The Sonic Geographies of Anti-border Music with Roberto D. Hernández &

18 April 2023

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 Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without a 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 a fusion band from Los Angeles. Since the early 1990s, 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 the earth.

Suggested Reading:

Video: Aztlan Unearthed

Hernandez Roberto D. ” ‘The Borders Crossed Us’: Anti-Mexican Racism as Anti-Indianism.” in Coloniality of the US Mexico Border. Univ of Arizona Press.

Listening to the Border with Valeria Luiselli

19 May 2023

Mexican Writer/Bard College & Harvard University

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.

Bien Sucio/Dirty Listening: Queer Approaches to Latinx Sound Texts with Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr.

25 May 2023

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 Joteria Arts, Activism, and Scholarship.

Suggested Reading:

Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr.,“Embodied Collective Choreographies: Listening to Arena Nightclub’s Jotería Sonic Memories,” Sound Acts Part 2, Receiving and Reflecting Vibration, Performance Matters 8, no. 1 (2022): 109-124.

Alvarez Jr, Eddy Francisco. “Jotería Listening: Sonic Trails and Collective Musical Playlists as Resistance to Gentrification in Silver Lake.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 33, no. 4 (2021): 126-151.

Vargas, Deborah R. “Ruminations on lo sucio as a Latino queer analytic.” American Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2014): 715-726.

Vargas, Deborah R. “Freddy Fender’s Blackbrown Country Ecologies.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 32, no. 2 (2020): 77-94.

Teaching Resistance Through Music: The Bad Bunny Syllabus Project with Vanessa Díaz &

14 December 2023

Loyola Marymount University, interdisciplinary ethnographer, filmmaker, and journalist. Díaz’s award-winning book, Manufacturing Celebrity: How Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters Build the Hollywood Industrial Complex, is grounded in her experience as a red carpet reporter for People magazine. In 2006, she completed her independent feature-length documentary Cuban HipHop: Desde el Principio (From the Beginning), which recounts the history of the Cuban HipHop movement while exploring how Afro-Cuban youth use HipHop to defy misconceptions about censorship in Cuba by delivering social critiques of racism and poverty on the island.

Petra Rivera-Rideau

Wellesley College, author of Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, focused on how the rap-reggae musical hybrid reggaeton offers new ways of thinking about Puerto Rico’s relationship to the broader African diaspora and Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. This project asks why Zumba Fitness, and Latinx popular culture more generally, is so popular in the mainstream at the same time that anti-Latinx rhetoric and anti-immigration sentiment thrives in the U.S. Co-editor of Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas with Jennifer A. Jones and Tianna S. Paschel.

Listening to Chicana Literature with Wanda Alarcón

5 April 2024

(University of Arizona) Wanda Alarcón is an interdisciplinary 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 Soundscapes and the Decolonial Feminist Politics of Listening examines the writings of Chicana authors whose collective works amplify how we hear gender and joteria through 1980s 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. Cambridge UP (2018) pp. 583-601.

Lugones, Maria. “Decolonial” in Keywords for Latina/o Studies. ed. Vargas Mirabal and La Fountain-Stokes. NYU Press (2017)

Smith, Bruce R. “Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology” in Hearing Cultures. Routledge 2004.

Sounding Subcultures: Dark Legacies and Vulgar Pleasures with Yessica García Hernandez &

3 May 2024

Documentary filmmaker and incoming Assistant professor in the department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her first book project, Vulgar Feminisms: Jenni Rivera, Fandom and Immigrant Performances of Latinx Sexualities dives into the gendered politics of Mexican regional music examining the paisa girl subculture through the career of late Chicana singer Jenni Rivera. Expanding the study of vulgar pleasures, her second book project focuses on the representation, labor, and reception of Latinas in the pornographic archive.

José G. Anguiano

Associate Professor in Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Anguiano’s primary focus is on listeners of popular music, documenting how music links communities across time and space and how it serves as a means for claiming space, citizenship, and respect. He has published on Latinx Moz-heads (fans of brit-pop artist Morrissey), Spanish-language radioscuchas, and Chicano subculture in Japan. As part of their current book project on Latino Listening Cultures, he is currently researching Chicanx/Latinx entanglements with goth & darkwave in the Rio Grande Valley.

Suggested Reading:
Anzaldua, Gloria. “La herencia de Coatlicue” in Boderlands/La Frontera the New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

Keating, AnaLouise. “From Borderlands and New Mestizas to Nepantlas
and Nepantleras: Anzaldúan Theories for Social Change” in Re-Membering Anzaldúa. Human Rights, Boderlands, and the Poetics of Applied Social Theory: Engaging with Gloria Anzaldúa in Self and Global Transformations. Vol. 4. Issue 3. (2016)

Anguiano, José G. “Voicing the Occult in Chicana/o Culture and Hybridity: Prayers and the Cholo-Goth Aesthetic.” in Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture (2018): 175

Hernandez, Yessica Garcia. “Intoxication as Feminist Pleasure: Drinking, Dancing, and Un-Dressing with/for Jenni Rivera.” New American Notes Online 9 (2016).

Garcia‐Hernandez, Yessica. “Sonic Pedagogies: Latina girls, mother‐daughter relationships, and learning feminisms through the consumption of Jenni Rivera.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 28, no. 4 (2016): 427-442.

From “Long-Term English Learners” to “No Sabo Kids”: The Politics of Listening and Latinx Racializations

17 May 2024

Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy,
Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is author of the award-winning book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the
Learning of Latinidad and co-editor of the volume, Language and Social Justice in Practice. His work has appeared in Harvard Educational Review, American Ethnologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language in Society, as well as media outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation, NPR, and Univision.

Suggested Reading:

Chávez-Moreno, Laura C. “The problem with Latinx as a racial construct vis-à-vis language and bilingualism: Toward recognizing multiple colonialisms in the racialization of Latinidad.” In Handbook of Latinos and Education, pp. 164-180. Routledge, 2021.

Martínez, Ramón Antonio, Danny C. Martinez, and P. Zitlali Morales. “Black lives matter versus Castañeda v. Pickard: A utopian vision of who counts as bilingual (and who matters in bilingual education).” Language Policy 21, no. 3 (2022): 427-449.

Rosa, Jonathan. Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford UP. (2019)