Silence, Swagger, and Sound: Jotería Listening as a Method of Unforgetting

• In Event: Historicizing Los Angeles : Envisioning New Educational Futures in Latinx Radical Imaginations

Abstract

Omi Salas-SantaCruz draws on jotería listening, a concept developed by Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr. (2021) in the context of queer Latinx nightlife displaced by gentrification in Los Angeles, to inform an educational methodology rooted in the sonic. Alvarez conceptualizes sound not just as aesthetic, but as a political practice of unforgetting, a way queer subjects call forth erased spatial and affective geographies. Extending this to education, Salas-SantaCruz listens for the reverberations of displacement, refusal, and survival within schools—through hallway banter, silences, laughter, and echoes of terquedad—as sonic traces of how queer and trans Latinx youth resist the normative architectures of schooling. In doing so, jotería listening becomes a method for recovering what educational institutions work to forget.

Author

• Omi Salas-SantaCruz, University of Utah