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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Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2024!
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What. A. Year. Thank you to all of the amazing thinkers who generously shared their writing with us during rough waters worldwide. During those times when our work feels like we’re screaming underwater, it’s especially important that we’re still out here making waves. A special shout out in gratitude to our readers, who are listening even harder during our 15th year, and rocking the boat along with us into 2025. –JS, Ed-in-Chief
Here, beginning with number 10, are our Top 10 posts released in 2024 (as of 12/19/24)!
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A Conversation by Todd Craig and LeBrandon Smith
What is it? The braids?–Kendrick Lamar, “Euphoria”
After a much-anticipated wait, Kendrick dropped “Euphoria.” It not only stopped Hip Hop culture in its tracks, but it allowed all spectators to realize this was gearing up to be an epic battle. The song starts with the backwards Richard Pryor sample from the iconic film The Wiz. For those unfamiliar, The Wiz is a film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz featuring an all-Black star-studded cast, including Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Richard Pryor played the role of the Wizard. When the characters realize the Wizard is a fraud, he says, “Everything they say about me is true”; this is the sample Kendrick uses, grounding himself in 1970s Black culture and situating where he plans to go in his writing.
[Click here to read more]
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A Conversation by Todd Craig and LeBrandon Smith
“By now, it’s safe to say very few people have not caught wind of the biggest Hip-Hop battle of the 21st century: the clash between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Whether you’ve seen the videos, the memes or even smacked a bunch of owls around playing the video game, this battle grew beyond Hip Hop, with various facets of global popular culture tapped in, counting down minutes for responses and getting whiplash with the speed of song drops. There are multiple ways to approach this event. We’ve seen inciteful arguments about how these two young Black males at the pinnacle of success are tearing one another down. We also acknowledge Hip Hop’s long legacy of battling; the culture has always been a ‘competitive sport’ that includes ‘lyrical sparring.'”
[Click here to read more]
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(8).Technologies of Communal Listening: Resonance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
By Harry Burson
“In both sound studies and the sonic arts, the concept of ‘resonance‘ has increasingly played a central role in attuning listeners to the politics of sound. The term itself is borrowed from acoustics, where resonance simply refers to the transfer of energy between two neighboring objects. For example, plucking a note on one guitar string will cause the other strings to vibrate at a similar frequency. When someone or something makes a sound, everything in the immediate environs—objects, people, the room itself—will respond with sympathetic vibrations. Simply put, in acoustics, resonance describes a sonic connection between sounding objects and their environment. In the arts, the concept of resonance emphasizes the situated existence of sound as a transformative encounter between bodies in a particular time and place. Resonance has become a key term to think through how sound creates a listening community, a transitory assemblage whose reverberations may be felt beyond a single moment of encounter.
For its recent performance series, simply called Resonance, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago drew on this generative concept by bringing together four artists who explore sound as an “introspective force for greater understanding, compassion, and change.” Curated by Tara Aisha Willis and Laura Paige Kyber, the series builds on theories of resonance as an affective relationship between sounding bodies developed by writers and artists like Sonia Louis Davis, Karen Christopher, and Birgit Abels. . .”
[Click here to read more]
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(7). Sonic Homes: The Sonic/Racial Intimacy of Black and Brown Banda Music in Southern California
by Sara Veronica Hinojos and Alex Mireles
“Sarah La Morena (Sarah the Black woman), or Sarah Palafox, was adopted and raised by a Mexican family in Mexico. At the age of five, she moved to Riverside, California, a predominantly Mexican city an hour east of Compton. Palafox started singing as a way to express the racism she faced as a child in Southern California, feeling caught between her Black appearance and her Mexican sound. She found her voice in church, a nurturing environment where she could be herself, surrounded by her family’s love. She gained attention with a viral video of her rendition of Jenni Rivera’s “Que Me Vas a Dar.” Palafox delivers each note with profound emotion and precision, leaving even the accompanying mariachi violinist in awe. . .”
[Click here to read more]
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(6). Echoes of the Latent Present: Listening to Lags, Delays, and Other Temporal Disjunctions
—by Matthew Tomkinson
“Sometime last year, during a recent deep clean of the apartment, I pulled out a wooden chest that my father built for me when I was ten, a pine-scented time capsule of that period of my life, full of assorted construction-paper projects and faded movie tickets. Buried underneath all this loose paper, set apart by a shiny laminated cover, is the first “novel” I ever wrote, our final project in fourth grade, which was really just a few typed pages folded and stapled together, held between a cardstock cover. In this book, I write about a mall janitor with magic powers, who uses his mop handle to transform villains into piles of fabric, and who time travels throughout history by way of a magic corvette (clearly, I had just seen a certain Robert Zemeckis film).
Having rediscovered this story, I am struck by the realization that my writerly voice has hardly changed. I am still drawn to the same hokey surrealism, the same comic book sensibilities, the same spirit of hand-stapled publishing projects. This is to say: I could not help but to identify in this proto-novel traces of my work to come, early impulses that echo throughout my present practice. As Lisa Robertson puts it in an interview: “Defunct forms resurface after years of latency. New work speaks with old work, as well as with the future.”.”
[Click here to read more]
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by Emily Collins
“When the COVID-19 global pandemic began, news reports and studies throughout the world began citing a lot of sound-based statistics: drastic reductions in noise pollution in urban centres, AI recordings of cellphone coughs, shifting soundscapes at home with new routines and work settings, and sonic sensitivities cultivated in quarantine and isolation. At the same time, in conjunction with these new research studies and areas of interest, there was an outpouring of calls for sound recordings and contributions to digital archival sound projects, such as Sounds of Pandemia, the Pandemic Diaries project, Sound of the Earth: The Pandemic Chapter, Sounds like a Pandemic? (SLAP?), and Stories from a Pandemic, just to name a few. A perceptive post by Sarah Mayberry Scott (2021)outlines the stakes for these types of initiatives grounded in a particular yet ever-changing historical moment, and the stakes of listening (in its attentiveness) and sound (in its persuasive power) more broadly, though undoubtably mediated and defined by power relations in their various social and the cultural contexts. . .”
[Click here to read more]
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—(4). Wingsong: Restricting Sound Access to Spotted Owl Recordings
by Julianne Graper
“I am not a board games person, yet I always seem to find myself surrounded by them. Such was the case one August evening in 2023, during a round of the bird-watching-inspired game, Wingspan. Released in 2019 by Stonemaier Games, designer Elizabeth Hargrave’s creation is credited with a dramatic shift in the board game industry. The game received an unparalleled number of awards, including the prestigious 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres (Connoisseur Game of the Year), and an unheard of seven categories of the Golden Geek Awards, including Best Board Game of the Year and Best Family Board Game of the Year. In addition to causing shifts in typical board game topic, artistry, and demographic, Wingspan has led many board game fans to engage with the natural world in new ways, even inspiring many to become avid birders.
Following the game’s rise to popularity, developer Marcus Nerger released an app, Wingsong which allows players to scan each of the beautifully illustrated cards and play a recording of the associated bird’s song. On the evening in question, the unexpected occurred when I scanned the Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis) card and received a message that read:
Playback of this birds[sic] song is restricted. . .”
[Click here to read more]
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—(3). Rhetoric After Sound: Stories of Encountering “The Hum” Phenomenon
by Trent Wintermeier
“‘So I have heard The Hum… The rest of what I’m about to tell you is beyond reasoning, and understanding.” Here, in a Reddit post, Michael A. Sweeney prefaces their story of their first encounter with “the hum,” an unexplained phenomenon heard by only a small percentage of listeners around the world. The hum is an ominous sonic event that impacts communities from Australia to India, Scotland to the United States. And as Geoff Leventhall writes in “Low Frequency Noise: What We Know, What We Do Not Know, and What We Would Like to Know,” the hum causes “considerable problems” for people across the globe—such as nausea, headaches, fatigue, and muscle pain—as it continues to be an unsolved “acoustic mystery” (94). . .”
[Click here to read more]
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(2). Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre
by Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas
“The announcer’s piercing “lucharaaaaaán” cries from the middle of the ring proclaims the constitutional two-out-of-three-falls rule of lucha libre. But before the famous cry rings out to set the stage for the spectacularized acrobatic combat between costumed warriors, their theatrical entrances set the all-important emotional stakes of the battle. The entrances are loud, campy, interactive exchanges between luchadores and spectators. An entrance song itself cues the luchador’s persona: a cumbia could signal a técnico (a good guy); a heavy metal song more than likely indicates a rudo (a bad guy) typically donning black, death-themed getups. Luchadores saunter into the arena, stopping to pose, high five their fans, and verbally heckle their opponents. The storylines of good versus evil, betrayal and revenge, or humility versus arrogance are some of the more standard plots that motivate spectators to adamantly cheer for the favorite and jeer for the foe.
The sonic exchanges between luchadores’ and spectators before, during, and after the fight positions lucha libre as much more than a sport. And while the term spectators, suggests the privileged act of watching or viewing; here, we expand spectators within lucha libre arena to mean “a call to witness” (á la Chela Sandoval). Put simply, lucha libre is a cultural phenomenon where contemporary cultural, social, and political anxieties are often tapped as fodder for theatrical plots. In the U.S./Mexico’s sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the political realities of border enforcement, immigration politics, and racial tensions are loudly heard and placed on display. . .”
[Click here to read more]
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(1). to follow an invisible creek: in search of a decolonial soundwalk praxis
by ameia camielle smith
“in the context of the rapid rise of big tech in san francisco, california, the perspective of land as perpetually exploitable is ever-present. tech-sponsored development projects are always framed by the city as being motivated by care and consideration for residents, and sometimes as being motivated by environmentalism. in reality, the displacement and destruction that results from projects like these falls primarily on poor people of color, and their homes, gardens, businesses, community spaces, and schools. similarly, large-scale development projects more often than not have devastating impacts on the land – whether it’s the land that’s being built over or the sacrifice zone elsewhere. perhaps the electric cars of san francisco are thought to represent clean energy and a healthy modern city, but the manufacturing of these cars is predicated upon extensive mining and exploitative and extractive labor outside far outside the city’s borders. and these cars drive over flattened creeks and sand dunes turned to asphalt—through gentrified neighborhoods on stolen land of the Ramaytush Ohlone, people who are still alive and fighting for sovereignty on their traditional territory, and who remain stewards of the land.
these disparities are present in the sounds of the bay area. sound, quite literally, does not exist in a vacuum. the presence of sound thus implies the presence of something outside of that sound; in every sound we hear, there is also information about the context that surrounds it. and the sounds that we do hear say something about the value of the sounds that we don’t. however, i want to argue for a soundwalking praxis that does not settle for the sounds that most easily reach the ear, as in the freeway noise or the planes passing above or the white people on the street, but that reaches beyond to listen for the negative sonic space that is always present and creating itself in the spaces between what we perceive as audible. in my understanding, this is a practice of giving life to that which capitalism/white supremacy/colonialism renders dead, a practice of centering the life that is otherwise stepped on, forgotten, discarded, silenced. listening for the ecologies of the dispossessed. for proof of life, insisting. this is a decolonial soundwalk praxis. . .”
[Click here to read more]
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Featured Image “underwater scream” by Flickr User Smellslikeupdog CC BY-ND 2.0
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2023!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2020-2022!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2019!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2018!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2017!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2016!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2015!
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