Musical Sites of Trauma, Critique, and Healing in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Chair(s): Nadine Hubbs (University of Michigan)
Individual and collective experiences of trauma are often encoded within musical performance and listening practices, subject to reinterpretation and contestation across communities, cultures, and generations (Cizmic 2012, Rogers 2024). This is particularly evident in music-making and artistic manifestations in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, a region whose residents and cultural heritage exist within a long-standing post-colonial history of physical, sociopolitical, and environmental violence, including forced acculturation and subjugation. In this panel, we explore musical iterations of traumatic experiences relevant to border communities in New Mexico, Texas, and California, analyzing how Indigenous, Hispanic, Mexican American, and Mexican migrant communities engage in processes of coping and healing within and across their community boundaries. We interrogate how, through musical performance and activism, these borderlands communities define and critique trauma to preserve, recognize, and reclaim identity and agency at a critical moment where U.S. government policies and enforcement continue to present immediate threats.
By employing intersecting methodologies relating to feminist sound art and noise, reflective approaches to ethics in nativism and nationalism, and artistic resistance to anti-immigrant rhetoric and dehumanization on the U.S.-Mexico border, we delineate how communities create musical sites for confrontation, mourning, and healing of complex traumas. The first presenter’s analysis of Aztec dance communities in California introduces the colonial origins of many reverberating acts of harm explored throughout this panel. The presenter discusses how this past has taken new salience in efforts to heal familial experiences of more recent pain and culture loss as extensions of 16th-century events. The second presenter examines how Indigenous and Hispanic female sound artists in New Mexico use sound and noise to process grief and trauma from environmental exploitation and gendered violence. The presenter argues that, drawing from their lived experience, these artists engage in a decolonial technique of imagining healing for themselves and their land. The third presenter explores how the all-women Texas-Mexican conjunto, the Texas Sweethearts musically embody transgenerational trauma relating to their family’s immigration story to the Rio Grande Valley. The presenter analyzes how, through performance, the Texas Sweethearts intentionally construct connections with conservative white audiences to create sites for intercultural empathy and collective healing.
Presentations of the Symposium
Aztec Dance Spaces: Healing and the Ethics of Scholarship in a Fraught Moment
Kristina Nielsen
Southern Methodist University
Aztec dance has gained popularity since the 1970s in the United States. Though it draws on Aztec cultural references and imagery of pre-Hispanic culture, contemporary Aztec dance took its present form through nationalist projects in Mexico City in the twentieth century. In the United States, Aztec dance has become connected to broader conversations about Indigenous identities and border experiences, and its growth at the end of the Chicano Movement in the early 1970s linked it to political activism in the US. As I explore in my forthcoming book, there are significant lines of nativism and indigenismo within Aztec dance that complicate narratives that portray it as a vehicle of Indigenous liberation. That said, despite the many warranted critiques of nationalism and indigenismo in ethnomusicology and anthropology (Brading 1989; Tarica 2016), the rallying nationalism of Aztec dance has provided tangible community benefits to many dancers, pointing to fine lines that must be navigated in contemporary critiques––especially in light of a new round of threats.
In this panel, I reflect on the ways dancers have cultivated Aztec dance spaces to navigate traumas wrought by continuing colonialities of the border, including culture loss and experiences of migration. I draw on interviews and my time among dance circles in California to explore the ways in which dancers think about healing in the context of cultural revitalization and Indigenous identity reclamation. Many of these efforts focus on children, and I suggest that these lessons within Aztec dance spaces on dances, music, and culture are a vital part of adult and communal healing. I also examine the challenges of writing about the border and border trauma at a time where the threats of state violence towards individuals in the Aztec dance community have escalated precipitously. How does one balance intersectionality, including the nationalist erasure of Indigenous Mexican identities, in this moment where nativist strategies easily gain appeal? In this light, I consider the ethical questions of writing about nativist strategies within Aztec dance at a moment where communities are increasingly under threat from the U.S. government.
Imagining Healing in New Mexico’s Experimental Feminist Sound Art
Ana Alonso-Minutti
University of New Mexico
New Mexico, often referred to as a “sacrifice zone,” has long endured environmental and economic exploitation. Colonized first by the Spanish in the 16th century and later by Anglo settlers in the 19th, the state experienced what Myrriah Gomez terms “nuclear colonization” in the 20th century. This period culminated in the Manhattan Project’s operations in the state, leading to the detonation of the first nuclear bomb. The legacy of these colonial and nuclear histories continues to affect the state’s Indigenous and Hispanic communities, leaving them with social, economic, and environmental trauma. In response to this ongoing history of exploitation, which is also marked by gendered violence, female sound artists in New Mexico have turned to their creative work for resilience and healing.
Based on my experiences living in the state and a decade of conversations with local artists, this paper explores how Indigenous and Hispanic female sound artists use sound to process grief and trauma while imagining new possibilities for healing. Building on Emma Pérez’s concept of the imaginary as “will to feel,” my study examines how imagination and lived experience can challenge oppressive structures (2020). Drawing from Gloria Anzaldúa’s autohistoria and autohistoria teoría, as well as Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of affect, Pérez emphasizes the transformative power of emotions in shaping new ways of knowing and being. Using this feminist framework, I explore how, for New Mexican artists, sound becomes a powerful tool for critique and healing. I argue that Autumn Chacon, Marisa Demarco, Monica Demarco, and Tahnee Udero draw from their lived experiences and their “will to feel” to imagine healing for themselves, their communities, and the land. Their approach to healing is unconventional; they do not rely on soothing or calm sounds, but instead embrace harsh, loud, and disruptive noise as a means of transformation. By utilizing sonic intensity, they seek to confront pain and move toward recovery. Through their work—whether intimate, personal performances in the domestic sphere, or large-scale collective actions like presenting an experimental opera in a high-scale shopping mall—they enact what Pérez calls a “compassionate critique,” offering paths toward healing and transformation.
Yo vine from “Just Across the Rio Grande”: The Texas Sweethearts, Intergenerational Migrant Trauma, and Intercultural Healing
Teresita D. Lozano
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Elisa De Hoyos bends back and forth, melding her body into her accordion while her mother, Mari releases the grip from her guitar as she cues the other women of the Texas Sweethearts. Cheers arise from local fans in the San Benito crowd, including multiple “winter Texans,” the predominately white, non-Latine seasonal residents hailing from northern United States. The Texas Sweethearts is a family band in the Rio Grande Valley, the cradle of the Texas-Mexican conjunto, whose instrumentation of button accordion, bajo sexto, electric bass, and drums arose from the intersections of 19th-century northern Mexican and southern Texan-German/Czech heritage. Conjunto is embraced as the musical “vanguard” (Peña 1999) of a cultural history rooted in political violence, land contestations, identity politics, racism, and other transgenerational trauma that extends to contemporary life along and across the border. While the Texas Sweethearts perform typical genres such as corridos and polkas, the group also prides itself as a country music cover band, a testament to Mari’s immigration story. The Texas Sweethearts’ lineup by artists including Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Reba McEntire is inspired by the De Hoyos’s relationship to post-migration healing through country music covers.
Building on scholarship that positions conjunto as an increasingly globalized phenomenon (Díaz-Santana Garza 2021, Bauer 2023) and on limited scholarship centered specifically on women and their role in conjunto’s continuing development (Vargas 2012), I explore how the Texas Sweethearts distinguish themselves as a “force femme” in the hyper-masculine conjunto community, framing their survival, existence, and resilience as part of a collective border narrative. Drawing on discourse relating to sonic archives of trauma (Cizmic, Rogers, et al. 2024) that are subject to reinterpretation and collective healing, I analyze how the Texas Sweethearts musically embody the traumas associated with the Mexican migrant experience. Additionally, I interrogate how the Texas Sweethearts intentionally forge intercultural connections with white, conservative audiences – including MAGA Republicans – through performance of country songs such as “Just Across the Rio Grande,” inviting them into a reciprocal exchange of “radical empathy” (Lowry 2019) to navigate endemic trauma from anti-immigrant sociopolitical rhetoric and mass deportation raids.
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