Conference Agenda

Under direct orders from the President of the United States, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) intensified its raids and targeted deportations in 2025, terrorizing Mexican American communities in cities including Los Angeles. This wave of state violence ignited resistance within the local Chican@ ska scene. In response, bands like 8Kalacas have used their music and public presence to challenge these crackdowns. Through social media, musicians and fans situate themselves and the music within this resistance by posting images of their participation in protests while wearing band apparel alongside use of imagery signifying Mexico and Mexican social movements like the Zapatista Uprising. Additionally, activists have incorporaated lyrics by 8Kalacas into their signs and recordings into videos posted from street demonstrations, using ska music as a visual and sonic declaration of defiance. My discussion engages with theories on music as a social movement tool (Manuel 2019), sonic activism in digital spaces (Danaher 2018), and the role of cultural memory in resistance (Melucci 1989, Eyerman and Jamison 1998). Drawing on digital ethnography and interviews with artists directly involved in social protests, I address the questions: how does the Chican@ ska scene frame its protest message through music and performance? How are these targeted political attacks directly felt within the Los Angeles ska community? In what ways does digital activism shape perceptions of artists’ political resistance? How are these current protest practices informed by other social justice movements in the United States and Mexico?

Since the 1970s, media has exoticized Miami’s Hispanic culture, dramatizing the drug wars of the Cuban and Colombian mafias and the sensuality of its beaches and nightlife. These depictions have cultivated a strong economy of tourism that has not only shaped the rhythmaculture of Miami but made it progressively expensive for locals to access their own cultural spaces. This socio-economic climate caused locals to create their own spaces for rhythmaculture; since the 2010s drum circles have become popular spaces where locals gather to dance, play music, and “flow.” Despite ordinances that instate trespassing on Miami Beach at night as an arrestable offence, drum circles on the beach that play through the night have increased over the last decade. In 2023, the South Pointe Beach drum circle grew to a crowd of hundreds of participants, garnering attention from media, tourists, and the police. This weekly event transformed into a socio-political movement, protesting to change the Miami Beach ordinances that list drumming as a “loud and unnecessary noise.” This attention caused many of the undocumented Latin American participants who initially founded the gathering to retreat into silence, leading us to question, who has a voice? What voices are necessary or unnecessary noise?

I argue that the city’s attitude towards drumming as “loud and unnecessary noise” testifies to the cultural politics of military utility and fetishization surrounding drumming that continues to systemically ostracize the drum from public spaces. Although the South Pointe Drum circle was shut down by the City of Miami Beach in 2023, the tensions caused by issues of class, first amendment rights, and privatization of public space has not dissipated. My ethnographic research allows the voices of the drum circle to speak for themselves, enabling their agency and urgency; furthermore, I draw from critical theory such as Jacques Ranciere and Lauren Berlant, as well as anthropologists such as Igor Cherstitch, Martin Holbraad, and Laura Kunreuther to situate the South Pointe Miami beach drum circle as a space of socio-political dissensus where collective “flow” constructs an urban utopia that is simultaneously as public as it is “off the grid”.

From the roar of the crowd after a goal to the non-stop chanting and drumming of hardcore fans, from the players’ grunt while fighting for position to the whistle of an exasperated referee, sound acts as a conduit for the circulation of emotions in Argentine soccer stadiums. Sonic events mediate experience through an affective economy that can conjure collective memory, shape behaviors, and intensify or dull the stadium’s atmosphere. These are not discrete affective events but episodic dramas unfolding over time. Each string of plays, game half, match, season, and club’s history establishes an affective disposition that grounds the appraisal and expression of emotion at any point. This paper uses phenomenology and (auto)ethnography to demonstrate the centrality of sound to this ebb and flow by bringing together two distinct bodies of scholarship to develop the notion of sonic affective economies within sports: emotion-enhancing excitation transfer theory (EEETT) and the concept of affective atmospheres. On the one hand, EEETT offers an explanatory framework for how the affective value of sound increases through circulation (Ahmed 2004) within short spans of time (Zillmann 2008; Cummins and Berke 2017; Cummins, Wise, and Nutting 2012). On the other hand, the concept of sonic affective atmospheres (Abels 2022, Eisenlohr 2022; 2018; Ashmore 2017; Jack 2021; 2024) shows how acoustic events transgresses body boundaries, connects thousands through vibrational materiality, and creates “energetic flows that affect felt-bodies while allowing for the mediation of the sonic through auditory cultures, semiotic ideologies, and other historically and social embedded traditions” (Eisenlohr 2018, 51). Complementing EEETT and its focus on the immediacy of stimuli, the concept of atmosphere is latently historical, reconciles the material and semiotic aspects of sound, and links actors across time and space. This work demonstrates how sonic events play a critical role in the affective economies of sports and the circulation, amplification, and transformation of emotions among participants, adding to recent musicological studies that demonstrate how sonic practices in sports and fandom operate as meaningful sites of political and social life (Jack 2013; 2021; 2024; Herrera 2018; 2024; 2025; Achondo 2022; 2024; Wells 2023).