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Sound, Citizenship, and Aural Ecologies of Place

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Monday, October 21, 2019
1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Alex Chávez

In this paper, I draw upon my decade of research among Latinx creatives and migrant musicians in the United States with an emphasis on the social and political mandates shaping their art within the context of intensified attacks on their communities. I ask: as emergent communicative modalities, what politics of visibility, belonging, and incorrigibility do their performance practices acquire vis-a-vis competing/dominant/national representations of Latinx personhood? In pursuit of this very question over the years, my research has extended beyond the academy and into adjacent forums of publicly engaged scholarship, cultural advocacy, and work with high profile institutions like Smithsonian Folkways. I draw on these experiences to speak of the ways Latinx communities on both sides of the border are increasingly challenged to engage and reorganize the ways that they identify as residents of the United States, transforming their soundings as aesthetic sites of democratic citizenship.