Based on extensive fieldwork in Tijuana, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Mexico City, this article explores the intersections of identity, modernity, desire, and marginality in the production, distribution, and transnational consumption of Nor-tec music. Tijuana musicians developed Nor-tec by combining sounds sampled from traditional music of the north of Mexico (conjunto norteno and banda) with compositional techniques borrowed from techno music. The resulting style reflects the current re-elaboration of tradition in relation to imaginary articulations of modernity that takes place in Tijuana's youth border culture.

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It is about 1.00 am. Roberto Mendoza ("Panoptica"), Ramon Amezcua ("Bostich"), and Pepe Mogt from Fussible are standing on the club's stage in front of their laptops. [2] Their bodies, transfigured by an array of images projected onto the screen behind them, move with the cadenced beats produced by their gentle manipulation of their computers' keyboards. Two hours of careful programming have led the party to this point: the dance floor, packed with bodies that refuse to stop moving, reacts to every detail of the musicians' performance with an approval that translates into shakier hips, faster heeling, higher arms, and sweatier bodies. At this moment, the loudspeakers fill the club with the distinctly raw and powerful tuba, guiro, and tarola (snare drum) sounds of Bostich's hit "Polaris." The images on the screen follow the frantic, syncopated pace of the music, spitting the fluorescent, transformed facsimiles of a surreal, hypermodern city which seems to look back at the club's audience. The dancers immediately recognize the music and frenetically scream, throw their fists up in the air, jump, spin, merge themselves with the sounds and images in a labyrinthine game of mirrors where the observed becomes the observer, where the city becomes the music, where the dancers become Tijuana. It is 16 September, we are at The Echo in Los Angeles, California, and this is the climax of the 2003 La Leche tour. This is also Mexican Independence Day and this is the culmination of a Nor-tec performance that proves to be more than just a musical event; this performance is a true transforming experience, one that both provides a site for identification and rearticulates discourses on tradition and modernity, center and periphery, the "Mexican" and the "American." These are indeed "bad-ass border beats" that present a site for the intersection and negotiation of tradition and modernity. [3]

Nor-tec as a musical style is the result of the tijuanenses' negotiation of the contradictory circumstances of living at the United States-Mexico border, [4] the boundary between the First and the Third World, the line that separates modernity and the dreams about modernity. Nor-tec is a music that re-articulates the issues that surround Tijuana's culture. The hyphenated term "nor-tec" (a fusion of the words norteno and tecno [techno]) was coined by Panoptica in 1999, when Pepe Mogt and Jorge Melo Ruiz from Fussible proposed the creation of a musical style that would fuse the typical sounds of Mexican conjunto norteno (accordion, tarola, bajo sexto) and banda (tuba, trumpet, clarinet, tarola) with the compositional principles of electronic popular music (juxtaposition of sound blocks and loops, combination of breaks, samplings and synthesizers, and computer manipulation). The hybrid character of the term refers to the transcultural nature of Mogt and Ruiz's idea, a notion that attempts to reconcile the young tijuanenses' desire for modernity with a musical tradition often associated with rural people and many times neglected as unsophisticated. However, it is in this conciliatory process that tradition is re-written according to the present and re-articulated in relation to the future. The idea of sampling nortena music originates in a desire to authenticate current musical practices in their relation to the past, and results in music that rewrites that past, thereby reconstituting tradition in a performative way. The sampling creates a prism that allows us to observe tradition and at the same time transforms our perception of that tradition. The liminal character of Nor-tec gives it the strength to constitute itself in a performative manifestation that articulates the processes of transculturation that are collectively experienced by subjects at the border, thus making its production into a clear example of performative composition (see Madrid, "Writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Music in Mexico" 16-19); Nor-tec is a musical articulation that at the same time announces and negotiates the musicians' place within a multi-ideological context.

Among other things, young middle-class members of different Latino communities in the United States (mostly Mexican Americans but also Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Colombians, etc.) have appropriated Nor-tec because it resonates with their own experience as border subjects. Like tijuanenses, many of these young Latinos are individuals who must negotiate a multicultural world and engage contradictory class, race, and gender discourses on a daily basis; and Nor-tec, as a manifestation that engages a multiplicity of ideologies, articulates their desire to find new and alternative sites of identification beyond the stereotypes reinforced by family and community traditions as well as American media. It is no coincidence that the organizers of La Leche selected 5 May and 16 September, two of the most recognizable Mexican and Mexican-American celebrations in the United States, as the beginning and ending dates of their 2003 circuit nor that Nor-tec artists were the tours' main attraction. Jennifer Manon, a Mexican American who coordinates La Leche for the British label Sonic 360, responded as follows when asked about the targeted audience of the tour:

   Well, it's really diverse. The parties have always been super
   mixed. But my friends were the first to bring [La Leche] to
   the United States, in New York, and we were all
   Latina. It happened to be that way--Latina girls. We started
   doing it, so our circle started that way and it's always been
   strong in that side especially playing Nor-tec music. And they
   thought it was really cool to introduce it to other Latinos
   because it's so new and people were all listening to the same
   stuff, and we were so sick of that mentality, so we wanted to
   push it to show Latinos that there's other stuff to listen
   to.... Because [at Sonic 360] we're always trying to do something
   that people don't know about yet. Bring out the next fresh music.
   Not hold on to the same thing forever and ever ... which is fun,
   too, I mean, we don't disregard traditional music, but it's good
   to get something different going and see people's reactions to
   something new.... A lot of Latinos seem stuck in their ways, and
   are stereotyped as wanting to keep their own ways; and radio
   stations are a number one way of brainwashing, saying "stick with
   it, 'cus it keeps everyone together." (Manon)

Manon's comments inform us of how the distribution of Nor-tec music among different Latino communities responds to the desire of young Latinos to challenge some of the stereotypes that associate them almost exclusively with "Latin music." Nevertheless, the fact that the chosen music was Nor-tec--itself a style that rewrites tradition out of a desire for modernity--and that the beginning and final dates coincided with traditional Mexican and Mexican-American celebrations illustrates the complex interrelation between modernity, tradition, and identity among transnational communities.