It is hard to define what the border sounds like. It is a complicated sonic imaginary: is it noisy? Are those sirens? Can you hear the conjunto playing next door? These questions, unequivocally, lead to deeper ones: Why are certain musical genres deemed as “noise” while others are not? What does it mean to be loud? And furthermore, how can we use music and community to fracture our relationship to white supremacy? Going back and forth between personal experience and theoretical approaches, this talk centers on placemaking through sound in the US border context from a Latinx perspective. I argue that soundmaking disrupts the logics of white supremacist borderlands as they attend to silence and quiet: volume and loudness become a tool of resistance for Latinx and immigrant communities that have been historically displaced and quieted down. To exemplify this reclamation of sound and space, I discuss my experience as a member of the Texas chapter of Chulita Vinyl Club, an all-womxn vinyl collective whose core mission is to reclaim our histories and take up space in a white-cis-male-dominated scene. I connect CVC’s mission to a broader discussion on immigrant sound through Alex E. Chávez’s concept “sounds of crossing”, which he defines as “sounds that cross the boundaries of both cultural and legal rationalities tethered to nation-states” (2017, 33). Understanding sound requires a type of thinking that dares to go beyond borders, whether geopolitical, symbolic, or physical; it invites us to embrace new temporalities and ways of being in the world. This talk will invite us all to reflect on sound and its possibilities, centering Latinx and immigrant joy as a powerful act of revolution.


Camila Torres Castro is a writer, DJ, and scholar from Guadalajara, México. She is assistant professor of Latin American literature and culture at Baruch College/CUNY. Her work focuses on contemporary Mexico, and her main fields of study are sound studies, film studies, and popular culture studies. A self-described noise enthusiast, she is also a vinyl collector and a national member of Chulita Vinyl Club.