2pm

Please join Alex E. Chávez, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and faculty fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame for a La Canoa Lecture. He works in the areas of linguistic and cultural anthropology, Latina/o Studies, and ethnomusicology.

Alex E. Chávez, is an ethnographer-composer-academic-musician whose talk will address how huapango arribeño music voices desires of recognition and connection among Mexican migrants. The product of transnational experiences, such desires are sharply political, particularly as they flow amidst the contexts of migrant deportability and illegality as American racial projects that coalesce around strategies intended to subjugate vulnerable workers who use transnational mobility to mitigate their life chances. Placed within the field of structural and cultural violence that fuel commonsensical ideas about Mexican migrants as disposable, criminal, and deportable subjects, vernacular performance and poetics achieved through huapango arribeño concerning life lived under these circumstances constitutes an embodied act of social affirmation. Chávez argues these notions of selfhood are inextricably linked to the transnational experiences, needs, and desires of Mexican migrants, all of which disturb both legal and cultural-nationalist logics on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
This is a Free Public Event