The Afterlives of Sound: Memory, Ethnography, and the Borderlands

This lecture is a part of the Borderland Symposium.

Alex E. Chávez, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame
Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies
Fellow of the Initiative on Race and Resilience

An immersive poetic and musical passage, Alex E. Chávez’s recently-released album Sonorous Present extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and memory across America’s borderlands—as physical place and liminal space. What began as an experimental and improvised performance—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing (Duke 2017)—was subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores, and features luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, poetry, and jazz. Through integration of a range of scholarly disciplines and communities of artistic practice, this multi-modal scholarly work uniquely integrates an epic spectrum of regional Mexican and Latin American sonic elements with field recordings and ethnographic songwriting drawn from years of research across the U.S.-Mexico border and his own personal experiences of personal loss. In his talk, The Afterlives of Sound: Memory, Ethnography, and the Borderlands, Chávez addresses how this work crosses the sunburst surreal of America’s musical and cultural borderlands, refiguring the borders of both performance and intellectual engagement to strategically reimagine the possibilities and forms scholarship can take.

Bio

Scholar-artist-producer, Alex E. Chávez is the Nancy O’Neill Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. His research explores articulations of Latinx sounds and aurality in relation to race, place-making, and the intimacies that bind lives across physical and cultural borders. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke University Press, 2017)—recipient of three book awards, including the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018), the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology’s Book Prize (2018), and the Association for Latina and Latino Anthropologists Book Award (2018). He has published in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of American Folklore, Latino Studies, and Latin American Music Review.

He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of academic research and publicly engaged work as an artist and producer. Chávez has recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores for Emmy Award-winning films, worked closely with Smithsonian Folkways, and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated artists.

He is co-editor of the recently published volume Ethnographic Refusals / Unruly Latinidades (2022), which grows out of an Advanced Seminar he co-chaired at the School for Advanced Research, and the recently published special issue in American Anthropologist entitled Amplify. A Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, in 2020 he was named one of ten Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and also recently concluded a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He currently serves on the Board of Governors of the Chicago Chapter of the Recording Academy (Grammys).