JUCS 4 (1+2) pp.

107–126 Intellect Limited 2017

Journal of Urban Cultural Studies

Volume 4 Numbers 1 & 2
© 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jucs.4.1-2.107_1

NATALIA BIELETTO-BUENO
Universidad de Guanajuato

Noise, soundscape
and heritage: Sound
cartographies and urban
segregation in twenty-
first-century Mexico City

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
By means of an auto-ethnography, I problematize the category of ‘noise’ in the soundscape
context of Iztapalapa, a stigmatized borough of Mexico City. Informed by the noise
interdisciplinary fields of sound studies, aural studies and urbanism, I propose sound cartographies
a comparison of two sound maps: the ‘First Map of Noise for the Metropolitan aural experiences
Area of Mexico’s Valley’ and ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’. I argue that the creation of urban segregation
both maps is a symbolic instrument that assists processes of social classification. I cultural tourism
historicize the concepts of ‘noise’ and ‘soundscape’ and analyse their uses in official intangible heritage
discourses. Paying attention to the concept of ‘sonic heritage’, I discuss the role of
official institutions in educating and managing forms of aurality. My investigation
is informed by the concept ‘division of aural labour’ to explain asymmetries between
people’s urban, aural experiences. I conclude that these two maps add to the social
stigma that burdens certain areas historically marginalized by the model of urban
segregation.

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Natalia Bieletto-Bueno

After years of graduate studies in the United States, I was surprised by how
my aural experience of Mexico City, my home city, affected me upon my
return. My new sensibility to what I characterized as ‘noise’ was in part due
to the contrast between the two neighbourhoods I inhabited in each place.
In Los Angeles, I lived in a quiet Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood located
near the intersection of Pico and Robertson Boulevard. In Mexico City, I
settled in Iztapalapa, an industrial-oriented borough located in the east of the
city. I lived in a house at the intersection of Eje 3 and Eje 8, a transportation
hub congested with heavy trucks and trailers en route to the highway that
connects the city with the state of Puebla.
This new environment required me to modify my daily schedule and
habits: the roar of traffic and blaring car horns normally woke me around
4 a.m. At 7 a.m., the car-repair business adjacent to my front door would
commence its activities accompanied by a repertoire of cumbias and reggae-
ton. In LA, I used to take my five-month old baby for a stroll around La
Cienega Park. Hoping to continue this habit, I asked directions to the near-
est park in Iztapalapa, which turned out to be located in a traffic island in the
middle of the heavily transited Eje 3. Willing to readjust in my home town, I
sought more alternatives. I walked in the opposite direction but my experience
was no less frustrating: powerful speakers with loud music and horns accom-
panied my walk. If at night I found some time to read, my neighbour’s loud
TV made it impossible for me to concentrate. My sense of aural displacement
became all the more perplexing when I broached the subject with others. I
asked my neighbour if the noise outside affected her sleep: ‘quite the oppo-
site!’ she said. ‘When I go to the beach, I can hardly sleep. It is too quiet there
and that makes me nervous’.
As a cultural musicologist familiarized with the field of sound studies, I was
constantly self-reminded that my interpretations of sounds as ‘bothersome’,
‘annoying’ or ‘aggressive’ were not objective, but rather the result of a series of
strictly subjective value judgments. I repeated to myself that what I interpret as
‘noise’ is closely correlated to discrepancies between my expectations of uses of
the space, and the actual activities that I am able to perform in it. My designa-
tion of certain sounds as ‘undesirable intruders’ was therefore a direct result of
such discrepancies (Dominguez Ruiz 2011, 2015a, 2015b). And yet, my discom-
fort was undeniable. I asked myself why sound regulation in Mexico City was
so lax, noise control initiatives so scarce, instruments to enforce them so inef-
ficient and my neighbour’s tolerance to noise so high. I tried to recall my past
experiences in other regions in Mexico City prior to my decade-long absence.
Had the city changed or had I? Or, rather, had my living in this particular area
of the city exposed me to an urban experience I was unaware of?
My aural experience during those few months in Iztapalapa made me feel
vulnerable, but most of all, I felt ‘out of place’. At the time, my daily contact
with those sounds seemed incompatible with my habitus. It forced me to
modify my life while it also marked an estrangement with my home city.
Invoking Barry Truax’ terms, I was entering this acoustic community as an
outsider (Truax 2001) and I did not like it. Furthermore, living in Iztapalapa,
an area with severe problems of urban infrastructure and a socially stigma-
tized neighbourhood (Goffman 1974), forced me to confront my own sense of
class privilege directly and to interrogate the almost reflexive supposition that
‘I deserved a better place to live’. By momentarily suspending the meaning of
‘noise’, I recognized that the ‘annoying’ sounds I perceived in the city, as well
as the discomfort these sounds triggered throughout my body, stemmed not

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from the sounds themselves but from my own aurality – the epistemological
framework that conditions my engagement with the audible world (Ochoa
Gautier 2006, 2014; Samuels et al. 2010).
My argument is also informed by studies in urban sociology and anthro-
pology concerned with phenomenological approaches to the construction of
the urban space, that is, to the city as experience. More specifically, this inves-
tigation is framed by the work of scholars invested in understanding both how
sensorial experiences inform the social meanings granted to particular cities
as well as how the social life of the senses contributes not only to subjectiv-
ity formations, but also to the physical and symbolic structure of urban space
(Löw 2013; Low 2006, 2015).
Once I had acknowledged the mutually constitutive imbrication between
sound and listener, I realized that my assessment of ‘noise’ was an expres-
sion of who I was, or better yet, of who I thought myself to be. My psyche,
my emotions, my prejudices, my taste, my habitus, my self-conception, my
desires, and my frustrations were all inseparable from my characterization of
‘noise’. Did I feel guilty about my classism? Yes, indeed. But most importantly,
I was truly intrigued by what my annoyance to those sounds was telling me
about myself and about those ‘others’ I did not want to be or to become.
Recent studies of music perception have applied the tenets of postco-
lonial critique to assist interpretations of how ‘otherness’ is projected on to
activities such as musicking, vocalizing and hearing (Tomlinson 2007; Bloechl
2008; Hagood 2011; Ochoa Gautier 2014). Although my interest in the sound-
scape of Mexico City preceded this experience, I was never as interested in
noise’s social and subjective effects as during those months. I read a myriad
of academic articles, participated in academic events and became acquainted
with government initiatives for noise control in Mexico City. This is how I
encountered two maps: the ‘First Map of Noise for the Metropolitan Area of
Mexico’s Valley’ (Comisión Ambiental Metropolitana- Fideicomiso Ambiental
1490 del Valle de México- Secretaría del Medio Ambiente- Gobierno del
Distrito Federal- Dirección de Vigilancia Ambiental- Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana 2011) and ‘Mapa Sonoro de México’ (‘Mexico’s Sound Map’),
each reflecting contrasting ways of experiencing the city through its sounds.
My intention with this brief auto-ethnography is to problematize the
category of ‘noise’ as it is commonly applied to Iztapalapa, and to contrast
this category with the most commonplace applications of the term ‘sound-
scape’. Specifically, I critique sound initiatives advanced by official institutions
invested in creating ‘cultures of heritage’, which is to say, objects and prac-
tices prone to be associated with so called ‘national heritage’. I accomplish
this by analysing the ‘First Map of Noise for the Metropolitan Area of Mexico’s
Valley’ and ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’. I examine the role of institutions such as
Mexico’s National Sound Archive and Mexico’s Ministry of Tourism in educat-
ing and managing discourses on aurality that serve the interests of the State.
To contrast the discursive uses of ‘noise’ and ‘soundscape’ as used in sound
cartographies, I take recourse to Ana María Ochoa’s differentiation between
‘recontextualization’ (i.e. how sound technologies transform the [cultural]
nature of the oral/aural divide) and ‘entextualization’ which in her words is,
‘the act of framing the musical object to be studied through multiple modes of
‘capturing’ it’ (2006: 389). I follow her argument that these two practices were
fundamental in creating notions of ‘traditional music’, and expand it to claim
that urban sounds are currently undergoing similar appropriations. Urban
sounds, recontextualized and entextualized in cartographic representations

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and embedded in institutional discourses, play an important role in producing

social representations of a city in which inhabitants are segregated by social
class. I finally sustain that by categorizing sounds and representing them
in space, these maps contribute to shape our aural experiences of the city,
and because such entextualizations grant different value to different hearing
cultures, they legitimize forms of aurality and thus condition the development
of subjectivities by indirectly shaping the meanings of the spaces we inhabit.
For example, Martina Löw addresses the connections between processes
of categorization, institutionalization and habit and how these translate into
meaningful experiences of the city for its inhabitants: ‘a city is the product
of current and past action and as such is objectified, that is, named, typi-
fied, institutionalized and habitualized’ (2013: 900). I follow her in claiming
that the institutionalization of cultural practices, hearing in this case, acts as
a mediator of the urban experience, thus contributing to the reproduction of
what she calls, the ‘city’s intrinsic logic’ – a way for inhabitants to make sense
of how the city is materially and socially structured. Löw elaborates:

Intrinsic logic captures the hidden structures of cities as locally well-

established, by and large tacitly operative processes of sense making
along with their physical, material manifestations [on ‘practical logic’,
see Bourdieu, 1977: 96–97]. In this sense, intrinsic logic also denotes a
constellation of specifically interrelated stocks of knowledge and forms
of expression by which cities coalesce into provinces of meaning.
(Berger and Luckmann 1967: 39–40, quoted in Löw 2013: 900)

The ‘provinces of meaning’, referred to by Löw, are more than mere meta-
phors for what others have termed the ‘mental maps’ of a city (Lynch 1960;
Jiang 2012). Rather, they account for why people living in a city tend to
habitualize and eventually naturalize to: reiterative classifications of places,
people or stimuli; criteria to structure a city into important and less impor-
tant regions; and social practices and the people performing them. As she
describes it, institutionalization acts as a mediator in how we make sense of
urban experiences and in the social relations between people living in the city.
To this end, Löw states,

[o]ne can understand institutionalization as the process that ‘occurs

whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by
types of actors’. Reciprocal typifications of actions are the result of a
shared history. They make typical actions out of individual actions and
make types out of individuals.
(2013: 899–900)

In the following pages, I will describe how the two aforementioned sound
cartographies contribute to this institutionalization of the aural experience of
Mexico City and how, in turn, they habitualize inhabitants to Mexico City’s
intrinsic logics as a segregated city.

FIRST MAP OF NOISE IN THE METROPOLITAN AREA AND THE

MEXICAN VALLEY
The ‘First Map of Noise in the Metropolitan Area and Mexican Valley’
(hereafter 1st MRZMVM) is a graphic tool to implement recent initiatives
to abate noise in Mexico City. Its creation was sponsored by the Secretaría

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 Noise, soundscape and heritage

del Medio Ambiente (Ministry of the Environment) and funded with

resources from Fideicomiso Ambiental del Valle de México (Mexico Valley’s
Environmental Funds). The participation of these two institutions partially
explains why the project mainly focused on sounds generated by vehicles,
characterizing them a priori as ‘noise’. It also clarifies why sonic emissions
were preconceived as ‘sonic pollution’.
Carried out by the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), this
research determined that sonic emissions constitute ‘noise’ when they exceed
50 decibels, generated by sources such as motorized vehicles and various
engines (Dirección General de Comunicación Social UAM, 2011: 32–33).
Beside the University’s official report, the press announced the results of
the research to the general public. But, although the study measured sounds
by dividing territory into quadrants that do not necessarily correspond with
political and administrative limits, the well-known newspaper El Milenio
presented the results through information graphics that reported the noise in
each of Mexico City’s constituent boroughs.
Seeking to emphasize the goals of the project to the general public, this
newspaper entitled their article ‘La Ruidosa Ciudad de México’ (‘The noisy
Mexico City’), and listed the noisiest boroughs: Miguel Hidalgo, Benito Juárez,
Coyoacán, Iztapalapa and Cuauhtémoc. According to the newspaper article,
‘[n]oise maps are cartographic representations of the existing levels of noise in
a given area during a period of time’. Stated in this way, noise appears to exist
as an inherent quality, one detached from sociocultural constraints, autono-
mous from the listening subjects and independent of the social interactions
that take place in emplaced cultures.
In a way, the results presented in the map confirmed my negative opin-
ion of Iztapalapa and justified my desires to move away: that borough was an
undesirable place to live, incompatible with my lifestyle and unfavourable to
my aspirations. My growing awareness of my own classist presumptions was
insufficient to my unwanted physical and emotional sensitivity to Iztapalapa’s
noise and so we eventually moved. The specialists carrying out the study and
the newspaper ratified my listening of Iztapalapa as a sonically aggressive,
bothersome and, in sum, unhealthy place to live.
Indeed, the 1st MRZMVM graphically represented the distribution of
loud sounds in the urban territory, but made no attempt to explain how the
distribution of these ‘harmful’ sounds may be connected to activities differ-
ent than putting an engine to work (be it connected to the sound of traffic or
to other mechanical sonic sources). Furthermore, it did not provide possible
reasons why some areas where louder than others nor did it try to explain the
structural patterns of distribution of noise that the map made visible. Going
beyond the somewhat obvious perception that urban sounds have a differ-
ential presence in urban areas, social geographer Moreno Jiménez enquired
about the patterns of inequitable distribution of sonic pollution in the city of
Madrid (2007). His interest was in explaining the relationship between the
acoustic output of certain activities, and the people who absorb the costs of
that output. The term Moreno Jiménez used was the ‘distribution of exter-
nalities’, which he explains as the ‘generation of benefits or damages by an
agent and projected into third parties and that are not subjected to charges
or fees’ (2007: 597). As he explained, the issue of unequal noise distribution
signalled a problem of environmental justice in which ‘the pernicious uses
of land were not equally distributed and in which people did not have equal
access to legal protection and public health’ (2007: 598). In other words,
his goal was to ‘disentangle whether or not the acoustically undesirable, or

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favourable, environments have unequal effects or coincide with the different

levels of socio-economic status of its inhabitants’ (2007: 600).
Despite their good intentions, the approaches taken by both Moreno
Jiménez in the city of Madrid and the UAM’s 1st MRZMVM in Mexico City
illustrate some of the ways in which ‘solutions’ conceived from single disci-
plines are incapable of elucidating the complexities of noise as a cultural
phenomenon. The alleged problem of perceived noise in cities has typically
been addressed through the utilization of acoustic and geographic criteria and
with instruments to measure, map, diagnose and ultimate solve noise pollution.
By strictly using quantitative criteria and by designating ‘noise’ as the
sound produced by the traffic of vehicles, the 1st MRZMVM identified the
areas most affected by traffic sounds but it did not consider the experiences,
social meanings and significance that such sounds provoke in listeners who
inhabit these so-called ‘affected’ areas. And while Jiménez is interested in the
social costs of ‘noise’ by finding the connections between social structures and
an unequal distribution of loud sounds in the urban space, the cause of his
concern mostly revolves around an acoustic phenomenon that he precon-
ceives as unjust. Dispensing with the aural element, both studies dissociate
sounds from the meanings they bear to listening subjects. What this shows is
that in attending to urgent problems such as the incontrollable increase of the
decibel levels in urban settings and its effects on people’s health, these schol-
ars dissect multifaceted problems into manageable pieces that run the risk of
generating oversimplified conclusions. Because the existing research concern-
ing noise abatement is often conceived from the centrality of well-established
disciplinary fields of knowledge, it also has the liability of disregarding the fact
that sound categorization is subject to intricate perceptual, social and cultural
processes.
If, by contrasts, the convergence of urban studies, sound studies, sociol-
ogy and anthropology of the senses seeks to understand the ways in which
the ‘unequal organization of cities grants its inhabitants unequal potential
for action and strategies for coping with adversity’ (Löw 2013: 900), such
an enquiry would only be possible given that certain stimuli are considered
adverse to specific groups of people – bearers of different aural cultures –
who live in the emplaced cultures of their smaller neighbourhoods. Such an
approach would imply first to renounce the methods that attempt to tackle
the city in all its extended geography and secondly, it requires acknowledge-
ment of the cultural variety inhabiting the various city’s regions.
Although the 1st MRZMVM ratified my internal conflict about the insalu-
brity of my neighbourhood, many questions still remained unanswered. For
instance, why did my neighbours seem so oblivious to the sonic, and hence,
social consequences of their domestic activities? Why did they look so unaf-
fected by the sounds that I found unbearable? What was it that helped them to
resignify their integral urban experiences into more than just troubling sounds
in ways that I could not? And most upsetting (at least to me), why was I so
distressed by my incapability to reintegrate into the society that was supposed
to be my community of birth? Clearly, my interpretation of noise forced me
to confront my countrymen and women, as well as the culture I was allegedly
a part of, anew. It also confirmed for me that class differences – understood
by the pioneers of cultural studies in terms of habitus – are often more socially
distancing than cultural differences stemming from citizenship. My recipro-
cal sense of belonging and distance to this local culture was mediated by the
specific ways in which the city is physically structured, evidenced by the fact

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 Noise, soundscape and heritage

that my experiences of the acoustic environment were different than those of

my neighbours, even though the sensorial stimuli were exactly the same.
In the case of Mexico City too, the processes by which listeners signify
the urban sounds of their surroundings are complex and in many cases,
highly idiosyncratic. As Ana Lidia Domínguez Ruíz has argued, few things
in the urban entourage make the inescapability of social interactions more
evident than the existence of the category ‘noise’. Often, the criteria by which
certain sounds are classified as noise not only consider how loud they are or
the characteristics of their source, but also entail the social interactions trig-
gered by factors such as demographic density, spatial proximity, materials
used for construction, poor urban planning and a deficient urban infrastruc-
ture (Domínguez Ruiz 2016). Domínguez Ruíz also observes that the elabora-
tion of the demeaning category ‘noise’, responds to processes of adaptation,
resignification, appropriation and collective elaboration of cultural memories
(2014). This perhaps explains why the boisterous rumble of traffic may be, for
some listeners, an appeasing din that makes them feel secure (i.e. not alone)
and thus propitiates a peaceful sleep.

FROM NOISE TO SOUNDSCAPE

The proposition that sounds-in-space are inextricable to cultural conforma-
tions was possible thanks to the coinage of the term ‘soundscape’ credited
to Murray Schafer and a group of colleagues who, during the late 1960s and
early 1970s, carried out the ‘World Soundscape Project’ (hereafter WSP) in
Vancouver, Canada. If the initial goal of this project was to alleviate this port
city of perceived noise by identifying the main sources of sonic pollution, the
interdisciplinary team soon noticed that the sonic composition of Vancouver
was more diverse and its sociocultural significations more complex than they
had anticipated. They realized that the negative connotations of the terms
‘sound pollution’ or ‘noise’ hindered understanding how local sounds and
aural practices were implicated in the city’s cultural identity. The term sound-
scape, a merger of ‘sound’ and ‘landscape’, was used to identify those sounds
that ‘describe a place, a sonic identity, a sonic memory, but always a sound
associated to a place’ (Wagstaff 2000: 19). Thus coined, the term allowed for
the development of a new aural sensibility to the urban space, and initiated
further questioning of the imbrications between sound, space, locality and
listening subjects. From then on, the concept began to be used to connect
sound to geography as well as to emplaced cultures. Over the years, it has
deeply transformed the ways in which we listen to culture. Without a doubt,
the term served as the foundation of fields now known as sound studies and
sounded anthropology (Feld 1982, 2012, 2013; Samuels et al. 2010). Scholars
revisiting the history of the soundscape concept have noticed that the term
itself

contains the contradictory forces of the natural and the cultural, the
fortuitous and the composed, the improvised and the deliberately
produced. […] constituted by cultural histories, ideologies, and practices
of seeing, soundscape implicates listening as a cultural practice.
(Samuels et al. 2010: 330)

As it can be noticed, the turn is not only lexical but also sensorial as it fosters
an introspective posture by listeners and encourages them to reposition

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themselves from passive recipients to active agents in sound interpretation.

Furthermore, as soundscape studies began to explore the specificity of sounds
in geographically located and physically emplaced cultures, they also unrav-
elled both the subjective factors at play in processes of sound categorization,
as well as the interrelational nature of space exemplified in social struggles
for the control of acoustic territories. Nowadays, a vigorous corpus of studies
in sound anthropology, with Steven Feld at the lead, compellingly describes
the sociocultural processes entailed in sound signification. Feld’s concept
of ‘acoustemology’ – a portmanteau of ‘epistemology’ and ‘acoustic’ – has
advanced efforts to elucidate the construction of knowledge through sound
and hearing, as well as the power differentials entailed in said construction.
The term ‘soundscape’ has indeed proven its import to several areas of
study including biology, ecology, geography, anthropology, linguistics, ethno-
musicology, history and sociology. In recent years, its use has expanded
beyond academic circles and it has made an entrance into areas such as
archive management and urbanism. Libraries have collaborated to digitize
and disseminate sound records from the most diverse eco-systems and urban-
ized habitats. Increasingly too the sound of the environment has become an
element at least considered by – and in cases incorporated to the work of –
architects and urban designers (see e.g. the Soundscape Park in Florida and
the many conferences on urbanism and urban planning organized around the
concept of soundscape).
And yet, the contributions of this subfield of academic research have not
been sufficiently incorporated to the area of public policy. In many cases, the
epistemological implications of the term ‘soundscape’ have been used discre-
tionally. I propose that the theoretical findings of sound studies that have
made it to the realm of public policy are few, and all tied to the commodifi-
cation of sound and soundscapes. In fact, rising public awareness about the
soundscape has facilitated the conception and implementation of Mexican
public policies to manage sound as ‘intangible heritage’, which is also to say,
as yet another element of Mexico’s cultural identity that has been repackaged
as a touristic commodity.

MEXICO’S SOUND MAP

‘Mexico’s Sound Map’ is an interactive database of environmental sounds
plotted on a map of the Mexican nation (Mapa Sonoro de México Official
Website 2011). This permanent project encourages its visitors to contribute
to the map by uploading self-produced audio recordings of soundscapes
collected in the different regions of the country and to do so under the tacit
understanding that these recordings are particularly representative of said
localities. Indeed, the samples already uploaded to the region of the map
that correspond to Mexico City include a variety of sounds associated with
a concept of a distinctive metropolitan Mexican sound. For example, in the
region identified as the ‘historical downtown’ there are sound samples that
could be well considered ‘vernacular’ or even ‘folkloric’, such as the cries of
ambulant sellers in the subway system, the daily bustle of markets, or the
sonic indexes of a variety of traditional urban jobs (oficios).
The inspirational principles behind ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’ are closely
connected to both the origins and the stated mission of the Fonoteca Nacional,
Mexico’s National Sound Archive founded in 2000. The foundation of this
archive is a direct result of the Master Plan of Development 2001–2006

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 Noise, soundscape and heritage

(Plan Nacional de Desarrollo 2001–2006, Anon. 2001), and the Master Plan
of Strategic Development for Economic Growth 2000–2006, both advanced
during the presidency of Vicente Fox (2000–06). The latter was designed
to reform the National Cultural Program 2000–06 (Programa Nacional de
Cultura), which gave new salience and hierarchy to the concept of ‘cultural
heritage’. Explicitly, the National Cultural Program sought after

instrumentalizing actions that advance a valorisation of archaeologi-

cal and colonial sites, artistic manifestations and traditions, histori-
cal monuments and buildings, as well as other cultural expressions,
considering their use, promotion and commercialization by the produc-
tive chain of tourism, equally contributing to generate resources for the
preservation of cultural heritage.
(National Program of Tourism: Anon. 2001)

The hallmark of this Master Plan was to enrich the connections between culture
and tourism. If the tourism sector had gained traction during the adminis-
tration of Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000), it was during Fox’s presidency that
tourism was ratified by the government as the fastest growing industry and
thus was also posited as the most viable growth option for the country. Since
2000, and with the stated goal of transforming Mexico into a leading power
in international tourism by year 2025, the Mexican state has been invested in
increasing, diversifying and promoting traditional and non-traditional tourist
attractions, for both native and foreign visitors. Under Fox’s master plan, tour-
ism was identified as, the ‘strategic sector’ for national economic growth, and a
national priority that subsumed many other areas of public policy. As decreed
in official communication, ‘The National Program of Tourism 2001–06 would
be mandatorily observed by all governmental dependencies and Federal
Public Management entities in their respective areas of competence’ (second
article of the National Program of Tourism: Anon. 2001). If initially directed to
the expansion and improvement of infrastructure at resorts, Mexican policy-
makers noticed that national tourism had to galvanize its ‘cultural tourism
industry’ by both diversifying and increasing its supply of attractions. From
this ensued a series of policies to identify, revalue, preserve and commercial-
ize buildings, objects, practices, and in general any sensorial stimuli that could
potentially become marketed as ‘national heritage’. This included food, music
and, as I will show, sounds.
The Federal Government thus encouraged the creation of the National
Sound Archive for ‘researching, documenting and disseminating Mexico’s
sound heritage, which results from both live experiences as well as from
phonographic and radio traditions’ (Fonoteca Nacional Official Website 2017).
Funded by the National Endowment for Arts and Culture (CONACULTA is
the acronym in Spanish), the Fonoteca’s mission accords that: ‘[sound] is a
fundamental part of said cultural heritage and a primary element in conform-
ing Mexico’s national memory and identity’ (Fonoteca Nacional Official
Website 2017). Since its creation, the Fonoteca has performed the invaluable
work of preserving, cataloguing and disseminating numerous phonographic
collections that, prior to its inception, were dispersed in various public and
private sound archives throughout Mexico. The Fonoteca’s purported mission,
however, says little about how official state institutions actually create herit-
age, either material or intangible, through processes of selection, discrimina-
tion and value assignment to what is thought to be representative of a given

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nation, a topic of interest that has acquired considerable salience not only in
Mexico but in several other countries (Arévalo 2010; Precedo Ledo et al. 2010;
Fan 2006, 2010; Prats 2006).
In the case of Mexico, its various musical traditions – traditional, folk-
loric, popular or academic – have been the ones most often integrated into
the debate on the impact of official policies on the construction of intangi-
ble heritage (López Vargas 2009; Villaseñor Alonso and Zolla Márquez 2012;
López 2014; Sevilla 2014; Hernández López 2009; Flores Mercado and Nava
2016; Alcántara 2014; Híjar Sánchez 2009; Vargas Cetina 2009). Sound and
soundscape however, have been rarely integrated to the discussion.
As was the case for noise in the first map, the discourse presented in the
National Sound Archive’s webpage creates the impression that sound herit-
age already exists out there, in space, but there is nothing natural in the
emergence of so called ‘heritage sounds’. Rather, the very existence of such a
category exemplifies the role of institutions in mediating the aural experience
of citizens, and most perceptibly visitors to the country. Through reiterative
and well-advertised classifications, institutions help to turn quotidian aspects
of everyday life into innovative attractions and precious objects, reinventing
their social meanings and reassessing their importance. Llorenç Prats has
dubbed this phenomenon ‘heritage activation’, which results from the disper-
sal of sacralized discourses around a collective, socially constructed notion
of cultural identity (2006). Moreover, Prats distinguishes between the two
identities these kinds of discourses activate: ‘we for us’ (discourses of self –
recognition) and ‘we for others’ (topical and stereotypical discourses) each
targeted to a different audience (2006: 74). Its position as the National Sound
Archive thus places the Fonoteca in a privileged position to manage sound
and aurality. Not surprisingly, over the past few years it has played an active
role in educating listeners to appreciate those sounds that supposedly consti-
tute Mexico’s ‘sonic heritage’. This has been done through the organization of
strategic activities and various initiatives such as the creation of the webpage,
‘endangered sounds’ or the hosting of the local activities to commemorate the
‘International Noise Awareness Day’, the implementation of ‘sonic bike rides’
around the central neighbourhoods of the borough of Coyoacán, the organi-
zation of conferences and other academic activities that deal with sound and/
or noise, and the creation of ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’ itself. Nevertheless, the
question remains: which sounds, then, according to the ears of those contrib-
utors, deserve to be represented on ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’ and which do not?
The Fonoteca is located in the barrio (neighbourhood) of Santa Catarina,
Coyoacán. This neighbourhood is one of the most emblematic areas in
the city and a prime destination for national and international tourists. Its
architecture includes colonial houses and plazas, public parks and gardens,
cobbled streets and colourful, hidden alleys. Along with the adjacent Colonia
del Carmen, these two neighbourhoods have traditionally hosted art schools,
bookstores, coffee shops, boutique stores and an array of businesses alike,
consolidating the bohemian identity of this southern region of Mexico City.
The principal cultural attractions of this zone include the former houses of
both Frida Kahlo and León Trotsky now turned into museums, as well as the
Museum of Popular Culture. Additionally, in 2005, the international Project
of Public Spaces – self-represented as ‘a central hub of the global placemak-
ing movement, connecting people to ideas, expertise, and partners who share
a passion for creating vital places’ (Project for Public Spaces, Official Website
2017) – ranked Coyoacán as one of the top places to live in North America.

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 Noise, soundscape and heritage

Interestingly, and worth mentioning, is that this is the only Mexican neigh-
bourhood included. Two years later, in 2007, UNESCO declared Coyoacán
a World Heritage Site and by 2011 Mexico’s Ministry of Tourism (SECTUR)
listed Coyoacán on its touristic programme of the City’s ‘Magic Towns’
(Gobierno de la Ciudad de México n.d.). Needless to say, this borough is
represented on the map by a varied collection of sound samples including
chirping birds, summer storms, the flow of water in colonial fountains, whirl-
ing bike wheels, or segments of a bus tour around Coyoacán.
Virtually touring the map towards the area of my interest in Iztapalapa,
the intersection of Eje 3 y Eje 8, I was most surprised to discover that there
was nothing there. One of the most resounding urban areas I have ever expe-
rienced in my home city was not represented on the map! Doubtlessly, such
an absence was enigmatic. Why did this area with so many, so loud and so
distinctive sonic emissions have so little presence in the cartography? I posit
that the answer to these questions can be found in the three, apparently unre-
lated causes that I have come to connect. The first is the influence of the book
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Schafer
[1977] 1993), resulting from the WSP by Schaffer and his colleagues; a study
that is now considered foundational to sound studies. Most influential has
been its characterization of the term ‘soundmark’ and its concurrent uses.
The second one concerns the division of aural labour, a term coined by Ana
María Ochoa, and that explains how different social actors have a differential
agency concerning the sonic (2006). The third and last one concerns the social
stigma that has burdened Iztapalapa for decades, if not centuries, due to its
past as a primarily indigenous settlement and historiographies that foster such
associations.

SOUNDMARK, CULTURAL IDENTITY AND TOURISM

Schafer and his team coined three categories to describe the components of
any given soundscape. The first of these categories, ‘keynote’ refers to the
‘sonic base of any soundscape. It includes vague sounds such as traffic, wind,
running water, etc.’. The second, ‘sound signal’, describes those sounds which
can be identified by their source and move the listener to perform particu-
lar actions, for example: an ambulance’s siren, a door bell or the intermittent
beep that accompanies a traffic light (aimed as a sonic signal for blind people).
Finally ‘soundmark’, describes a sound which the community of listeners asso-
ciate with a given locality be it a neighbourhood, a region or an entire country.
The term ‘landmark’ was once used in naval culture to indicate a visual
signal indicating the proximity of land and which ended up being distinctive
of a locality due to its physical characteristics (e.g. Petrone Towers in Kuala
Lumpur) or to its historical significance (e.g. Vancouver’s steam clock) or to
both. These icons may thus become national symbols as in the cases of the
Eiffel Tower, Macchu Picchu, Tikal’s pyramid, Stonehenge or the Parthenon.
The ‘soundmark’ is likewise used to refer to a characteristic sound, some-
times a unique sound, imbricated with local identity so that all the members
of that community identify it as their own, assuming that such a relation-
ship has been sustained over time. Big Ben’s tolling bells, for example, may
be a soundmark of London, the songs of gondola rowers that of Venice or the
electrical crackle of the trolly cars of San Francisco.
While the cultural significations of soundmarks vary in each locality, they
have, in my opinion, the greatest influence in connecting sound to space,

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hence are central both in cartographic representations and in shaping the

listening modalities that define the current uses of the term ‘sonic heritage’. It
has also determined its concurrent uses in discourses to promote cultural tour-
ism. In the context of neo-liberal capitalism, the creation of soundmarks seems
to be connected also with the ideology of the ‘trademark’ and the hegem-
onic tendency to turn all aspects of human existence into properties and/or
commodities. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), for
example, provides a list of registered soundmarks that are the property of a
given trademark (United States Patent and Trademark Office 2011). While this
propensity to register and patent melodies composed ex profeso for commer-
cial purposes may seem like common sense, the logic is harder to extrapolate
when it comes to patenting ambient sounds. This propensity is well exempli-
fied by the Trademark Ordinance 2001 or Pakistan Code, issued by the World
Intellectual Property Organization, which proposed to register the property of
aspects as unusual and unprecedented as the sounds and colours of certain
places (Pakistan Code, WIPO). Such entrepreneurial logics have been applied
to countries in their efforts to market their ‘nation brands’, which are, in turn,
used as instruments to commodify and advertise the reputation of a country
in the global market. While the ‘nation brand’ is not equivalent to a tourism
campaign, they often have overlapping functions, especially in cases in which,
like Mexico, government conceives tourism as a strategic axis of economic
growth. Clearly then, the nation brand, and the marketing of the city are
aimed to attract both tourism as well as foreign investment (Fan Ying 2006,
2010).
Needless to say, the more a city can claim to have ‘heritage’, the more
attractive it will look to travellers worldwide. As Precedo et al. indicate (2010),
in the few past years, strategies of urban marketing have tended towards
a model that treats the intangible aspects of cities as assets for commercial
purposes. Such initiatives, of neo-liberal orientation, have tried to anchor
the touristic appeal of cities in its intangible heritage by extolling the senso-
rial experiences they offer (Precedo Ledo et al. 2010). Legitimizing authori-
ties in business making have celebrated such sustained efforts on the part of
the Mexican government. Forbes magazine, for example, states that ‘accord-
ing to its National Plan of Development, Mexico would seek to promote its
touristic destinations highlighting its difference and offering new and unique
experiences’ (28 January 2015). Likewise, in January 2016, the New York Times
declared Mexico City as the first tourist destination at an international level
(Anon. 2016).

AURAL LABOUR
In examining the configuration of the aural sphere in Latin America in the
context of nation formation, Ana María Ochoa identifies some mechanisms
whereby hegemonic as well as State power serves to legitimize certain aural
modalities over others. As she explains, such inequalities of participation and
agency concerning the legitimacy of the sonic can be considered a ‘division of
aural labour’. This division is a consequence of processes she calls ‘purification
of sounds’, which pose a distinction between ‘pure’ or ‘traditional sounds’ and
hybrid or modern ones. In other words, pure/traditional sounds refer to those
that correspond to place-based identity constructions and hybrid sounds are
produced through creative uses and transculturation practices. As Ochoa
explains, a practice of sonic transculturation

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 Noise, soundscape and heritage

involves the collection of sounds, the description of sounds into multi-

ple disciplines, the cultural practices through which these sounds are
embedded into politics of recontextualiztion and the creative textualities
and entextualizations into which these sounds are embedded. By sonic
transculturation I mean a ‘general restructuring’ [Rama 1982: 39] of the
practices, modes of signification and circulation of the sonic.
(2006: 816)

As it can be noticed, the processes of sound purification are in many ways

analogous to the processes whereby sound heritage is constructed through
the use of recontextualized sound recordings: both of them require a clear
division of aural labour. In this division, hegemonic discourses grant greater
legitimacy to the aural cultures of certain people (e.g. scientist, intellectuals or
artists, etc.). Consequently, these people are the ones summoned to design
and instrumentalize policies for sound control, sound managing and listening
education.
Sound cartographies, supposedly meant only to spatialize the sounds in
relation to each other, serve in fact to naturalize categories such as ‘noise’,
‘soundscape’ and ‘heritage’. However, the contrasts between the two maps
that I have analysed suggest that, despite the good intentions behind the use
of the term ‘soundscape’, it is often used discretionally. There is a tacit consid-
eration, more or less generalized, of those sounds that are prone to become
‘activated heritage’ and those that are bothersome by-products of human
activities. In this regard, I concur with Moreno Jiménez who argues that such
aural perceptions tend to respond to the way social differences have been
organized in the urban territory – that is, according to distinctive distribution
patterns that intensify privilege and poverty by concentrating each in specific
areas of the city (see Massey 1996). The under-representation of certain places
on ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’, such as Iztapalapa, suggests a deficient acknowl-
edgment of the existence of these sonic environments and thus of the people
who live them and make them possible. The over-represention of Coyoacán’s
soundscape further attests to the distinctive pattern of distribution, alluding to
a discrepancy between the city as a constellation of desires and one of reality.
Angel Rama has argued that maps are ‘operative cultural models’ that,
through signs, insert ideologies and cultural values thereby organizing the
perception of reality and in doing so, create reality. Furthermore, because
maps also reflect the desire of the map maker(s), they are instruments of
power (Rama [1980] 1984: 22–23). Indeed, if ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’ is entextu-
alized around the concept of ‘heritage’, it acts as a collective social representa-
tion that positively values the sounds of certain urban areas at the expense of
others. It thus activates heritage discourses by structuring sonic traditions, and
by resignifying the social memories awoken by sonic stimuli. In this respect,
Rama’s argument holds true that cartographies, an assemblage of signs, are in
effect, operative models of power. As he explains,

[i]nstead of representing things already existing, signs can be made to

represent things as yet only imagined – the ardently desired objects of
an age that displayed a special fondness for utopian dreams. Thus the
manipulation of signs opened the way to a futurism characteristic of the
modern era, an attitude that has attained an almost delirious apotheosis
in our own day. The dreams of a future order served to perpetuate the
reigning political power and its attendant social, economic and cultural

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structures. In addition, any discourse raised in opposition to the reign-

ing power was required henceforth to establish credibility by presenting
an alternative dream of the future.
(Rama [1980] 1984: 8)

By contrast, the entextualization of the 1st MRZMVM around the category

of ‘noise’ reproduces Mexico City’s ‘intrinsic logic’ as a segregated space, in
which silence and/or ‘heritage sounds’ are privileges available only to some.
As indicative of Iztapalapa as they may be, horns, traffic and loud speakers,
crowd noises or sound of communitarian activities such as street dancing
(see e.g. López Cano 2015) are not generally considered the ‘soundmarks of
Iztapalapa’, let alone ‘heritage’. As ‘keynote sounds’, they are just the basic
layer of the soundscape, and are thus prone to be hastily classified as ‘noise’
regardless of how such sonority is perceived by Iztapalapa’s inhabitants. As I
showed, the noise map presents Iztapalapa’s sonic culture as a problem that
should be abated. But most importantly, the discourses accompanying the
map naturalize the disadvantageous position Iztapalapa occupies in the city at
large. The social representation it presents suggests that Iztapalapa’s ‘noise’ is
not a by-product of institutionalized urban segregation but rather the natural
result of the lifestyle of its inhabitants.
The social stigma that has burdened certain zones of Mexico City (e.g.
Iztapalapa, Tepito, Culhuacán, etc.) dates back to colonial times, and
can be traced to the historically indigenous communities that live there.
Consequently, projects to urbanize these neighbourhoods have been delayed
if not entirely omitted. As Aréchiga Córdoba explains, ‘in colonial times, most
indigenous neighbourhoods were irregular villages settled among corrals,
crops, ditches and rubble. Their particular distribution contrasted with the
order of wide, well aligned streets in the centre of the capital’ (2004: 276).
Such historical segregation has caused the generalized, and deeply engrained,
perception that these stigmatized neighbourhoods are ‘poor’. Such asso-
ciations not only contribute to naturalize their disadvantageous position
but also promote the association, among outsiders, between deficient urban
infrastructure and social behaviour. Noise making is a widely held and oft-
cited example of this social behaviour. As Mexican sociologist Cristina Bayón
indicates too:

[Social] representations of the most disadvantageous sectors [of the

population] are almost always spatialized and their negative value has
tended to translate into a pathologization of their spaces (neighbour-
hoods, schools, streets, etc.). Through images of locality, – resulting
from oversimplification, stereotypes and labelling – stigmas emerge that
are associated with types of places inhabited by types of people.
(2012: 134)

CONCLUSIONS
Demeaning discourses about the sounds characteristic of certain areas disre-
gard what people who dwell in these areas make out of those sounds, in terms
of the experiential, the symbolic, and the affective. If the 1st MRZMVM map
adds to the social stigma that burdens historically marginalized areas such as
Iztapalapa, ‘México’s Sound Map’ neglects those sounds that may be mean-
ingful to ears appreciative of this neighbourhood’s cultural and sonic identity.

120   Journal of Urban Cultural Studies

 Noise, soundscape and heritage

It presents a subtext that implies that the sonic and aural cultures of these
marginalized areas are irrelevant and even insalubrious. Yet more intriguing
is the reason why, if ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’ is intended as an interactive plat-
form, it is effectively silencing neighbourhoods such as Iztapalapa, and why
this fact has not been contested by users, specially by those who live in this
area. A possible explanation is that they simply lack the means or knowledge
to access these maps; after all, the digital divide is always a possibility. But,
another (or additional) explanation could be that the residents of Iztapalapa
have internalized the stigma, and do not perceive their sonic experiences as
‘heritage’.
Pierre Bourdieu explained how spaces reproduce the hierarchies of social
structures ([1993] 2015). He also draws attention to the symbolic effects that
segregation, as an instance of symbolic violence, may have upon people’s
subjectivities. Meanwhile, symbolic interactionist Erving Goffman (1974)
expanded on how marginalized communities may internalize social stigma and,
subsequently, reimagine it as an emblematic aspect of their individual or collec-
tive identities. When applying these interpretations to explain why the inhab-
itants of Iztapalapa have not contested the lack of representation in ‘Mexico’s
Sound Map’, one is tempted to believe that possibly members of this acous-
tic community have internalized the stigma that burdens this neighbourhood,
adopting and accepting the tacit understanding that the bothersome noises of
their immediate soundscapes are unworthy of be considered part of Mexico’s
sonic heritage. If they have indeed internalized the category of ‘noise’ as a
constitutive element of their habitat, then it is possible that they also consider
it a distinctive aspect of their cultural identity (identidad barrial), a reversal that
may even have an impact on how their hearing bodies listen to and sense the
surrounding stimuli. This is, however, an intuition that could only be confirmed
by an extensive ethnographic approach, a project that exceeds the purposes of
this article. Instead, I posit that the maps presented in this investigation not
only serve to localize sounds in space. They also associate sound with territory
and may also carry information of the differentiated uses of the urban space,
thus reinforcing projects of urban segregation. Because these sound cartog-
raphies appraise sounds negatively or positively using the terms ‘noise’ and
‘soundscape’, respectively, these maps classify the sonic/hearing cultures of the
people inhabiting certain areas and thus, classify people themselves.

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Bieletto-Bueno, N. (2017), ‘Noise, soundscape and heritage: Sound carto-
graphies and urban segregation in twenty-first-century Mexico City’,
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 4:1&2, pp. 107–26, doi: 10.1386/
jucs.4.1-2.107_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Natalia Bieletto (Ph.D., UCLA) is an associate professor at the cultural stud-
ies program at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico. Her line of research
is mainly focused on understanding the role that music and listening play
in processes of social and cultural differentiation, especially in terms of the
distinctions between social classes.
Contact: Departamento de Estudios Culturales, División de Ciencias Sociales
y Humanidades, Universidad de Guanajuato, Campus León, Prolongación

www.intellectbooks.com   125
Natalia Bieletto-Bueno

Calzada de los Heroes, #908, esquina Blvd. Vasco de Quiroga, Col. La

Martinica, CP. 37500, León Guanajuato, Mexico.
E-mail: nbieletto@gmail.com

Natalia Bieletto-Bueno has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format
that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

126   Journal of Urban Cultural Studies