Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Committee on Women and Gender.

For centuries and across borders, La Llorona has made her presence known, sonically. While some claim to have seen her, all who encounter her have heard her: her wail is her defining feature. Her identity is acoustic. Yet her wailing is not static; it moves as she crosses bosques, deserts, mountains, and valleys. With every step, she wails for harmed children, for innocents killed without blame, for wounded lands and waters. She wails because it is her nature. She wails to release grief and wrath as well as impotence, frustration, and fear. She wails to free herself. She wails to heal.

Traversing multiple registers, this lecture poses an imperative: we must become Lloronas. We all must wail. Drawing on experimental music and sound art, I examine how artists channel La Llorona’s wail through distortion and noise. Building on my work on transborder Lloronas along the Río Bravo / Rio Grande, I propose wailing as a sonic practice that unsettles and exceeds fixed categories of gender, race, class, and nation. In dialogue with Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, and others, I theorize the wail as an embodied affective force that moves between human and nonhuman bodies vibrating through shared resonance.

To become La Llorona is to embrace wailing as a liberatory sonic practice through which vulnerability becomes an empowering tool for transformation. Through the exertion of sounding grief, we participate in a process of self-healing that ripples outward, enabling kinder ways of being together. As we walk and wail, we exhaust ourselves and a soft sensation of peace emerges. In that moment, we recognize our potential to effect transformation from within. Wailing, as a healing technology of freedom, carries us into a grounded space from which to fight for justice. It is from this place of vulnerability and truth that our teaching, writing, and creating are not only renewed but reoriented. We do not simply speak; we walk, enact, and vibrate. In these urgent times, across our differences, we wail. We all become Lloronas and, as we wail, we acquire the capacity to sustain, to resist, and to build.