This article describes the challenges we faced in building a social science outreach website specializing in popular music studies in northeastern Mexico and south Texas. It makes explicit the problems related to the models of social science communication that we have encountered. These challenges include communication and negotiation processes with those who collaborated in the construction of scientific knowledge and now do so in its dissemination stage, to which are added publicists or technicians in social communication. All of them always have similar and/or alternative visions to ours. The complexity of the dissemination work is highlighted and the notion that identifies it as a dispensable complement to the construction of scientific knowledge is combated.

This article explores the practices and meanings surrounding the profession of accordion repairer in the metropolitan area of Monterrey, Mexico, making use of the cultural study of musical instruments and the anthropology and sociology of work. It describes the diversity of services offered under the term "repair" and highlights the amount and variety of knowledge required to maintain or embellish this "sound machine". It also describes the different ways to obtain and update them. In these processes, the skills of a technician can be identified at certain times, or of a craftsman at others; skills conditioned, but not determined, by the global processes of manufacture and circulation of this instrument.

The social spaces of northern Mexico and the United States are the protagonists of most of the proposals and stage cross-border and transnational cultural flows, armed violence, creativity and innovation, and adaptation to the impacts of the global economy. All these phenomena are crossed by digital contexts of production, circulation and consumption of symbolic forms and, as new forms of social life, of subjectivities and intersubjectivities that social scientists are just beginning to study.