Recorded in Los Angeles and Chicago, dynamic explorations of Mexican Regional and Latin American sounds are deepened on Sonorous Present by avant jazz arrangements and field recordings, alongside poems written and recited by renowned author and poet Roger Reeves (Guggenheim fellow, National Book Award finalist, and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Griffin Poetry Prize recipient). Featuring luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, jazz, and R&B—including, Martha Gonzalez (2022 MacArthur Fellow), Aloe Blacc (2015 Grammy Award nominee), Ramón Gutiérrez (of Son de Madera), and Lucía Gutiérrez Rebolloso (Winner of the 2022 Sarah Vaughn International Jazz Vocal Competition)—this suite explores an aesthetic terrain that is worlds away from the projects Chávez is most known for.

all the world is sleeping

Musical Contributor

Directed by Ryan Lacen & spearheaded by Bold Futures, “All The World Is Sleeping” tells the story of a young Chicana in New Mexico struggling with addiction and motherhood. Watch the official trailer here.

The feature film was created by seven mothers whose battles with addiction led to the creation of this story. From the birth of the script to the first shot on set, they guided the non-linear film to create a unique, cerebral and chaotic view of the growing drug epidemic. The lead actresses Melissa Barrera (In the Heights) & Jackie Cruz (Orange Is the New Black) worked alongside these survivors to make sure their words felt both represented and authentic.

MxTx: Cross border Exchange

As U.S. contemporary politics have stoked fears and intensified attacks on Latin American migrants, particularly with populist calls for build a wall along the southern border with Mexico, MXTX has sought to build musical, cultural, and social bridges through collective art-making, community outreach, and live performances.

The curated and gender-balanced projects spearheaded by Golden Hornet involves over forty producers and composers from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The album is available through Six Degrees Records.

chavela

"Just as Vargas, who died in 2012, stripped away costume froufrou, she peeled singing down to its essence. Celebrating a great ranchera interpreter without sugarcoating her, this straightforward film honors her approach." — Sheri Linden, Los Angeles Times

In 2017 I had the wonderful opportunity to offer my expertise to the music supervision team working on the feature documentary film Chavela about the legendary Costa Rican-born singer of Mexican ranchera music, Chavela Vargas.

PUENTES SONOROS

I had the honor of curating the liner notes for Quetzal’s latest album Puentes Sonoros out on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. It was a blessing working with these wonderful souls and the record is absolutely stunning. Read the liner notes here and purchase here.

Pancho Villa Opera

Pancho Villa From a Safe Distance is a bilingual cross-border opera about the life and death of Pancho Villa—a genre-hopping composition by visionary composer Graham Reynolds. The opera is an insightful examination of the Mexican and Mexican-American impact on the culture and politics of West Texas, contributing to the current and timely conversation about borders and the limitations of the concept of delineated states.

Where Soldiers Come From

News and Documentary EMMY AWARD winner for "Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story"

“A profoundly moving experience. One of the best movies I have seen this year.” — Michael Moore

“Hauntingly beautiful and deeply felt… some of the best Afghanistan war-related storytelling I’ve seen.” — Hank Stuever, The Washington Post

“Revelatory… emotional and engrossing." —Steven James Snyder, Time

Where Soldiers Come From is a 2011 American documentary film directed by Heather Courtney. The film is an intimate look at a group of young American men who join the Michigan Army National Guard, their families, and the town they come from.

Despertar: Chicano Civil Rights

Musical Contributor

Lone Star EMMY AWARD winner for Cultural/Historical Documentary and produced by Joe Rocha, KLRU’s "El Despertar" installment of Austin Revealed explores the struggle of the Chicano movement of the 60s and 70s. Through extensive oral histories, Austin Revealed shows how the Mexican-American community of Austin united to fight for quality education and equal representation. Watch the entire documentary below.

Letters From the Other Side

“A much-needed examination of the collateral damage of illegal immigration … sensitive ... effective and emotionally potent.” — John Anderson, Variety

“Impressively thorough … painful and honest.” — Austin Chronicle

Letters from the Other Side interweaves video letters carried across the U.S.-Mexico border by the film's director with the personal stories of women left behind in post-NAFTA Mexico. Director Heather Courtney provides a way for these women to communicate with both loved ones and strangers on the other side of the border, and illustrates an unjust truth—as an American she can carry these video letters back and forth across a border that these women are not legally allowed to cross.

american anthropologist

The AmericanAnthropologist special section I co-edited with Matt Sakakeeny is now out! Years in the making, the section theme is Amplify and includes my article—“El disco es cultura: Sonic artifacts and Latinx Chicago” (abstract below)— alongside amazing articles by Dylan Robinson, Lee Veeraraghavan, George Lipsitz, Roshanak Kheshti, and Matt Sakakeeny. 

El disco es cultura: In music production, a sonic artifact refers to sonic material that is accidental or unwanted, typically the result of the manipulation of sound. This understanding con- notes both physical and figurative meanings: artifact as material alteration and as subjectively defined auditory disturbance. Both meanings attune the act of listening to noise—the perception of which relies on normative conceptions of rationality. This article takes up the sonic artifact as an aesthetic figure to listen to Latinx Chicago with attention to vinyl records (or discos) as literal material artifacts and asks: how do discos broadcast—in embodied and symbolic ways—the racialized politics of urban territory, and in turn amplify forms of spatial entitlement?

JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE

In the wake of a Presidency that ended with a photo op at a border wall that Mexico never paid for and began by labeling Mexicans as rapists, my article “Gender, Ethno-Nationalism, & the Anti-Mexicanist Trope” was just published in the Journal of American Folklore—a piece that explores how anti-Mexicanism has powerfully shaped the landscape of contemporary politics of race, citizenship, and white violence in the United States, particularly as an important component of white ethno-nationalist rhetoric and its murderous consequences. It is available here.

Kalfou

I had the privilege of contributing a Keyword entry on ”Presentness” to Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic, co-edited by George Lipsitz and Vilna Bashi Treitler.

Excerpt: Typically, the structures of consciousness in how we experience time—or the broader phenomenological question of temporality—divide said experience into past, present, and future. These distinctions are not self-evident; rather, they are shaped by politics, institutions, society, economy, and so forth. Indeed, in his expressed engagement with historical materialism, Walter Benjamin claims that history—as one such structuring of temporality—is neither ideal nor causal, discrete nor universal, determined by the past nor exclusive to the future. Rather, it is a living process of present-future-pasts folding in on themselves…

decentering the nation

In 2018, I had the opportunity to participate in a symposium on the topic of “Music, Mexicanidad, and Globazliation” alongside a number of luminary scholars, including Chela Sanvodal, Alejandro Madrid, Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell, Lizette AlegreGonzález, among many others. The gathering subsequently formed the basis of the volume Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization (Lexington Books 2019), edited by Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell. My essay, “‘Yo Lo Digo Sin Tristezas (I say it without lament)’: Transnational Migration, Postnational Voicings, and the Aural Politics of Nation,” extends questions I raise in my book Sounds of Crossing to further address the cultural complexities and contradictions of Mexican musical nationalism.