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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SO! Amplifies: Immigrants Wake America Podcast and the Work of Engaged Digital Humanities
SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig. You’re welcome!
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Conceptualized at a time of rampant increase in anti-immigrant violence, Immigrants Wake America is a creative response to the growing bias and violence against immigrant women in the U.S., as seen in the Atlanta shootings, the rise in hate crimes since the onset of Covid-19, and the US-Mexico border crisis. We believe that storytelling allows us to find similarities and differences between ourselves and others, offering a humanizing counterpart to harmful media narratives. The podcast creates a living archive of stories not yet heard, serving as an audio intervention into how immigrant women’s (hi)stories are narrated and passed on.
Immigrants Wake America is a public humanities, community-engaged project of digital storytelling through podcasts, in partnership with the Tenement Museum in New York. It features storytellers who share their family stories about migration and the centrality of women in their life histories. These storytellers have submitted stories to the Tenement Museum’s digital archive Your Story, Our Story (YSOS),
Founded in 1988, the Tenement Museum, focuses on immigration and immigrants to “foster a society that embraces and values the role of immigration in the evolving American identity.” YSOS cofounded by Annie Polland and Kathryn Lloyd, is a digital archive that houses stories associated with immigration, migration, and cultural identity. Some of the storytellers are first generation immigrants, while others are descendants of immigrants, born and raised in the US; their great-grandparents or grandparents migrated to the US ages ago. Through YSOS, the Tenement Museum invites people across the country to share their stories in the online digital storytelling exhibit. Each story reveals one individual’s experience. Together, the stories help us see how the unique histories shape the nation, and the patterns that bind us together.
Through exploring and curating stories from Your Story Our Story, we facilitate conversations that supplement and expand it. This makes possible the conception of an archive that is both dynamic and collaborative. Such an archive resists the colonization and appropriation of lives and narratives of our storytellers. We navigate through the ethical conundrums that one might structurally and personally face in this collaborative endeavor. In our engagement with the archives at the Tenement Museum, we believe that our podcasting project really opens up the possibilities for an expansion of the archive.
We released our first episode, the Introductory Episode on January 15th, 2022, and have since been consistently releasing one episode per month.
While our podcast does not claim to retrieve or lay out these microhistories in their entirety, at an early stage of its development, we came to realize the potential that the form of the podcast itself offers for a different kind of storytelling. In our podcast, we treat stories as primary documents instead of marginalia. Michelle Caswell (2014) uses the term “symbolic annihilation” to describe the absence or misrepresentation of marginalized communities in archives. She advocates the powerful forces of community archives in countering “symbolic annihilation.” In thinking about archives in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault is concerned with “the density of discursive practices” wherein he observes “systems that establish statements as events and things (145)” This system of statements (as events or things) is what contributes to the law of what can be said. Processes of digital communal archiving such as those done by South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) or the Tenement Museum attempt to extend or expand the systematic possibility of events and things. Caswell and her colleagues have demonstrated the importance and success of the SAADA project. They have also pointed to the impossibility of representation in a traditional archive which is built on violence committed on colonized and enslaved bodies, also eloquently pointed out by Saidiya Hartman’s scholarship.
Through our experience we’ve learnt that podcasts can serve as a transgressive-dynamic expansion of digital archiving, given their unique ability to cut across racial and gendered lines of preconceived sonic notions and their potential to expand the current techniques and media of digital archiving. We map this formal potential of the podcast in the way it intersects with digital archiving in the following ways:
First, narratorial voice.
We wanted our project to act as an intervention in the way in which immigrant women’s (hi)stories are consumed and passed on. We wanted to provide counter narratives. It was essential that the storytellers share their stories in their own voices, literally! The audio medium allows us to produce a space for listening to voices that are otherwise marginalized and/or demonized.
–Le Li and Shruti Jain
Among the several unique and inspiring stories of resilience that the Tenement Museum houses, one such is a story by an immigrant case manager at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, Goretti Mugambwa. The museum and our podcast make it possible for her story to be narrated by herself in her voice. With her experience of working with the refugee and immigrant community she also does not just remain an individual voice, but acts to further a collective assertion.
Next, sonic variations.
Our storytellers’ voices are not just “characteristics” of the story but are an essential part of the story itself. We believe that each immigrant and their descendent brings to the story their unique tonal texture. This diversity destabilizes what immigrants and their descendants are expected to sound like. The sounds we add in the editing process are minimal. We try not to impose emotional cues and responses upon our listeners.
–Shruti Jain and Le Li
The multiplicity of voices in our podcast–and therefore in the archive–are not just “characteristics” of the aural storytelling or listening process, but are as much an essential part of the story itself. In line with what The Sonic Color Line reminds us, our work also finds that, “sound frequently appears to be visuality’s doppelgänger in U.S. racial history” (Stoever 4). This leads to the coding of race as not just visual but aural too. We want to clarify that the white constructed ideas of how people of color must sound flatten out the complexities in how people within and across communities do sound. At the same time, these notions of white sonic normativity also create a strong sense of what one must or must not sound like in order to succeed in the racial capitalist world order. The storytellers of our podcast and we ourselves are of diverse backgrounds. This, for us, is a way to demonstrate the “complex range of sounds actually produced by people of color” (Stoever 43). As Nancy Morales argues in “Óyeme Voz: U.S. Latin@ & Immigrant Communities Re-Sound Citizenship and Belonging,” the sound of ‘everyday voices’ mobilized against—and remarking on—the nation-state’s attempts to mark immigrant communities as vulnerable exerts an impactful and profoundly material agency.” With its conversational and collaborative format, our podcast serves as a dynamic medium to represent (his)stories that complicate generic conventions in critical ways.
Then, collaboration.
We have also been personally deeply impacted by the process of working on this podcast. We have made lasting bonds with our colleagues and storytellers alike. The storytellers of our podcast act not just as guests, but as collaborators and stakeholders. Instead of interpreting the stories in our own way and retelling the stories, we collaborate with the storytellers, and facilitate the unfolding of hidden stories by the storytellers. Dr. Lisa Yun, Professor of English at Binghamton University, and Kathryn Lloyd, Senior Director of Programs, Tenement Museum, have been advisors and the executive producers of the podcast. Together with Lloyd and Yun, we built a project on the ethos of collaboration.
The editing process of IWA too, is different. Rather than making individual editorial decisions, we engage the storytellers directly in post-production. After finishing a first edit of an episode collaboratively between ourselves, we then send it to the storytellers for their feedback and approval before releasing it. Sometimes, the storytellers do suggest changes. Based on their feedback, we re-edit the episode and eventually release it after the storytellers approval. We have also innovated methods of community editing, where we edit in groups of as large as 15 people.
Finally, accessibility.
The podcast medium makes Immigrants Wake America an ideal project for the public humanities. As opposed to lengthier podcasts, each episode of our podcast is edited down to 15-20 minutes. These can be used by educators as an in-class resource to generate discussion and activities. Community listeners could tune in during lunch breaks, get-togethers, cooking, driving or doing chores. Our episodes can also serve as conversation starters and help facilitate affective bonds among immigrants and non-immigrants alike.
The final episode of our first season, “Finding Our Grandmother in the Records,” aired just last week, and a second season is in the works.
As a way to expand this project, our second season will feature storytellers from our local community in addition to Your Story, Our Story. We plan to have units within our project dedicated to translation, recording and editing, and creating teaching resources. We aim for meaningful and engaged conversations and try to blur the supposed boundaries between the university and the community. Join us!
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The first season of Immigrants Wake America was sponsored through the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Binghamton University and a Public Humanities Grant from Humanities New York. Dr. Lisa Yun, Professor of English at Binghamton University, and Kathryn Lloyd, Senior Director of Programs, Tenement Museum, have been our advisors and the executive producers of the podcast. IWA is available on major streaming platforms such as Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, and Audible.
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Le Li and Shruti Jain are pursuing their PhDs at Binghamton University in the Translation Research and Instruction Program and the English Department respectively. They were Humanities New York Public Humanities fellows (2021-22) and graduate fellows of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at Binghamton University (2021-22). Through their podcast project and their work with digital community archives, Le and Shruti are currently working on exploring intersection between podcasts and digital archiving. They try to capitalize on the unique ability that the form of the podcast offers to cut across racial and gendered lines of preconceived sonic notions, which makes possible the conception of an archive that can be both dynamic and collaborative. Le’s research interests include translation studies, cultural studies, diaspora studies, and public humanities. Shruti’s PhD focuses on the Enlightenment, British Empire and the relationalities between race and caste formations.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig all this good stuff about sound studies pedagogy! Good luck with Fall semester, folks!:
“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist Project—Todd Craig
SO! Podcast #79: Behind the Podcast: deconstructing scenes from AFRI0550, African American Health Activism – Nic John Ramos and Laura Garbes
The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom- Carter Mathes
Making His Story Their Story: Teaching Hamilton at a Minority-serving Institution–Erika Gisela Abad
Teaching Soundwalks in a Course on Gentrification, Black Music, and Corporate America–Rami Toubia Stucky
Deejaying her Listening: Learning through Life Stories of Human Rights Violations– Emmanuelle Sonntag and Bronwen Low
Audio Culture Studies: Scaffolding a Sequence of Assignments– Jentery Sayers
Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt
“Toward A Civically Engaged Sound Studies, or ReSounding Binghamton”–Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Listening to #Occupy in the Classroom–D. Travers Scott
SO! Podcast #71: Everyday Sounds of Resilience and Being: Black Joy at School–Walter Gershon
Sounding Out! Podcast #13: Sounding Shakespeare in S(e)oul– Brooke Carlson
A Listening Mind: Sound Learning in a Literature Classroom–Nicole Brittingham Furlonge
My Voice, or On Not Staying Quiet–Kaitlyn Liu
(Re)Locating Soundscapes of Schooling: Learning to Listen to Children’s Lifeworlds–Cassie J. Brownell
If You Can Hear My Voice: A Beginner’s Guide to Teaching–Caroline Pinkston
Mukbang Cooks, Chews, and Heals – David Lee
SO! Podcast #80: Refugee Realities Miniseries–Steph Ceraso
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