Conference Agenda

The historical characterization of African divinities as demonic within Christian theology has contributed to a damaging imaginary surrounding African-derived religions in Brazil. Scholarly literature has documented different facets of the theological, juridical persecution of Afro-Brazilian sacred traditions (Cunha 2016; Lühning 1996), interpreting these prohibitions as forms of religious racism (Cantave 2024; Marinho 2022) and exploring their enduring legacies in contemporary religious movements (Silva 2017). In 1938, the criminalization of Afro-Brazilian sacred practices prompted police authorities in Brazil’s Northeast to confiscate a substantial number of atabaques (hand drums central to these traditions). In the same year, participants in an ethnographic expedition tasked with collecting materials related to “Brazilian Folk-lore” acquired many of these drums and transferred them to an archive in São Paulo, where they are currently housed. Despite their historical and cultural significance, the trajectory of these percussion instruments remains largely underexplored in scholarly literature.

In this paper, I examine the material traces of this religious persecution by focusing on the afterlives of the atabaques seized by police authorities. Analyzing penal codes, newspaper reports from the period, and the drums themselves, I argue that these instruments have been central to evolving state narratives about Afro-Brazilian religious traditions. I show that state authorities initially legitimized this suppression through Christian moral values and later through secular claims of “crimes against public health.” However, the current preservation of these instruments in a São Paulo archive marks a further discursive development, one that reframes them as cultural patrimony while continuing their history of dispossession.

In nineteenth-century Chiapas, Mexico, state and local authorities killed hundreds of Tzotzil Maya people in and around the highland town of Chamula. This conflict—known as the Chiapas War of Castes—emerged from tensions over indigenous ritual gatherings that unsettled the authority of mestizo elites, Catholic priests, schoolteachers, and other representatives of the Mexican state. One priest, Cristóbal de Molina, wrote an “eyewitness” account of the uprising. Long treated as a foundational source in the historiography of the conflict, Molina’s narrative has yet to be examined through the lens of sound.

This presentation proposes that Molina framed indigenous sound, noise, and music as vehicles of illegitimacy and distortions of truth. Writing at a moment when positivism peaked in Mexican official culture, Molina cast indigenous sound as a building force nurturing irrational and occult practices that threatened to pervert the order imposed by Western colonial modernity. His narrative reveals how sound becomes both a means of indigenous world-making and a target of colonial anxiety.

Although most scholars rely on a 1934 English translation of Molina’s account, my analysis draws from a pre-1925 manuscript in the original Spanish, allowing for new insights into how sound was scripted, suppressed, and weaponized in the post-independence imaginary.

Since the Mexican Revolution (1910 – ca.1920) and top-down efforts to articulate mexicanidad (Mexican-ness) in its aftermath, managing deathways in Mexico has been a nationalist project. For Claudio Lomnitz, mexicanidad is a nationalist symbology bound in an “ironic intimacy with death,” in which processing loss—be it literal or figurative, collective or personal—is brandished as a key cultural expression. In Mexico City, symbolic representations of death are fixtures of daily life, contributing to what Lawrence Taylor describes as a “cult of memory” upon which national identity and authority depend. In this urban setting, Mexico’s ironic intimacy with death may be rendered through a chronotope of sound: firecrackers and church bells announce one’s passing from a distance borough; an actor’s weeping brings the Virgin Mary’s perpetual lamentation to a sidewalk passion play; and musician-activists engage in sonic occupations of the nation’s most solemn sites of commemoration. These resonant traces mark the stations of public grieving and link present losses to past ones. Focusing on the activities of musician/activists during the marches against gender violence in Mexico City in 2019 and 2020, this paper puts Michael Herzfeld’s notion of social poetics in conversation with emerging discourse on Rolando Vázquez’s decolonial listening to show how the confluence of sound and grieving in Mexico City’s streets may present the listening public with more than a reaffirmation of an ineffable national essence but serve as a generative field for the articulation of competing claims on mexicanidad.

Since 2007, Mexican migrants have embraced YouTube as a sacred space where they continue to share musical testimonies of an apparition who helps migrants cross the U.S.-Mexico border. This collection of corridos, which I define as “ghost smuggling ballads” (corridos de coyotes fantasma) tells a collective ghost story of near-death experiences and miraculous encounters with the ghost of Santo Toribio Romo, who migrants refer to as el Santo Coyote (the Holy Smuggler) and unofficial Patron of Immigrants. Toribio Romo González was a young priest killed in the highlands of Jalisco during La Cristiada, the 1926-1929 Cristero Rebellion. The Catholic Church canonized Santo Toribio in 2000 alongside other Cristero martyrs yet has never recognized him as the Patron of Immigrants. My recent work analyzes how Santo Toribio Romo corridos function as religiopolitical self-representation of migrants, demonstrating their impact as narratives of resistance against antimigrant rhetoric parallel to their significance as musical votives (2020, 2024). Inspired by Derrida’s writings on “hauntology” (1993) and contributing to discourse on Catholicism and immigration politics (Young 2015, Calvo-Quirós 2023) and musical expressions of transgenerational trauma (Cizmic 2012, Rogers 2024), I continue to build on my prior analyses by interrogating how these corridos are specters themselves, embodying inherited memory of trauma, injustice, and resistance through multiple layers of “haunting.” These hauntings extend to current experiences of undocumented migrants amidst the second Trump administration’s ongoing execution of mass deportations and controversial endorsement by right-wing American Catholic politicians and their MAGA supporters, notably critical of the late Pope Francis’s advocacy for migrants and refugees.

In November 2024, controversy erupted in Colombia after the song "+57" was released on social media. Although this song, recorded and promoted as a collaboration among Colombian reggaeton singers Karol G., J. Balvin, Maluma, Feid, Ryan Castro, Blessd, Ovy On The Drums, and DFZM, was expected to be an immediate hit, it did not produce the anticipated response. Instead, it elicited increasing uproar and harsh criticism from many fans regarding the song's lyrics and its veiled condonation of child sexual abuse. The controversy spread to such an extent that it reached political and academic spheres when Colombian President Gustavo Petro expressed dissatisfaction with the song, while a message titled "Invitation to Action" circulated on the Colombian University Musicological Network mailing list, inviting its members to contribute to the debate and take a clear collective stance. This debate soon gained transnational scope when some Colombian researchers shared the message in the Latin American Branch of the International Association of Popular Music (IASPM-AL) mailing list, inviting their Latin American peers to express their opinions and join the discussion. In this presentation, I analyze the different responses and reactions to the debates that +57 generated in each forum, to study how an aesthetic problem can extend its limits and produce new layers of meaning added to sound when the political and ethical spheres are elicited by music vis-à-vis censorship, denunciation, and social issues.