Sounding Latinx

Sounding Subcultures: Dark Legacies and Vulgar Pleasures with Yessica Garcia Hernandez and Jose Anguiano

Listening to Chicana Literature with Wanda Alarcón

Dr. Wanda Alarcon (University of Arizona) is an interdsciplinary scholar specializing in Chicana literature, music, and decolonial feminist thought. Her research investigates ways of listening to a field of multiple resistant sounds that signal the enduring presence of Mexican and Latinx communities in the U.S. that shape the contested soundscape of América. Her current book project, Chicana Soundscape and the Decolonial Feminist Politics of Listening examines the writings of Chicana authors whose collective works amplify how we hear gender and jotería through 1980’s East L.A. soundscapes.

Suggested Reading:

Alvarado, Lorena. “Listening to Literature: Popular Music, Voice, and Dance in the Latina/o Literary Imagination, 1980–2010.” In The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature, edited by John Morán González and Laura Lomas, 583–601. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Lugones, María. “Decolonial.” In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, edited by Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Deborah R. Vargas. NYU Press, 2017.

Smith, Bruce R. “Listening to the wild blue yonder: The challenges of acoustic ecology.” In Hearing Cultures, pp. 21-41. Routledge, 2020.

Teaching Resistance Through Music: The Bad Bunny Syllabus Project

https://www.badbunnysyllabus.com

Vanessa Díaz is an interdisciplinary ethnographer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles. Her first book Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood was published and 2020 and is the recipient of several book awards.

Petra Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Duke, 2015) and co-editor of Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas. Petra has published articles in journals such as Latino Studies, Identities, and Journal of Popular Music Studies. Her article “If I Were You: Tego Calderon’s Diasporic Interventions” published in Small Axe in 2018 won the inaugural Blanca Silvestrini Prize for Best Article in Puerto Rican Studies from the Latin American Studies Association.

Listening to the Border with Valeria Luiselli

An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Valeria Luiselli is the author of Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and The Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize.

Luiselli has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and The New Yorker, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She teaches at Bard College and is a visiting professor at Harvard University.

Chicana Punk Epistemologies

Michelle Habell-Pallán (University of Washington), author of Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture and current book project, Chicanxfuturism: Punk’s Beat Migration “No Future” to the “Eternal Getdown.” Guest curator of American Sabor: US Latinos in Popular Culture.

Marlén Ríos-Hernández (California State University, Fullerton), trained in Ethnic Studies and Musicology, her research investigates the genealogies between policing and SoCal punk communities as told by queer Black, Chicana, Latina punk women and femmes; and founding member of PunkCon– a biannual conference celebrating punk scholars, activists, artists, musicians, and communities.

Bien Sucio/Dirty Listening: Queer Approaches to Latinx Sound Texts

Deborah R. Vargas is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Vargas draws on the fields of queer studies, critical race feminism, and Chicana/x Latina/x Studies to consider the cultural politics of the U.S.- Mexico borderlands. Vargas is the author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda and currently at work on two other manuscripts, “Toward a Sucialogy of Culture,” and “The Lower Frequencies of Brown Soul.” 

Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr. is Assistant Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Fullerton. His academic and creative work has been published in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Revista Bilingüe/Bilingual Review, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Sounding Out! The Sound Studies Blog. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript titled Finding Sequins in the Rubble: Memory, Space and Aesthetics in Queer Latinx Los Angeles. He is also a founding member of the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship. 

The Sonic Geographies of Anti-Border Music

Dr. Roberto D. Hernández (xicano) is an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University and an actively engaged, community-based researcher, scholar, teacher and writer. He co-edited the anthology Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without and is the author of Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative.

Yaotl Mazahua is lead singer of L.A. based band Aztlan Underground. Aztlan Underground is a fusion band from Los Angeles. Since the early 1990’s, Aztlan Underground has played rapcore. Indigenous drums, flutes, and rattles are commonplace in its musical compositions. This unique sound is the backdrop for the band’s message of dignity for Indigenous people, all of humanity, and Earth. 

Crip Listening with a Latina Feminist Ear

Professor of Latina/o Studies at Williams College, María Elena Cepeda focuses on intersectional approaches to Latinx media and popular culture. She is the author of Musical ImagiNation: U.S.-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom; co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media; and currently working on Loca Epistemologies: Essays at the Intersection of Media, Migration, and Latina/x Madness. Cepeda ’s commentary on popular culture and media has been featured in various US media outlets including National Public Radio, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone. Cepeda will discuss the significance of feminist listening in crip time.