Overview

Audible Ancestors provides a new understanding of music performance and the inheritance of Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies in Greater Mexico. By examining the audibility of Indigenous ancestry in the negotiation of Mexican subjectivities through danza performance, author Luis Chávez-González amplifies muted Caxcan Indigeneity rooted in the sounds of Regional Mexican music through tamborazo-Zacatecano, a drum-centered style originating from northcentral Mexico. Based on extensive musical ethnographic research between the US/Mexico border, this book offers an inter-musicological depth to Indigenous sound studies, Indigenous performativity, self-determination, decolonizing methodologies, and borderlands research. This new research considers Indigenous sonic cartographies that continue to that defy erasure amidst US and Mexican colonial normative paradigms by musically crossing, re-crossing, and reimagining place and belonging.

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Reviews

Audible Ancestors is an exemplary study of how ceremonial music and dance articulate and sustain Indigenous continuity across colonial and national borders. Through meticulous ethnography, theoretical rigor, and profound ethical care, Luis Chávez-González reveals how tamborazo grooves, song, and tastuán dance performances function as technologies of memory, sovereignty, and situated knowledge. Bridging ethnomusicology, Native American studies, and Borderlands theory, the author advances the concept of 'sovereign acoustemology' to show how music renders Indigenous ancestry audible—and therefore susceptible to be felt—across Mexico and its diaspora. Eclectic, yet cohesive in method, the book will appeal to scholars interested in decoloniality and to readers seeking to understand how musical sounds mediate history, migration, and Indigenous self-determination in Mexico, the United States, and beyond. * Juan Diego Díaz, Associate Professor of Music, University of California, Davis, USA * In Audible Ancestors, Chávez-González dances and sings an important contemporary contribution to Indigenous studies of sound and movement into being, refusing colonial assumptions and reframing a brilliant interdisciplinary group of influences to amplify Tamborazo music, dance, and memory. * John-Carlos Perea, Chair of Ethnomusicology, University of Washington, USA *

Author Information

Luis Chávez-González is a postdoctoral fellow at Bard College, USA. He is an interdisciplinary musician and scholar whose research bridges music and sound with narrative performance by focusing on the expression of danza, fiesta, and Indigenous self-determination in the Americas. Other research interests include Indigenous research methodologies and ways of knowing, Nahua history and culture, and Native language revitalization (Nahuatl). He is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and the Arts.

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