Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez
Date:
Thursday, September 28th, 2017
Time and Location:
2:00-3:30pm, Waters Room, Zimmerman Library
Lecture Title:
Imagining Something Better: Punk, Tejano, La Bamba, and Other Rolas from My Border Hi-Fi
Description:
With a focus on narrative soundscapes from borderlands communities, this presentation reflects on the ways that music —in particular, Chicana/o punk— can examine complicity, entanglement and compromise in relation to nation, identity, migration and globalization.
Unrepentant border crosser, writer, ex-dj, and academic. Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez is an Associate Professor of US Southwestern Literatures, and Creative Writing in the Department of Spanish, and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. Has lectured and taught at universities across the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Author of four collections of short stories, Algún día te cuento las cosas que he visto (2012), Luego el silencio (2014), One Day I’ll Tell You the Things I’ve Seen (2015), and En el Lost ‘n Found (2016). His academic work focuses on US Latino cultural expression, and US/Mexico border cultures.
An Americanish Songbook: Linda Ronstadt’s “other” Country
This talk will consider performances and recordings by singer Linda Ronstadt to propose what I refer to as her Americanish musical songbook. The suffix “ish” here intends to accentuate the “somewhat” or “to some extent” of “American” that Ronstadt—Tucson born and raised—lived and sonically imagined through her extraordinary musical career.
Arab Musicking on the U.S.–Mexico Border
This talk explores the relationship between trauma and identity by examining Arab music performance on the U.S.–Mexico border. Drawing on the musicking of Syrian and Mexican migrant communities, I interrogate theories of cultural and psychological trauma and borderland epistemologies to explore how border tensions influence the often-fraught views of identity.
Music from the Americas presents The Low Frequency Trio
Formed by Antonio Rosales (bass clarinet), Juan José García (doublebass), and José Luis Hurtado (piano), LOW FREQUENCY TRIO is one of the few ensembles in the world that plays music that was exclusively composed for them.