This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@. Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas
—
This post is co-authored byEsther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas —
“Lucharaaaaaán a dos a tres caídas sin limite de tiempoooo!“
[“They will fight two out of three falls, with no time limit!”]
Announcer at Lucha Libre, El Paso, Texas
“This ain’t no sideshow.”
George Lipsitz on the role of popular culture
The announcer’s piercing “lucharaaaaaán” cries from the middle of the ring proclaims the constitutional two-out-of-three-falls rule of lucha libre. But before the famous cry rings out to set the stage for the spectacularized acrobatic combat between costumed warriors, their theatrical entrances set the all-important emotional stakes of the battle. The entrances are loud, campy, interactive exchanges between luchadores and spectators. An entrance song itself cues the luchador’s persona: a cumbia could signal a técnico (a good guy); a heavy metal song more than likely indicates a rudo (a bad guy) typically donning black, death-themed getups. Luchadores saunter into the arena, stopping to pose, high five their fans, and verbally heckle their opponents. The storylines of good versus evil, betrayal and revenge, or humility versus arrogance are some of the more standard plots that motivate spectators to adamantly cheer for the favorite and jeer for the foe.
The sonic exchanges between luchadores’ and spectators before, during, and after the fight positions lucha libre as much more than a sport. And while the term spectators, suggests the privileged act of watching or viewing; here, we expand spectators within lucha libre arena to mean “a call to witness” (á la Chela Sandoval). Put simply, lucha libre is a cultural phenomenon where contemporary cultural, social, and political anxieties are often tapped as fodder for theatrical plots. In the U.S./Mexico’s sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the political realities of border enforcement, immigration politics, and racial tensions are loudly heard and placed on display. As part of Rebeca Riva’s ongoing research about the history of lucha libre at the border—which too often gets skipped over for Mexico City as the epicenter of the sport—we listen for the exchanges between luchadores and spectators as resonant participants in the ritual of this sport. Specifically, we tune into lucha libre and its accompanying mega-spectacle to analyze how fans scoff at lucha libre’s MAGA-spectacles. In Time Passages, George Lipsitz (2001) reminded scholars of popular culture decades ago that “this ain’t no sideshow.” In a similar vein, lucha libre directly engages in the larger social and political arena that contextualizes the sport.
In lucha libre, spectators are resonant participants in the construction of an essential “hi-fi” sonic ambiente. Like in football, as Kaj Ahisved notes, the “noise of the crowd” (building on Les Back’s concept) are essential to a “hi-fi” sound where a high degree of information exchange occurs between listeners and the sound environment.Or, as David Hendy describes Olympic arenas, “cauldrons of concentrated sound, [where] the roar of the spectators took on a collective force of its own – a volatile quality rich with cultural and political repercussions.” The crowd’s response, experienced by athletes as ambient noise, bolsters athlete’s spirits and develops an emotional plot for the contest. In certain cases, for instance in Algeria as Stephen Wilford documents, it is a venue for social critique; football stadiums served as “safe zones” where fans could dissent the Abdelaziz Bouteflika dictatorship through chanting political slogans and songs as an anonymous crowd (139).
By listening to lucha libre, we gain a deeper understanding of the embodied components of fan activism, collective identity, and political action. Visual spectacle, bodily gestures, and musical choices, coupled with verbal taunts and visceral grunts serve as interactive storytelling tools. Yet, the crowd’s noise and, importantly, the sonic memories evoked by visual parafenalia amplify a shared political consciousness and prompts the expression of their allegiance with and opposition to the symbolic representations staged.
Chris Watson proudly holds the MAGA flag. Image by Rebecca Rivas
* * *
The following audio was captured in November 2023 at a parking lot across from El Paso City Hall during a children’s fundraiser. We hear Chris Watson, a previous college wrestler from Oklahoma, make his debut appearance in lucha libre as a white supremacist character. Wearing a clichéd U.S. flag-themed bandana and waving a Trump 2024 campaign flag, he points towards the crowd and makes swimming motions with his arms to communicate the pejorative “wetback.”
The reactions from spectators are visceral and cathartic, eliciting camaraderie, anger, or empowerment. They retaliate strongly: “Fuck you! Fuck Donald Trump!”‘ and “Fuera!”, a seemingly hateful exchange interjected with cheering and laughter. Spectators are amused by the insults and retaliations. Watson’s staged “gimmick” prompts spectators to playfully rage against the violence he embodies. Their taunting in Spanish represents both resistance as cultural pride and insider knowledge. The joke is on Watson, who (presumably) does not understand the double entendres hurled at him.
A MAGA luchador evokes the memory of violence carried out against Mexicans and African Americans in Texas since at least the mid 1800s by white enslavers, colonial settlers, Texas Rangers, border patrol, and the modern police force. White supremacist violence is not mere political rhetoric but an ongoing contemporary reality. On August 3rd, 2019 a white man motivated by the “Great Replacement” theory popular in MAGA circles, drove 9 hours from his home in Allen, Texas to a Walmart in El Paso, a majority Latino city, to carry out a mass shooting with the intent of discouraging immigration. He killed 23 people and left 22 injured. Listening and yelling at Watson and his MAGA symbols at the US/Mexico border vocalizes the cultural, political and humanitarian crisis propelled by neoliberalism, the militarized police, and the exploitation of White supremacist sentiments by a wannabe fascist dictator.
Image by Flickr User C-Monster, taken in Ontario, CA (2017) CC BY-NC 2.0
Watson comes from a line of “gringo” white supremacist luchadores such as Sam Adonis (Sam Polinsky) who sprays himself orange and waves a US flag stamped with a Trump portrait. El Migra (Gonzalo Garcia), a U.S.-born Mexican American border enforcer performed during the Bush/Clinton era, who threw tortillas while taunting “traguense estas tortillas frijoleros nopaleros” (“choke on these you cactus-eating beaners”) and growled the U.S. national anthem into the mic. Spectators jeered and threw their drink cups at him; an opportunity to retort white supremacist rhetoric.
In another instance from the 1990s, a major showdown between Love Machine (a gringo wrestler turned técnico) and Blue Panther (a tejana wearing feline-themed rudo) the crowd favor turned against the yankee when his neck-breaking illegal move prompted fans to reconsider their alliances in the context of massive Mexican emigration prompted by the devastating yoke of the country’s debt to the IMF and subsequent neoliberal economic reforms. Love Machine’s fake benevolence would seem to embody U.S. gleeful exploitation of Mexico’s expatriated campesinos while simultaneously introducing legislation to further marginalize them.
Screencapture: Blue Panther enters a fight to the tune of “La Puerta Negra”
Unlike Karen Yamashita‘s staging of SUPERNAFTA vs. El Gran Mojado in her 1997 novel Tropic of Orange, or the masked Chicano poetry of the Rudo Revolutionary Front, MAGA-spectacles within lucha libre are not intentionally staged to politicize the public but tap into the raw political nerve of the moment. They allow fans to emotionally resolve social and political anxieties when excoriating the “bad guy,” be it an anti-social character or the symbols of the oppressor, even if only for dos de tres caidas.
—
Featured image by Flickr User C-Monster, taken in Ontario, CA (2017) CC BY-NC 2.0
—
Esther Díaz Martín is an assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Latina Radiophonic Feminisms: Sounding Gender Politics into the Digital Age, (forthcoming UT Press, Spring 2025) theorizes Chicana feminist listening attending to the political work of Latina voices in contemporary sound media.
Rebeca Rivas is a graphic artist and doctoral student in History at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research examines the lucha libre and community building in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. She is currently conducting an extensive oral history and archival project documenting this spectacular sport at the border.
Part of this surge in scholarly attention and artistic projects is premised on the idea that sound and sound recordings are important additions to cultural heritage in documenting histories and personal evidence, and yet, they are often viewed as supplementary adjuncts to more physical or visual archival artefacts. This subjugation to the primacy of the visual extends to the arts, humanities, and social sciences, but this is beginning to change as scholars across these fields increasingly argue that sound (with its attendant listening) is an especially critical medium for cultivating different modes of attention, forging affective relations, producing alternative knowledges, revealing hidden narratives, and attuning to neglected pasts.
Two digital sound archival projects created in response to the pandemic, The Pandemic SensoryArchive and#StayHomeSounds, are especially instructive in thinking about sound as a key medium for engaging with the monumental a/effects of the present and as important contributions to cultural history. Like other pandemic digital sound archival projects, these two projects sought to document the present for the future – creating a “past” in real time, based on the underlying assumption that sound – as a material-discursive apparatus – can offer particularly generative possibilities in this context. The methods, scope, and presentation design employed by these two web-based archival platforms generates a sense of intimacy, proximity, andcollectivity in otherwise surreal, secluded, uncertain, detached, and disconnected situations, much like in radio and podcasting though in this case with different infrastructure and interactivity.
In these online, mediated spaces where worlds intensely collide and conflate, and users become flattened out and disembodied, new configurations of intimacy, subjectivities, and world-building emerge through alternative forms of affective archival engagement. This was (and still is) particularly important and complex during COVID-19, which is marked not only by a series of indefinite lockdowns and uneven distribution of intervention measures, but an affective logic whereby life is completely reconfigured and capacities within the world are diminished and redistributed. Part of making mass sound archives usable relies on the medium for circulation, the presentation for users, and what user participation empowers for these living histories, as Fabiola Hanna makes clear. These two projects generate what Hanna identifies as a particular orientation in digital humanities projects through a politics of listening that necessitates an active mode of participation that is not simply one-directional but a two-way engagement.
The Archive of Intimacy, later renamed The Pandemic Sensory Archive (PSA), wascreated by professors William Tullett (Associate Professor in Sensory History, Anglia Ruskin University, U.K.) and Hannah McCann (Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia) with the goal of exploring the senses through a digital platform and to act as an open data bank of contributions from the public. Their open call for contributions asks for a response that considers two questions: What smells, sights, sounds, touch, and/or tastes do you associate with the pandemic? Has your experiences of the senses (smell/sight/hearing/touching/taste) changed at all as a result of the pandemic? Contributors are then asked to drop a pin on the map (though this is not a typical Google Maps rendition of a specific locale, but a sort of simplified graphic representation of sensory input/output waves) and follow the prompts to anonymously submit. The digital map is divided among the five senses and features the entries that contain a title and brief response, such as:
Quiet where there should not be quiet: “Being in my flat in the centre of town on my own with nobody else around on a Saturday. Everything weirdly, eerily, quiet.”
Birdsong: “Hearing birdsong in the garden having not noticed it before, no longer drowned out.”
You’re on mute! “Did the conversation in meetings become less robust as we all sit there on mute, politely waiting for our turn to speak?”
Less sound, more sound: “Blissfully quiet at night as curfew curtails the normal constant traffic roars, far more voices in the early morning and through the day as people‘exercise together’ to socialize in the park”
Complimenting this map, which may seem limited in scope but allows users to engage without having to sift through an overwhelming amount of content, is the Sound category page, where four interviews are embedded with “sensory experts on sound during the Covid-19 pandemic,” including Shoshana Rosenberg, Andrew Mitchell, Martin Stewart, and Stephen Sullivan. One interview considers how the pandemic clarified the immensely relational dimension of artistic sound practice and that the lack of access to intimacy during lockdown instigated a radical reformatting and questioning of what it means, more broadly and now, to be intimate and close in creating sound art. For them, what the pandemic spelled out is that intimacy is fragile and valuable, and that this delicate balance and fluctuating ratio has come to the fore during this time.
The initial designation for the platform, “the archive of intimacy,” is worth meditating on to consider the particular forms of intimacy in this context, perhaps through Lauren Berlant’s “intimate publics” – a concept that captures the affective and collective dimensions of intimacy among strangers. The notion lends itself to understanding the mediated social intimacy in these spaces and the different affective experiences they invite in varying capacities through sound.The connection between imagined publics and community through sound has, of course, been conceptualized by scholars who do historical work on radio and podcast studies, but it can also be extended to these digital, affective, pandemic sound archives. Evidenced in the submission prompts and interview data, the emphasis on the distinct shifts and palpable changes resulting from this new situation, and its accompanying affective logic, can be read as a strategy for cultivating intimacy and connection because attending to these changes may render their intensities as less alarming.
“Listening” by Flickr User Silvia Siri, April 4, 2020CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED
Through the descriptions and dialogues of these new affective environments grounded in sound, some users might feel a sense of camaraderie, connection, and affinity to these novel experiences and how it relates or compares to one’s own (or the sense of not being so alone), especially in the personalized, diaristic, idiosyncratic tone in the short text extracts and longer interview forms. According to Tizian Zumthurm and Stefan Krebs (2022), digital spaces enable this type of “self-affirmation: by contributing and following the contributions of others, users are assured that they are not alone in whatever they experienced” (492). They also point out that as a result crowdsourced archives, particularly related to traumatic events, have a curative function.
Although the PSA may not be what likely comes to mind when thinking about a digital sound archive, presumably composed exclusively of musical or field recordings, it provides an entry point into a confluence of concerns to grapple with some of the key questions and issues related to sound, intimacy, and affect during the pandemic. In particular, diversity in form – between short excerpts and lengthier conversations, creates different engagement options for users based on preference and capacity (quick snapshots of the sonic changes in daily life or deeper explorations concerning sonic worlds), and across sensory inputs. Moreover, interviews add an oral history aspect to the project, which some scholars argue is more empowering and intimate than other modes of telling or sharing history. As a historically feminist practice, oral history has the potential to expose ignored topics and present diversified perspectives on traumatic pasts (like the 1918 pandemic) which is also especially important considering the research areas and professional backgrounds among the interview experts.
#StayHomeSounds is part of a larger project led by UK-based sound artist Stuart Fowkes, who created Cities and Memories in 2014, which Milena Droumeva describes as a “one-of-a-kind sonic portal dedicated to the exploration of place, sound and memory” (147). The website boasts being the largest sound project in the world with over 5000 sound recordings from over 1000 different contributors across 100 territories worldwide. It encompasses field recordings, sound art, and sound mapping, and each location features two sounds: the original field recording of that place and a reimagined sound that presents that place and time as somewhere, something else. The listener can explore sites through their actual sounds or the reimagined versions, flipping between the two different sound worlds. #StayHomeSounds is one of the latest ongoing sub-projects on the site and it is a collection of recordings during the pandemic from all over the world mostly done using cell phone recordings.
Bari lockdown sound recorded by Roberto Lippolis.
Although there is a wide range of quality and content, #StayHomeSounds offers a glimpse into the everyday sonic realities of quarantine life that cut across geography, life, and circumstances. The immensely mundane soundscapes and sheer multitude of recordings across cities and regions allows us to listen comparatively and try to notice the striking sonic cultures of different places even in lockdown. Those submitting sounds are required to provide a reflective text, and an elective representative image, to accompany their recording which details the changes in the soundscape as well as any a/effects that change has produced on other aspects of life.
An entry from Vancouver reads “Their chorus runs day and night and is a most pleasant soundtrack to both fall asleep with and wake up to. In this clip the background birds have joined in to add their avian melody to the amphibian bass line.”
Another from the Greek island of Crete, “after a heavy rain last night, the chirping of the birds woke me up this morning. It was such a powerful sound, like waking up from a sweet dream or a bad nightmare. I think that due to quarantine measures the nature’s sounds are more clear than even before.”
Athens, Greece lockdown sound recorded by Stamatis Mitrou.
In New Orleans, “I’m thankful for my quiet spot out here on the edges of town, but I worry about how the city can recover and for all those sick, out of work, or unable to stay home.”
New Orleans lockdown sounds recorded by Elizabeth Joan Kelly.
The objectives of the project, as described by Fowkes in the online text, are largely affective or affectively oriented, that is, to establish a sense of connection in the present, “how it feels at this unique moment,” by being able to discover new relations to place, to others, and to our sentient selves, through these sonic recordings and texts. In an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Fowkes said, “(You can) see what other people are hearing around the world and also read their stories and see that actually people are feeling similarly… hopefully that helps to make us feel a little bit more connected.” The breadth of contributions in terms of different locations and number of entries helps build this sense of connection, increasing the possibility of similar experiences to be seen and heard.
Lockdown sound from Lagos, Nigeria recorded by Ibukun Sunday.
By attending to personal struggles, observations, and speculations in relation to sound, these two digital sound archival projects gesture towards the intersections of intimacy, memory, and world-building, and alleviate and mediate some of the dominant and pervading affects that marked lockdown and remote life. In undertaking this project, I found pleasure in the informality of the responses and both the fresh insights and shared resonances, creating an experience that was jointly intimate (feeling seen and validated) and expansive (an opening to alternative experiences). In cultivating openness and a space for difference, and making the reflections and recordings publicly available, so that we can listen together but apart, the projects cultivate new forms of intimacy, empathy, collectivity, and nostalgia.
Dhaka, Bangladesh lockdown sound recorded by youKnowWho.
But, of course, the potential affective experience with the entries and recordings is not a given, much like with any critical scholarly intervention or artwork that attempts to raise awareness (in this case, to both the grave and minute effects of the pandemic) and resist dominant narratives (that the pandemic is under-control, over, or effects only one’s respiratory system), there is no guarantee that the intended experience will transpire in every engagement, but the possibility to do so – to cultivate intimacy and world-building at a time of profound uncertainty and physical distance – is nonetheless still valuable. Much like the diversity in responses, undoubtedly there are varying degrees and types of resonances, perceptions, and impacts within each visit.
Using an open access, crowdsourced approach, the PSA and #soundsathome construct participatory, community archives, creating and remediating documents and recordings for collective access and engagement on behalf of a global community that underwent monumental change, disruption, and loss. Calling explicit attention to palpable sensory shifts and disruptions is a central way to track, record, and make sense of the immense changes in this historical moment, and to illuminate the inequalities in environments and experiences that have been exacerbated by the (lack of) responses by governments and policy. The very existence of these projects and their participation through listening marks a resistance to the discourses of a “return to normalcy” or that we are on the other end of the pandemic. Because affects live in the body and are not often considered as objects of knowledge, the ongoing presence, use, and discussion of these two projects amplifies the a/effects, and a resistance to the affective logic of the pandemic, that they seek to produce. By considering COVID as an unprecedented, deeply affective, traumatic event, these online spaces operate to archive this moment in time and its myriad sonic dimensions, bringing these affective worlds into dialogue through an intimate exchange and assemblage between different bodies, experiences, and locations.
—
Emily Collins is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, educator, and PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Tkaronto (Toronto) whose work draws on sound studies, feminist theory, critical disability studies, and cultural theory to examine sonic social relations and materiality through entanglements of resistance and care within contemporary artworks and creative practices. As a cultural worker and active member in the arts community, Emily has worked at diverse film, visual arts, and digital media organizations, institutions, and research networks within Canada and abroad, including Archive/Counter-Archive, PUBLIC Journal, VUCAVU, Festival Scope (Paris), the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Sounding Out! 
Recent Comments