Sonorous Present: Songs of Border Crossings, Sunrises, and Mournings - An evening of music and storytelling

• Event Date: Thursday, October 8, 2026
• Time: 4:00 pm–5:30 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL

• Performance

An immersive poetic and musical passage, Alex E. Chávez’s critically-acclaimed album Sonorous Present extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and memory across America’s borderlands as physical place and liminal space. What began as an experimental and improvised performance—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s multi-award-winning book

Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke 2017—was subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores featuring luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, poetry, and jazz. This presentation is an intimate and immersive dive into select compositions featured on Sonorous Present and which will highlight both personal stories and research behind the compositions, in addition to discussion about the production process.

Artist Bio:

Scholar-artist-producer, Alex E. Chávez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. His research explores articulations of Latinx sounds and aurality in relation to race, place-making, and the intimacies that bind lives across physical and cultural borders. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke University Press, 2017)—recipient of three book awards, including the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018)—and has published widely, including in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of American Folklore, Latino Studies, and Latin American Music Review.

He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of academic research and publicly engaged work as an artist and producer. Chávez has recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores for Emmy Award-winning films, worked closely with Smithsonian Folkways, and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated artists.

He is co-editor of the volume Ethnographic Refusals / Unruly Latinidades (2022), which grows out of an Advanced Seminar he co-chaired at the School for Advanced Research, and the recently published special issue in American Anthropologist entitled, Amplify. A Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, in 2020 he was named one of ten Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. His current book project—Sound City—is forthcoming through Duke University Press. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Recording Academy (Grammys).