Audible Ancestors

Explores how Nahua musical performance and histories in Mexico and the United States are generated, challenged, and maintained by examining danza performance as a cultural artifact. 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.