Ten years after the passing of Chilean folklorist Margot Loyola (1918-2015), students and friends grieve and remember her passing in culturally specific ways. Based on fieldwork conducted in Chile between 2022 and 2024, this presentation posits a methodological framework of an “attentive ethnomusicology” for how to connect with interlocutors still mourning. Expanding decolonial and feminist literature across ethnomusicology, anthropology, geography, and public-facing thinkers, I argue that attentiveness, compassion, and vulnerability are key components for cultivating trust and opening space for healing amongst those experiencing loss. Throughout research, I engaged in open-ended discussions with over fifty individuals who were close with Margot, establishing rapport quickly to ask questions pertaining to their relationship to her and her personal impact on their musical lives. I prioritized attending – being present for, caring for, nurturing – over the ethnomusicological pillars of participant observation and semi-formal interviews. I developed this form of relationship building, one that remains highly feminine in the Chilean cultural context and was practiced by Margot herself, throughout fieldwork, as I learned how to extend empathy in culturally appropriate ways. I frequently engaged in griefwork, allowing for open-ended conversations to provide space for informants to remember, cry, and process a deeply personal loss. The affective relationships that I fostered emphasized the quality of the social connection over the information obtained. I ultimately argue for the need to understand the sociocultural norms of remembrance and mourning in order to create space for interlocutors to feel compassion across lines of cultural and linguistic difference.

In October 2024, Rosy Valle and I sat together in Mexico City, wiping away tears as we reminisced about our experiences as members of the Latina cast of SALSA Lotería, part of Motus Theater’s UndocuAmerica Project autobiographical series that premiered in 2015. Rosy made the difficult decision to return to Mexico after living undocumented in Colorado for two decades, while others from the mixed-status SALSA cast remain in the U.S. After sharing about her complex grief in leaving her adopted “homeland” and family to return to her “true home,” she asked me to sing “Adios Mariquita Linda.” During SALSA’s premiere, I sang this 1920s Mexican song as part of the closing act, encapsulating the profound emotional and intergenerational impact of leaving homeland within the Latina migrant experience. The song – whose lyrics relay a sorrowful farewell to unrequited love – quickly transformed into an anthem for the production. Building on my prior analysis (2022), I argue how reinterpretation of the lyrics parallel to the movement and expressions on stage serves as a vehicle for “vicarious grief” (Sparling 2023) and “radical empathy” (Lowry 2019), inviting audiences unable to relate directly to migrant experiences to participate in emotional display and validation of collective grief. Based on prior and ongoing ethnographic work, I interrogate how performing “Adios Mariquita Linda,” combined with participants’ reflection ten years after SALSA’s premiere, continues to demonstrate musical “intercorporeality” (Sumera 2020) of grief, nostalgia, and “posthumous survival” (Nussbaum 2024), further compounded by the second Trump administration’s mass deportation raids.

Families of the Quechua community of Q’eros, Peru seasonally gather their llama and alpaca herds to vigorously give abundant offerings of songs, food and alcohol to the animals' specific mountain protectors in ayni (reciprocity) for the health and fertility of the herds. Because these rituals are about vitality and life, they are also about loss and death, with the “implicit recognition that the cycle of reciprocity is ever liable to rupture” (Mannheim 1991,19). Expanding on previous studies of ritual blowing for communication with supernatural forces in the Andes and Amazon (Uzendoski 2005, Allen 2002, Olsen 1996, Guss 1989, Butt 1956), the Q’eros’ unique aysariykuy - expulsion of air in singing and flute playing – is intensified to ensure that the song “arrives” to the mountain gods, and they are "made to hear" the musical offerings. The saturation of symbolic actions, shared consumption and musical production merges with the intercorporeality of people with their animals, environment and mountain spirits, thereby engendering the expected singing of grief. Weeping individuals spontaneously insert personalized text into the prescribed fertility song, which then becomes the vehicle for unconstrained singing of intimate grief in shared community. The people’s perception of necessary aysariykuy, the anticipated grief-singing and subsequent healing, lend insight into an Indigenous theory of musical expression of loss. Responses to and use of returned audio-visual archives of recorded grief-singing (Author 2018), and the impacts of the now disrupted and diminished celebrations due to road arrival, modernization, and outward migration, are also explored.

From December of 1960 to October of 1962, over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors arrived in the United States as part of a covert airlift known as Operation Pedro Pan (OPP). Because of its association with the Cold War, the memory of OPP became entrenched in a polarizing political rhetoric that obscured the lived experiences of the young migrants. Though their visibility as “symbolic children” (Dubinsky 2010) in the Cold War’s ideological battle faded over time, the grief many Pedro Pans associate with the simultaneous loss of homeland, family, culture, language, and childhood remains potent. To process this grief, many have turned to the arts to depict their exodus, including Willy Chirino, Mario Ernesto Sánchez, and Ana Mendieta. Musical works commemorating OPP often center nostalgic pre-Revolutionary genres and artists, as nostalgia remains an important expression of exilic grief for Pedro Pans, their families, and the broader Cuban-American community (e.g. Pérez-Firmat 2012; Laguna 2017). Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s delineation of “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgias, I note a distinction between “restorative” works that depict a unified, shared utopic past and “reflective” works that underscore loss through the conversion of the familiar to the strange. Through analyses of Pedro Pan created musical works, I expose the divergent ways in which these artists both process their own grief through music and how they attempt to incite witnessing for it in their audiences.