SO! Reads: Dolores Inés Casillas’s ¡Sounds of Belonging!
In Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014), Dolores Inés Casillas turns up the volume on the sonic and the political dynamics of the Latino immigrant experience in the United States. A theoretically rich yet accessible book, Sounds of Belonging jump-starts Spanish-language radio studies, proving that the broader field of radio and sound studies can no longer continue to ignore or silence the importance of Spanish-language radio—from its historical significance for Spanish speaking Latinos to its lucrative place in radio markets today. Spanish-language radio reveals the power of sound in shaping the lived experiences of Latina/o communities, including immigrants and those with deep roots in the United States. Casillas shows how sound acts as a platform through which Latin Americans insert themselves in the U.S. imaginary, despite the nation’s attempts to erase their presence.
Sounds of Belonging provides keen insight into the constant buzz of immigration on the airwaves. Some questions that propel this book: What sonically constitutes the Latina/o experience in the United States? Also, what immigration-related sounds are found on Spanish-language radio airways? Casillas’s emphases shows how little we know of how the Latina/o sounds.
Sounds of Belonging deftly navigates the historical and contemporary domains of Spanish-language radio, theorizing them as a dynamic sonic terrain where we can listen to struggles for and against power, as well as to modalities of difference. Beginning with the traces of Spanish-language radio that emerged early in American radio’s so-called “Golden Age” in the 1930s-1940s, moving through the activist-driven bilingual Chicano community radio of the 1960s and 1970s, and then laying out the landscape of the highly profitable world of Spanish-language broadcasting today, Casillas guides readers through a historical trajectory of Spanish-language radio. She draws from Spanish-language radio broadcasting in its commercial and non-commercial iterations, while keeping tuned to the transnational connections transmitted through these frequencies.
Casillas engages with critical cultural studies, Chicana/Latina studies, and radio/media studies to explore the production of masculinity on El Cucuy’s morning radio program. Casillas studies El Cucuy as both an on-air personality and a political figure advocating for immigrants’ 
rights, illustrating the “complex interplay of gender, labor, and globalization” (104). While El Cucuy’s “shock-jock” style–imbued with sexual humor–often garners him comparison to Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh, El Cucuy does more than shock and entertain his listeners. Casillas argues that sound and immigrant listening practices are integral to El Cucuy’s discursive aural constructions of a transnational working-class male audience, one that is not shamed for speaking Spanish, enjoying ranchera music, or laboring in “women’s work.” However, by highlighting how El Cucuy and his listeners reinscribe traditional gender roles that silence and marginalize Latinas, Casillas reveals the complexity of El Cucuy’s political advocacy for male workers on the one hand, and the program’s misogynistic message on the other.
Sounds of Belonging pushes scholars to think more thoroughly about the role format and genre play in the characterization of radio stations, as well as the audience constructed through these programming choices. She characterizes Spanish-language radio as both on-air dialogues and conversations between callers and radio hosts. This approach provides an intersectional analysis comparing radio listeners to those working in production. Casillas opens a line of inquiry into non-normative or non-hegemonic radio practices by positing that Latino radio listening is public and communal and not a solitary practice. Casillas shows how research that frames listeners as a market—simply audiences or consumers—polarizes our understanding of radio practices, particularly within research on Spanish-language radio.
One of Casillas’s most important interventions is her granular analysis of the role of radio in Latino communities, particularly within migrant and working class groups who may have easier access to and familiarity with radio, as opposed to other media such as the Internet. For these communities, radio becomes as an anchor, grounding the cultural ties Latinos have to the communities they migrated from—through stations’ language and music—but it also functions as a way to aurally migrate between borders, specifically when listeners-turned-callers locate themselves bi-nationally.
Casillas also argues that Spanish-language radio is an alternative site of congregation and dialogues amongst communities that are marginalized and made hyper visible by mainstream English-language media. Anti-immigrant policy and legislation—heard and seen in popular media as a narrative of “illegal aliens” invading America—is the backdrop against which Casillas explores the role of Spanish-language radio as an “acoustic ally,” a concept she explores in the chapters “Acoustic Allies: Early Latin-Themed and Spanish-Language Radio Broadcasts, 1920s-1940s,” and “Sounds of Surveillance: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio Patrols La Migra.” She explains that Texas and California were home to the debut of U.S. Spanish-language radio in the 1920s, crafted specifically for Mexican listeners. Radio announcers such as Pedro J. Gonzalez brokered airtime, typically broadcasting during the unfavorable times of late night or early morning. As a method of resistance, radio provided Spanish-language audiences with the capability of listening to “home.”
Images of Pedro J. González, who was also a musician and a founding member of Los Madrugadoras in addition to an important early Spanish language radio announcer
In the chapter “Mixed Signals: Developing Bilingual Chicano Radio, 1960s-1980s,” Casillas uncovers a major gap in research on the aurality of the Chicano Media Movement. She pivots the analytical lens of Chicano movement activism from urban to rural areas and traces the emergence of bilingual community in conjunction with farm worker activism in California and Washington. Bilingual community radio stations such as Radio KDNA in Granger, Washington, KBBF-FM in Santa Rosa, California, and Radio Bilingüe in Fresno, California—places that rely heavily on low-wage farmworker labor—showcase how the political activism of this movement era took place on emergent community airwaves. Listener-focused Chicano community radio stations “sought to broadcast independent of commercial influence, produce local programming, and, perhaps most significant, operate under the full control of Mexicans and Chicanos themselves” (52-53). While under the control of Chicano/a community radio producers, Casillas demonstrates how the funding model for community radio stations—namely, a heavy reliance on grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—underscores the bureaucratic limitations for public broadcasts.
Sounds of Belonging opens the path for a new line of inquiry regarding Spanish-language radio while revealing that there is much work to do in the area of Spanish-language radio studies. Despite the chapter “Mixed Signals”’s focus on the community radio format, Casillas’s dedication to commercial radio highlights an urgent need for scholarship on non-commercial radio. Studying non-commercial stations will advance necessary conversations around content and innovation rather than economic success and failure.
Overall, Sounds of Belonging is an exciting and foundational text for scholars and readers interested in Latina/o media studies, sound, radio, cultural production, immigration and the Latina/o experiences in the United States as experienced and lived through sound and listening. Casillas’s agility in drawing from various theoretical and methodological perspectives provides a rich analysis of Spanish-language radio situated in a transnational context that reflects not just the listenership, but also the continued importance of radio for Latina/o communities living throughout the U.S. borderlands.
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Monica De La Torre is a doctoral student in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Her scholarship bridges New Media and Sound Studies by analyzing the development of Chicana feminist epistemologies in radio and digital media production. A member of Soul Rebel Radio, a community radio collective based in Los Angeles, Monica is specifically interested in the ways in which radio and digital media production function as tools for community engagement. She is an active member of the UW Women of Color Collective and the Women Who Rock Collective. Monica earned a B.A. in Psychology and Chicana/o Studies from University of California, Davis and an M.A.in Chicana/o Studies from California State University, Northridge; her master’s thesis was entitled “Emerging Feminisms: El Teatro de las Chicanas and Chicana Feminist Identity Development.” Monica received a 2012 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, which recognizes superior academic achievement, sustained engagement with communities that are underrepresented in the academy, and the potential to enhance the educational opportunities for diverse students.
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Featured image: “Hi-Fi” by Flickr user Feans CC BY 2.0
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Sounding Out Podcast #24: The Raitt Street Chronicles: A Survivor’s History — Sharon Sekhon and Manuel “Manny” Escamilla
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Ritual, Noise, and the Cut-up: The Art of Tara Transitory
Marginalized bodies produce marginalized sounds to communicate things that escape language. The queer body is the site of sounds that engage pleasure, repression, rage, isolation, always somehow outside of dominant language. Sound Studies tells us that we should trust our ears as much as our eyes, justifying our trust in sound, and of the resonating body. Affect Theory goes further, saying that all senses play into a body that processes input through levels of response, experience, and anticipation. Affect is the vibrational space that is both bodily memory and anticipation. So where do sound and affect meet in queer bodies? How do marginalized peoples use sound and the body to express liberation, objectification, joy, and struggle?
Our writers in Sound and Affect tackle these questions across a spectrum of the marginalized experience. I opened the series by offering the concept of the tremble, a sonic form of affect that is necessarily queer in its affective reach. Then, Kemi Adeyemi, sloooooooowed thingggggggggs doooooooooownnnnn so to hear the capitalist connections between the work expected of black bodies and the struggle for escape from this reality through the sonic affects, temporal shifts, and corporeal elsewhere of purple drank. Last week, Maria P. Chaves Daza explored the connection between voice, listening, and queer Chicana community formation: through space, across time, and with laughter. In the final post of the Sound and Affect forum, Justyna Stasiowska brings the noise in a discussion of the trans body and the performance work of Tara Transitory. —Guest Editor Airek Beauchamp
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Ritual is another word that needs a new definition… Ritual, as I use the term, refers to an artistic process by which people gather and unify themselves in order to confront the challenges of their existence. –Anna Halprin
The shivering on your skin gradually builds like a soft electric shock that presses you down to the floor. The whole experience feels like an earthquake, with vibrations pricking through bone into organs. The affective tonality of the performance puts the body in a state of alarm, where listening turns into self-observation. Your perception is immersed in sensing the materiality of a room filled with other bodies, all attuning to the low frequencies resonating with the architecture of space, trying to maintain equilibrium. You refocus away from the artist to yourself and the rest of the audience, realizing the depth of your feelings of total connection.
This transcendence comes through dissolving the boundaries of the body and the vibrational disturbance of one’s kinesthetic sense of self in a room, or proprioception. As One Man Nation, Tara Transitory creates noise during her performances to offer out-of-body experiences for her listeners, a ritual where the unity of body and self dissolves. Using samples gathered through field recording and sounds from her midi controller, 64button monomer, and contact microphones on the tables and floor, Transitory catches her body moving and interacting with the instruments, amplifying the process of making sound in the here and now.
Tara Transitory Performing
Transitory’s artistic praxis enables me to explore the ways in which the body creates and receives noise. I define noise here as the unwanted and always-present materiality of (mis)communication. Transitory explores the body as a site of noise and disruption, working to disrupt the false narrative of unity pervasive in Western concepts of gender. Using cut-ups, noise, and ritual, Transitory exposes the falsehoods of gender norms and repositions the body as a locus of possibility that allows for transgression and what Angela Jones and Baran Germen have called “queer heterotopias.”
Queer Heterotopias and the Rituals of Self
Morning rituals like taking pills and brushing teeth produce the tiny noises of becoming one’s self, or at least molding one into a presentable self. Repetition is a key element, making the process seem effortless and automatic. As Judith Butler discussed in Gender Trouble, everyday movements, gestures, actions, and ways of using and presenting one’s body are framed by gender categories. Butler also demonstrated that gender is a performance made of repeating gestures and movement that are prescribed to male and female genders.
The everyday routine of Transitory’s life, therefore, in a specific socio-political context, can seem unnatural and marginalized. Taking drugs every day changes the meaning of an action, whether the drugs are hormonal, supplemental, medicinal, or recreational. Still, the “natural,” as most queer theorists show, exhibits power only through the framing of social categories as transparent, creating an illusion of normalcy. However, while this post-structuralist perspective seeks an antidote to the normalization of cultural schemes, it does not make clear what to do after destroying society’s illusion. Deconstructionist perspectives produce a constant grating sound coming from the friction between the conceptual framing of body and the materiality of fleshly gender performance.
In other words, what didn’t make the cut?
Cut-up spaces
As proposed by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs in The Third Mind, the cut-up method, an early analog method resembling sampling, involved artists cutting up pieces of text and reassembling the pieces in a new form. This technique, used across different media, enables artists to create a self outside the limits of the body. In Burroughs’ Invisible Generation, he describes creating a “cut-up” using a tape recorder. Recording, cutting up the tape, then reassembling it for playback allows the listener and the artist to become aware of a specific socio-cultural programming that Burroughs presents as method of policing the self. However, remixing and repetition also opens spaces to reprogram our-selves. The tape recording cut-up becomes a multisensory stimulant used to create an other self through de- and re-construction. Furthermore, the body, working as a membrane, becomes transformed through the repetition of these new sounds; sound affects listeners simultaneously at the level of cognition as well on the level of the body as a corporeal listening apparatus.
Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge on the left and Genesis P-Orridge on the right. Still from the documentary movie, “The Ballad of Genesis And Lady Jane.”
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye also explored the concept of the body itself as a cut up medium in their Pandrogeny project. They underwent the process by cutting up each other’s gestures and behaviours through mimesis and cutting up parts of their bodies by undergoing plastic surgery in order to create a third being. According to a post by a plastic surgeon in Louisville, the cut up material that they used is DNA, which they refer to as the “first recording.” They used the pronoun “We” even after Lady Jaye left her body (passing away in 2007), so the third being is not just a shared body, but a connection of minds and spirits across the divisions of gender and body. Making a cut-up of the body enabled them to create an other, a combined Genesis and Lady Jaye, the pandrogyne self, the WE that is now Genesis and Lady Jaye. Pandrogyny is, in their project, a unified being presented as the double self in the negation of gender. It is a performance aimed to create a space for the connected consciousness, the third mind within a physical space of the body.
Tara Transitory uses a different method of “cut-up,” focusing on vibrational exchange among bodies to create communitas—or common public– specific to ritual in order to disenchant the geopolitical connection of body and gender. Transitory’s “cut-up” aims to create a body in transition, which connects with other bodies through the amplification of noises the body produces. Her work uses vibration to establish communication across genders, within a body or between bodies in a state of flux.
The last day before the end of the world. Somehow I feel my life has been up till now very fulfilling and I really cannot think of what more I want, or what I need to do before the end. My only plan is to take my first pill of estrogen at 2359 tonight Bangkok time, the beginning of the apocalypse of my testosterone. –Tara Transitory, Ritual.
Originally from Singapore, Transitory works as One Man Nation, documenting and developing communities in Europe and Asia. Her project International //gender|o|noise\\ Underground consists of mapping and documenting lives of trans women in Asia and Europe and creating performances using noise. She, with Miriam Saxe Drucki-Lubecki, also took part in establishing a monthly trans/queer left- field music party in Granada called Translæctica. Translæctica has grown to other countries, with editions (in Paris, Bankok, Saigon), and includes lectures, workshops and film screenings mixed with electronic music. As posted on Translæctica’s Facebook page, the goal behind the event is to present “the idea of a new world as one borderless living space, with all the shifts and transformations and their irreversible impact on local/original cultures.” It connects local and international artists and activists to create an ever-evolving community without borders.
As Transitory’s name might suggest, she herself is not committed to a national identity. Throughout her migratory experience, Transitory gathers field recordings then uses narrative to transform them. Her site-specific approach focuses on concrete, situated realities that are entangled in current political situations, where friction arises between the policing norms in Asian and European societies and her own functioning as a nomadic being in state of transition. Her performances are rituals that blur the restrictions that society conveys through noise (screams, samples from field recording, the sound of the moving body) as an affective force, creating a state of meditation and catharsis. For example, while documenting the lives of trans experience, she worked with trans women street performers from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.
These women make fire performances to “Gangnam Style,” moving during the night from one public place to another to perform for unsuspecting audiences. Sampling the street noises and then playing them back during the performance creates a mirror for the audience; interjecting common noise into a common dance song established a specific heterotopia, shifting what might be a normal experience into something uncanny within the conventions of street entertainment.
In her performances, Transitory uses noise as an intentional activity, suspending communication, disabling the recipient from receiving information, leading to an “immersion in noise.” This immersion is similar to sensory deprivation in that it overloads the receiver with stimuli, suspending communication. Its affective force comes from invading the body with frequencies and vibrations, where one feels the body in constant movement – a state of perpetual flux. It becomes the tactic of distancing from the self, enabling the listener to create different experiences, a heterotopian space of otherness and developing new rituals for specific situations.
Angkana Khunchai
One Man Nation’s performances end with Traditional Laotian Molam-style music (“Mo” is an artist and “Lam” is a kind of performance art where the artist tells a story using tonal inflections) sung by Angkana Khunchai, a 1970’s pop-music singer. The pop-ish songs are calming and soothing after the intense experience of Transitory’s performance. The text is a repetition of the words “calm down,” a therapeutic ending creating a sense of light from this cathartic performance. Transitory’s use of Molam eases re-entry into one’s everyday existence outside of the performance. The harmonies and softness of the song contrast with the harshness of noise performance as part of ritual – from transgressing the everyday and entering the liminal state that Transitory creates in her performances to better re-enter society.
Transitory’s work conjures new rituals of transcendence and distancing one-self from the body. I treat the //gender|o|noise\\ as a hacking of the everyday experience of body. By creating a temporary heterotopia. Tara’s work reveals the tactics of hacking gender, generating a temporary space for alternative modes of existence. She creates flux in bodies and bodies in flux, thus affectively crafting heterotopic spaces, sites which are, as Brian Massumi states:
[…]an open threshold — a threshold of potential. You are only ever in the present in passing. If you look at that way you don’t have to feel boxed in by it, no matter what its horrors and no matter what, rationally, you expect will come. You may not reach the end of the trail but at least there’s a next step (“Navigating Spaces”).
The everyday processes of becoming oneself by repeating practices become rituals when performed in different contexts. This ritual is a process of creating an affect, a space of potentiality that enables the body to reshape and change, much like Transitory refits old rituals into new skin. The ritual forms applied to actions of the everyday enable us to change their meaning and our perceptions, creating a sense of the transitory nature of one’s body. Sonic rituals like Transitory’s are tactics to develop a self-conscious and creative approach to everyday activities and use them, as Anna Halprin says, to confront the challenges of existence.
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Featured Image: Tara Transitory in performance mode
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Justyna Stasiowska is a PhD student in the Performance Studies Department at Jagiellonian University. She is preparing a dissertation under the working title: “Noise. Performativity of Sound Perception” in which she argues that frequencies don’t have a strictly programmed effect on the receiver and the way of experiencing sounds is determined by the frames or modes of perception, established by the situation and cognitive context. Justyna earned her M.A in Drama and Theater Studies. Her thesis was devoted to the notion of liveness in the context of the strategies used by contemporary playwrights to manipulate the recipients’ cognitive apparatus using the DJ figure. You can find her on Twitter and academia.edu.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:
Pleasure Beats: Using Sound for Experience Enhancement ––Justyna Stasiowska
Papa Sangre and the Construction of Immersion in Audio Games–Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo
SO! Reads: David Novak’s Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation—Seth Mulliken
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