Verses and Flows: Migrant Lives and the Sounds of Crossing – A Lecture by Alex Chávez

The Graduate Music Society at Boston University is pleased to announce the first speaker of the year in the Musicology and Ethnomusicology Colloquium Series. Co-sponsored by Boston University’s Center for Latin American Studies and the Anthropology department, the GMS@BU has invited anthropologist Alex Chávez (University of Notre Dame) to give a talk entitled “Verses and Flows: Migrant Lives and the Sounds of Crossing.”

In his award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke 2017), Dr. Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in the sounds and aural poetics of huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. In this presentation, he draws on this work to address how Mexican migrants voice desires of recognition and connection through performance, and the politics such desires attain amidst the transnational context of migrant deportability As a researcher, artist, and participant, Chávez has consistently crossed the boundary between scholar and performer in the realms of academic research and publicly engaged work as a musician and producer. In this presentation, he draws on these experiences to address the politics of his intellectual and creative work and how he engages both to theorize around the political efficacy of sound-based practices, the "voice," and the disciplinary futures of borderlands anthropology.

Ethnographer-composer-performer-academic-musician, Alex E. Chávez is the Nancy O'Neill Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and a faculty fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. As a Cultural Anthropologist trained in Linguistic Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore, Chávez is committed to an integrative Anthropology that applies the tools of these sub-disciplinary fields to the realm of Latina/o/x Studies. His research explores Latina/o/x expressive culture in everyday life as manifested through language, performance, and sound. His work also bridges scholarship and creative expression as a means to explore how performance intersects with larger social concerns surrounding mobility, racialized personhood, and the intimacies that bind everyday life across physical and cultural borders. In this regard, he has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in both Mexico and the United States. As a student and practitioner of various Mexican folk musics for nearly two decades, he has engaged in music-making alongside his interlocutors, transforming his own experiences into a unique perspective on the body politics of performance that has shaped his understanding of how people cross various types of borders.