Event Details:
Dr. Alex Chávez, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, delivers the 2025 Ernesto Galarza Lecture, presented by the Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies Program.
An immersive poetic and musical passage, Alex E. Chávez’s recently released album Sonorous Present extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and memory across America’s borderlands as physical place and liminal space. What began as an experimental and improvised performance—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke 2017)—was subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores featuring luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, poetry, and jazz. Through integration of a range of scholarly disciplines and communities of artistic practice, this multi-modal scholarly work uniquely integrates regional Mexican and Latin American sonic elements with field recordings and ethnographic songwriting drawn from years of research across the U.S.-Mexico border and his own personal experiences of loss. In his talk, The Afterlives of Sound: Memory, Ethnography, and the Borderlands Chávez addresses how this work crosses the sunburst surreal of America’s musical and cultural borderlands, refiguring the borders of both performance and intellectual engagement to strategically reimagine the possibilities of what a studio album can sound like and the forms scholarship can take.
Co-Sponsored by Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity and El Centro Chicano y Latino.