Chávez, Alex E. 2017. Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Alex Chávez’s bold and engaging study of huapango arribeño in the everyday lives of Mexican migrants fills a void in anthropological and ethnomusicological scholarship. Based on his 2010 dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin, Sounds of Crossing is an anthropologically based study of how lived politics informs performance in the poetic genre of huapango arribeño, an understudied musical form that originated in the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Querétaro, and San Luis Potosí. Chávez argues that huapango arribeño is crucial in meeting everyday needs for intimacy, place, and belonging—“beyond culture, beyond illegality, and irrespective of geography; through it postnational subjectivities are fashioned and necessary, aquí (here), not allá (out there)” (54). His book includes colorful photographs from the everyday lives of performers and poignant transcriptions of conversations and songs, as well as musical notation—all of which add to his ethnography’s depth and multiplicity, reaffirming his argument that his book is not so much the study of huapango arribeño as an object but as “an analytical lens into the contemporary experiences of Mexican migrants” (34). Sounds of Crossing is teeming with moments of intimacy, and a genuine attention to humanity—a trait that is seldom associated with the lives of Mexican migrants in the United States. The book articulates a theoretical network of affect, semiotics, voice, and place through the scholarship of Américo Paredes, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kathleen Stewart, and José Limón to name a few. Chávez positions himself among these scholars with the assertion that the material enactment of voicing takes place. Voicing, he says, “constructs mattering maps that represent the ways social actors move through the world, or desire to do so” (8). Sounds of Crossing crosses back and forth over the border, from Xichú to Austin, from San Luis Potosí to Tennessee, and takes shape around the individuals who sing, perform, and enjoy huapango arribeño—the stories of their lives, the politics that have inspired their lyrics, the clever and metalinguistic ways in which huapangueros, or the troubadours, build discourse throughout the course of a night, the interactions between huapangueros and the audience, and the ways in which huapangueros create an aural space with a sense of purpose and dignity. Chávez transcribes the back and forth compositions of particular performances with precision to show