Events

SYMPOSIUM: Texas-Mexico Crossings in Film and Music

Beautiful Borders: Texas-Mexico Crossings in Film and Music is a one-day symposium and film screening focusing on the unique role of music in Texas-Mexico border culture, to be held on February 26, 2026 on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The event is centered in a public screening of the 50th anniversary 4K restoration of the Les Blank/Chris Strachwitz film Chulas Fronteras (1976), paired with Del Mero Corazón (1979) at the Pollock Theater. The screening will be followed with a Q&A with Maureen Gosling (Assistant Editor of Chulas Fronteras and Director of Del Mero Corazón) and Juan Antonio Cuéllar (Archivist at Los Cenzontles Music and Art Academy), moderated by David Novak (Director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music). The film screening is preceded by an afternoon symposium during which Gosling and Cuéllar will be joined by Alex Chávez (musician/ anthropologist at Notre Dame and author of the award-winning book Sounds of Crossing), as well as a joint presentation by Monterrey-MX-based archivist and media producer Jorge Balleza of Sabotaje Media with Omar Lozano of Austin, TX label Trucha Soul on contemporary documentations of Texas-Mexico border music. The screening will be preceded by a performance of corridos by Gallo Armado (Monterrey, MX), with DJ sets by Balleza, Lozano and UCSB/KCSB alum Eduardo Camacho (Sonido Sapo) before and after the film screening. All events are free and open to the public. Seats are guaranteed with online ticket reservation at the Pollock Theater website.

 

Beautiful Borders is organized by the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music (CISM), with cosponsorship from the Carsey-Wolf Center, The College of Letters & Science, HFA Dean’s Office, Music Department, Ethnomusicology Forum, KCSB-FM and the Global Latinidades Project. 

  1. February 26, 2026 - 12:00am to 11:45pm
CISM in the Archive: Archive Khanah: Kurdish Media History and the Role of Cassettes in Iraq - Hardi Kurda (Goldsmiths, University of London, Music)

Archive Khanah, part of SPACE21 Sound Gallery in Slemani, is an experimental archival project exploring Kurdish cassette culture. Using colour organization and gaming, it challenges institutional archives by emphasizing community-driven preservation. By redefining media circulation, diasporic memory, and sonic history, it demonstrates how displaced communities rely on alternative media to sustain cultural continuity. The project not only reimagines Kurdish archival structures but also deepens our understanding of how media circulates within and beyond Kurdish communities.

 

 

 

  1. May 28, 2025 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm
SCREENING: Sisters with Transistors

Sisters with Transistors tells the remarkable untold story of the pioneering women who shaped electronic music, crafting the sounds and technologies that define the genre today. Narrated by Laurie Anderson, the film delves into the lives and work of trailblazing composers such as Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Pauline Oliveros, Wendy Carlos, Laurie Spiegel, and Suzanne Ciani, among others, whose experiments with early synthesizers, tape manipulation, and unconventional soundscapes pushed the boundaries of musical composition.

 

 

 

 

  1. May 6, 2025 - 7:00pm to 9:30pm
TALK: Sirius Musicology - Michael E. Veal (Yale University, Music)

This talk presents an exploration of Julius Hemphill’s seminal 1972 recording “Dogon AD,” in its relationship to the jazz avant-garde, Afrofuturism, and renegade notions of jazz theory. Professor Veal has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1998. A self-described “musical pan-Africanist,” Veal’s work has typically addressed musical topics within the black Atlantic cultural sphere of Africa and the African diaspora. His 2000 biography of the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti uses the life and music of this influential African musician to explore themes of African post-coloniality, the political uses of music in Africa, and musical and cultural interchange between cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.
 

  1. April 23, 2025 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm
TALK: The Afterlives of Sound: Memory, Ethnography, and the Borderlands - Alex E. Chávez (University of Notre Dame, Anthropology)

An immersive poetic and musical passage, Alex E. Chávez’s Sonorous Present extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and memory across America’s borderlands—as physical place and liminal space. What began as an experimental and improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing—was subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores, and features luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son and jazz—including, Aloe Blacc (2015 Grammy Award-nominee), Martha Gonzalez (2022 MacArthur Fellow), and Roger Reeves (Guggenheim fellow, National Book Award finalist, and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Griffin Poetry Prize recipient).

  1. April 16, 2025 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm