‘This song is a map’: sonic pathways of enclosure and dwelling

Many popular songs describe journeys to the Ajusco mountain range, south of Mexico City, sentimentally extolling the region’s colours and natural abundance. The connection between music and place is so close that songs are frequently described as ‘maps’ or ‘guides’. This article explores these songs-as-maps in relation to a distinction between expressivities which are complicit in enclosure, and those involved in dwelling; and it argues for an understanding of songs-as-maps as palimpsestic, over-layered compositions of matter, meaning and sonority on the pathways traversed through Ajusco. In some cases, songs-as-maps describe journeys with an end goal – often the appropriation of a landscape presumed empty – and in others, these songs focus on and enact the process of walking and path-making. At a time when the extension of paths and roads from Mexico City into the Ajusco region has drastically impacted patterns of land tenure – with implications, in turn, for the viability of a densely forested region commonly described as the ‘lungs of Mexico City’ – the affordances of popular song for distinct spatialities is a subject of great importance. We cannot research spatially dynamic musicianship, it is argued here, while sitting still.