Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

Boom! Boom! Boom!: Banda, Dissident Vibrations, and Sonic Gentrification in Mazatlán

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

—

Boom! Boom! Boom! Da-da-da-da-da— The unmistakable blast of the tuba and the resounding crash of cymbals, embedded in banda sinaloense, reverberate through the narrow streets of Mazatlán, Sinaloa. It’s a sound that shakes you to your core, quite literally—a sound that some may find overwhelming but for others, it’s the heartbeat of the city. Yet, this very heartbeat is increasingly at odds with a new rhythm, imposed by the influx of white American settlers (retirees, snow birds) and tourists who prefer quieter, more sanitized (less sucio) soundscapes. Public debates about sound – its volume, its rightful “place” – demonstrate how sonic gentrification displaces local, cultural identities and highlights the impact of globalization on indigenous soundscapes.. In a city where culture has always been expressed loudly and proudly, this clash is more than just about volume; it’s about identity, survival, and the right to exist audibly.

Banda is unapologetically brass-heavy with its tubas, trumpets, clarinets, and trombones–direct inheritances from the German brass bands brought to Mexico in the late 19th century by German immigrants and traders. Helena Simonett’s hallmark book, Banda: Mexican Musical Life Across Borders, details how the influence of polka is unmistakable in the rhythmic patterns of banda, with its characteristic 2/4 meter and the upbeat, driving rhythms that push the music forward. Both styles share repetitive rhythmic, danceable, lively tempos and showcase the tuba’s full, resonant sound. In polka, the tuba provides a consistent “oom-pah” bass line, while  in banda, the tuba drives the harmonic structure with deep, grounding tones that propel the music forward, often in a steady and rhythmic pulse that mirrors the polka bass line. The accompanying tambora, a large bass drum unique to the genre, adds an unmistakable Mexican flair, infusing banda music with rhythmic accents that tie it back to the Mexican dance traditions of sones and norteños. With the loud combination of brass and tambora blaring through the city, it’s understandable that white tourists and settlers would feel a dissonance between the soundscape and their Western settler notions of respectability.

The tambora leads Banda La Amistad in NYC, Image by Chris GoldNY, CC BY-NC 2.0

Sonic gentrification refers to the process in which local auditory cultures are marginalized or displaced by soundscapes that cater to the preferences of more affluent or dominant groups as Marie Thompson discusses in Beyond Unwanted Sound (2017). This concept aligns with Stoever’s  “listening ear,” which privileges certain auditory experiences—such as quiet and controlled soundscapes favored by Western tourists—while marginalizing others. This phenomenon in Mazatlán manifests through tensions surrounding the sounds of banda, increasingly heard as incompatible with the tranquil settings promoted by the tourist industrial complex. To Western ears unaccustomed to such instruments blaring through their environments, banda is heard as intrusive or abrasive. Yet, banda was never meant to be quiet or contained; it’s a celebratory proclamation of life itself.

As a symbol of the region’s cultural, namely working-class identity, banda’s shaky acceptance dates back to when nobility regarded banda as music of the commoners. It is often mariachi music, with its more melodic and string-dominated compositions, that is seen as “easier on the ear” and perceived as a more sophisticated representation of Mexico’s soundscape— incidentally hailing from a racially whiter region of Mexico. Reclaiming banda as a proud symbol of Northern Mexican culture is a direct challenge to both the casteism of Spanish settlers and the sonic imperialism imposed by white American settlers.

The response by local musicians to new ordinances aimed at limiting live banda performances on Mazatlán’s beaches are being met with “dissident vibrations.” Or, as I describe, when a musical collective effervescence can be harnessed to challenge dominant structures and create spaces for marginalized voices to assert their rights and identities. In Mazatlán, these dissident vibrations took on a visible and visceral form when a viral video showed tourists enjoying a classical guitar performance inside a hotel while the energetic sounds of banda blasted from the beach just outside.

This video sparked a heated online debate about noise levels, with some tourists and local authorities advocating for more restrictions on banda music. Soon after, the conversation escalated with a public notice at a condominium complex prohibiting the hiring of live bands in the beach area—a move that directly impacted local banda musicians who depend on beach performances for their livelihood. 

The tensions culminated in a nine-hour protest, during which hundreds of musicians marched through the streets of Mazatlán, playing their instruments in defiance of the regulations that aimed to control the noise. Their march, which eventually turned into a riot after clashes with police, was a sonic manifestation of resistance, challenging the regulations that limited not only the number of live banda performances but also attempted to regulate the very essence of Mazatlán’s cultural identity. These acts of dissident vibrations served as powerful counter-narratives to the dominant discourse that seeks to sanitize public spaces from their vibrant soundscapes. These musicians not only contested their economic marginalization but also championed the existential right of their culture to flourish in its native setting, resisting efforts to reduce their sound to mere noise in favor of tourist comforts. Their defiance highlights the complex interplay between cultural and economic survival, identity, and resistance within the broader context of globalization and cultural homogenization.

Critics who dismiss banda often fail to appreciate its rich harmonics and historical significance in the cultural landscape of Mazatlán. By reducing this music to mere noise, they overlook the deep-rooted connections it fosters within local communities and its role as a communal bond reflecting the spirit and resilience of the people. Such dismissals prioritize the comfort of tourists over the cultural rights of the local population, further entrenching inequalities between those who advocate for cultural integrity and those who perceive the city merely as a short-term, leisure destination.The role of banda in Mazatlán, an exemplary case of sonic gentrification, raises essential questions about who has the authority to define the cultural and sonic boundaries of public spaces.

Sonic gentrification in Mazatlán serves as a poignant example of global discussions on cultural identity, heritage, and the impacts of globalization on local communities. But this isn’t just a local issue; banda has followed the Mexican diaspora, becoming an audible assertion of identity in cities across the United States. The call to action is clear: to preserve banda not as a relic of the past, but as a living, breathing sound that defines working class public spaces of color far beyond Mexico’s borders. Whether in Los Angeles, Chicago, or Houston, these vibrant sounds demand to be heard, and more importantly, understood. The beat of the tuba and tambora still thunder on, daring us to listen.

—

Featured Image: “Todos dorados” by Flickr User Juanantibes CC BY-SA 2.0

—
Kristie Valdez-Guillen, PhD, is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges the fields of musicology and decolonial studies. With a PhD in Musicology from UCLA and advanced training in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, her research delves into the critical intersections of decoloniality, music, and politics across the Americas and the Caribbean. Currently, she brings her expertise to USC’s Writing Program, where she teaches first-year and first-generation students, with a focus on writing across disciplines. Dr. Valdéz-Guillén is dedicated to fostering critical thinking and empowering the next generation of scholars and writers.

—

REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes 

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre –Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas

Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

Boom! Boom! Boom!: Banda, Dissident Vibrations, and Sonic Gentrification in Mazatlán

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

—

Boom! Boom! Boom! Da-da-da-da-da— The unmistakable blast of the tuba and the resounding crash of cymbals, embedded in banda sinaloense, reverberate through the narrow streets of Mazatlán, Sinaloa. It’s a sound that shakes you to your core, quite literally—a sound that some may find overwhelming but for others, it’s the heartbeat of the city. Yet, this very heartbeat is increasingly at odds with a new rhythm, imposed by the influx of white American settlers (retirees, snow birds) and tourists who prefer quieter, more sanitized (less sucio) soundscapes. Public debates about sound – its volume, its rightful “place” – demonstrate how sonic gentrification displaces local, cultural identities and highlights the impact of globalization on indigenous soundscapes.. In a city where culture has always been expressed loudly and proudly, this clash is more than just about volume; it’s about identity, survival, and the right to exist audibly.

Banda is unapologetically brass-heavy with its tubas, trumpets, clarinets, and trombones–direct inheritances from the German brass bands brought to Mexico in the late 19th century by German immigrants and traders. Helena Simonett’s hallmark book, Banda: Mexican Musical Life Across Borders, details how the influence of polka is unmistakable in the rhythmic patterns of banda, with its characteristic 2/4 meter and the upbeat, driving rhythms that push the music forward. Both styles share repetitive rhythmic, danceable, lively tempos and showcase the tuba’s full, resonant sound. In polka, the tuba provides a consistent “oom-pah” bass line, while  in banda, the tuba drives the harmonic structure with deep, grounding tones that propel the music forward, often in a steady and rhythmic pulse that mirrors the polka bass line. The accompanying tambora, a large bass drum unique to the genre, adds an unmistakable Mexican flair, infusing banda music with rhythmic accents that tie it back to the Mexican dance traditions of sones and norteños. With the loud combination of brass and tambora blaring through the city, it’s understandable that white tourists and settlers would feel a dissonance between the soundscape and their Western settler notions of respectability.

The tambora leads Banda La Amistad in NYC, Image by Chris GoldNY, CC BY-NC 2.0

Sonic gentrification refers to the process in which local auditory cultures are marginalized or displaced by soundscapes that cater to the preferences of more affluent or dominant groups as Marie Thompson discusses in Beyond Unwanted Sound (2017). This concept aligns with Stoever’s  “listening ear,” which privileges certain auditory experiences—such as quiet and controlled soundscapes favored by Western tourists—while marginalizing others. This phenomenon in Mazatlán manifests through tensions surrounding the sounds of banda, increasingly heard as incompatible with the tranquil settings promoted by the tourist industrial complex. To Western ears unaccustomed to such instruments blaring through their environments, banda is heard as intrusive or abrasive. Yet, banda was never meant to be quiet or contained; it’s a celebratory proclamation of life itself.

As a symbol of the region’s cultural, namely working-class identity, banda’s shaky acceptance dates back to when nobility regarded banda as music of the commoners. It is often mariachi music, with its more melodic and string-dominated compositions, that is seen as “easier on the ear” and perceived as a more sophisticated representation of Mexico’s soundscape— incidentally hailing from a racially whiter region of Mexico. Reclaiming banda as a proud symbol of Northern Mexican culture is a direct challenge to both the casteism of Spanish settlers and the sonic imperialism imposed by white American settlers.

The response by local musicians to new ordinances aimed at limiting live banda performances on Mazatlán’s beaches are being met with “dissident vibrations.” Or, as I describe, when a musical collective effervescence can be harnessed to challenge dominant structures and create spaces for marginalized voices to assert their rights and identities. In Mazatlán, these dissident vibrations took on a visible and visceral form when a viral video showed tourists enjoying a classical guitar performance inside a hotel while the energetic sounds of banda blasted from the beach just outside.

This video sparked a heated online debate about noise levels, with some tourists and local authorities advocating for more restrictions on banda music. Soon after, the conversation escalated with a public notice at a condominium complex prohibiting the hiring of live bands in the beach area—a move that directly impacted local banda musicians who depend on beach performances for their livelihood. 

The tensions culminated in a nine-hour protest, during which hundreds of musicians marched through the streets of Mazatlán, playing their instruments in defiance of the regulations that aimed to control the noise. Their march, which eventually turned into a riot after clashes with police, was a sonic manifestation of resistance, challenging the regulations that limited not only the number of live banda performances but also attempted to regulate the very essence of Mazatlán’s cultural identity. These acts of dissident vibrations served as powerful counter-narratives to the dominant discourse that seeks to sanitize public spaces from their vibrant soundscapes. These musicians not only contested their economic marginalization but also championed the existential right of their culture to flourish in its native setting, resisting efforts to reduce their sound to mere noise in favor of tourist comforts. Their defiance highlights the complex interplay between cultural and economic survival, identity, and resistance within the broader context of globalization and cultural homogenization.

Critics who dismiss banda often fail to appreciate its rich harmonics and historical significance in the cultural landscape of Mazatlán. By reducing this music to mere noise, they overlook the deep-rooted connections it fosters within local communities and its role as a communal bond reflecting the spirit and resilience of the people. Such dismissals prioritize the comfort of tourists over the cultural rights of the local population, further entrenching inequalities between those who advocate for cultural integrity and those who perceive the city merely as a short-term, leisure destination.The role of banda in Mazatlán, an exemplary case of sonic gentrification, raises essential questions about who has the authority to define the cultural and sonic boundaries of public spaces.

Sonic gentrification in Mazatlán serves as a poignant example of global discussions on cultural identity, heritage, and the impacts of globalization on local communities. But this isn’t just a local issue; banda has followed the Mexican diaspora, becoming an audible assertion of identity in cities across the United States. The call to action is clear: to preserve banda not as a relic of the past, but as a living, breathing sound that defines working class public spaces of color far beyond Mexico’s borders. Whether in Los Angeles, Chicago, or Houston, these vibrant sounds demand to be heard, and more importantly, understood. The beat of the tuba and tambora still thunder on, daring us to listen.

—

Featured Image: “Todos dorados” by Flickr User Juanantibes CC BY-SA 2.0

—
Kristie Valdez-Guillen, PhD, is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges the fields of musicology and decolonial studies. With a PhD in Musicology from UCLA and advanced training in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, her research delves into the critical intersections of decoloniality, music, and politics across the Americas and the Caribbean. Currently, she brings her expertise to USC’s Writing Program, where she teaches first-year and first-generation students, with a focus on writing across disciplines. Dr. Valdéz-Guillén is dedicated to fostering critical thinking and empowering the next generation of scholars and writers.

—

REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes 

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre –Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas

Mercedes Bunz

A Greco-Roman Look at Sanskrit Theater

A Greco-Roman Look at Sanskrit Theater

By Roberto Morales-Harley

Comparing Theaters

Any well-read person who has had the pleasure to read both Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā will probably know that the differences between the two far surpass their similarities. The Greek tragedy begins with a deathly plague, progresses through several ominous oracles, and touches on themes like murder, suicide and self-injury, only to wrap things up with a protagonist defeated at the hands of fate, as well as an audience likely pitying him and fearing suchlike disgrace. The Sanskrit nāṭaka, on the other hand, covers such a wide range of topics as the idyllic life of hermitages, the ludicrous nature of buffoons, the power of curses, the ways in which bad and good luck can tilt the scales, and the relationship between gods and men, all this while both characters and spectators ride along in an emotional roller-coaster, encompassing not only the joy of a love story, but also the didactics of genealogy. Apples and oranges.

It is also likely that not many people will know the complexity of each of these theatrical traditions. Besides Tragedy, Greek theater has Comedy. But more importantly, even the Greeks were not as dualistic as often thought of, since they also developed a third subgenre in the form of Satyr Drama. In Rome, the scene is still more intricate, since tragedy is not viewed as monolith but treated separately as either Fabula Crepidata or Fabula Praetexta, and likewise, comedy manifests itself in the forms of Fabula Palliata, Fabula Togata, Fabula Atellana, and Mimus. India is no exception, given the fact that there are as many as ten main forms of theater: Nāṭaka and Prakaraṇa, but also tragic-like subgenres like Aṅka; comic-like subgenres like Prahasana, Bhāṇa, and Vīthī; and even heroic-like subgenres like Samavakāra, Īhāmṛga, Ḍima, and Vyāyoga. Some mix and match between all this can at least allow us to compare varieties of apples.

The Greek Influence Hypothesis

In 1852, Albrecht Weber first formulated what then came to be known as the “Greek Influence Hypothesis”. According to him, (a) we have no preserved early Sanskrit plays, but (b) we have testimonies of Greek plays being represented in Bactria and in North- and West India; therefore, (c) it is possible to presuppose a Greek influence in the origins of Sanskrit theater, even though (d) there seems to be no specific manifestations of such general influence.

Since Weber, new developments allow us to rethink these four statements. (A) In 1906, Ganapati Shastri discovered thirteen Sanskrit plays and attributed them to the early playwright Bhāsa. (B) In 1975, Paul Bernard discovered a building that used to function as a Greek theater in the region. (C) Greco-Roman influences in Sanskrit romance, fable, and epic have been argued for, respectively, in 1940 by Vittore Pisani, in 1987 by Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, and in 2008 by Fernando Wulff Alonso. If influences happened not only in theater but also in other literary genres, we could move on from considering it a mere possibility and start talking about a highly probable practice. (D) Lastly, specific borrowings from Roman theater into Sanskrit theater were suggested in 2012 also by Francisco Rodríguez Adrados.

When comparing some Greco-Roman texts to some of the Sanskrit plays attributed to Bhāsa, the parallelisms are shockingly detailed: paintings being described in words, intentional avoidance of death and violence on stage, merging of two plots into one. I believe that any Indologist who reads this short list would without a doubt be reminded of Sanskrit theater. But I assure you that the same would happen for a Classicist thinking of Greek or Roman theater! Could this be more than a series of lucky coincidences?

The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre

The book The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater tackles an issue that, although first raised nearly two centuries ago, still had not received a full-length treatment in the form of a monograph. The study is based on three literary motifs: the embassies from Iliad 9, Mahābhārata 5, Euripides’ Phoenix, and (Ps.-)Bhāsa’s The Embassy; the ambushes from Iliad 10, Mahābhārata 4, Ps.-Euripides’ Rhesus, and (Ps.-)Bhāsa’s The Five Nights; and the ogres from Odyssey 9, Mahābhārata 1, Euripides’ Cyclops, and (Ps.-)Bhāsa’s The Middle One. But the comparisons do not end there. Other plays by the Greek playwright Aeschylus or by the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence are also compared here for the first time with some works of Sanskrit theater. Hopefully a study like this will start a long-overdue conversation between Classicists and Indologists about these subjects.

Access The Embassey, The Ambush, and the Ogre for free at: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0417

Mercedes Bunz

Why you should read ancient law as social networks

Why you should read ancient law as social networks

By Christian Canu Højgaard

Law texts are not usually the literature you would prefer for learning about culture, ideas, and values. They are often tedious, repetitive, and essentially impersonal. They must of course be impersonal because they present the laws of an authority and not any personal opinions. Ancient laws are similar to modern laws in many respects, but there are also import differences.

My own interest in ancient Near Eastern laws was sparked when I encountered scholarly works done since the 1990s on the laws of the Hebrew Bible. Scholars such as the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that Leviticus and other legal books of the Hebrew Bible were not merely legal stipulations but articulations of a certain worldview that needed other interpretational tools than Biblical scholars have normally used.

The so-called Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26) is a case in point. Alongside its lists of stipulations of various sorts, it contains concrete—even heartbreaking—cases that are meant to impress the hearer/reader. For example, when a fellow is pictured as literally shaking of poverty (Lev. 25.35).

Through this lens of personal experiences and concrete, everyday disputes, the Holiness Code deals with issues that continue to be relevant: poverty, inequality, immigration, religion. Not in abstract ways but by exemplifying how poor immigrants should be helped and included while preserving the core identity of the community.

The community of the Holiness Code is relatively small. I found it to consist of 59 members, some of them concrete persons like Moses or Aaron, but most of them representing social groups such as peasants, women, priests, immigrants, and poor. The Holiness Code is therefore a model community that represents the most pressing issues in the eyes of the legislator.

It is interesting to see how the community is intertwined in so many different ways. It is clear that encounters with an immigrant do not only affect the ones encountering him but the entire society because ideas and physical goods are exchanged and diffused through the society.

To capture and visualize this intricate network of social roles and relations, I developed a social network model. The benefit of applying social network analysis (SNA) is that it is sensible to how the interactions between two members of a community or between a member and an outsider affect the entire community.

The social network model proposed in my book diverges from most other SNA-approaches in at least three ways:

1. The social network of the Holiness Code is naturally derived from a text. This is not unusual, and there are many interesting social network analyses on the basis of written literature. I have tried to advance this area of research by applying a semi-automatic, computational approach to capture and delineate the persons of the text (chapter 3).

2. Unlike traditional social network approaches, which focus on one particular type of interaction (e.g., marriage ties, friendship, or economical transactions, etc.), the model I created took into account all possible types of interaction including communicational, juridical, cultic, economical, and emotional ones. The benefit of which was to glean as much information from the text as possible. In order to compare quite diverse interactions, I sought out to measure the interactions on the basis of how much agency was required to perform the event (chapters 4–6). For example, speech and harvest are very different events, but each of them requires a certain amount of agency which can be measured given an appropriate linguistic framework.

3. I came to realize that SNA of a text must somehow take into account the structure of the text because the role of a person is not only dependent on his/her interactions but also on how it is positioned in the text. Accordingly, I included the syntactic structure of the text as a third dimension to the social network apart from persons and interactions (chapter 7).

The social network of the Holiness Code is complex but illuminating. As a law text, it offers a glimpse into how an ancient society dealt with pressing issues of immigration, poverty, and increasing inequality. And by capturing the interactions as a social network, we can detect patterns of behaviour that reveal ancient ethics.

This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.

Roles and Relations in Biblical Law: A Study of Participant Tracking, Semantic Roles, and Social Networks in Leviticus 17-26
Leviticus 17–26, an ancient law text known as the Holiness Code, prescribes how particular persons are to behave in concrete, everyday situations. The addressees of the law text must revere their parents, respect the elderly, fear God, take care of their fellow, provide for the sojourner, and so on.…
Why you should read ancient law as social networksOpen Book Publishers
Why you should read ancient law as social networks
Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre 

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

—

This post is co -authored by Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas
—

“Lucharaaaaaán a dos a tres caídas sin limite de tiempoooo!“

[“They will fight two out of three falls, with no time limit!”]

Announcer at Lucha Libre, El Paso, Texas

“This ain’t no sideshow.”

George Lipsitz on the role of popular culture

The announcer’s piercing “lucharaaaaaán” cries from the middle of the ring  proclaims the constitutional two-out-of-three-falls rule of lucha libre.  But before the famous cry rings out to set the stage for the spectacularized acrobatic combat between costumed warriors, their theatrical entrances set the all-important emotional stakes of the battle. The entrances are loud, campy, interactive exchanges between luchadores and spectators. An entrance song itself cues the luchador’s persona: a cumbia could signal a técnico (a good guy); a heavy metal song more than likely indicates a rudo (a bad guy) typically donning black, death-themed getups. Luchadores saunter into the arena, stopping to pose, high five their fans, and verbally heckle their opponents. The storylines of good versus evil, betrayal and revenge, or humility versus arrogance are some of the more standard plots that motivate spectators to adamantly cheer for the favorite and jeer for the foe.

The sonic exchanges between luchadores’ and spectators before, during, and after the fight positions lucha libre as much more than a sport. And while the term spectators,  suggests the privileged act of watching or viewing; here, we expand spectators within lucha libre arena to mean “a call to witness” (á la Chela Sandoval). Put simply, lucha libre is a cultural phenomenon where contemporary cultural, social, and political anxieties are often tapped as fodder for theatrical plots. In the U.S./Mexico’s sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the political realities of border enforcement, immigration politics, and racial tensions are loudly heard and placed on display. As part of Rebeca Riva’s ongoing research about the history of  lucha libre at the border—which too often gets skipped over for Mexico City as the epicenter of the sport—we listen for the exchanges between luchadores and spectators as resonant participants in the ritual of this sport. Specifically, we tune into lucha libre and its accompanying mega-spectacle to analyze how fans scoff at lucha libre’s MAGA-spectacles. In Time Passages, George Lipsitz (2001) reminded scholars of popular culture decades ago that “this ain’t no sideshow.” In a similar vein, lucha libre  directly engages in the larger social and political arena that contextualizes the sport.

In lucha libre, spectators are resonant participants in the construction of an essential “hi-fi” sonic ambiente. Like in football, as Kaj Ahisved notes, the “noise of the crowd” (building on Les Back’s concept) are essential to a “hi-fi” sound where a high degree of information exchange occurs between listeners and the sound environment.Or, as David Hendy describes Olympic arenas, “cauldrons of concentrated sound, [where] the roar of the spectators took on a collective force of its own – a volatile quality rich with cultural and political repercussions.” The crowd’s response, experienced by athletes as ambient noise, bolsters athlete’s spirits and develops an emotional plot for the contest. In certain cases, for instance in Algeria as Stephen Wilford documents, it is a venue for social critique; football stadiums served as “safe zones” where fans could dissent the Abdelaziz Bouteflika dictatorship through chanting political slogans and songs as an anonymous  crowd (139).

By listening to  lucha libre, we gain a deeper understanding of the embodied components of fan activism, collective identity, and political action. Visual spectacle, bodily gestures, and musical choices, coupled with verbal taunts and visceral grunts serve as interactive storytelling tools.  Yet, the crowd’s noise and, importantly, the sonic memories evoked by visual parafenalia  amplify a shared political consciousness and prompts the expression of  their allegiance with and opposition to the symbolic representations staged. 

Chris Watson proudly holds the MAGA flag. Image by Rebecca Rivas

* * *

The following audio was captured in November 2023 at a parking lot across from El Paso City Hall during a children’s fundraiser. We hear Chris Watson, a previous college wrestler from Oklahoma, make his debut appearance in lucha libre as a white supremacist character. Wearing a clichéd U.S. flag-themed bandana and waving a Trump 2024 campaign flag, he points towards the crowd and makes swimming motions with his arms to communicate the pejorative “wetback.”

Aligning these symbols of MAGA ideologies with Watson’s role as a rudo in the match positions him as a willing vessel for the scorn of the mostly Mexican American spectators. His red-white-and-blue echoes Trump’s xenophobic statements burned into Latinx consciousness: “they’re all rapists,” “bad hombres,” from “shithole countries” as well as renewed promises to “build a great wall… and Mexico will pay” and enact the largest deportation effort in U.S. history since Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback.”

The reactions from spectators are visceral and cathartic, eliciting camaraderie, anger, or empowerment. They retaliate strongly: “Fuck you! Fuck Donald Trump!”‘ and “Fuera!”, a seemingly hateful exchange interjected with cheering and laughter. Spectators are amused by the insults and retaliations. Watson’s staged “gimmick” prompts spectators to playfully rage against the violence he embodies. Their taunting in Spanish represents both resistance as cultural pride and insider knowledge. The joke is on Watson, who (presumably) does not understand the double entendres hurled at him.

A MAGA luchador evokes the memory of violence carried out against Mexicans and African Americans in Texas since at least the mid 1800s by white enslavers, colonial settlers, Texas Rangers, border patrol, and the modern police force. White supremacist violence is not mere political rhetoric but an ongoing contemporary reality. On August 3rd, 2019 a white man motivated by the “Great Replacement” theory popular in MAGA circles, drove 9 hours from his home in Allen, Texas to a Walmart in El Paso, a majority Latino city, to carry out a mass shooting with the intent of discouraging immigration. He killed 23 people and left 22 injured. Listening and yelling at Watson and his MAGA symbols at the US/Mexico border vocalizes the cultural, political and humanitarian crisis propelled by neoliberalism, the militarized police, and the exploitation of White supremacist sentiments by a wannabe fascist dictator. 

Image by Flickr User C-Monster, taken in Ontario, CA (2017) CC BY-NC 2.0


Watson comes from a line of “gringo” white supremacist luchadores such as Sam Adonis (Sam Polinsky) who sprays himself orange and waves a US flag stamped with a Trump portrait. El Migra (Gonzalo Garcia), a U.S.-born Mexican American border enforcer performed during the Bush/Clinton era, who threw tortillas while taunting “traguense estas tortillas frijoleros nopaleros” (“choke on these you cactus-eating beaners”) and growled the U.S. national anthem into the mic. Spectators jeered and threw their drink cups at him; an opportunity to retort  white supremacist  rhetoric.

In another instance from the 1990s, a major showdown between Love Machine (a gringo wrestler turned técnico) and Blue Panther (a tejana wearing feline-themed rudo) the crowd favor turned against the yankee when his neck-breaking illegal move prompted fans to reconsider their alliances in the context of massive Mexican emigration prompted by the devastating yoke of the country’s debt to the IMF and subsequent neoliberal economic reforms. Love Machine’s fake benevolence would seem to embody U.S. gleeful exploitation of  Mexico’s expatriated campesinos while simultaneously introducing legislation to further marginalize them. 

Screencapture: Blue Panther enters a fight to the tune of “La Puerta Negra”

Unlike Karen Yamashita‘s staging of SUPERNAFTA vs. El Gran Mojado in her 1997 novel Tropic of Orange, or the masked Chicano poetry of the Rudo Revolutionary Front, MAGA-spectacles within lucha libre are not intentionally staged to politicize the public but tap into the raw political nerve of the moment. They allow fans to emotionally resolve social and political anxieties when excoriating the “bad guy,” be it an anti-social character or the symbols of the oppressor, even if only for dos de tres caidas.

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Featured image by Flickr User C-Monster, taken in Ontario, CA (2017) CC BY-NC 2.0

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Esther Díaz Martín is an assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Latina Radiophonic Feminisms: Sounding Gender Politics into the Digital Age, (forthcoming UT Press, Spring 2025) theorizes Chicana feminist listening attending to the political work of Latina voices in contemporary sound media. 

Rebeca Rivas is a graphic artist and doctoral student in History at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research examines the lucha libre and community building in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. She is currently conducting an extensive oral history and archival project documenting this spectacular sport at the border.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness—Esther Díaz Martín and  Kristian E. Vasquez 

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes 

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre 

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

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This post is co -authored by Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas
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“Lucharaaaaaán a dos a tres caídas sin limite de tiempoooo!“

[“They will fight two out of three falls, with no time limit!”]

Announcer at Lucha Libre, El Paso, Texas

“This ain’t no sideshow.”

George Lipsitz on the role of popular culture

The announcer’s piercing “lucharaaaaaán” cries from the middle of the ring  proclaims the constitutional two-out-of-three-falls rule of lucha libre.  But before the famous cry rings out to set the stage for the spectacularized acrobatic combat between costumed warriors, their theatrical entrances set the all-important emotional stakes of the battle. The entrances are loud, campy, interactive exchanges between luchadores and spectators. An entrance song itself cues the luchador’s persona: a cumbia could signal a técnico (a good guy); a heavy metal song more than likely indicates a rudo (a bad guy) typically donning black, death-themed getups. Luchadores saunter into the arena, stopping to pose, high five their fans, and verbally heckle their opponents. The storylines of good versus evil, betrayal and revenge, or humility versus arrogance are some of the more standard plots that motivate spectators to adamantly cheer for the favorite and jeer for the foe.

The sonic exchanges between luchadores’ and spectators before, during, and after the fight positions lucha libre as much more than a sport. And while the term spectators,  suggests the privileged act of watching or viewing; here, we expand spectators within lucha libre arena to mean “a call to witness” (á la Chela Sandoval). Put simply, lucha libre is a cultural phenomenon where contemporary cultural, social, and political anxieties are often tapped as fodder for theatrical plots. In the U.S./Mexico’s sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the political realities of border enforcement, immigration politics, and racial tensions are loudly heard and placed on display. As part of Rebeca Riva’s ongoing research about the history of  lucha libre at the border—which too often gets skipped over for Mexico City as the epicenter of the sport—we listen for the exchanges between luchadores and spectators as resonant participants in the ritual of this sport. Specifically, we tune into lucha libre and its accompanying mega-spectacle to analyze how fans scoff at lucha libre’s MAGA-spectacles. In Time Passages, George Lipsitz (2001) reminded scholars of popular culture decades ago that “this ain’t no sideshow.” In a similar vein, lucha libre  directly engages in the larger social and political arena that contextualizes the sport.

In lucha libre, spectators are resonant participants in the construction of an essential “hi-fi” sonic ambiente. Like in football, as Kaj Ahisved notes, the “noise of the crowd” (building on Les Back’s concept) are essential to a “hi-fi” sound where a high degree of information exchange occurs between listeners and the sound environment.Or, as David Hendy describes Olympic arenas, “cauldrons of concentrated sound, [where] the roar of the spectators took on a collective force of its own – a volatile quality rich with cultural and political repercussions.” The crowd’s response, experienced by athletes as ambient noise, bolsters athlete’s spirits and develops an emotional plot for the contest. In certain cases, for instance in Algeria as Stephen Wilford documents, it is a venue for social critique; football stadiums served as “safe zones” where fans could dissent the Abdelaziz Bouteflika dictatorship through chanting political slogans and songs as an anonymous  crowd (139).

By listening to  lucha libre, we gain a deeper understanding of the embodied components of fan activism, collective identity, and political action. Visual spectacle, bodily gestures, and musical choices, coupled with verbal taunts and visceral grunts serve as interactive storytelling tools.  Yet, the crowd’s noise and, importantly, the sonic memories evoked by visual parafenalia  amplify a shared political consciousness and prompts the expression of  their allegiance with and opposition to the symbolic representations staged. 

Chris Watson proudly holds the MAGA flag. Image by Rebecca Rivas

* * *

The following audio was captured in November 2023 at a parking lot across from El Paso City Hall during a children’s fundraiser. We hear Chris Watson, a previous college wrestler from Oklahoma, make his debut appearance in lucha libre as a white supremacist character. Wearing a clichéd U.S. flag-themed bandana and waving a Trump 2024 campaign flag, he points towards the crowd and makes swimming motions with his arms to communicate the pejorative “wetback.”

Aligning these symbols of MAGA ideologies with Watson’s role as a rudo in the match positions him as a willing vessel for the scorn of the mostly Mexican American spectators. His red-white-and-blue echoes Trump’s xenophobic statements burned into Latinx consciousness: “they’re all rapists,” “bad hombres,” from “shithole countries” as well as renewed promises to “build a great wall… and Mexico will pay” and enact the largest deportation effort in U.S. history since Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback.”

The reactions from spectators are visceral and cathartic, eliciting camaraderie, anger, or empowerment. They retaliate strongly: “Fuck you! Fuck Donald Trump!”‘ and “Fuera!”, a seemingly hateful exchange interjected with cheering and laughter. Spectators are amused by the insults and retaliations. Watson’s staged “gimmick” prompts spectators to playfully rage against the violence he embodies. Their taunting in Spanish represents both resistance as cultural pride and insider knowledge. The joke is on Watson, who (presumably) does not understand the double entendres hurled at him.

A MAGA luchador evokes the memory of violence carried out against Mexicans and African Americans in Texas since at least the mid 1800s by white enslavers, colonial settlers, Texas Rangers, border patrol, and the modern police force. White supremacist violence is not mere political rhetoric but an ongoing contemporary reality. On August 3rd, 2019 a white man motivated by the “Great Replacement” theory popular in MAGA circles, drove 9 hours from his home in Allen, Texas to a Walmart in El Paso, a majority Latino city, to carry out a mass shooting with the intent of discouraging immigration. He killed 23 people and left 22 injured. Listening and yelling at Watson and his MAGA symbols at the US/Mexico border vocalizes the cultural, political and humanitarian crisis propelled by neoliberalism, the militarized police, and the exploitation of White supremacist sentiments by a wannabe fascist dictator. 

Image by Flickr User C-Monster, taken in Ontario, CA (2017) CC BY-NC 2.0


Watson comes from a line of “gringo” white supremacist luchadores such as Sam Adonis (Sam Polinsky) who sprays himself orange and waves a US flag stamped with a Trump portrait. El Migra (Gonzalo Garcia), a U.S.-born Mexican American border enforcer performed during the Bush/Clinton era, who threw tortillas while taunting “traguense estas tortillas frijoleros nopaleros” (“choke on these you cactus-eating beaners”) and growled the U.S. national anthem into the mic. Spectators jeered and threw their drink cups at him; an opportunity to retort  white supremacist  rhetoric.

In another instance from the 1990s, a major showdown between Love Machine (a gringo wrestler turned técnico) and Blue Panther (a tejana wearing feline-themed rudo) the crowd favor turned against the yankee when his neck-breaking illegal move prompted fans to reconsider their alliances in the context of massive Mexican emigration prompted by the devastating yoke of the country’s debt to the IMF and subsequent neoliberal economic reforms. Love Machine’s fake benevolence would seem to embody U.S. gleeful exploitation of  Mexico’s expatriated campesinos while simultaneously introducing legislation to further marginalize them. 

Screencapture: Blue Panther enters a fight to the tune of “La Puerta Negra”

Unlike Karen Yamashita‘s staging of SUPERNAFTA vs. El Gran Mojado in her 1997 novel Tropic of Orange, or the masked Chicano poetry of the Rudo Revolutionary Front, MAGA-spectacles within lucha libre are not intentionally staged to politicize the public but tap into the raw political nerve of the moment. They allow fans to emotionally resolve social and political anxieties when excoriating the “bad guy,” be it an anti-social character or the symbols of the oppressor, even if only for dos de tres caidas.

—

Featured image by Flickr User C-Monster, taken in Ontario, CA (2017) CC BY-NC 2.0

—

Esther Díaz Martín is an assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Latina Radiophonic Feminisms: Sounding Gender Politics into the Digital Age, (forthcoming UT Press, Spring 2025) theorizes Chicana feminist listening attending to the political work of Latina voices in contemporary sound media. 

Rebeca Rivas is a graphic artist and doctoral student in History at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research examines the lucha libre and community building in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. She is currently conducting an extensive oral history and archival project documenting this spectacular sport at the border.

—

REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness—Esther Díaz Martín and  Kristian E. Vasquez 

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes 

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

Minor Compositions

Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde

Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde Edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen The avant-garde is dead… long live the avant-garde Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde offers a new way of analysing and theorizing the question of the avant-garde today. It is customary within art history and cultural history to argue that the avant-garde disappeared as an (anti)artistic gesture during the … Continue reading →
Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

Technologies of Communal Listening: Resonance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

In both sound studies and the sonic arts, the concept of “resonance” has increasingly played a central role in attuning listeners to the politics of sound. The term itself is borrowed from acoustics, where resonance simply refers to the transfer of energy between two neighboring objects. For example, plucking a note on one guitar string will cause the other strings to vibrate at a similar frequency. When someone or something makes a sound, everything in the immediate environs—objects, people, the room itself—will respond with sympathetic vibrations. Simply put, in acoustics, resonance describes a sonic connection between sounding objects and their environment. In the arts, the concept of resonance emphasizes the situated existence of sound as a transformative encounter between bodies in a particular time and place. Resonance has become a key term to think through how sound creates a listening community, a transitory assemblage whose reverberations may be felt beyond a single moment of encounter. 

For its recent performance series, simply called Resonance, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago drew on this generative concept by bringing together four artists who explore sound as an “introspective force for greater understanding, compassion, and change.” Curated by Tara Aisha Willis and Laura Paige Kyber, the series builds on theories of resonance as an affective relationship between sounding bodies developed by writers and artists like Sonia Louis Davis, Karen Christopher, and Birgit Abels. Crucially, the curators cite composer Juliana Hodkinson’s definition of resonance as an action occurring “when the space between subject and object starts to be reduced, without them fusing into one.” Sound has the capacity for creating a moment of connection, but resonance doesn’t efface difference. As Willis notes in the series program, the artists in the series largely identify as women of color, occupying a position “where distinction and difference are most ingrained in lived experience, and where practice of creating resonance across them are most honed.”

Although the artists in the series, Anita Martine Whitehead, Samita Sinha, Laura Ortman, and 7NMS, are at least partially working within musical traditions, the curators’ framing of the series in terms of sound rather than music speaks to a broader aural turn that has animated both sonic art and scholarship. The essential conceptual move underlying the growth of sound art in the museum and sound studies in the academy is the identification of sound as a medium of expression not fully contained by the history of music. Abstracting from the realm of music to the broader terrain of sound allows these artists to reconsider the materiality of sound and practices of listening—in short, to explore the resonant relations between bodies coexisting in time and space. Yet these pieces do not search for an ahistorical sonic ontology, but instead use sound as a situated tool to forge new social realities in the present. As the artist Samita Sinha puts it, her piece “offers technologies of listening and being together.” Thinking of listening in terms of resonance, we can hear these works as technologies of communal listening.

The series kicked off with the world premiere of Anna Martine Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts. I attended the evening of March 28, the first of three scheduled performances. Each performance in the series began at 7:30pm at the MCA’s Edlis Neeson Theater. The experimental musical work is an oneiric meditation on the US carceral state centered on the experience of trio of Black femmes passing time in a prison waiting room, ruminating on their dreams, living with state violence, and the unceasing passage of time. Choreographed and co-written by Whitehead, this particular performance of FORCE began with the audience congregated outside the museum’s Edlis Neeson Theater in the transitional space of the lobby, appropriately waiting for the show to start. The opera’s first act took in this space, as a group of performers entered and sat on the grand spiral stairs of the MCA, patiently biding their time. After a few minutes, a mass of four dancers joined them, slowly making their way down the long lobby corridor towards the group on the stairs; their bodies rhythmically moved as one, limbs interlinked and breathing heavy as if burdened by an invisible weight.

The choreography of FORCE continued this motif, as weary bodies became enmeshed, leaning and relying on each other for support. When this phalanx reached the stairwell and laboriously climbed as a unit, the first song began and their voices resonated through the halls of the museum. From there, the audience members were led to the stage not through the theater’s main doors, but through the innards of the museum. Laying the institution bare, the performers led us downstairs through hallways of lockers, then backstage, before we finally took our seats on stage.

Photo: Shelby Ragsdale, from @forceanopera

The majority of FORCE is then performed on a bare theater stage, the audience in rows encircling the singers and dancers accompanied by a small ensemble of bass, drums, and keys. Just as the audience surrounds the stage, an array of speakers arranged along the edges of the room faces inward to create a shared soundscape inhabited by both the spectators and performers. As an opera, FORCE presents less a linear narrative than a series of songs swirling with reoccurring motifs that, through their repetition, suggest the temporality of waiting. One of the most powerful of these lyrical motifs introduced early in the show is that of fungal growth, of lichens felt on the body, in the nose, and on the eyes. This bivalent image of fungus both points towards an omnipresent carceral power felt on the body, while also recognizing the strategic possibilities of rhizomatic forms. The major theme of the work is of course waiting and time itself, with the singers repeatedly asking how long they have been here—the waiting room, the prison system, the police state—and how much longer they may have yet to go.

While addressing these weighty themes, the work still makes space for the possibility of joy and alternative futures. The performance ends with the singers repeating lines about freedom in a song that never concludes. As we exited, again through the bowels of the MCA, the song reverberated from the theater into the lobby. If FORCE’s first act took place before the audience entered the space of the theater, then the third act likewise continued beyond these four walls as our temporary listening community dispersed into the streets of Chicago. Even after the show, the song did not end.

The second work in the series, Samita Sinha’s Tremor built on these themes of power, space, and sonic connections between resonating bodies. I attended the first of three performances at the MCA on the evening of April 18. Performed on a minimal stage set designed by architect Sunil Bald consisting of three dramatic red sashes suspended from the ceiling, Tremor is an hour-long piece centered on Sinha’s “unraveling” of Indian vocal traditions. Of the artists in this performance series, Sinha perhaps most explicitly explored the theme of resonance, describing her work as “the practice of attuning oneself to the raw material of vibration and its emergence in space, as well as unfolding the possibilities that arise from encounters between this sonic material and other individuals.” In Tremor, the artist is accompanied by the dancer Darrell Jones, vocalist Sunder Ganglani, and an electronic soundscape created live by Ash Fure. As in FORCE, the audience was seated on the stage around the performers, with the shared sonic environment emphasizing the coexistence of our bodies in space.

In broad strokes, Tremor demonstrates the power of sonic community in the face of entropy, presenting a pair of singers competing with a barrage of electronic sound, finding solace in each other’s voice, and ultimately emerging together after an overwhelming onslaught of noise. Accompanied by a low rumble of barely audible sound, the piece begans with the four performers entering the stage and walking in an ever-widening circle, a starting point of social dispersal. Sinha, Ganglani, and Fuhre then took their places at opposing corners of the stage, on cushions placed under the suspended sashes. Jones moved around the center of the stage in ways alternately suggesting ecstasy and pain. The vocalists tentatively began singing wordless vocalizations that tended to resolve to a single note, sometimes accompanied by Sinha’s droning ektara.

Photo: Rachel Topham Photography, on https://mcachicago.org/

As the performance continued, the lights dim and Fure’s electronic sound become increasingly loud and abrasive, a heavily delayed electronic whirring alternately suggesting buzzsaws or heavy machinery. When this noise reached a sustained roaring climax, the dancer and singers moved to the center of the stage, forming a circle with their bodies. Finally, the electronic sound subsides, and the vocalists, led by Sinha, begin singing again—this time with a more supple melody, no longer abrasive vocalizations centered on a single note. This circle of bodies—the performers and we, the audience—have outlasted the assault of noise, co-existing in space, transformed and fortified by this resonant encounter.`

White Mountain Apache sound artist and musician Laura Ortman’s performance marked the release of her latest album, Smoke Rings Shimmers Endless Blur and it provocatively reframes the spatiality of resonance in temporal terms. Ortman performed twice at the MCA, and I attended the first night on April 26. White Mountain Apache sound artist and musician Laura Ortman’s performance marked the release of her latest album, Smoke Rings Shimmers Endless Blur and it provocatively reframes the spatiality of resonance in temporal terms. Where the idea of resonance largely has spatial connotations of synchronic coexistence, Ortman challenges us to think of resonance in terms of time and history through her use of looping sound. Curator Laura Paige Kyber points to this aspect of the artist’s practice, drawing on the work of writers Joseph M. Pierce and Mark Rifkin to argue against the linear time of settler history in favor of “many distinct and self-determined notions of time.” As Kyber suggests, while past histories may resonate through her work, Ortman’s vital sound-making confronts us forcefully in the present.

For her hour-long set, Ortman employed a minimal—but powerful—toolkit for her practice of “sculpting sound”: a single electrified violin run through a pedal board, occasionally supplemented by her voice, a whistle, and a small bell. Throughout the show, the violin was heavily augmented by distortion, delay, and a looping pedal run through a Fender amplifier. Ortman used the loop to build repeating layers of shoegaze-like fuzz over which she improvised on her violin, her bowing veering ecstatically between melodic phrases and rhythmic noise. For most of the performance, she was alone in front of the bare black wall of the Edlis Neeson Theater, with heavy fog machine haze dramatically lit by spotlights and two lines of fluorescent lights on the floor receding into a vanishing point at the back of the stage. She was also accompanied by two short films for the first half: footage  of dramatic New Mexico landscapes shot in collaboration with Daniel Hyde and Echota Killsnight, and a video directed by Razelle Benally of Ortman performing in Prospect Park near her home in Brooklyn.

Like Ortman’s music, Benally’s film plays with time, freely shifting between slow motion and double time footage of her performance. Likewise, Ortman’s use of the loop inherently emphasized temporality; with each decaying loop, the past continues to noisily repeat in the present—yet remains with us even as it becomes harder to discern. But amidst the resonance of the past, we are confronted with the artist meeting us in the here and now. We continue to hear the past resonating with is its own distinct temporality and it becomes the basis for Ortman’s vital artistic practice in the present. At the end of her performance, the loops fade away and we are ultimately faced with the artist standing before us sculpting sound with the violin.

The final work in the series, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist by 7NMS, a collaboration between Marjani Forté-Saunders and Everett Saunders, centered on the figure of the Emcee and the tradition of hip-hop as powerful forces in the Black radical imagination. I attended the May 9 performance. Charting the creative journey of an aspiring lyricist, the piece mixes choreography by Forté-Saunders, an extended spoken-word monologue by Saunders, and a collage of music and sound partially drawn from the Sun Ra Collection at Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio. Putting the communal ideals of resonance into practice, the artists developed this work in collaboration with the Chicago artistic community, finding inspiration from visits to the city’s South Side Community Arts Center, Stony Island Arts Bank, and Miyagi Records.

7NMS | Everett Asis Saunders and Marjani Forté Saunders, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist, REDCAT, September 21, 2023. Photo: Angel Origgi.

The performance begins with a choreographed prelude with Forté-Saunders and dancer Marcella Lewis moving together on a bare stage. Upon Saunders’s entrance onto the stage as the titular lyricist, Forté-Saunders and Lewis largely recede, becoming silent specters, moving through, and occasionally entering the ensuing narrative. In the first section, the lyricist recounted his youth training to be an emcee, adopting an increasingly martial cadence as he described his hard work developing breath control, free-styling, and rhyme-writing skills. This artistic intensity is followed by the most powerful part of the show: a long audio montage of interviews with other lyricists, their voices emanating from speakers surrounding Saunders. As their words ping-ponged from speaker to speaker, the narrator began flinging his body across the stage, before finally collapsing in a roar of white noise and projected static. From there, the lyricist described his further spiritual and political education under the tutelage of “three kings,” wise men he met on the streets of Philadelphia. In the show’s final moments, we watched the emcee frantically writing his lyrics on the stage floor, his words projected, resonating through the auditorium.

The diversity of performances in the series speaks to the capacious power of the concept of resonance, and the continued vitality of sound as a medium of expression. Through the series, sound was employed as a situated tool of connection, convening audience and performer in a communal space without eliding difference.

In her piece, Samita Sinha draws on the thinking of Caribbean philosopher’s Éduoard Glissant’s notion of trembling. Trembling thinking “is the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought … We need trembling thinking – because the world trembles, and our sensibility, our affect trembles … even when I am fighting for my identity, I consider my identity not as the only possible identity in the world.” Airek Beauchamp suggests a similar connection between sound and trembling, writing about the potential for sonic connection between marginalized queer bodies. Beauchamp argues that strategically deployed noise “communicates in trembles, resonating in both the psyche and the actual body,” coalescing disparate identities into a powerful social form. Trembling then, like resonance, doesn’t offer a single solution to global crises—likewise these artists do not treat sound as an inherently revelatory tool of political liberation. But through resonance, understood as a technology of communal listening, the artists invite us to hope for transformative encounters, for new ways of hearing the world.

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Featured Image: Photo: Rachel Keane on https://mcachicago.org/

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Harry Burson holds a PhD in Film & Media from the University of California, Berkeley. He researches and teaches on the theory and history of sonic media, exploring the intersection of digital and aural cultures, with particular focus on immersive media, sound art, and VR. His work examines how sound technologies have shaped both our understanding of and embodied relationship to digital media. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago (hburson@uic.edu)

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This article also benefitted from the editorial review of Dahlia Bekong. Thank you!

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig this:

SO! Amplifies: Wu Tsang’s Anthem (2021)—Freddie Cruz Nowell

Freedom Back: Sounding Black Feminist History, Courtesy the Artists–Tavia Nyong’o

My Time in the Bush of Drones: or, 24 Hours at Basilica Hudson–Robert Ryan

The Sound of What Becomes Possible: Language Politics and Jesse Chun’s 술래 SULLAE (2020)—Casey Mecija

Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

Technologies of Communal Listening: Resonance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

In both sound studies and the sonic arts, the concept of “resonance” has increasingly played a central role in attuning listeners to the politics of sound. The term itself is borrowed from acoustics, where resonance simply refers to the transfer of energy between two neighboring objects. For example, plucking a note on one guitar string will cause the other strings to vibrate at a similar frequency. When someone or something makes a sound, everything in the immediate environs—objects, people, the room itself—will respond with sympathetic vibrations. Simply put, in acoustics, resonance describes a sonic connection between sounding objects and their environment. In the arts, the concept of resonance emphasizes the situated existence of sound as a transformative encounter between bodies in a particular time and place. Resonance has become a key term to think through how sound creates a listening community, a transitory assemblage whose reverberations may be felt beyond a single moment of encounter. 

For its recent performance series, simply called Resonance, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago drew on this generative concept by bringing together four artists who explore sound as an “introspective force for greater understanding, compassion, and change.” Curated by Tara Aisha Willis and Laura Paige Kyber, the series builds on theories of resonance as an affective relationship between sounding bodies developed by writers and artists like Sonia Louis Davis, Karen Christopher, and Birgit Abels. Crucially, the curators cite composer Juliana Hodkinson’s definition of resonance as an action occurring “when the space between subject and object starts to be reduced, without them fusing into one.” Sound has the capacity for creating a moment of connection, but resonance doesn’t efface difference. As Willis notes in the series program, the artists in the series largely identify as women of color, occupying a position “where distinction and difference are most ingrained in lived experience, and where practice of creating resonance across them are most honed.”

Although the artists in the series, Anita Martine Whitehead, Samita Sinha, Laura Ortman, and 7NMS, are at least partially working within musical traditions, the curators’ framing of the series in terms of sound rather than music speaks to a broader aural turn that has animated both sonic art and scholarship. The essential conceptual move underlying the growth of sound art in the museum and sound studies in the academy is the identification of sound as a medium of expression not fully contained by the history of music. Abstracting from the realm of music to the broader terrain of sound allows these artists to reconsider the materiality of sound and practices of listening—in short, to explore the resonant relations between bodies coexisting in time and space. Yet these pieces do not search for an ahistorical sonic ontology, but instead use sound as a situated tool to forge new social realities in the present. As the artist Samita Sinha puts it, her piece “offers technologies of listening and being together.” Thinking of listening in terms of resonance, we can hear these works as technologies of communal listening.

The series kicked off with the world premiere of Anna Martine Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts. I attended the evening of March 28, the first of three scheduled performances. Each performance in the series began at 7:30pm at the MCA’s Edlis Neeson Theater. The experimental musical work is an oneiric meditation on the US carceral state centered on the experience of trio of Black femmes passing time in a prison waiting room, ruminating on their dreams, living with state violence, and the unceasing passage of time. Choreographed and co-written by Whitehead, this particular performance of FORCE began with the audience congregated outside the museum’s Edlis Neeson Theater in the transitional space of the lobby, appropriately waiting for the show to start. The opera’s first act took in this space, as a group of performers entered and sat on the grand spiral stairs of the MCA, patiently biding their time. After a few minutes, a mass of four dancers joined them, slowly making their way down the long lobby corridor towards the group on the stairs; their bodies rhythmically moved as one, limbs interlinked and breathing heavy as if burdened by an invisible weight.

The choreography of FORCE continued this motif, as weary bodies became enmeshed, leaning and relying on each other for support. When this phalanx reached the stairwell and laboriously climbed as a unit, the first song began and their voices resonated through the halls of the museum. From there, the audience members were led to the stage not through the theater’s main doors, but through the innards of the museum. Laying the institution bare, the performers led us downstairs through hallways of lockers, then backstage, before we finally took our seats on stage.

Photo: Shelby Ragsdale, from @forceanopera

The majority of FORCE is then performed on a bare theater stage, the audience in rows encircling the singers and dancers accompanied by a small ensemble of bass, drums, and keys. Just as the audience surrounds the stage, an array of speakers arranged along the edges of the room faces inward to create a shared soundscape inhabited by both the spectators and performers. As an opera, FORCE presents less a linear narrative than a series of songs swirling with reoccurring motifs that, through their repetition, suggest the temporality of waiting. One of the most powerful of these lyrical motifs introduced early in the show is that of fungal growth, of lichens felt on the body, in the nose, and on the eyes. This bivalent image of fungus both points towards an omnipresent carceral power felt on the body, while also recognizing the strategic possibilities of rhizomatic forms. The major theme of the work is of course waiting and time itself, with the singers repeatedly asking how long they have been here—the waiting room, the prison system, the police state—and how much longer they may have yet to go.

While addressing these weighty themes, the work still makes space for the possibility of joy and alternative futures. The performance ends with the singers repeating lines about freedom in a song that never concludes. As we exited, again through the bowels of the MCA, the song reverberated from the theater into the lobby. If FORCE’s first act took place before the audience entered the space of the theater, then the third act likewise continued beyond these four walls as our temporary listening community dispersed into the streets of Chicago. Even after the show, the song did not end.

The second work in the series, Samita Sinha’s Tremor built on these themes of power, space, and sonic connections between resonating bodies. I attended the first of three performances at the MCA on the evening of April 18. Performed on a minimal stage set designed by architect Sunil Bald consisting of three dramatic red sashes suspended from the ceiling, Tremor is an hour-long piece centered on Sinha’s “unraveling” of Indian vocal traditions. Of the artists in this performance series, Sinha perhaps most explicitly explored the theme of resonance, describing her work as “the practice of attuning oneself to the raw material of vibration and its emergence in space, as well as unfolding the possibilities that arise from encounters between this sonic material and other individuals.” In Tremor, the artist is accompanied by the dancer Darrell Jones, vocalist Sunder Ganglani, and an electronic soundscape created live by Ash Fure. As in FORCE, the audience was seated on the stage around the performers, with the shared sonic environment emphasizing the coexistence of our bodies in space.

In broad strokes, Tremor demonstrates the power of sonic community in the face of entropy, presenting a pair of singers competing with a barrage of electronic sound, finding solace in each other’s voice, and ultimately emerging together after an overwhelming onslaught of noise. Accompanied by a low rumble of barely audible sound, the piece begans with the four performers entering the stage and walking in an ever-widening circle, a starting point of social dispersal. Sinha, Ganglani, and Fuhre then took their places at opposing corners of the stage, on cushions placed under the suspended sashes. Jones moved around the center of the stage in ways alternately suggesting ecstasy and pain. The vocalists tentatively began singing wordless vocalizations that tended to resolve to a single note, sometimes accompanied by Sinha’s droning ektara.

Photo: Rachel Topham Photography, on https://mcachicago.org/

As the performance continued, the lights dim and Fure’s electronic sound become increasingly loud and abrasive, a heavily delayed electronic whirring alternately suggesting buzzsaws or heavy machinery. When this noise reached a sustained roaring climax, the dancer and singers moved to the center of the stage, forming a circle with their bodies. Finally, the electronic sound subsides, and the vocalists, led by Sinha, begin singing again—this time with a more supple melody, no longer abrasive vocalizations centered on a single note. This circle of bodies—the performers and we, the audience—have outlasted the assault of noise, co-existing in space, transformed and fortified by this resonant encounter.`

White Mountain Apache sound artist and musician Laura Ortman’s performance marked the release of her latest album, Smoke Rings Shimmers Endless Blur and it provocatively reframes the spatiality of resonance in temporal terms. Ortman performed twice at the MCA, and I attended the first night on April 26. White Mountain Apache sound artist and musician Laura Ortman’s performance marked the release of her latest album, Smoke Rings Shimmers Endless Blur and it provocatively reframes the spatiality of resonance in temporal terms. Where the idea of resonance largely has spatial connotations of synchronic coexistence, Ortman challenges us to think of resonance in terms of time and history through her use of looping sound. Curator Laura Paige Kyber points to this aspect of the artist’s practice, drawing on the work of writers Joseph M. Pierce and Mark Rifkin to argue against the linear time of settler history in favor of “many distinct and self-determined notions of time.” As Kyber suggests, while past histories may resonate through her work, Ortman’s vital sound-making confronts us forcefully in the present.

For her hour-long set, Ortman employed a minimal—but powerful—toolkit for her practice of “sculpting sound”: a single electrified violin run through a pedal board, occasionally supplemented by her voice, a whistle, and a small bell. Throughout the show, the violin was heavily augmented by distortion, delay, and a looping pedal run through a Fender amplifier. Ortman used the loop to build repeating layers of shoegaze-like fuzz over which she improvised on her violin, her bowing veering ecstatically between melodic phrases and rhythmic noise. For most of the performance, she was alone in front of the bare black wall of the Edlis Neeson Theater, with heavy fog machine haze dramatically lit by spotlights and two lines of fluorescent lights on the floor receding into a vanishing point at the back of the stage. She was also accompanied by two short films for the first half: footage  of dramatic New Mexico landscapes shot in collaboration with Daniel Hyde and Echota Killsnight, and a video directed by Razelle Benally of Ortman performing in Prospect Park near her home in Brooklyn.

Like Ortman’s music, Benally’s film plays with time, freely shifting between slow motion and double time footage of her performance. Likewise, Ortman’s use of the loop inherently emphasized temporality; with each decaying loop, the past continues to noisily repeat in the present—yet remains with us even as it becomes harder to discern. But amidst the resonance of the past, we are confronted with the artist meeting us in the here and now. We continue to hear the past resonating with is its own distinct temporality and it becomes the basis for Ortman’s vital artistic practice in the present. At the end of her performance, the loops fade away and we are ultimately faced with the artist standing before us sculpting sound with the violin.

The final work in the series, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist by 7NMS, a collaboration between Marjani Forté-Saunders and Everett Saunders, centered on the figure of the Emcee and the tradition of hip-hop as powerful forces in the Black radical imagination. I attended the May 9 performance. Charting the creative journey of an aspiring lyricist, the piece mixes choreography by Forté-Saunders, an extended spoken-word monologue by Saunders, and a collage of music and sound partially drawn from the Sun Ra Collection at Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio. Putting the communal ideals of resonance into practice, the artists developed this work in collaboration with the Chicago artistic community, finding inspiration from visits to the city’s South Side Community Arts Center, Stony Island Arts Bank, and Miyagi Records.

7NMS | Everett Asis Saunders and Marjani Forté Saunders, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist, REDCAT, September 21, 2023. Photo: Angel Origgi.

The performance begins with a choreographed prelude with Forté-Saunders and dancer Marcella Lewis moving together on a bare stage. Upon Saunders’s entrance onto the stage as the titular lyricist, Forté-Saunders and Lewis largely recede, becoming silent specters, moving through, and occasionally entering the ensuing narrative. In the first section, the lyricist recounted his youth training to be an emcee, adopting an increasingly martial cadence as he described his hard work developing breath control, free-styling, and rhyme-writing skills. This artistic intensity is followed by the most powerful part of the show: a long audio montage of interviews with other lyricists, their voices emanating from speakers surrounding Saunders. As their words ping-ponged from speaker to speaker, the narrator began flinging his body across the stage, before finally collapsing in a roar of white noise and projected static. From there, the lyricist described his further spiritual and political education under the tutelage of “three kings,” wise men he met on the streets of Philadelphia. In the show’s final moments, we watched the emcee frantically writing his lyrics on the stage floor, his words projected, resonating through the auditorium.

The diversity of performances in the series speaks to the capacious power of the concept of resonance, and the continued vitality of sound as a medium of expression. Through the series, sound was employed as a situated tool of connection, convening audience and performer in a communal space without eliding difference.

In her piece, Samita Sinha draws on the thinking of Caribbean philosopher’s Éduoard Glissant’s notion of trembling. Trembling thinking “is the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought … We need trembling thinking – because the world trembles, and our sensibility, our affect trembles … even when I am fighting for my identity, I consider my identity not as the only possible identity in the world.” Airek Beauchamp suggests a similar connection between sound and trembling, writing about the potential for sonic connection between marginalized queer bodies. Beauchamp argues that strategically deployed noise “communicates in trembles, resonating in both the psyche and the actual body,” coalescing disparate identities into a powerful social form. Trembling then, like resonance, doesn’t offer a single solution to global crises—likewise these artists do not treat sound as an inherently revelatory tool of political liberation. But through resonance, understood as a technology of communal listening, the artists invite us to hope for transformative encounters, for new ways of hearing the world.

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Featured Image: Photo: Rachel Keane on https://mcachicago.org/

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Harry Burson holds a PhD in Film & Media from the University of California, Berkeley. He researches and teaches on the theory and history of sonic media, exploring the intersection of digital and aural cultures, with particular focus on immersive media, sound art, and VR. His work examines how sound technologies have shaped both our understanding of and embodied relationship to digital media. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago (hburson@uic.edu)

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This article also benefitted from the editorial review of Dahlia Bekong. Thank you!

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Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

to follow an invisible creek: in search of a decolonial soundwalk praxis

i begin with an acknowledgement of the myriad of organizers, scholars, artists, and teachers that have shaped and continue to shape the way that i think and write. Édouard Glissant, Christina Sharpe, Lucille Clifton, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Dionne Brand, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde. it is through their profound reflections on questions of Blackness, place, belonging, earth, and love, that i have found meaning in and context for what follows.

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in the context of the rapid rise of big tech in san francisco, california, the perspective of land as perpetually exploitable is ever-present. tech-sponsored development projects are always framed by the city as being motivated by care and consideration for residents, and sometimes as being motivated by environmentalism.  in reality, the displacement and destruction that results from projects like these falls primarily on poor people of color, and their homes, gardens, businesses, community spaces, and schools. similarly, large-scale development projects more often than not have devastating impacts on the land – whether it’s the land that’s being built over or the sacrifice zone elsewhere. perhaps the electric cars of san francisco are thought to represent clean energy and a healthy modern city, but the manufacturing of these cars is predicated upon extensive mining and exploitative and extractive labor outside far outside the city’s borders. and these cars drive over flattened creeks and sand dunes turned to asphalt—through gentrified neighborhoods on stolen land of the Ramaytush Ohlone, people who are still alive and fighting for sovereignty on their traditional territory, and who remain stewards of the land.

these disparities are present in the sounds of the bay area. sound, quite literally, does not exist in a vacuum. the presence of sound thus implies the presence of something outside of that sound; in every sound we hear, there is also information about the context that surrounds it. and the sounds that we do hear say something about the value of the sounds that we don’t. however, i want to argue for a soundwalking praxis that does not settle for the sounds that most easily reach the ear, as in the freeway noise or the planes passing above or the white people on the street, but that reaches beyond to listen for the negative sonic space that is always present and creating itself in the spaces between what we perceive as audible. in my understanding, this is a practice of giving life to that which capitalism/white supremacy/colonialism renders dead, a practice of centering the life that is otherwise stepped on, forgotten, discarded, silenced. listening for the ecologies of the dispossessed. for proof of life, insisting. this is a decolonial soundwalk praxis.

Allie Martin describes “decolonial soundwalk praxis” as a way of listening that disrupts and disturbs dominant western understandings of sound and space, in “Hearing Change in the Chocolate City: Soundwalking as Black Feminist Method” (2019). to me, it also involves cultivating an embodied practice of centering that life which dominant pedagogies deem less than, exploitable, and extractable. in the specific geographies of the bay area, it has meant that my primary orientation while soundwalking has been to listen for the creek that runs through the land—even when the water runs dry, even when all we can see is an intersection.

following lobos creek, this and all remaining images by the author

the creeks i followed were mostly routed underground, culverted to run under parking lots, freeways, shopping malls, grocery stores, and other urban sites of development. the prioritizing of urban development/renewal/gentrification in the bay area over tending to the ecologies of its creeks points to the place that the land is seen to hold in so-called modern society: as a resource available to exploit as desired, as is convenient for the logistics of capitalist expansion and development. to listen in such a way, for the creek and for other forms of life forced underground and to the margins, requires methods perhaps alternative to the traditional soundwalk. we must renegotiate the categories of sound that are implied in western colonial pedagogies. we must reevaluate what constitutes a “creek sound” or a “nature sound” in the first place.

to listen for the creek when it is covered by concrete necessitates that we reach beyond thinking of a creek as something which exists in and of itself, in isolation.

∼∼∼might the sound of a creek be more than just trickling water falling through rocks? can it not be heard still in the place where it meets the ocean?∼∼∼

clip from lobos creek soundwalk, recorded at the point where the creek meets the pacific ocean.

∼∼∼or in the rustling of the trees who drink from the same groundwater?∼∼∼

clip from garden soundwalk, recorded at the head of the eggplant bed, by the marigolds, looking out at the southeast mulberry tree. strawberry creek runs alongside the garden and though it is in an underground tunnel, i like to think of it as feeding the plants.

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∼∼∼couldn’t a creek be heard in a voice that speaks of it, as in a prayer, or a promise, or a song?∼∼∼

clip from pinole creek soundwalk. a white man approaches me and talks about how sick pinole creek is, but he also says that he walks along it often.
clip from lobos creek soundwalk. Joel points out that lobos creek is visible. brushing past the foliage, i press my face against the fence that encloses it to get a look.

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if we understand space as relational, as Nigel Thrift offers in “Space: The Fundamental Stuff of Human Geography” (96), then perhaps we can reach an imagining of a creek as finding its life everywhere where water is sacred, running freely through the bodies of those that know it is there.

acknowledging the body as the point of contact between the self and the environment is an important part of a decolonial soundwalk praxis. “place is involved with embodiment” Thrift says (103), and in fact, when we truly acknowledge the body, the very boundary between the body and the environment begins to dissipate, because the body itself is constantly a part of place-making processes. if sound is a dimension through which we can understand place, then, similarly, listening for the life insisting in a place is not separate from listening for the people who are in relationship with it.

in my soundwalks, i leaned into the fact that i was experiencing every place principally through my body, and as i became more comfortable recording, i gave myself more permission to allow my experience to be subjective. what i realized is that my subjectivity, my specific presence to my body’s relationship with the places i was in, was an important orientation to be able to embody a decolonial soundwalk praxis – to be able to hear the sounds that otherwise may have been neglected.

∼∼∼while walking along lobos creek trail, for example, i noticed, growing out of the sand, plants that were familiar to me, that i had relationships with. the house finches were chirping, and my footsteps were clear∼∼∼

clip from lobos creek soundwalk, sounds of walking

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∼∼∼but the plants i recognized were not – could not be – audible to me until i spoke their names and touched their seed pods.∼∼∼

clip from lobos creek soundwalk, identifying the wild coastal lupine that grows near the water, and noticing that it had gone to seed.

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∼∼∼i pulled a few pods off a branch and holding them near the microphone i cracked them open, letting the seeds fall into my hands. i listened to the pods split down the middle and drop the seeds, and in their snapping i heard how much tension they were holding.∼∼∼

clip from lobos creek soundwalk, cracking open the seed pods

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i felt how much strain it must be to make and carry all those seeds, how much release it must be to crack open and spill out of yourself, and i was grateful to bear witness. i held the seeds in my hand and some time later, i gave them to the creek. in allowing myself the trust to follow my body’s intuitive relationship with the given place, i found sounds that i otherwise would not have heard. ultimately, i found a depth of connection to and intimacy with a place that before listening to in this way, i was a stranger to.

the work of giving attention to the sounds that go unheard is necessarily an embodied exercise. it demands relationship and it demands entanglement. it demands crawling inside a mossy culvert to hear the creek talk.

clip from bushy dell creek soundwalk

curious to hear how the creek sounded differently in the tunnel, i went off the trail at piedmont park to climb inside the section where the culvert begins. with the dripping, there was a nuance to its rhythm distinct from its sounds outside of the tunnel. i was able to hear, but only by coming inside and joining the creek. we sat there together, in the dark, for a while.

it also meant sawing down a 20-foot-tall agave in order to save the seeds after the 30-something-year-old plant finally bloomed—with bright yellow flowers on branches shaped like coral—and then began to dry out and lean precariously. to keep the other plants safe, and to release some pressure from the agave, we cut its stalk and from it saved its branches, seed pods, and seeds. the pods are now hanging around the garden at the Land of Disturbance and Defiance as art.

clip from cracking of pods audible in garden soundwalk

i am principally interested in sound because i am interested in love, and when i imagine a decolonial soundwalk praxis, intimacy is surely at the center. this perspective offers a way of learning place from the position of a being who is co-creating it – not as a scientist but as a steward. a decolonial soundwalk praxis complicates traditional soundwalking’s aversion to the body. we cannot exist separate from the sonic space around us anymore than we can exist separately from the ecologies woven into our lives. to touch is to alter, and so the work here is to lean into the inevitability of connection, the impossibility of objectivity. a decolonial soundwalk praxis rejects the extraction of sound as data, pushing us instead to open our bodies/hearts/minds to receive the sounds of a place as the place is receiving us. how might we use sound to remove ourselves from the perspective of the observer? and what kind of responsibility to place does this open up? if we are a part of the places we are in and listening to, then surely we owe them reciprocity, love, conversation, patience; we must listen as we would a relative, a lover, or a friend.

altar at the garden, image by author

i chose to record my final soundwalk at the garden on walnut and virginia street in berkeley, california, because it is a place that i know well and love dearly and i hoped to center that. the north side of the garden runs alongside strawberry creek.

rather than imposing a plan/route through the garden upon arriving, i allowed my relationship with the land to guide my movement through it. in my final mix, i layered pieces from this soundwalk together with selected excerpts from a meeting i attended with two fellow members of A.G.A.V.E., or Aspiring Gardeners Affirming Vibrant Ecologies (also Aspiring Gardeners Against Violent Extraction).in which we were trying to synthesize a manifesto using notes from previous conversations, itself a process of collective and layered creation. i chose to include portions of our conversation centered around ideas of relationship and care grounded in land, and i chose sounds from the walk that i feel hold in them intimacy and history:

∼∼∼the crows, who we feed every day and who plant seeds for us∼∼∼

clip from garden soundwalk

∼∼∼the lock, which only those who know the land can open∼∼∼

clip from garden soundwalk

∼∼∼and the marigolds, which we grow every year and which we harvest for offerings∼∼∼

clip from garden soundwalk

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these sounds are proof of relationship. small sounds that are easy enough to forget to hear, but that are important to remember – and so i try, as i would for an invisible creek.

if a decolonial soundwalk praxis is anything, it is that love is listening, and so, my promise to invisible creeks (and all quiet[ed] sounds) everywhere is to lean a little closer,

and feel your whisper on my neck,

and to listen well,

and to take notes,

and to remember,

and to conspire.

full lobos creek soundwalk.

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Featured Image: “California Pepper Tree” by Flickr user baird, CC BY-SA 2.0

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ameia camielle smith (they/she) is an aspiring gardener, dancer, and writer based in the san francisco bay area (Ohlone land). they are of mixed Afro-Indian ancestry and are greatly shaped by the seeds/shells/lives that exist at the intersection of these diasporas. ameia’s work is anchored in cultural ecologies and Black feminist geographies, and they are most inspired by stories of survival and collaboration between people and plants.

ameia received their B.A in geography from the university of california berkeley in may 2024. they are currently traveling through the southern united states where they are exploring maroon swamp geographies, tracing the steps of Zora Neale Hurston, and listening to the swampy cicada sounds of their childhood in north-central florida.

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tape reel


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