Mercedes Bunz

Navigating AI in Academic Publishing: Balancing Efficiency, Expertise and Ethics

Navigating AI in Academic Publishing: Balancing Efficiency, Expertise and Ethics

by Adèle Kreager

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming many sectors, from its role in breakthrough research on protein structure prediction, which recently earned a Nobel Prize, to more controversial uses in film and entertainment. As AI infiltrates our digital world, internet users are increasingly exposed to what has been evocatively termed ‘AI slop’—from seemingly innocuous AI-generated meme trends, such as ‘Shrimp Jesus’, to more demonstrably dangerous outputs, such as AI-generated mushroom-foraging books that contain bogus advice. In turn, AI now powers everyday tools like Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checks, or Gmail’s email filters, often without us even noticing.

Amid this surge in AI capabilities and applications, many industries, including academic publishing, are recognising the opportunities and challenges posed by these tools. AI offers a way to enhance efficiency, streamlining the more time-consuming, repetitive and mundane tasks. Yet these advancements come with ethical and practical considerations that demand careful thought. As a small, scholar-led, non-profit publisher, we are experimenting with how AI can support, rather than replace, the human expertise and creativity that underpin high-quality academic research and its dissemination.

How We Use AI in Our Editorial Processes

We are adopting a cautious but practical approach to integrating AI, using it as an ancillary tool in various stages of the editorial process:

1.      Assisting with index topic lists

Developing a list of index topics is a laborious task often shouldered by our authors. We’ve found that AI tools, like ChatGPT, can suggest preliminary lists of topics or place names, which serve as useful starting points.  However, these AI-generated lists often focus on broad, main topics, lacking the nuance needed for a comprehensive index. Therefore, human oversight is essential, and we rely on our authors and editors to review and refine the suggestions to ensure that the final index is accurate and usable.

2.      Crafting first drafts for book blurbs

We have also experimented with using AI to generate first drafts of book blurbs. By inputting key information about the book, ChatGPT can produce a structured summary that provides a useful point of departure. However, the critical insight needed to highlight a book’s key contributions is something that AI cannot replicate, since the responses are based on algorithmic combinations of text rather than a deeper understanding of the content. This is why these drafts are always reworked by our editors and authors.

3.      Creating alt-text for accessibility

Alt-text (alternative text) provides a textual description of images, making content more accessible to people with visual impairments. Assistive technologies, like screen readers, can then translate the alt-text into speech or braille. Alt-text can also be helpful for those with unreliable internet connections, serving as a stand-in for visual content when an image fails to load.

Creating alt-text for images is essential for improving the accessibility of our books, but it can also be a labour-intensive task. Using ChatGPT’s alt-text assistant reduces the time involved in generating alt-text descriptions, and even allows for multi-language output. Still, AI-generated alt-text isn’t flawless: it can struggle to identify the most relevant elements of an image, and can overlook important context. Again, human input is necessary, with all AI-generated alt-text outputs for images reviewed by our team and authors.

4.      Expanding access with AI-generated audiobooks

AI also has the potential to make academic content accessible to a broader audience by converting texts into audiobooks through Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, at a fraction of the cost associated with professional audiobook production. Audiobooks can provide a new way to engage with scholarly content, especially for those who prefer listening over reading. The audiobook conversion process isn’t entirely automated, and adjustments like excluding bibliographies and non-essential footnotes are necessary to ensure the listenability of the end product.

However, while we don’t have the resources to employ professional narrators, we are mindful of the ethical implications of using AI narrators, which risk displacing human voice actors. Striking a balance between efficiency, accessibility and ethical responsibility is a challenge to take seriously, and we welcome reader and listener feedback on the few AI-generated audiobooks we’ve made available so far. If there is demand for audiobooks, producing them in-house is more environmentally friendly than leaving the conversion to individual readers.

How We Use AI in Our Marketing Processes

AI has proved helpful in compiling lists of relevant journals and societies for marketing purposes. However, we’ve noticed that AI chatbots often prioritise Anglo-American journals. To ensure broader international representation, we adjust our prompts to include foreign-language journals, allowing us to reach a more diverse audience. The same strengths that make chatbots effective for drafting preliminary blurbs also make them handy for condensing our policy statements into more succinct, audience-friendly summaries for marketing materials.

How Our Developers Use AI

Our developers integrate AI into their coding environments to streamline specific tasks, such as code explanation, generating snippets of code and automating test writing (a tedious activity that AI can handle efficiently).

How Our Authors Are Using AI

Since the summer of 2024, we have asked our authors to disclose any use of AI tools in their research and writing, with the aim to understand how AI is being integrated into academic work and to ensure transparency in the research process. Although uptake has been relatively limited so far, some authors have reported using AI for tasks such as translating texts, clarifying complex ideas, improving language accuracy, and providing feedback on grammar, vocabulary and style.

Zooming Out: Ethical Considerations for AI in Publishing and Beyond

As AI becomes more embedded in academic publishing, it raises a host of ethical questions, with implications within and beyond the industry itself.

1.      Data, accountability and algorithmic bias

AI’s outputs are shaped by the datasets used to train it, many of which are harvested without the consent of creators. In turn, these datasets can be biased or incomplete (often underrepresenting marginalised groups), leading to baked-in algorithmic biases that can perpetuate social inequalities. For this reason, we avoid using AI for editorial decision-making, especially in evaluating research: a practice that could effectively institutionalise past prejudices through new technologies.

2.      The environmental cost of AI

AI is an extractive industry, at multiple levels: not only is it exploitative of human labour,[1] but it is highly resource-intensive, with a single request made through ChatGPT consuming nearly ten times the electricity of a typical Google Search. Data centres consume significant electricity, produce harmful e-waste, and rely on the extraction of critical minerals, which are often mined unsustainably and traded in areas of conflict (as discussed in one of our recent publications). AI may appear as a kind of disembodied computation, but its material, environmental impacts are very real.

3.      AI and job displacement in creative fields

Widespread use of AI in creative industries risks crowding out human expertise and creativity, depending on its implementation. A revealing comment made by OpenAI’s former CTO, Mira Murati, earlier this year—that ‘Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place’—is darkly suggestive of the company’s priorities and attitudes towards AI’s role in the profit-driven workplace.

AI: A Complement to Human Expertise

At OBP, AI currently plays a useful but limited role in our workflows. We use it to streamline repetitive or time-consuming tasks, enabling our staff and authors to allocate more time and energy to the critical and creative work involved in high-quality academic publishing. As we explore AI’s potential, we remain committed to responsible use, ensuring that human creativity, transparency and fairness remain central to our work.


[1] ChatGPT-creator OpenAI not only faces accusations of intellectual property theft by training their systems on works under copyright, without consent; they also employed contractors in Kenya, earning less than $2 per hour, as content moderators to label horrific and harmful content.

Mercedes Bunz

October 2024 Newsletter

Mercedes Bunz

Our reflections on ‘community over commercialisation’

Our reflections on ‘community over commercialisation’

Since the theme for this year’s Open Access Week is ‘Community over commercialisation’, we thought we would offer some thoughts about how our focus on community, rather than profit, has benefited our press—and some reflections on the potential for community-driven open access (OA) to grow over the next few years.

The practical benefits of a non-commercial and community-focused structure

Open Book Publishers (OBP) is an independent, non-profit, scholar-led OA book publisher. We were founded in 2008 by academics with a clear mission: to make high-quality academic research freely accessible everywhere. In order to serve this mission, OBP was founded as a Community Interest Company (CIC), a regulated non-profit that is obligated to serve a community purpose.

This structure meant that OBP has had a community focus since its beginning—but it was a practical and strategic choice, as well as a principled one. As a CIC, OBP has never had to meet obligations to shareholders on top of its running costs. This has enabled the press to be light and agile, to innovate, and to grow at its own pace.

This was important in the early days of OBP: OA was a new way of publishing that demanded new workflows, business models and infrastructures. Being a non-profit financed by grants and a loan rather than by investment capital gave the founders and directors, Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti, the time to experiment and pilot these while publishing only a very small number of books a year.

It also made it more feasible to resist the Book Processing Charge model of funding, an inequitable approach that requires an author (or funder) to cover the costs and, in some cases, the expected profit margin of a book before publication as a hedge against OA reducing sales. This deeply risk-averse model is common among presses that usually publish closed access, for whom OA is an occasional and unfamiliar mode of publishing—and the fees tend to be higher for presses that are expected to return high dividends to their shareholders (or for those university presses that return a substantial amount of money to their parent institutions every year).

Instead, OBP piloted a Library Membership programme in 2015 to provide an additional income stream, employing a mixed model to fund our costs via income from i) sales of paperback, hardback and EPUB formats, ii) the income from our Library Membership programme, and iii) any grant funding that the author is able to secure. (Publication does not depend on funding, and most of our books are published without it—last year, 35 out of 49 books were published with no additional funding.) The directors began to grow the press by taking on more staff and publishing more books only once this model began to provide sufficient reliable income.

Our reflections on ‘community over commercialisation’
Find out more about our business model

Choosing not to impose fees on authors means we are not limited to only working with those who can afford to pay, thus broadening the communities of scholars we serve. Some have chosen us for precisely this reason—Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at University of Cambridge and the series editor of ‘Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures’, writes about the importance of not excluding authors from his series in a recent blog post, as well as reflecting powerfully on the extractive relationship closed-access research can have with communities that are studied.

‘Scaling small’: growth through community

Once OBP began to grow, its non-profit status and community focus enabled the directors to set a strategic direction focused on the press’s mission, without the need to pursue higher levels of revenue as an additional responsibility. Currently OBP publishes around 50 books per year and, if the directors chose, we could put all our energies into our own growth and development (as we might if we had a commercial imperative). But instead, Gatti and Tosi decided there was a potentially more exciting and impactful route to be taken by collaborating with like-minded presses, libraries, funders, community organisations and infrastructure providers to build open, non-profit infrastructures and networks that could enable many more presses to publish OA books in an equitable way. This is now a core component of OBP's company ethos, and it is an approach that Copim has described as ‘scaling small’.

This mindset governed our involvement in Copim, an international partnership funded by Arcadia and Research England that, among other developments, has created the Open Book Collective, a community-governed charity currently supporting 13 publisher and service provider members with more than £674k raised from 79 supporting libraries, and which will also award more than £84k in small grants to mission-driven OA initiatives by 2026. Copim has also supported the development of Thoth, a non-profit open metadata management and dissemination service (also a Community Interest Company) that has more than 27 publishers using its platform to manage & disseminate open metadata for OA books (as well as underlying OBP’s own revamped catalogue).

Our reflections on ‘community over commercialisation’

We co-founded ScholarLed, a group of seven independent, academic-led, OA book publishers sharing skills, knowledge and resources to further all of our work, as well as the Open Access Books Network (OABN), a broad and growing community of publishers, librarians, authors and others interested in learning more about, and developing, OA book publishing. Hosting open events, fostering collaborations and sharing free resources, the OABN has also recently been involved in the EU-funded PALOMERA project, exploring why so few OA policies involve books, and what might be done to change this.

As well as contributing to these communities, we are supported by them. Infrastructures built by Copim are part of our workflows; collaborations fostered by ScholarLed and the OABN inform and improve what we do. Essential funding flows from our Library Members, whose substantial contribution is so necessary to our work, and our advisory and editorial boards offer invaluable advice and expertise as we look to innovate and grow our impact in different ways. Some readers choose to donate to us in support of our approach. Finally, our community of authors trust us with their work, the foundation of any publisher’s activity, and in return we do all we can to share that work as widely as we can, in the best form possible.

It's also worth noting that several of these larger ongoing initiatives were first sparked by small grants. The Polonsky foundation funded OBP to develop an open source metadata database and website, which was a crucial seed for the idea that became Thoth. And an OpenAIRE grant brought together the presses that founded ScholarLed (itself a subset of the Radical Open Access Collective) which went on to devise the initial bid for Copim. These early, small grants brought like-minded people and organisations together and facilitated deeper collaboration and opportunities for development—so by enabling collaboration, these smaller grants made space for alternatives to commercialisation.

A growing role for communities in OA publishing?

Open Access Week offers a moment to reflect on developments in OA, and, given our investment in community ways of working, we are particularly interested to see the founding and development of other communities of practice based around OA. These include the Open Institutional Publishing Association (a UK network), as well as the New University Presses in the Netherlands, the Irish Open Access Publishers. (There is also the recently-announced University-Based Publishing Futures group in North America, which we're keen to learn more about). These organisations are invested in growing equitable and resilient OA publishing via mutual support and collaboration rather than competition, which is a spirit we recognise from our work with Copim and other communities. It is an approach that is developing fast.

A focus on community is also being driven by the increased profile of Diamond OA, with the DIAMAS project in Europe, the UNESCO Global Diamond Open Access Alliance, and the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access helping to drive debates about whether Diamond is ‘just’ a model (free to read and free to publish) or whether it also requires community ownership and/or control over the publishing outlets themselves. Understanding what that control might look like requires a firm focus on governance, a topic that is currently not receiving the serious attention it deserves in conversations about OA.

The increased emphasis on community has not gone unnoticed in commercial circles either, and casual claims of being ‘community-driven’ are cropping up more often. We would encourage caution when hearing these warm words—what do they mean in practice? Can they be backed up by robust governance models, or by evidence of tangible investment in the communities in question, or are they simply a marketing label designed to part libraries and funders from their cash?

It will be fascinating to see where these currents have taken us when we arrive at next year’s Open Access Week.

Our reflections on ‘community over commercialisation’
Copim's 'community-washing' social media graphic.
Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

Sonic Homes: The Sonic/Racial Intimacy of Black and Brown Banda Music in Southern California

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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No tengo nada de sangre de Mexico. Soy afro americano. 

(I have no Mexican blood. I am African American.)

El Compa Negro (Ryhan Lowery)

The grain is the body in the singing voice, in the writing hand, in the performing limb.

Roland Barthes (The Grain of the Voice,1971)

***This post is co-authored by Sara Veronica Hinojos and Alex Mireles

Sarah La Morena (Sarah the Black woman), or Sarah Palafox, was adopted and raised by a Mexican family in Mexico. At the age of five, she moved to Riverside, California, a predominantly Mexican city an hour east of Compton. Palafox started singing as a way to express the racism she faced as a child in Southern California, feeling caught between her Black appearance and her Mexican sound. She found her voice in church, a nurturing environment where she could be herself, surrounded by her family’s love. She gained attention with a viral video of her rendition of Jenni Rivera’s “Que Me Vas a Dar.” Palafox delivers each note with profound emotion and precision, leaving even the accompanying mariachi violinist in awe. 

Similarly, El Compa Negro (The Black Friend/Homie) or Rhyan Lowery heard the sounds of banda coming from his neighbor’s backyard in Compton; a historically Black-populated city with a current Mexican majority. Lowery couldn’t shake the song out of his head and learned the song’s Spanish-language lyrics. Like Palafox, videos of him singing in Spanish during high school made him a viral sensation. “They called me ‘el compa negro’ (…) All I heard was ‘blah blah blah negro or negro’ and I wasn’t having it until they explained to me what it meant. And I was like ‘ok, cool’.” 

The sonic stylings of El Compa Negro and Sarah La Morena within the banda genre enable transcultural connections beyond the pan-Chicano-Mexican-Central American popularity of tecnobanda and la quebradita. The 1990s banda craze, writes George Lipsitz  “challenged traditional categories of citizenship and culture on both sides of the US-Mexico border.” Banda music might sound like it was established south of the border, but multicultural listeners and dancers continue to influence its vibrations.  Pop stars like Snoop Dogg, Shakira, Bad Bunny, and Karol G have released (tokenized) songs with Mexican-tinged, banda-recognizable beats. Yet, both El Compa and Sarah demonstrate a form of musical Black/Brown, working-class intimacy. Their respective musics are much less about a pop star (duet) kind of solidarity and much more about a deep knowing, a sensibility among working-class cultures and othered people that resonates through the aesthetics of sound. As Karen Tongson writes in Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, about her experience of “queer, brown, immigrant musical discovery” in Riverside, the hometown she shares with Sarah La Morena: “It is the music that inspires us to ask questions” (26).

Certainly, US Mexican immigrant culture does not have the same (mainstream) cultural caché as African American culture, unless somehow softened or filtered. Jalapeños get “de-spicifed“; pre-made Día de Los Muertos altares are now at Wal-Mart, and huipiles are available as fast-fashioned “peasant blouse;” filtering out their Mexican-indigenous origins. Thus, classics like “La Yaquesita” and originals like “Yo Soy Compton” heard through the grain of Black voices affirm the possibilities of U.S. Mexican belonging or what D. Travers Scott characterizes as a form of “intimate intersubjectivities;” rooted in long-established Black/Brown co-existences  across the borderlands and city barrios. Turning the volume up on these artists serves an important counterpoint to Latino anti-Black racism.

Their voices, blending with brass and tambora, embody a Black-Brown sonic and symbolic solidarity, or spatial entitlement. As theorized by Gaye Theresa Johnson in Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity, innovative applications of technology, creativity, and space foster new collectives which, even when “unheard” by historians, assert social citizenship and pave the way for new working-class political futures. In the contested neighborhoods of greater Los Angeles, Black and Brown communities are often pitted against one another through processes of containment and confinement leading to competitions for jobs, housing, status, and political power. Yet, they share the experiences of labor exploitation, housing segregation, and cultural vilification. Filmed in the intimate settings of backyards, the viral videos underscore Black/Brown hood/barrio soundscapes as multi-generational, familial, and culturally hybrid. Home is where shared class, racial, and gender politics are negotiated and resolved.

Asserting Black identity and the choice to perform in Spanish creates a unique visual and auditory experience within the Mexican-dominant world of banda. In fact, in 2024, Lowery made history as the first Spanish-language artist signed by Death Row Records, a label known primarily for hip hop. The lively rhythms of banda – oompah-oompah-oompah – offers both banda and hip hop listeners a new orientation to discern the racial-cultural politics of broader Los Angeles.

Like the mid-century Haitian-Mexican bolero singer Antonia del Carmen Peregrino Álvarez, alias “Toña La Negra,” the added tags “Negro” and “la Morena” signals Black singers’ recognition of the meaning(s) of their racial difference within the transnational Mexican music scene. The auditory discomfort that their vocal grain might cause is named and thus recognized as the persistent colorism of listeners at large. Lowery describes his initial unease with the given “Compa Negro” nickname. “My Mexican friends always tell me ‘Hey, compa negro, you’re Mexican, man. God just left you in the oven a little too long.’” The harassment came from both Black peers and Mexicans alike, for liking banda, dating Latinas, or dressing “like a Mexican.” “They would say, ‘You hate being Black. Self-hate. Self-hate. I’m like man it ain’t that I self-hate, it’s just that I embrace something. I took the time to have an open mind and study something, you know?” His way of being made sense in the context of a Compton teenage experience. “Becoming Mexican” by way of musical/cultural engagement surpassed skin tone-deep and nationalist differences.

Or, as Mexican ranchera singer Chavela Vargas–born in Costa Rica–famously asserted, “Mexicans are born wherever the hell they want!” Try listening to Juan Gabriel’s “Amor Eterno” to find out. Black creatives like Evander, Vaquera Canela, and Terry Turner  are just a few more examples of Black mexicanidad. Yessica Garcia Hernandez reminds us that Black and Brown sonic solidarities have been the driving pulse of US popular music. She argues, “Home and sound is acknowledging that both corridos, hip-hop, and G-funk relationally, has formed paisas.” 

El Compa Negro’s “Verde es Vida,” a tribute to California’s weed culture, lowriders, and corridos, booms loudly. The song begins with an accordion playing reggae rhythms, soon interrupted by percussion, guitars, and El Compa’s fast-paced verses. About a minute in, the accordion slows the tempo with a few reggae notes before the vocals return, reintroducing the corrido rhythm: “Hoy andamos en LA bien tranquilitos. En el lowrider escuchando corridos.” The reggae-corrido fusion ends with the familiar “pom pom pom pom!” of the drums, typical of banda and corrido finales, as the accordion plays its last note. Through Lowery’s reggae corrido, we hear his “sonic home” rooted in Black and Brown Los Angeles.

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Featured Image: still from Sarah La Morena’s “La Llorona” (2020)

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Sara Veronica Hinojos is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and on the advisory board for Latin American and Latino Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Her research focuses on representations of Chicanx and Latinx within popular film and television with an emphasis on gender, race, language politics, and humor studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates the racial function of linguistic “accents” within media, called: GWAT?!: Chicanx Mediated Race, Gender, and “Accents” in the US.

Alex Mireles is a PhD student in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She writes on Latinx identity and queerness, labor, and global capitalism through aesthetic movements in fashion, beauty, media, and visual cultures. Her dissertation explores the queer potential and world-making capabilities of Chicanx popular culture through Mexican regional music, social media, queer nightlife, and film. 

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

Boom! Boom! Boom!: Banda, Dissident Vibrations, and Sonic Gentrification in Mazatlán—Kristie Valdez-Guillen

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

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

Sounding Out! Podcast #28: Off the 60: A Mix-Tape Dedication to Los Angeles–Jennifer Stoever

Mercedes Bunz

On bi-musicality: a passage to Indian music

On bi-musicality: a passage to Indian music

By David Clarke

Image: David Clarke and Vijay Rajput, Recital Room, Newcastle University, 25 April 2024. Image: John Donoghue (www.jdphotographer.co.uk). Licence held by Newcastle University.

‘Bi-musicality’ was a term first coined by the ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood (1960). It was an aspiration of his programme at UCLA in the 1950s, that students should explore the music of an unfamiliar culture not by ‘passive observation’ or ‘museum studies’, but through practical, first-hand engagement: they were to acquire a second musicianship in the way you might learn a second language. To this day, experiential immersion in the music of other cultures (and its modes of pedagogy) lives on as a fundamental tenet of ethnomusicological fieldwork.

Nowadays, however, you don’t hear the word ‘bi-musicality’ itself so much. Ethnomusicologist John Baily (2001), for example, favours the more prosaic phrase ‘learning to perform’ when he writes of his own apprenticeship on the Afghan dutār and rubāb. Even so, I still find Hood’s original notion suggestive. It captures something of the inner and outer game of learning another’s music: a dialogue, a negotiation—between cultures, between people, between different facets of your musical mind and being. This is certainly what my own experience as a westerner learning North Indian classical music has felt like. And that experience is under the skin of my book Rags Around the Clock, produced collaboratively with my Hindustani vocal teacher, Dr Vijay Rajput.

Vijay ji is an outstanding singer in the North Indian khayāl style, a disciple of the much-feted Pandit Bhimsen Joshi. Vijay relocated from New Delhi to Newcastle upon Tyne in 2004, not long after I had taken my own first steps into Hindustani music (my first Indian-music teacher, a remarkable musician called Arun Debnath, had returned to India a couple of years earlier). Previously, I’d trained as a western classical musician; and my academic role at Newcastle University was focused on western classical music and theory. Gradually, with Vijay as my new guru, and with the experience of a several trips to India, I absorbed more and more of Hindustani classical music and the culture that underpins it. Crucially, however, this journey never meant relinquishing my prior identity as a western musician. For me, the two experiences have always jostled together, with all their differences and similarities.

Bi-musicality is not an explicit theme of Rāgs Around the Clock. Yet this dual standpoint has shaped the work, as have the many dialogues between Vijay and myself. The book and its audio materials offer a resource for the study of North Indian classical music in general and the khayāl style in particular. It includes materials—songs and their notations—useful to student practitioners. It comes with two online albums by Vijay, which provide windows onto the many colours and subtleties of rāg – an essential concept of Indian classical music. It provides contextual, theoretical and historical perspectives informed by recent research, including from western scholarship. And it ventures analysis of Vijay’s recordings, and of the conventions and complexities of the music. This last aspect, which perhaps represents the book’s principal research contribution, is informed by both my own insider knowledge of singing this music and by many years as an analyst of western music. In other words, like so much else in this project, it emerges from the crucible of becoming a musician and musicologist twice over. We hope that there is something for everyone to enjoy in this compendium, regardless of their prior level of knowledge of Indian music or their cultural entry point.

REFERENCES

Baily, John (2001). ‘Learning to Perform as a Research Technique in Ethnomusicology’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology10(2), 85–98.

Hood, Mantle (1960). ‘The Challenge of “Bi-Musicality”’, Ethnomusicology 4, 55–9.

Rāgs Around the Clock is available now. Read for free or get a hard copy here. Listen to an audio sample from the book here.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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 →