This dissertation is a study of Indigenous music and multicultural governance in Michoacán, Mexico. Specifically, the dissertation concerns pirekua, a music in Indigenous P’urhépecha language on and around Lake Pátzcuaro, and the ways it lays bare the temporal regimes to which multiculturalism is tethered. How are Indigenous subjects in Mexico made to feel and experience history and historicity? And how does Indigenous music reveal the intercalations of past, present, and future inherent to multicultural policies and logics? Pátzcuaro sits at the confluence of many histories and contemporary conflicts: from debates over nationalism and national patrimony; to concerns over increasing cartel violence; to ecological degradation wrought by state-sponsored monoculture. I place pirekua at the center of these conflicts, asking how, through music, multiculturalism becomes sensed and felt in social forms and bodily practices and in unruly temporalities and historical feelings. The dissertation draws from 28 months of fieldwork conducted between 2022-2024. On one level, it is a fine-grained ethnographic-historical account of an Indigenous musical practice and the ways Indigenous communities negotiate the political cunning of multiculturalism. It tracks pirekua through a variety of institutional pathways such as copyright and cultural policy but also attends to the values and meanings that P’urhépecha musicians insist upon in their own understandings of pirekua. On another level, this dissertation offers a commentary on the historical grammar and contemporary machinations of governance in Mexico. I propose “ecologies of difference” as a theoretical framework that holds together notions of alterity and indigeneity and reveals the ways incommensurability both pulls together and holds apart an aporia at the center of the Mexican state. In this regard, I offer a revision of existing theories of indigeneity and difference in ethnomusicology and anthropology and propose a framework for examining the experience of time, history, and power for marginalized subjects in Mexico and beyond.