Abstract:

In this talk, I bring the archive of early-nineteenth century settler colonialism, citizenship, and music in North America to the present and center my examination on one audio recording of crying children separated from their families. This recording’s fleeting but painful materialization of the rhetoric of music—that is, in a border agent’s allusion to an orchestra—opens the historical floodgates of White supremacy and latinidad’s own histories of inflicting trauma and pain on Indigenous and African-descended people. By combining artifacts from the Anglo, Spanish, and Mexican colonial archives with online artifacts of Trump’s America, I argue for a nineteenth-century musicology of latinidad that resides in the struggles of our present.

David Garcia is Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the music of the Américas with an emphasis on African diasporic and Latinx music and history. His publications include Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music (Temple University Press, 2006) and Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017). He is currently editing a critical reader on the history of Latin music, dance, and theater in the United States, 1783-1900. He is also editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music.

This event will be streamed virtually and is free and open to the public with registration. Register here.

This event is part of the Spring 2021 Sounding Latinidades series, sponsored by the Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music,Latin American Music Center, Latino Studies Program, and Center for Latin American and Carribean Studies.