Sonic Strategies - (Critical Mexican Studies) by Christina Baker

About the Book

How the use of sound in twenty-first-century Mexican theater and performance transmits experiences of living in a nation at war

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Marcia Herndon Prize (Gender and Sexualities Studies Section), Society for Ethnomusicology, 2024

In Sonic Strategies, author Christina Baker highlights the tactics employed by contemporary performance artists in Mexico in response to the violence surrounding the nation's War on Drugs. The introduction opens with a description of the 2007 reenactment of the Grito, or "cry," of independence, a moment fraught with sonic sparring, setting the stage for how each subsequent chapter focuses on themes related to war and violence. Each chapter focuses on the works of one or more performance artist, and taken together, the case studies illuminate how critiques of the nation's rising death tolls, governmental corruption, and gendered violence very literally sound, whether in Música de balas, a post-dramatic piece by Hugo Salcedo; the lamentations of the nation's Antigones in works by Violeta Luna and Lukas Avendaño; satirical revisions of Mexican Golden Age film in the cabaret piece Nosotras las proles; or the story of transfeminicide in César Enríquez's La Prietty Guoman by way of US pop music.

Written in an accessible style grounded in theater studies but interdisciplinary by design, Sonic Strategies will appeal to literary critics, students, musicologists, and theater and performance scholars alike. By paying close attention to planned and spontaneous sounds within live and textual experiences, Sonic Strategies contends that conscientious listening reveals dynamic practices that reside beyond the linguistic and embodied gesture.

Review Quotes

"Sonic Strategies offers a stunning account of Mexico City's vibrant soundscapes in the post-2006 context of violence, feminicide, and the nation's war against drugs. Establishing bridges between musicology, sound studies, ethnomusicology, and theater, Baker focuses on the strategies artists use to bear auditory witness and create communities of resistance, survival, mourning, and care."
--Brenda Werth, author of Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina

"Christina Baker's book is an engaging exploration of contemporary theater and performance artists in Mexico that brings to the fore the centrality of sound in their efforts to respond to the multiple forms of violence impacting life--and death--in the country since the 2006 declaration of a War on Drugs."
--Sarah J. Townsend, author of The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil

"Complementing the analysis of the dominant and, to a certain extent, unavoidable scopic regimes through which Mexico's troubles and social ills since the War on Drugs have been witnessed, Sonic Strategies focuses on the diverse sonic production without which spectacular and senseless violence would be experienced more like an extended silent horror movie. In Baker's fascinating study, musical and aural assemblages not only reveal deep causal connections to the dark scenarios that she convincingly describes as 'a country in war with itself, ' but also to the vital channels of collective sense-making and resistance provided by cultural producers in both Mexico and diasporic Mexico, who call attention to the transformative political and aesthetic potential of music and performance. "
--Ignacio Corona, co-editor of Gender Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border: Media Representation and Public Response

"Christina Baker's expertly researched Sonic Strategies reminds readers to listen for violence. Baker uses aural registers to uncover what is hidden, destroyed, manipulated, or made invisible through political, gendered, and narco practices. Baker's fresh approach to bodies performing, emitting, absorbing, refracting, and reacting to sound as violence displaces the visual and gestural for new sensorial understanding, if we are willing to listen."
--Sarah M. Misemer, author of Theatrical Topographies: Spatial Crises in Uruguayan Theater Post-2001

About the Author

Christina Baker is an assistant professor of Latin/x American theater and performance at Temple University.