Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region
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
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This post is co-authored by José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas
A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.
Gloria Anzaldúa (1999)
Ciudad Juárez es número uno/
y la frontera más fabulosa y bella del mundo
Juan Gabriel (lyric to “Juárez es el #1” – 1984)
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Geographically, the Paso del Norte (PdN) region includes the city of El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as well as neighboring cities in the state of New Mexico (see map). U.S. citizens live and play in Juárez, and those in Juárez (Juarenses), live and work in El Paso with families extended on both sides; continually moving back and forth. Yet, this broader region has long been plagued with sensationalizing headlines, both in the U.S. and in Mexico, that cast violent and limiting portrayals of these borderland communities. Recognized as sister cities, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez are seen less as close-knit siblings and more like distant cousins with Juárez routinely referred to undesirably as the little sister or ugly sister in comparison to El Paso. Indeed these hierarchical north/south (first world/not-quite-first-world) distinctions are products of histories of colonialism, unequal trade policies, and racial capitalist systems galvanized by immigrant detention camps (a tenant of the Immigration Industrial Complex). Within larger conversations about border cities, both Tijuana (San Diego) and Reynosa (McAllen) are recognized as the “primary” border cities due to their larger population size, transnational capital, and industrious reputations.
Two decades ago, Josh Kun’s concept of the “aural border” invited scholars to consider the US/Mexico border as a “field of sound, a terrain of musicality and music-making, of melodic convergence and dissonant clashing” (2000). Kun’s writings over the years have roused generations of sound scholars to listen to borders, border crossings, border communities and how they reverberate their economic, social, and migrant conditions. This essay intentionally moves away from Kun’s (beloved) border city of Tijuana and towards a less-referenced US/Mexico border city: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Here, 1,201 kilometers east of Tijuana, we offer an opportunity to listen to Juárez’s everyday bustling of migratory life through the digital sound repository, the Border Soundscapes Project.
Sound structures our social, cultural, and political relations, and as Tom Western reminds us succinctly: “sounds have politics” (2020). Indeed, Juárez’s soundscapes are microcosms of economic, immigration and border enforcement policies as the city’s migratory composition changes depending on the latest economic crisis in the global south. “Whether intentional or unintentional,” Sarah Barns insists “urban soundscapes are by-products of both active design strategies as well as infrastructure and socio-economic organization” (2014). In essence, listening to migrants within Juárez, along with those planning to traverse Ciudad Juárez (to el norte), shapes our multiethnic and multiracial understandings of Latinidad.
Field audio recordings of public life including nuanced linguistic expressions, comprise a rich sonic site that best demonstrates Juárez’s daily sounds of transit. This Project benefits tremendously from José Manuel Flores’s attentive ear, raised as a borderlander himself, and a seasoned crosser of the bridges linking Juárez and El Paso. Flores created this Project in 2018, the same year, Ciudad Juárez became a prominent make-shift, temporary “home” for groups of migrants – currently a majority of Venezuelan-nationals with previous waves of Cubanos and Salvadoreños. Within Juárez, these migrant caravans initially settled on the primary Paso del Norte bridge and later to nearby main border bridges. Migrants have felt comfortable settling in this arid city of approximately 1.5 million people, while others consider Juárez more of a “waiting room” before setting their sights on securing political asylum in the United States. Either way, Juárez becomes part of both their journey and resettlement.
Below are five instances where we listen to migrants in Juárez.
Track 1: Migrants in Ciudad Juarez: “Te traigo un manguito”
Near the Paso del Nte. International Bridge, in Juárez, on Avenida Juárez, a downtown street where people begin to line up to cross the border. Cars are heard passing. A Venezuelan man wants to rest on this hot day yet his friend cajoles him to get ready to work. He promises his resting friend un mangito o agua (a mango or water) as soon as he’s up and ready to tackle some work.
Track #2: Migrants in Ciudad Juarez: “Cualquier bendición que le sale a tu corazón es buena”
Near Juárez’s Migration’s national institute and Presidencia Municipal de Ciudad Juárez, an older woman cleans car windshields during traffic stops. As she cleans, she is heard laughing while conversing and doling out bendiciones (blessings) to those who gave her work. She’s assumed to be Venezuelan yet her use of the word “carnal” –a Mexican phrase to say brother – indicates that she’s been in Juárez for sometime.
Track #3: Migrants in Ciudad Juarez: “El Escandalo”
Local news highlights the influx of migrant caravans in promising tones. In an interview for local and national media in Mexico, Mr. José Luis Cruzalta, Cuban migrant, comments that: “no hay que ir para el lado de allá (EE.UU.), aquí se vive igual o mejor que del lado de allá, menos sacrificio, sin meterte en problemas, aquí no hay problemas de ningún tipo.”
“you don’t have to go there (USA), here you live the same or better than on that side, less sacrifice, without getting into trouble, there are no problems of any kind here, they can stay here.”
He later sends assurances that there is enough work for everyone and that only a willingness and desire to work is required, that nothing else.
Track #4: Migrants in Ciudad Juarez: “Rincon Cubano”
A group of Cuban migrants started a small Creole street food business offering “frituras de maíz” and Cuban “tamales.” The sound space of the downtown of Ciudad Juárez is nourished by the voices of a group of Cubans proclaiming Cuban Corn, “Maíz Cubano”. These contemporary Cuban criers conjure the city’s sonic memories of previous food vendors. Flores remembers fondly as a child the shouting of “Caldo de Oso” (Bear Broth) for sale and the fear that he’d find a grizzly bear in his soup.
Track #5: Migrants In Ciudad Juarez: Haitians Talking in La Taquería
The small restaurant,”La Taqueria,” in downtown Juárez has undergone ethnic transformations. A few years ago it used to be a place known for traditional Cuban food –el rincón cubano–, nowadays it is a place recognized for its tasty, Venezuelan food. Caribbean music attracts some Haitian migrants to this place, inside the restaurant there are some families eating and having a restful moment. Outside the place, there are some Haitian families moving through the city carrying their luggage.
Bonus Track and Outro
The Border Soundscapes Project offers an acoustic ecology of this region through a site that acts as part-archive, part-map, and perhaps even, part-love-song, à la the late singer Juan Gabriel, a globally famous Juaranese who dedicated six songs to his beloved home city.
The Border Soundscapes Project invites listeners to hear for yourself why Juan Gabriel characterized Juárez as the most beautiful borderland in the world. His lyrics fiercely defended Juárez, and decades later, the Border Soundscapes Projects demonstrates how Juarez, the “little sister,” dignifies their migrant communities, in the critical context of Gloría Anzaldúa’s conceptions of borders as vague, “unnatural boundaries” crafted by the “emotional residue” of two other siblings: colonialism and capitalism.
Inspired by the written musings of Valeria Luiselli (2019), the Border Soundscapes Project also functions as an “inventory of echoes,” where sounds are not simply recovered or used within a larger catalog project. Instead, sounds are considered “present in the time of recording and that, when we listen to them, remind us of the ones that are lost” (p. 141), and we would add, in transit. Most importantly, echoes cannot be placed on static, visual representations of standard “maps.” In offering audio snippets of Juárez’s public life, sound becomes a different migrant-led “scale of analysis” (DeLeon 2016); a type of audio counter-mapping of the U.S./Mexico border that lends itself uniquely to sound.
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Featured Image by Flickr User Simon Foot, “Ciudad Juárez, from El Paso, Texas” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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José Manuel Flores is a Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric and Composition Program at The University of Texas at El Paso. He holds an MA in Studies and Creative Processes in Art and Design. He considers that the sounds that arise between the Juarez and El Paso border are relevant because they contribute to the historical heritage of the region. That is why his interest as a researcher focuses on Sound Studies, specifically in the intersection between Soundscapes and philosophy from a disciplinary posture of rhetoric.
Dolores Inés Casillas is Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Director of the Chicano Studies Institute (CSI) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (2014), which received two book prizes, and co-editor of the Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (2016) and Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (2018).
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness—Esther Díaz Martín and Kristian E. Vasquez
Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes
SO! READS: Melissa Mora Hidalgo’s Mozlandia: Morrissey Fans in the Borderlands–Nabeel Zuberi
Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport–Michelle Pfeiffer
Óyeme Voz: U.S. Latin@ & Immigrant Communities Re-Sound Citizenship and Belonging-Nancy Morales
“Don’t Be Self-Conchas”: Listening to Mexican Styled Phonetics in Popular Culture*–Sara Hinijos and Inés Casillas
“Listening to the Border: ‘”2487″: Giving Voice in Diaspora’ and the Sound Art of Luz María Sánchez”-D. Ines Casillas
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Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness
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
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In the past year, we, Esther, a first-generation profesora in Latinx culture and feminist studies in Chicago and Kristian, an L.A-raised Xicano de letras pursuing a doctoral degree in Santa Barbara, engaged in a multi-synchronous dialogue on the life-giving sonics of our critical consciousness. This Xicanacimiento, as theorized in Kristian’s current writing and in conversation with Irene Vasquez and an emerging generation of Chicana/o scholar-educators, refers to the incomplete process and life-giving knowledge forged in the socio-political and pedagogical activities of Chicanx worldmaking.
SO! writers note music listening as a powerful site for critical thinking. Erika Giselda Abad, for instance, teaches the Hamilton Mixtape so her Latinx students may “hear [their stories] from people who look and sound like them.” We reflected on the pedagogical implications of our music listening that informed our coming-into-critical consciousness. In this diálogo, we developed a playlist through experimenting with our sonic memories through the poetics of our rasquache sensibilities. Gloria Anzaldúa suggests something similar with notes from Los Tigres, Silvio Rodriguez, and others in La Frontera. Our auditory imaginary echoes our evolving conocimiento toward spiritual activism.
Here, we offer our musical resonances as shaped by our gendered, place-based, and generational Xicanx experiences as a pathway to hear the auditory dimensions of Xicanacimiento. Our listening is thus counter-hegemonic or a “brown form of listening” as suggested by D. Inés Casillas, “a form of radical self-love, a sonic eff-you, and a means of taking up uninvited (white) space,” when this listening evolves critical anti-imperialist and feminist consciousness that hears 500 years of opresión y resistencia.
Diverging from the mixtape genre, our Xicanacimiento playlist seeks to convey something beyond connection and emotion towards a sustained affective state. Instead of a sonic moment, we hear a sonic stream; a subaltern auditory repertoire that is multi-directional and open to expansion by any and all interpellated Xicanx ears.
Kristian: Tuning-in to Xicanacimiento is a symbiosis of feeling and listening to La Chicanada from Califas to all corners of Aztlán unearthed. I was raised to the sounds of my father’s rancheras played in his truck and the hip-thumping rhythms of bachata and reggaetón played in my mother’s kitchen after a workday.
Yet, my love for UK anarcho-punk and US hardcore punk developed in defiance of public schooling and of a disaffected civil society. As a youth during the Great Recession, a future without higher education meant prison, the military, death by overdose, or the eternal damnation of working the Los Angeles service industry. I thrashed in sound; numbing my ears with noise, bruising in the mosh pit; bearing witness to minors as mota and alcohol addicts; pierced by the cries of police sirens breaking up our communion.
I found refuge in Xicanacimiento as a community college student and as a transfer at UC Los Angeles. I came into Xicanx consciousness by studying Mexican anarchists and Chicanx organizing. As a MEChistA, I came to listen to the ways local elders, youth, organizers, and agents of social transformation in Los Angeles identified their struggle with land, life, and spirit. My primer to social movements gave me language, and it was MEChistAs who offered me a new soundtrack against the escapism of the Los Angeles punk scene. The resonances of marchas, fiestas, and the songs of danza azteca oriented me into a new modality of listening. Xicanacimiento was the sonic web of these social and cultural practices, rooted in my auditory encounters with the verses of Quetzal, the biting guitars of Subsistencia, the rhythms of Quinto Sol, and the lyrical narratives of Aztlán Underground. The life-giving sonics of Xicanacimiento grazed against my wounded sonics of broken glass, nos tanks, drunk noise, and the cacophonous affair of a raided gig as intoxicated Latinx youth disperse into the discordant symphonies of the urban soundscape.
Esther: I listen as a campesina migrante translocada from Jalisco to California, Texas, and Illinois. Some twenty years ago, while attending Cal State en el Valle Central, I heard Xicanacimiento as concientización; an evolving awareness about la lucha obrera, the open veins of Latinoamerica and my place within the interlocked hierarchies of race, class, and gender in US society. With Chicanx and brigadista musics I felt connected to la lucha and acquired the language to name capitalist imperialism rooted in white supremacy as the enemy of humanity and Pachamama.
My early sonic memories include the sequence of my Alien number, the urging tones of radio hablada discussing Prop 187 (insisting we were aliens), Prop 227 (banning our language), and reports of Minuteman harassing la raza. I was immersed in listening; my mother’s sobremesa, my sister’s Temerarios at 5 am, Selena on the school bus, and 90s hits-from Chalino to Morrissey-on Columbia House CDs I traded with my older brother. Among other norteñas, La Jaula de Oro, the theme song of the diaspora of papás mexicanos, played at random-at the marketa, en los files, in passing cars, and so on…- to remind us of my father’s sacrificio en el norte caring for 500 dairy cows, six days a week, in two 5-hour shifts, to provide us el sueño americano.
I studied music in college, playing jazz and orchestral bass until the racist and sexual harassment targeting my young Latina body turned me away. I left the scene but continued my communion with music through library loans, traveling vendors, and trips to Amoeba. In reggae and canción nueva I found otros mundos posibles in the upbeat, cariño in 2 over 3, and the poetics of black and brown history; manos abiertas, muchas manos.
In 2002, “El Rasquache Rudo” a poet from the Rudo Revolutionary Front brought me sounds from Azltán; the UFW unity clap rallying in Modesto, a recitation by José Montoya in Sacramento, and brigadista music synergizing the 1492 quincentennial resistance with the uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). As Omar Marquez argues, the Zapatista uprising shifted Chicano ideology to speak from the position of a living indigenous present; still loud in the work of Xicanx activists like Flor Martinez. Into the 21st century, Aztlán Underground, Manu Chao, and Todos Tus Muertos, among others, soundtracked our protests against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Julieta Venegas’s distinctly vulnerable voice over the controlled chaos of ska and Martha Gonzalez’s tension over the wall of sound that is Quetzal, was transformative as I heard In Lak’ech; hearing in their voices possibilities for my Chicana existence.
Some of these selections anchor my first-year lectures at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where most of my students are working-class Latinx and Black. I do this with the intention of “opening affective pathways toward Xicanacimiento” as Kristian offered, and to insist on the point that Latina/o/x Studies is to be a critical, anti-hegemonic, subaltern field of study that hears a history from el mundo zurdo.
Outro:
In a gesture to deconstruct the term Xicanacimiento, one might think of the words “renacimiento”and “conocimiento.” What might emerge is a “regenerative force” and “collective knowledges” in consideration to how we listen, what resonances are made, and what sounds we inhabit when Xicanacimiento is invoked or felt as sound. Tuning into this auditory imagination guides the listener to a myriad and select decisions of what constitutes the Xicanx resonance for the local sonic geographies and the soundscapes which emerge from music. This curated sonic experience is one where voice, instrument, memory, and affect intersect.
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Featured Image by Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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Esther Díaz Martín is a researcher and educator in the Latin American and Latino Studies and the Gender and Women’s Studies program at the University of Illinois in Chicago. At present, she is working towards finishing her manuscript Latina Radiophonic Feminism(s) which seeks to amplify the acoustic work of popular feminism in contemporary Spanish-language radio and Latina podcasting.
Kristian E. Vasquez is a Xicano writer, poet, and zinester born and raised in Los Angeles, California currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research on the affects, sounds, and semiotics of La Xicanada expands the concept of Xicanacimiento, centering the affective force of expressive culture.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes
SO! Podcast #74: Bonus Track for Spanish Rap & Sound Studies Forum—Lucreccia Quintanilla
“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist Project—Todd Craig
Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt
Mixtapes v. Playlists: Medium, Message, Materiality–Mike Glennon
SO! Amplifies: Memoir Mixtapes
Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?–Wanda Alarcón
Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Christopher Chien
Sounding Out! Podcast #28: Off the 60: A Mix-Tape Dedication to Los Angeles–J.L. Stoever
“Oh how so East L.A.”: The Sound of 80s Flashbacks in Chicana Literature–Wanda Alarcón
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