Listening Across Borders: Migration, Dedications, and Affect

• In Event: The Ethnographic Effect: Imagining a Next Generation of Methodological Possibilities I

Abstract

How can one listen to immigration? What might it sound like? Where could we tune our ears to hear these stories? I explore how recorded performances of the diasporic Mexican music genre, cumbia sonidera (sound system cumbia), provide a mode of transmitting messages and creating sonic co-presence across national borders. At performances, audience members hand sonideros (DJs, literally “sounders”) slips of paper with dedications written on them and sometimes their mobile phones—which are on international calls to family members. Speaking through sonideros, the public calls out to absent loved-ones via baroquely, sentimental dubbed cumbia songs. Audiences send the recordings of these performances to family members named in the dedications thus creating sonic ways to remember, feel, and connect across borders. Saludos (salutations or dedications) trace an auditory archive of relations, migration, and feelings of longing, love, and homesickness for family and villages left behind.

I attune to the role of the acoustic in constituting immigrant lifeworlds through both conventional ethnographic approaches—interviewing and what Lila Abu-Lughod terms, “deep hanging out”—and more experimental listening-intensive methods—analyzing hundreds of dubbed cumbias and curating a music compilation of cumbia produced between Los Angeles and Mexico.

I contribute to discussions within STS through attending to how sonic technologies are creatively used to register emotion, and produce relations and memory across increasingly militarized and difficult-to-cross borders.

Author

• Alexandra Sharp Lippman, University of California, Davis