Scholars of music/sound and gentrification have recently argued that while shifts in soundscape must be counted among the violences of “racial/spatial dispossession” (Zanfagna and Werth 2021), numerous communities of color persist against the erasure of their histories through musical or sonic practice (Martin 2024, Summers 2021). While it is crucial to highlight how artists and communities resist gentrification through sound, we must also ask how musical practices shift in response to violent displacement and spatial reconfiguration, and concomitantly how communities navigate the sonic losses entailed by such violence. Drawing on the work of Jeff Todd Titon and others that understand musical practices as dynamic “ecologies” to be sustained, rather than preserved (2021; see also Cooley 2020), I examine how the reconfigurations characteristic of “urban renewal” shift musical practice by changing its spatial ecology. In particular, I focus on the Cabo Verdean and Cabo Verdean American communities of New Bedford, MA, many of whose longstanding musical support network of social clubs, benefit societies, bars, and restaurants have closed in the wake of “urban renewal,” highway-building, and disinvestment. I argue that my Cabo Verdean/American interlocutors engage with the violence of “racial/spatial” capitalism against this community, in part, through discomfort with how their music resonates in spaces not built to accommodate it. Further, I show that “resistance” to this violence is not always audible as protest, but also emerges in attempts to reconfigure and rebuild sound spaces towards present and future musical sustainability.

In the last five decades, Danza Azteca (Aztec dance) has become prominent in Chicago's Mexicano-Latino community and has thrived under community outreach and youth education. This paper argues that Danza Azteca participants in Chicago utilize the practice as a catalyst for resilience, resistance, and respite, navigating an ongoing transnational push-and-pull dialogue with what Walter D. Mignolo first coined as the coloniality of being. I highlight Chicago's reverence as a "hidden Tenochtitlan" and analyze how external and internal senses of place are cultivated internationally and intertemporally across geographic locations, inviting a broad range of participants. Finally, I explore authenticity discourses amongst Danza Azteca groups in Chicago, explicating how an Aztec identity is navigated, imagined, and critiqued amongst participants. Ultimately, I reflect on what it means "to be" as a Mexican in Chicago, incorporating theorizations of sonic disruption as ontological disruption and decolonial strategy.

To do so, I draw upon several interviews as well as participation in velaciónes, celebrations, and performances throughout Chicago. While a handful of studies trace Danza Azteca narratives and their complexities in the United States (Armstrong 1985; Luna 2012; Huerta 2019; Nielsen 2017), few incorporate the concretized experiences of danzantes in Chicago into the current discourses and transnational dialogues impacting Danza Azteca group members. This paper fills this gap in the literature by exploring the particular effects that Danza Azteca spaces have on individuals as they navigate their region-specific identities whilst attempting to grapple with enduring transcultural and intergenerational colonial legacies.

This presentation examines the placeness and cultural geography of the commercialized island reggae by Pacific Islander Americans in the Los Angeles reggae music scene. On the continent of the United States, the island reggae of Los Angeles serves as an Indigenous medium of storytelling for Pacific Islanders to express their metropolitan and interracial experiences. Since its emergence in the 1990s, island reggae has fused Jamaican roots reggae and R&B with traditional island music, sharing spaces and sounds with diasporic Africans. As the genre is commercialized, it now occupies performance spaces in the Southern Californian music scene alongside roots reggae and reggae-rock, the latter predominantly influenced by Caucasian Americans. This commercialization has created a prosperous Islanders’ space in the scene but also led to criticisms of inauthenticity, highlighting the complex interracial political dynamics Pacific Islanders navigate in Los Angeles. Despite this, their narratives and musical expressions remain underexplored in music and spatial studies of interracial interactions (Johnson 2013; Alvarez 2022). How do Islanders articulate their shared spaces and sounds with diasporic Africans through island reggae within the capitalist framework of Los Angeles? The case study focuses on the 2025 Marley’s Festival in Long Beach, a significant event celebrating Bob Marley’s legacy, where roots reggae, reggae-rock, and island reggae are performed concurrently. I argue that Islanders’ interracial interactions remain rooted in practices of Indigenous relationality and self-determination despite its commercialization. The presentation advocates for studying the interracial experience as the new continental localness of diasporic Indigeneity.

Since the mid-19th century, Japan and the United States have participated in political and cultural exchanges that have influenced Japanese identity. The 20^th century especially saw a stark rise in the popularity of Americana in Japan. Drawing from fieldwork done in Japan, I argue that in performing, consuming, and interacting with bluegrass and old-time music, participants cultivate individual and communal identities in uneasy dialogue with imagined class-based, regionalized, and racialized iterations of Americanness. These imagined iterations of Americanness, both temporally contingent and enmeshed in broader cosmopolitan dynamics, demonstrate the multifaceted nature of identity. By focusing on the imagination, I attend to the complex processes through which Japanese musicians and enthusiasts constitute their identities, investigating how transnational imaginaries are tied to constructions of Americanness yet simultaneously rooted in Japan. To do so, I identify expressions of personal significance, communal meanings, and anxieties connected to participating in these music cultures. In this paper, I focus on divergent meanings tied to imaginaries cultivated within bluegrass and old-time music by highlighting periods of engagement that correlate with heightened geopolitical encounters between Japan and the United States, such as the Japanese anti-Vietnam war protests and accompanying Folk Boom in the 1960s-70s. I suggest that the history of bluegrass is also a Japanese history, furthering an ongoing conversation that repositions bluegrass as a global music. In doing so, I continue conversations within ethnomusicology that examine Japanese consumption and performance of transnational cultural forms while pushing back on overly particularizing discourses of Japanese cultural uniqueness.