Singing to the Machine: Rodolfo Garcia's Autobiographical Report

Abstract

My paper examines an autobiographical monologue which Rodolfo García, an elderly Mexican American vaudevillian from San Antonio, Texas, recorded on his home tape recorder. In the monologue, Mr. García moved from a temporally ordered story to a performance of several song parodies he once sang on stage. He thus brought diachronic and synchronic modes of apprehension of past events (i.e., narrative and list) into dialogue. By presenting a working-class masculine mexicano self grounded in a family tradition of performance, he responded creatively to social tensions within his community, as well as those inherent in the ethnographic encounter.