Faithful Listening: Notes Toward a Latinx Listening Methodology
**This piece is co-authored by Wanda Alarcón, Dolores Inés Casillas, Esther Díaz Martín, Sara Veronica Hinojos, and Cloe Gentile Reyes
For weeks, we have been inundated with executive orders (220 at last count), alarming budget cuts (from science and the arts to our national parks), stupendous tariff hikes, the defunding of DEI-anything, the banning of transgender troops, a Congressional renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, terrifying ICE raids, and sadly, a refreshed MAGA constituency with a reinvigorated anti-immigrant public sentiment. Worse, the handlers for the White House’s social media publish sinister MAGA-directed memes, GIFs across their social channels. These reputed Public Service Announcements (PSAs), under President Trump’s second term, ruthlessly go after immigrants.
It’s difficult to refuse to listen despite our best attempts.
“The ASMR video was true.”
On February 18, 2025, the official White House social media account, @WhiteHouse, shared a 40-second video showing a group of detained immigrants boarding a military aircraft for deportation. The video was captioned: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, features gentle, soothing sounds—such as whispering, tapping, or brushing—which can evoke pleasurable tingling sensations. In this satirical ASMR-style post, however, the sounds include the clinking of metal shackles on concrete floors, the jangle of handcuffs against bodies, and the grating of metal on metal as detainees slowly ascend the aircraft’s steps. By framing these distressing noises within the ASMR genre, the video invites listeners to consume them as aesthetically pleasing; encouraging a visceral embodiment where the sounds of violence toward migrants elicit an uncontrollable physical pleasure that seeps through the body. This effectively turns state violence into an unsettling sonic spectacle. Cruelty towards migrants, according to Cristina Beltrán, is not a failure of democracy but an expression of it. The (sonic) spectacle of migrant cruelty functions as a political practice meant to sustain white democracy as both a racial and political category.
Framed within ASMR, Trump’s official message is unmistakably “saying the quiet part out loud.” But not all that well. A closer listen reveals that the roar of the jet engine drowns out more intimate, human sounds: footsteps on the tarmac, the rustle of police pat-downs, and the deep, rhythmic breaths—proof of life—condemned. Listening to this disturbing post, we become attuned to our own internal pleads; our refusal to believe until the unsettling truth confirms: this isn’t a parody or a hoax—it’s real.
How does a sonic social media trend—built around such sounds as the crinkling of chip bags, the crunches of eating, the tap-tap of acrylic nails, the gentle clinks of typing or espresso-making—become a soundboard for the forced removal of immigrants? Indeed, the video has amassed nearly 105 million views on X alone. Clearly, the post broadcasts a pedagogy of cruelty—a lesson in how to aestheticize suffering—and we are left questioning just how far that message both travels and resonates. For many, the video is neither entertaining nor soothing, but rather shocking, offensive, and deeply disturbing.
Written comments show more revulsion than support, with many users openly challenging the video. In doing so, their protest, contained in the comments, starts to dismantle the ASMR aesthetic, undercutting its intended sense of calm. After all, the video isn’t particularly convincing as ASMR to begin with! These are echoes of dissent, outrage, and refusal, that accompany the in-person collective actions that have taken place across the nation rallying against Trump’s broader white-supremacist and anti-democratic agenda.
“What was louder was the screaming and cursing inside my head.”
History shows us that abolitionist efforts often relied on the sounds and images of chains to evoke empathy for enslaved Africans—making their suffering and humanity visible to a broader public. Yet, as Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection makes clear, such representations can easily devolve into a spectacle of suffering, where the emphasis shifts from the enslaved person to the emotional response of the white witness. Today, that same auditory imagery—clinking metal, mechanical restraints—resurfaces, but in a profoundly different register. No longer stirring empathy, they risk desensitizing listeners to the pain and struggle of Latinx migrants. This ASMR instance, directed at MAGA-listeners, prioritizes a cruel-yet-gleeful response without any compassion whatsoever towards immigrants.
The word “Illegal” in the caption further amplifies the discourse of criminality, evoking a long legacy of racialized policies and media portrayals that cast mexicanos and Chicanos as perpetually deportable. Note the hypocrisy in naming the people as illegal, when their forced removal without legal due process, is itself illegal. U.S. immigration policy—think Operation Wetback and the Bracero Program, have long simultaneously expelled and depended on Mexican labor. The enduring power of these tropes lies not just in law, but in sentiment—in the way migrants are imagined, portrayed, and ultimately policed in the public eye. Just as Hartman argues that the end of slavery did not mean the arrival of true freedom for Black Americans, so too have U.S. immigration policies failed to fully embrace immigrants as residents or neighbors and much less citizens. In both cases, legal status did not equate to genuine belonging or liberation.
What is notable in the current deployment of “illegality” in the @WhiteHouse post is its expanded scope: whereas earlier rhetoric primarily targeted Mexicans and Mexicanness this framing now extends to encompass all Latinx peoples, which always includes Black, Indigenous, Trans and Queer. This further intensifies prior waves of anti-Mexican sentiment while broadening the reach of criminalizing discourse. In doing so, it reinforces a racialized logic of illegality that casts an ever-widening net of suspicion and exclusion.
The MAGA White House’s broader propaganda – from the self-deport ads on Spanish-language media and Kristi Noem’s pinche photo-ops from CECOT (El Salvador’s infamous mega-prison) to SCOTUS attempts to revoke birthright citizenship – raises the stakes of listening, rendering our response—and our work as Latinx sound studies scholars—urgent.
Like it or not, this video reshapes the contours of our field in real time. Using the ASMR video as a point of departure, we offer a mode of listening on the side of resistance—a practice that affirms our solidarity with migrants and their right to move, work, and live with dignity. Drawing on the work of the late María Lugones, we advocate for a practice of faithful witnessing—a listening attuned not only to sound, but to histories, structures, and acts of refusal that resist dehumanization.
Ofrenda
From Lugones’s book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, she teaches that a collaborator witnesses from the side of power; a faithful witness stands with resistance even when it entails risk. And, to witness faithfully is to recognize and honor acts of resistance—even when doing so defies common sense of what we recognize as political acts/sounds. In Decolonizing Diasporas, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez reminds us of the important coalitional sociality Lugones envisions in practicing faithful witnessing. For Figueroa, “the practice of faithful witnessing is one that oppressed and colonized peoples have deployed since time immemorial as a method of bearing witness to each other’s humanity even as they faced myriad forms of violence” (156).
Faithful witnessing entails centering the plight of all MAGA political scapegoats, migrants in precarity, pro-Palestinian student activists, the still separated children, trans youth, women, and who ever is next on the Project 2025 agenda. Faithful witnessing is not about centering our own emotional response, but about coming together to listen, to bear witness, and to protect. In response to these distorted public signals, we present a suite of countersonics, shared in a lo-fi listening mode that enacts faithful witnessing and affirms our roles as co-resisters to sonic oppression. We conclude with a noise-filled, healing artifact: a sonic limpia for deep listening and a playlist to sustain the good fight.
FOR THE FULL PLAYLIST CLICK THIS LINK, OR START BELOW!
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Featured Image: Philly Immigrant May 1st, 2025 march for Justicia. Migrant workers and supporters rallied at 4th & Washington and marched in the streets to the AFL-CIO Mayday rally and march. Image by Joe Piette, cropped by SO! CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Wanda Alarcón is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research takes up sound as a generative site and method for hearing and amplifying resistant grammars in Chicana narratives. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Chicana Soundscapes, which listens closely to sound, noise, language, songs, echoes, and silences, and proposes decolonial feminist ways of hearing Chicana and queer Chicana worlds.
Dolores Inés Casillas (she/her/ella) is Director of the Chicano Studies Institute (CSI) and Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media. She is the author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014), co-editor of The Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (Routledge Press, 2016) and Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge Press, 2018).
Esther Díaz Martín (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Radiophonic Feminisms: Latina Voices in the Digital Age of Broadcasting, (UT Press, 2025) theorizes Chicana feminist listening and attends to the political work of Latina voices in contemporary sound media.
Sara Veronica Hinojos (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Her research critically engages popular representations of Chicanxs and Latinxs as racialized, “accented” speakers. Her current book project, The Racial Politics of Chicana and Chicano Linguistic Scripts in Media (1925-2014), intentionally brings together language politics, digital media, humor studies and sound studies.
Cloe Gentile Reyes (she/her/ella) is a queer Boricua scholar, poet, and perreo profa from Miami Beach. She is a Faculty Fellow in NYU’s Department of Music and has a PhD in Musicology from UC Santa Barbara. Her writing focuses on how Indigenous Caribbean femmes navigate intergenerational trauma and healing through decolonial sound, fashion, and dance. Her pieces have been featured in Sounding Out!, Intervenxions, and the womanist magazine, Brown Sugar Lit.
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Thank you to Daimys Ester García for care in the form of editorial labor.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Oh how so East L.A.”: The Sound of 80s Flashbacks in Chicana Literature–Wanda Alarcón
Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region–José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas
Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness–Esther Díaz Martín and Kristian E. Vasquez
Listening to Digitized “Ratatas” or “No Sabo Kids”–Sara Veronica Hinojos and Eliana Buenrostro
Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body–Cloe Gentile Reyes
Latinx Soundwave Series–Edited by Dolores Inés Casillas
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Taters Gonna Tate. . .But Do Platforms Have to Platform?: Listening to the Manosphere
In March 2025, shortly after returning to the United States from Romania, where he and his brother Tristan had been held under house arrest for two years after being charged with human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal group to sexually exploit women, the social media influencer and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate’s podcast, Pimping H**s Degree was removed from Spotify for violating that platform’s policies.
According to the technology media outlet 404 Media, which first reported the news, some Spotify employees had complained in an internal Slack channel about the availability of Tate’s shows on their platform. “Pretty vile that we’re hosting Andrew Tate’s content,” wrote one. “Happy Women’s History Month, everybody!” wrote another. A change.org petition to call on Spotify to remove harmful Andrew Tate content, meanwhile, received over 150,000 signatures.
When asked for comment by the U.K. Independent, a Spotify spokesperson clarified that they removed the content in question because it violated the company’s policies, not because of any internal employee discussion. These policies state, in part, that content hosted on the platform should not “promote violence, incite hatred, harass, bully, or engage in any other behavior that may place people at risk of serious physical harm or death.”
Still, there is a veritable fire hose of Tate content available on Spotify. A search for the name “Andrew Tate” on the platform yields upwards of 15 feeds (and a music account) associated with the pro kickboxer-turned-self-help guru, many of which seem to be updated on a sporadic basis or not at all. Apple Podcasts, meanwhile, features an equally wide spectrum of shows with titles like Tatecast, Tate Speech, Andrew Tate Motivation, and Tate Talk [Ed. Note: Normally there’d be links to this media–and the author has provided all of his sources, but we at SO! does not want to drive idle traffic to these sites or pingbacks to/from them. If you want to follow Andrew Salvati’s path, all these titles are readily findable with a quick cut-and-paste Google search.–JS]
With so many different feeds out there, wading into the Andrew Tate audio ecosystem can be a bewildering experience. There isn’t just one podcast; there’s a continuous unfolding of feeds populated by short clips of content pulled from other sources.
But this may be the point exactly.
As I learned from this article in the Guardian and these interviews with YouTuber and entrepreneur MrBeast (“MrBeast On Andrew Tate’s MARKETING” and “MrBeast Reveals Andrew Tate’s Strategy”), Tate achieved TikTok virality, in part, by encouraging fans to share clips of video podcast interviews – rather than the whole interview itself – on the platform.
“Now is the best time to do podcasts than ever before,” MrBeast said in one interview. “Now it’s like the clips are re-uploaded for months on months. It gets so many views outside of the actual podcast … I would call it the ‘Tate Model’ … Like I think if you’re an influencer, you should go on like a couple dozen podcasts. You should clip all the best parts and just put it on a folder and just give it to your fans. Like literally promote you for free.” Though it can be hard to tell exactly who uploaded a podcast to Spotify, it seems that something like this is happening on the platform – that fans of Tate are sharing their favorite clips of his interviews and monologues pulled from other sources.
In its “About” section, for instance, a Spotify feed called Andrew Tate Motivational Speech declares that “this is a mix of the most powerful motivational speeches I’ve found from Andrew Tate. He’s a 4 time [sic] kickboxing world champion and he’s been having a big impact on social media.” In another Spotify feed called Tate Therapy, posters are careful to note that they “do not represent Mr. Tate in any way. We simply love his message. So we put together some of his best speeches.”
Given that Spotify is increasingly a social media platform, rather than simply an audio streaming service–users can collaborate on playlists and see what their friends are listening to–it follows that this practice of clipping and sharing Tate content may potentially expand the influencer’s online footprint. It may also serve as insurance against the company’s attempts to remove content or completely deplatform Tate: surely Spotify can’t police all the feeds that it hosts
So, what is it that Andrew Tate is saying – and how is he saying it?
To get a sense of why he has been called the “King of Toxic Masculinity,” and a “divisive social media star,” I had a listen to several of the interviews and monologues posted to Andrew Tate Speech Daily on Apple Podcasts, which, of all of the Andrew Tate audio feeds, is the most consistently updated.
The first thing to take note of is his voice. It’s brisk and aggressive and carefully enunciated – it’s like he’s daring you to take issue with what he, an accomplished and eloquent man, is saying. Above all, listening to Tate feels like being spoken to like an inferior, because that is precisely what he preys on. His accent, moreover – now British, now American – is unique, lending itself to some unusual pronunciations that can be considered as a part of his system of authority and charm.
One of Tate’s main arguments about what ails men today – and it is clear from his mode of address that he assumes he is talking to men exclusively – is that they are trapped in a system of social and economic “slavery” that he unimaginatively calls “The Matrix” after the film series of the same name. Though he is somewhat vague in his descriptions, in the podcast episode “Andrew Tate on The Matrix,” he explains that power, as it actually exists in the world, is held by elites who rely on systems of representation (language, texts) to effect their will. These systems of representation, however, are prone to abuse because they are ultimately subject to human fallibility. Tangible assets, like wealth, he reasons, are susceptible to control by “The Matrix,” as they can be taken away arbitrarily by the redefinition of decisions and the printing/signing of documents. His example, though it is a little hard to follow, is that if someone says something that the government doesn’t like, a judge can simply order that their house be taken away. Instead, Tate argues that individuals can escape “The Matrix” by building intangible assets (here, he gives no examples), which cannot be taken away by elites and their bureaucracy. It is a difficult path, he cautions (and here, he sounds sympathetic), and one that not everyone has the discipline to endure.
Tate gets a little more specific in the episode “Andrew Tate on The Global Awakening. The Modern Slave System,” in which he asserts that elites are using the system of fiat currency – a term that cryptocurrency supporters like to use to disparage government-issued currencies – to keep individuals “enslaved.” In this modern version of enslavement, he explains, individuals are forced to work for currency, but, since fiat currency is subject to inflation and other forms of manipulation, only end up making the bare amount they need to survive. The result, he argues, is a system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (of course this ignores the real possibility of shitcoin and other crypto manipulation schemes). It’s quite a populist message for a guy who is famous for his luxurious lifestyle. Still, his message here is consistent: with the proper amount of discipline, a willingness to speak truth to power, and faith in God (he converted to Islam in October 2023) will result in an awakening of consciousness that will finally end the stranglehold that elites have on power – will finally break “The Matrix.”
On the other hand, Tate deems women incapable of the discipline required to break out of “The Matrix” – he seems to think that they are too materialistic, too distractible, too enamored of the chains that elites use to bind individuals to the system to see beyond them (see “Andrew Tate on ‘Fun’”). In his view, women are better off at home bearing children or fulfilling male sexual desires. (In an apparent demonstration of male dominance, Tate’s “girlfriends” often appear in the background of his videos cleaning house).
For his part, Tate claims that his own legal troubles, and his own vilification in the press, are part of a coordinated campaign of persecution against him for exposing the way that the world really works (see, for example, “Andrew Tate: Survival, Power, and the System Exposed”). From this vantage, Tate seems to be acting as what the ancient Greeks called a parrhesiastes, someone who, as Michel Foucault writes, not only sees it as his duty to speak the truth, but takes a risk in doing so, since what he says is opposed by the majority. Indeed, often congratulating himself on his bravery in the face of “The Matrix,” Tate has suggested that his role as a truth teller might get him sent to jail (“Andrew Tate on the Common Man”), or worse (“Survival, Power, and the System Exposed.”) In such moments, he plays the martyr, adopting a quiet, yet defiant voice.
Aside from the aspirational lifestyle he purveys – the fast cars, the money, the women, the flashy clothes, the jets, the mansions, the cigars, and the six pack – it seems to me that this parrhesia is a key part of what makes Tate popular among men and boys (as of February 2025, he had over 10 million followers on X [formerly Twitter]). What he reveals to them, though it is often muddled, is the way in which elites maintain social control under advanced capitalism. It’s all rather Gramscian in the sense that it is concerned with the hegemony of a dominant class, though, ironically, Tate seems too much of a capitalist himself to engage in Marxian social critique. Instead of offering a politics of class solidarity, Tate merely rehearses familiar neoliberal scripts about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps (see “You Must Constantly Build Yourself”), getting disciplined, going to the gym, developing skills, and starting a business. For Tate, life is a competition, a war, though most men don’t realize it.
And I think this is the key to understanding Tate’s parrhesia – it’s not only that he is speaking truth to power in his criticism of “The Matrix”; he also sees himself as speaking an uncomfortable truth to his listeners, truths that they might not be ready to hear. As in the movie, The Matrix, he says in “Andrew Tate on the Global Awakening,” some minds are not ready to have the true nature of reality revealed to them. In his perorations, therefore, Tate often takes a sharp and combative tone, accusing his listeners of being guilty of complacency and complicity in the face of “The Matrix.”
“If I were to explain to you right here, right now, in a compendious and concise way, most of you wouldn’t understand,” he says in “Andrew Tate on The Matrix.” “And those of you who do understand will not be prepared to do the work it takes to then actually genuinely escape. But those of you who are truly unhappy inside of your hearts, those of you who understand there’s something more to life, there’s a different level of reality you’ve yet to experience … But if your mind is ready to be free, if you’re ready to truly understand how the world operates and become a person who is difficult to kill, hard to damage, and escape The Matrix truly, once and for all, then I am willing to teach you.”
For those persuaded by this line of thinking, or who are otherwise made to feel guilty about their complicity in “The Matrix,” Tate offers a special “Real World” course at $49 per month, which teaches students how they can leverage AI and e-commerce tools to earn their own money and finally be free.
And that’s really what it’s all about – all the social media influencing, all the clip sharing, all the obnoxious antics, and deliberately controversial statements – they are all calculated to raise his public profile (good or bad) so that he can sell the online courses that have made him and his brother Tristan fabulously wealthy.
It is for this reason that I don’t think that Spotify’s deplatforming of one of Tate’s shows will ultimately do anything meaningful to stem his popularity. If anything, the added controversy will likely confirm to his fans that he has been right all along – that the elites who are in control of “The Matrix” are so threatened by the truth that he tells about the world and about women that they will first deplatform him and then send him to jail.
No, we will only rid ourselves of Tate when he becomes irrelevant. This may happen if he ends up going to prison in Romania or in the UK (where he also faces charges of rape and human trafficking). But even then, there are many vying to take his place.
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Featured Image: Close-up and remixed image of Andrew Tate’s mouth and arm, Image by Heute, CC BY 4.0
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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.
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This post also benefitted from the review of Spring 2025 Sounding Out! interns Sean Broder and Alex Calovi. Thank you!
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Robin Williams and the Shazbot Over the First Podcast–Andrew Salvati
“I am Thinking Of Your Voice”: Gender, Audio Compression, and a Cyberfeminist Theory of Oppression: Robin James
DIY Histories: Podcasting the Past: Andrew Salvati
Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre –Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas
Gendered Sonic Violence, from the Waiting Room to the Locker Room–Rebecca Lentjes
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