On Community Media, Popular Music, and Transmedialities of Survival

At a historical moment of polycrisis, it has never been more urgent to re- engage with the multiple semantic possibilities of survival. This article explores varying accounts of survival that emerge in the interplay between community media and popular music traditions in Ajusco, a small town south of Mexico City in which Indigenous languages are no longer spoken, but in which an “originary” identity has been preserved. Interlacing the ethnographic and the historical, the article shows how activities to maintain popular and folk musical traditions, especially mariachi, respond to questions of community identity, safety, livelihoods, and ecosystem survival. Here, music may be drawn into a virtuous cycle, as distinct ecological, economic and cultural iterations of survival come into relation, often complementing and supporting each other. Building on this research, the article proposes the concept of “transmedialities of survival” to describe the complex interactions across distinct media technologies through which concepts of survival are disseminated.