<div>Texas-Mexican music, or <i>música</i><i> </i><i>tejana</i><i>,</i> is not one single music but several musical and musico-literary genres, ensembles, and their styles, encompassing the<i>corrido</i><i>, </i><i>canción</i><i>,</i> and what author Manuel Peña calls the<i>canción-corrido</i><i>.</i> Música tejana also includes two major regional ensembles and their stylesthe<i>conjunto</i> and the Texas-Mexican version of the <i>orquesta</i><i>.</i> A more recent crop of synthesizer-driven ensembles and their styles, known since the mid-eighties as &quot;Tejano,&quot; is another representative of música tejana.<br><br>Despite their diversity, these various ensembles, genres, and styles share two fundamental characteristics: they are all homegrown, and they all speak after their own fashion to fundamental social processes shaping Texas-Mexican society. As Peña persuasively argues, they represent a transforming cultural economy and its effects on Texas-Mexicans.<br><br>Peña traces the history of música tejana from the fandangos and <i>bailes</i> of the nineteenth century through the<i>canción</i><i> </i><i>ranchera</i> and the politically informed corrido to the most recent forms of Tejano music. In the beginning, he argues, musicmaking was a function of &quot;use-value&quot;its symbolic power linked to the social processes of which it was an organic part. As música tejana was swept into the commercial market, it added a second, less culturally grounded dimension&quot;exchange-value&quot;whereby it came<br><br>under the culturally weakening influence of the commercial market. Since the 1940s, the music has oscillated between the extremes of use- and exchange-value, though it has never lost its power to speak to issues of identity, difference, and social change.<br><br><i>Música</i><i> </i><i>Tejana</i> thus gives not only a detailed overview of música tejana but also analyzes the social and economic implications of the music. The breadth, depth, and clarity with which Peña has treated this subject make this a most useful text for those interested in ethnomusicology, folklore, ethnic studies, and Mexican American culture.<br><br></div>