon. 2001). If initially directed to
the expansion and improvement of infrastructure at resorts, Mexican policy-
makers noticed that national tourism had to galvanize its ‘cultural tourism
industry’ by both diversifying and increasing its supply of attractions. From
this ensued a series of policies to identify, revalue, preserve and commercial-
ize buildings, objects, practices, and in general any sensorial stimuli that could
potentially become marketed as ‘national heritage’. This included food, music
and, as I will show, sounds.
The Federal Government thus encouraged the creation of the National
Sound Archive for ‘researching, documenting and disseminating Mexico’s
sound heritage, which results from both live experiences as well as from
phonographic and radio traditions’ (Fonoteca Nacional Official Website 2017).
Funded by the National Endowment for Arts and Culture (CONACULTA is
the acronym in Spanish), the Fonoteca’s mission accords that: ‘[sound] is a
fundamental part of said cultural heritage and a primary element in conform-
ing Mexico’s national memory and identity’ (Fonoteca Nacional Official
Website 2017). Since its creation, the Fonoteca has performed the invaluable
work of preserving, cataloguing and disseminating numerous phonographic
collections that, prior to its inception, were dispersed in various public and
private sound archives throughout Mexico. The Fonoteca’s purported mission,
however, says little about how official state institutions actually create herit-
age, either material or intangible, through processes of selection, discrimina-
tion and value assignment to what is thought to be representative of a given
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nation, a topic of interest that has acquired considerable salience not only in
Mexico but in several other countries (Arévalo 2010; Precedo Ledo et al. 2010;
Fan 2006, 2010; Prats 2006).
In the case of Mexico, its various musical traditions – traditional, folk-
loric, popular or academic – have been the ones most often integrated into
the debate on the impact of official policies on the construction of intangi-
ble heritage (López Vargas 2009; Villaseñor Alonso and Zolla Márquez 2012;
López 2014; Sevilla 2014; Hernández López 2009; Flores Mercado and Nava
2016; Alcántara 2014; Híjar Sánchez 2009; Vargas Cetina 2009). Sound and
soundscape however, have been rarely integrated to the discussion.
As was the case for noise in the first map, the discourse presented in the
National Sound Archive’s webpage creates the impression that sound herit-
age already exists out there, in space, but there is nothing natural in the
emergence of so called ‘heritage sounds’. Rather, the very existence of such a
category exemplifies the role of institutions in mediating the aural experience
of citizens, and most perceptibly visitors to the country. Through reiterative
and well-advertised classifications, institutions help to turn quotidian aspects
of everyday life into innovative attractions and precious objects, reinventing
their social meanings and reassessing their importance. Llorenç Prats has
dubbed this phenomenon ‘heritage activation’, which results from the disper-
sal of sacralized discourses around a collective, socially constructed notion
of cultural identity (2006). Moreover, Prats distinguishes between the two
identities these kinds of discourses activate: ‘we for us’ (discourses of self –
recognition) and ‘we for others’ (topical and stereotypical discourses) each
targeted to a different audience (2006: 74). Its position as the National Sound
Archive thus places the Fonoteca in a privileged position to manage sound
and aurality. Not surprisingly, over the past few years it has played an active
role in educating listeners to appreciate those sounds that supposedly consti-
tute Mexico’s ‘sonic heritage’. This has been done through the organization of
strategic activities and various initiatives such as the creation of the webpage,
‘endangered sounds’ or the hosting of the local activities to commemorate the
‘International Noise Awareness Day’, the implementation of ‘sonic bike rides’
around the central neighbourhoods of the borough of Coyoacán, the organi-
zation of conferences and other academic activities that deal with sound and/
or noise, and the creation of ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’ itself. Nevertheless, the
question remains: which sounds, then, according to the ears of those contrib-
utors, deserve to be represented on ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’ and which do not?
The Fonoteca is located in the barrio (neighbourhood) of Santa Catarina,
Coyoacán. This neighbourhood is one of the most emblematic areas in
the city and a prime destination for national and international tourists. Its
architecture includes colonial houses and plazas, public parks and gardens,
cobbled streets and colourful, hidden alleys. Along with the adjacent Colonia
del Carmen, these two neighbourhoods have traditionally hosted art schools,
bookstores, coffee shops, boutique stores and an array of businesses alike,
consolidating the bohemian identity of this southern region of Mexico City.
The principal cultural attractions of this zone include the former houses of
both Frida Kahlo and León Trotsky now turned into museums, as well as the
Museum of Popular Culture. Additionally, in 2005, the international Project
of Public Spaces – self-represented as ‘a central hub of the global placemak-
ing movement, connecting people to ideas, expertise, and partners who share
a passion for creating vital places’ (Project for Public Spaces, Official Website
2017) – ranked Coyoacán as one of the top places to live in North America.
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hence are central both in cartographic representations and in shaping the
listening modalities that define the current uses of the term ‘sonic heritage’. It
has also determined its concurrent uses in discourses to promote cultural tour-
ism. In the context of neo-liberal capitalism, the creation of soundmarks seems
to be connected also with the ideology of the ‘trademark’ and the hegem-
onic tendency to turn all aspects of human existence into properties and/or
commodities. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), for
example, provides a list of registered soundmarks that are the property of a
given trademark (United States Patent and Trademark Office 2011). While this
propensity to register and patent melodies composed ex profeso for commer-
cial purposes may seem like common sense, the logic is harder to extrapolate
when it comes to patenting ambient sounds. This propensity is well exempli-
fied by the Trademark Ordinance 2001 or Pakistan Code, issued by the World
Intellectual Property Organization, which proposed to register the property of
aspects as unusual and unprecedented as the sounds and colours of certain
places (Pakistan Code, WIPO). Such entrepreneurial logics have been applied
to countries in their efforts to market their ‘nation brands’, which are, in turn,
used as instruments to commodify and advertise the reputation of a country
in the global market. While the ‘nation brand’ is not equivalent to a tourism
campaign, they often have overlapping functions, especially in cases in which,
like Mexico, government conceives tourism as a strategic axis of economic
growth. Clearly then, the nation brand, and the marketing of the city are
aimed to attract both tourism as well as foreign investment (Fan Ying 2006,
2010).
Needless to say, the more a city can claim to have ‘heritage’, the more
attractive it will look to travellers worldwide. As Precedo et al. indicate (2010),
in the few past years, strategies of urban marketing have tended towards
a model that treats the intangible aspects of cities as assets for commercial
purposes. Such initiatives, of neo-liberal orientation, have tried to anchor
the touristic appeal of cities in its intangible heritage by extolling the senso-
rial experiences they offer (Precedo Ledo et al. 2010). Legitimizing authori-
ties in business making have celebrated such sustained efforts on the part of
the Mexican government. Forbes magazine, for example, states that ‘accord-
ing to its National Plan of Development, Mexico would seek to promote its
touristic destinations highlighting its difference and offering new and unique
experiences’ (28 January 2015). Likewise, in January 2016, the New York Times
declared Mexico City as the first tourist destination at an international level
(Anon. 2016).
AURAL LABOUR
In examining the configuration of the aural sphere in Latin America in the
context of nation formation, Ana María Ochoa identifies some mechanisms
whereby hegemonic as well as State power serves to legitimize certain aural
modalities over others. As she explains, such inequalities of participation and
agency concerning the legitimacy of the sonic can be considered a ‘division of
aural labour’. This division is a consequence of processes she calls ‘purification
of sounds’, which pose a distinction between ‘pure’ or ‘traditional sounds’ and
hybrid or modern ones. In other words, pure/traditional sounds refer to those
that correspond to place-based identity constructions and hybrid sounds are
produced through creative uses and transculturation practices. As Ochoa
explains, a practice of sonic transculturation
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structures. In addition, any discourse raised in opposition to the reign-
ing power was required henceforth to establish credibility by presenting
an alternative dream of the future.
(Rama [1980] 1984: 8)
CONCLUSIONS
Demeaning discourses about the sounds characteristic of certain areas disre-
gard what people who dwell in these areas make out of those sounds, in terms
of the experiential, the symbolic, and the affective. If the 1st MRZMVM map
adds to the social stigma that burdens historically marginalized areas such as
Iztapalapa, ‘México’s Sound Map’ neglects those sounds that may be mean-
ingful to ears appreciative of this neighbourhood’s cultural and sonic identity.
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Bieletto-Bueno, N. (2017), ‘Noise, soundscape and heritage: Sound carto-
graphies and urban segregation in twenty-first-century Mexico City’,
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 4:1&2, pp. 107–26, doi: 10.1386/
jucs.4.1-2.107_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Natalia Bieletto (Ph.D., UCLA) is an associate professor at the cultural stud-
ies program at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico. Her line of research
is mainly focused on understanding the role that music and listening play
in processes of social and cultural differentiation, especially in terms of the
distinctions between social classes.
Contact: Departamento de Estudios Culturales, División de Ciencias Sociales
y Humanidades, Universidad de Guanajuato, Campus León, Prolongación
www.intellectbooks.com 125
Calzada de los Heroes, #908, esquina Blvd. Vasco de Quiroga, Col. La
Martinica, CP. 37500, León Guanajuato, Mexico.
E-mail: nbieletto@gmail.com
Natalia Bieletto-Bueno has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format
that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.