Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Listening across borders: migration, dedications, and voice in cumbia sonidera

2018; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/25729861.2018.1497273

2572-9861

Alexandra Lippman,

Music History and Culture

During performances of cumbia sonidera, a Mexican style of music with roots in Colombia's northwest, sonideros (DJs) recite names of people and places over the music. Fans hand slips of paper, hold signs, or send text messages for the DJ to read. Speaking through sonideros' voice, the public calls out to loved-ones via songs dubbed with dedications. Audiences send the recordings on CD or, increasingly, links to the Facebook Live stream of the performances to family members named in the dedications. Saludos (salutations) trace an auditory archive of relations, migration, and feelings of love and longing for people and places. I attune to the role of sound in constituting Mexican and Mexican-American lives through both established ethnographic approaches and more experimental forms of "doing anthropology in sound" [Feld, Steven, and Donald Brenneis. 2004. Doing Anthropology in Sound. American Ethnologist 31 (4): 461–474] – by curating and producing a compilation of border-crossing cumbia produced between Los Angeles and Mexico. How does the circulation of recorded sound – intensely layered music – provide ways for sensing, remembering, honoring, and conveying emotional messages across borders? I attend to how sonic technologies are creatively used to convey emotion, relations, and memory to produce co-presence across increasingly militarized borders.