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). Through integration of a range of scholarly disciplines and communities of artistic practice, this multi-modal scholarly work uniquely integrates an epic spectrum of regional Mexican and Latin American sonic elements with jazz, poetry, dance, field recordings, and ethnographic songwriting that crosses the sunburst surreal of America’s musical and cultural borderlands, and refigures the borders of both performance and intellectual engagement—strategically reimagining what a studio album should sound like, what live performance should accomplish, and what forms scholarship should take.

Bio

Scholar-artist-producer, Alex E. Chávez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. His research explores articulations of Latinx sounds and aurality in relation to race, place-making, and the intimacies that bind lives across physical and cultural borders. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke University Press, 2017)—recipient of three book awards, including the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018)—and has published in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of American Folklore, Latino Studies, and Latin American Music Review.

He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of academic research and publicly engaged work as an artist and producer. Chávez has recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores for Emmy Award-winning films, worked closely with Smithsonian Folkways, and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated artists.

He is co-editor of the volume Ethnographic Refusals / Unruly Latinidades (2022), which grows out of an Advanced Seminar he co-chaired at the School for Advanced Research, and the recently published special issue in American Anthropologist entitled, Amplify. A Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, in 2020 he was named one of ten Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. His current book project—Sound City: Place, Poiesis, Xicago—is forthcoming through Duke University Press. He currently serves on the Board of Governors of the Chicago Chapter of the Recording Academy (Grammys).

Organized by the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music, cosponsored by Anthropology, Chicana/o Studies, Ethnomusicology Forum, and Global Latinidades.