I am an ethnographer and anthropologist of music from Mexico City. My work deals with the intercalations of music, difference, and power in Latin America and, broadly speaking, with the politics of sound. I think about the ways music reveals latent registers of feeling, sense, and history; and sound’s intersections with media and technology, law and governance, movement and migration, faith and cosmology, and other dimensions of social life. My long-term ethnographic research commitments are in Michoacán, Mexico. I also work in Mexico City and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
My first book project, entitled Pirekua’s Traces, is an ethnography of Indigenous P’urhépecha music and the political machinations of liberal multiculturalism in contemporary Mexico. Specifically, the book takes pirekua, a P’urhépecha-language song form from Michoacán, as an entryway to understand the ways in which the weight of multicultural governance is experienced and inhabited by subjects marked as Indigenous. The project traces pirekua through many histories and conflicts: debates over nationalism and patrimony; concerns over increasing cartel and political violence; ongoing ecological degradation; and the ways in which Indigenous “culture” has been taken up within a culture of global capital. Broadly put, the book is an account of power and the shapes it takes in Indigenous Mexico, and about the production of social difference and indigeneity in multicultural states.
Beyond this book, I am pursuing several ethnographic and historical projects grounded in my work in Mexico. My second monograph project called Blood and Cinder is a wide-ranging ethnographic study of popular music/media and cartel violence in western Mexico. Thinking with the massive popularity of so-called “bellicose” music (corrido tumbado and banda) in Mexico and beyond, this project asks how rural subjects experience the contradictions of the “war of drugs.” Other ongoing projects include a historical study of voice and juridical thought in Mexico; an ethnography of music and P’urhépecha migration to and from the US; (with Sofia Lesur Kastelein) an ethnography of public gossip around insecurity and corruption in Mexico City; and (with Jacob Reed) a musical history of anthropological theory from the inceptions of American anthropology.=
Much of this work has been animated by an interest in the multimodal possibilities of sound-based ethnographic research, and I am working on several short-form documentary videos and photography projects that accompany my written ones. My work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Tinker Foundation, among others. In the past, I have published on 19th-century Brazilian opera and on contemporary protest sounds in Rio de Janeiro. I also have a longstanding intellectual investment in whales and salamanders.
I joined the faculty at Berkeley in 2025, where I teach on a range of topics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Before then, I received my PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. In a past life, I was a professional musician living and working in Atlanta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. I’ve performed, toured, and recorded in a variety of genres (jazz, pop, rock, K-pop) with artists from the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Korea. I grew up between Mexico City and Detroit.
Publications
2024 “‘So Let’s Bang on Some Pots’: Sound, Intimacy, and the Public Life of Affect in Brazil’s Panelaços.” Ethnomusicology 68 (3): 458-481.
2023 “Brazil on the World Stage: Carlos Gomes’ Colombo, the First Republic, and Brazil’s Cosmopolitan Desires.” Journal for Latin American Cultural Studies 32 (1): 83-107.