Overlooking the Sierra Gorda Queretana. Photo Credit: Alex E. Chávez.
This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.
Sonorous Present
Alex E. Chávez
Often, we think of elegies as commemorations, as moments of sadness.
But really, an elegy is about the praise of something.
You can’t mourn something you don’t love.
— Roger Reeves
break
Art both feels and is witness to how life unfolds as a relational universe of individuated and collective experiences that together form the political subject. Art can intervene across this social surround, across literal and figurative borders—the divides of nation-states, the threshold between life and death. Art bears witness. Art bears witness. Art takes up the call to elevate the seemingly ordinary—like mourning and grief—those moments when we all feel that lump in the throat. Knot in the chest. Knees buckle. Chin trembles. Hollow stomach—an emotive and cognitive stream that flows, empties out, elsewhere, beyond “here,” leaving only tracings of its own imaginings.
Like many, a fair amount of trauma lives in me. Most of it concerns death and dying. My sister—a fatal victim of domestic violence, gunned down in our home when I was eleven. My mother—died suddenly in Mexico fifteen years ago. My father also died suddenly two years ago. This, it seems, has shaped much of what I have created over the years as an artist and musician, for nothing is quite what it seems when you are mourning. This is often so because the proper space to grieve escapes you. Such has been my experience. In those moments, I found myself taking care of and being strong for those around me, keeping it together for them. Thus, I’ve held space for myself elsewhere—creating through loss, through the disturbance, at the prophetic edge of wreckage, when things aren’t quite right. Truth be told, we all move through loss in our own way. This struggle takes on many forms.
And so, over these past few years—particularly in the wake of COVID-19 and the death of my father—I crafted a suite of compositions attuned to my own grief; songs of border-crossings, sunrises, and mournings: Sonorous Present. This was/is a mediation,
a eulogy
an apology
a conversation
provocation
oral history
fiction
confession
testimonio
an offering
an attempt, an urge, an inclination
A center
An edge
A Border
A Break
Thinker, writer, and philosopher Fred Moten (2003) speaks to us about the break, the unique epistemological standpoint where we construct other possible worlds through art, worlds that perform the necessary work of amplifying presence and choreographed collective memory that offers political possibility. The break in which broken bodies and broken memories dwell, defy, endure, refuse, bear witness, and heal. These compositions broke my heart. Yet, I believe we all need to dwell in heartache sometimes. It has the capacity to open a space for healing. And so, Sonorous Present invites listeners into this space, this break—to meditate, to mourn, to celebrate a memory.
Indeed, aesthetic enactments put on display lived-in worlds of attunements—interpretive, imaginative, relational, contingent, improvisational experiments that louden the resonance of memories (Berlant and Stewart 2019). In this instance, my memories of music, migration, rhythms, scenes, encounters, and grief have come to form and inform my creative process. This is what Gloria Anzaldúa (2015) elsewhere describes as conocimiento:
Skeptical of reason and rationality, conocimiento questions conventional knowledge’s current categories, classifications, and contents … . A form of spiritual inquiry, conocimiento is reached via creative acts—writing, art-making, dancing, healing, teaching, meditation, and spiritual activism—both mental and somatic (the body, too, is a form as well as a site of creativity). (119)
As epistemic practice, conocimiento grounds theory in everyday life, interweaving history, art, culture, the compositional, world-making, and the self, forming the basis of what she terms autohistoria-teoría. She continues:
Autohistoria is a term I use to describe the genre of writing about one’s personal and collective history using fictive elements, a sort of fictionalized autobiography or memoir; and autohistoria-teoría is a personal essay that theorizes (Anzaldúa 2009b: 578).
This set of approaches is in dialogue with the adjacent scholarly project of ethnography, in particular auto-ethnography, wherein the present-tense social entanglement of our storied selves and others’ stories is the space where ethnography becomes “a point of impact, curiosity, encounter” (Stewart 2007: 5). However, autohistoria-teoría includes and expands beyond autobiography and cultural narratives: theorizing from the margins of scholarly convention, opening up a bridge between art and scholarship, voicing knowledges and experiences that open up sites of struggle and connection. Sonorous Present is inspired by these ideas.
More broadly, my ethnographic engagements concern regimes and practices of amplifying, surveilling, and displacing sound, particularly as these intersect with histories of migration and racialization of Latinxs in the United States. I’ve approached these topics with an interest in sound and aurality in the borderlands to consider: what sonorous phenomena abound/resonate as you move through/across borders? And as we listen, what assumptions are we making, what aural connections? And how are these evaluative processes shaped by social relations? What histories undergird them? And how might all of this evidence the way “sound appears simultaneously as a force that constitutes the world and a medium for constructing knowledge about it” (Ochoa 2014, 3).
These questions are quite prescient, particularly given the intensified attacks on asylum seekers and migrant communities amidst the challenges of transnational migration. Most recently, we are bearing witness to mass deportation efforts pulling children out of schools, families from their homes, and people from their places of work; the stationing of federal troops along the U.S.-Mexico border; and assaults on sanctuary cities. All of this currently made possible by a series of unlawful gambits and the hostile takeover of the administrative state in the service of “totalitarian fantasies of racial, gendered, and sexual purification” in which, for instance, shipping migrants to Guantanamo Bay and rescinding the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th amendment are key components (Rosas 2022: 184). Relatedly, the discourses that brace these extreme actions, I’ve argued elsewhere, are part of a long-standing rhetorical project, or a well-worn genre in US-American racial talk, evincing a deep-seated discursive enterprise that has produced “the savage” or “illegal” in the American racial imagination as necessary to the project of white supremacy. In Aurality, Ana María Ochoa explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, sound, and the voice—determining the politics of life at the juncture of the human and nonhuman and in service of the construction of notions of personhood. Here, I am also reminded of Sylvia Wynter’s writings concerning the violence that the genre of the human as man performs as ontological ethno-class index for the species. These works help particularize Western-centric voice studies’ ostensibly universal claims; that is, they provincialize Western ontologies regarding the voice in order to understand how both race and language are situated enactments within specific histories of European colonialism and its various modes of governance. Returning to migration and the U.S.-Mexico border, anti-immigrant rhetoric performs the cultural work of perpetually positioning migrants—particularly from Latin America and the global south—outside the boundaries of national belonging, a type of linguistic violence that goes hand-in-hand with the US-Mexico border as a physical site, as a literal theater of violence.
My ethnographic work has born witness to this spectacular terror, yet beyond telling the story of suffering in a country that outstrips (Robbins 2013), I’ve loudly voiced stories of intimacy, of struggle, of refusal. For a critical aurality is necessary—an always urgent listening to the whole of America amid the deafening swell of a lethal white supremacy, a critical aurality that beckons us to situate necro-subjection to the center of analysis. Or as Gilberto Rosas (2022) describes:
Making dead in order to live is part of a project of documenting and expressing contemporary brutalities without exacerbating the obscene suffering of border crossers and demands to revictimize them both in legal proceedings and engaged traditions of scholarship, so that we analyze, recognize, and ultimately struggle against violence and oppression, both spectacular and mundane. (177)
Making dead to let live is attuned to conditions of existence at the margins wherein those subjected as illegal, criminal, etc. “are situated socially, materially, discursively, and ideologically closer and closer to death” in order that they may live (190).
Although most of my immediate family—my mother, my father, and older sister—are now dead, they lived. They survived the border. Their stories of crossing always seemed impossible to me: my mother crossed Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua/El Paso, Texas in the trunk of a car; my father survived the crossing in Ojinaga, Chihuahua and a week-long trek across West Texas in the dead of winter. They lived. These stories defined much of who my mother and father were. They’ve long become a part of me. And over the years, sounds have attached themselves to them. Sonorous Present is the culmination of these memories, it chronicles this universe of story, of family, of borders, of trauma, of migration—through sound, lyric, poetry, theory, verse, ethnography, autohistoria, and rhythm. A break to remember, mourn, and heal.
qualia
Ethnography is an affective experience, always in tension with the seemingly elusive attempt to render the feeling of being there in textual form. Songwriting is not too dissimilar, yet in being less script-centric, it opens up the possibility of translating and expressing experience through sonic and performative registers. Ultimately, Sonorous Present is an album—an aesthetic statement that integrates my experience and talents as an artist, educator, musician, and scholar in order to reimagine what a studio recording should sound like and the forms scholarship should take. While artistic and scholarly practices are often treated as discrete domains, Sonorous Present manifests robust articulations between heterogeneous modalities with little regard to disciplinary distinctions. In this way, it puts on display the possibilities of multi-modal scholarship and ethnographic songwriting to expand our understanding of what arts-based methodologies can achieve.
Similar to a conventional ethnography, an album requires refinement and attention to production. Further, “if ethnography is understood not as a science but as an interpretive art,” to quote Kristina Jacobsen (2017), “then it is in the interpretation and the craft of writing about a lifeworld with compassion, depth, and nuance where the greatest skill—and challenge—arguable lies” (116). In my case, my ethnographic songwriting was an attempt to honor the memories of family members that have passed, touch on the topic and politics of immigration, source the sounds of Mexican folk traditions, and connect this world of personal story and sound to my long-standing research on both sides of the border. And so, what began as an experimental, collaborative, and improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of my book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (2017)—was subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores. Recorded in Los Angeles and Chicago, dynamic explorations of Mexican Regional and Latin American sounds and traditions are deepened on Sonorous Present by avant-garde jazz arrangements and field recordings, alongside poems written and recited by renowned author and poet Roger Reeves. Featuring luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, jazz, and R&B—including, Martha González, Aloe Blacc, Matt Ulery, Ramón Gutiérrez, and Lucía Gutiérrez Rebolloso, among many others—this suite explores an aesthetic terrain that is worlds away from the projects I am most known for. Nevertheless, I source the sounds of Mexican musical traditions I am familiar with and have been a student of for years, including huapango huasteco, huapango arribeño, and son jarocho. These sounds are rooted in communities of practice that have long utilized music as a form of healing in the face of brutal circumstances. In the end, to honor and grieve—for me—was to fully, honestly, and vulnerably engage in a process of elevating the seemingly ordinary—like grief—through music, rhythm, and verse; that is, to lend sounded significance to the everyday of migration and amplify the desire to mourn through “dramaturgical voice” (Ihde 2007: 167).
Writing and recording Sonorous Present provided an avenue to deeply explore co-creative methods alongside producer Quetzal Flores. While I have worked with producers in the past and have recorded with countless other music projects, Sonorous Present is the first to solely feature my music and my stories. Beneath the surface of what we were able to craft exists a well of musical and cultural reference that—with the aid of Flores—was always in play, as we both pushed at the edges of traditional sounds and ethnography. We electrified traditional instruments like the guiarra de son; recorded, sampled, and looped the zapateado dance footwork directly from the wooden tarima stomp box; incorporated field-recordings from my research into the sonic and compositional scaffolding of several songs; re-interpreted Mexican son rhythms in asymmetrical time signatures; and combined traditional instruments with seemingly disparate elements. These strategies were integral to our multi-modal approach to songwriting as ethnographic and ethnography as aesthetic—all part of a sonic border-crossing methodology through which we explored a world of sonic possibility unachievable through conventional ethnographic means alone.
cómplices de luto (accomplices in mourning)
In my writing and songcraft, one question remains constant, a concern that continues to shape my thinking: what makes this sound possible? An adjacent query emerges in response: what are the possibilities of (this) sound? Sonorous Present crosses the emotional landscape of these ideas, telling of migrant lives across seemingly disparate places through sound, song, poetry, rhythm, and lyric. And indeed, as Claudia Rankine (2014) reminds us, America’s lyric is racism, and so we must continue to grapple with it in the face of being told to accept brutality as the condition of “how you are a citizen” and to “Let it go. Move on” (151). Sonorous Present refuses to move on.
Sonorous: capable of sound; in the offing.
Present: occurring now; impermanent; gift.
Sound must exist in time. “Acoustic feedback in the process of auditory inscription” (Ochoa 2014: 82) is constituted by the interdiscursive temporal movement and interplay between repetition, replay, and relay. Yet, in inviting listeners into the space of “lasting presence” (Chion 2016: 29), Sonorous Present asks us to stay put (in space) and to be still (in time) in order to honor the process and possibility of (sonic) mourning in a bordered world. For amid the repeating violences and numbing political rhythms so much a part of life in the United States of America, we must pursue conceptual, political, and artistic breaks in order to get free. Resting in the break to heal, to mourn, to remember, enacts an analytical push away from normative analysis of what counts as research within dominant knowledge formations. Resting in the break is an attempt at sounding out the possibilities of the unrecognized, of the unheard and thus carries with it longstanding “legacies as minoritarian subjects of/with the dead in constant acts of mourning (Ruiz 2024: 5).
My dead. Personal, political, unconventional, communal, past, present, and future-oriented, Sonorous Present seeks to mourn in common.
References
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2009. “now let us shift … the path of conocimiento … inner works, public acts.” In The Gloria Anzaldua reader, ed. Ana Louise Keating. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Berlant, Lauren and Kathleen Stewart. 2019. The Hundreds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chávez, Alex E. 2017. Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chávez, Alex E., and Gina M. Pérez. 2022. Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades.Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.
Chion, Michael. 2016. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Jacobsen, Kristina. 2017. “Songwriting as Ethnographic Practice: How Stories Humanize”. In Arts-Based Research Education: Foundations for Practice, Second Edition, ed. Melissa Cahnmann-Taylor and Richard Siegesmund. London: Routledge.
Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth- Century Colombia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (3): 447–462.
Rosas, Gliberto: 2022. “Witnessing in Brown: On Making Dead to Let Live” In Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades, ed. Alex E. Chávez and Gina M. Pérez. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.
Ruiz, Sandra. 2024. Left Turns in Brown Study. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257-337.