Published works

My book with friend and collaborator Dan Margolies, entitled ¡Maldito Coronavirus!: Mapping Latin American Musical Responses to the Pandemic Moment, was released in August 2024. The book conceptualizes the ways in which locally-contingent compositions addressed a global public health crisis.

My forthcoming article, "Buscando Guaguancó: Genre Naming, Race Aesthetics, and the Resignification of a Folkloric Form (1918 – 2023)", will appear in American Music. This piece traces the historical and discursive evolution of guaguancó as a musical genre, exploring its racialized aesthetic frameworks and the tensions between folklore and innovation in contemporary practice.

I recently contributed a Spanish-language prologue to A pesar del tiempo: sones de Carnaval en el violín huasteco de Fidencio Ramírez, a monograph by my friend and colleague Raquel Paraíso published by Editorial Universidad Veracruzana. The prologue situates Fidencio Ramírez’s musical legacy within the broader landscape of Huastecan violin traditions, highlighting his role in the endurance and transformation of regional repertoire.

I recently co-authored "Stories Told, Stories Heard: Takeaways from the 2022 Texas Folklife Community Folklife Fellowship" with my friend and collaborator Jeannelle Ramirez for Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. The article reflects on the participatory methodologies employed in a community-based oral history fellowship and considers the stakes of independent folklife documentation in Texas. It draws extensively from our experience producing these podcasts, and we presented our findings alongside some of our Folklife Fellows at the American Folklore Society’s 2024 meeting.

Writing with Daniel Margolies, the early findings from our research on COVID and music in the Latin American context, as well as some of the seeds of what developed into my dissertation project, were published in the Journal of Music, Health, and Wellbeing; Frontiers in Psychology; and the edited collection Sounds of the Pandemic: Accounts, Experiences, Perspectives in Times of COVID-19. This work considers how digital improvisation and online performances shaped new forms of musical community in the Huasteca region during the pandemic. The piece explores how technology-mediated musicking fostered social bonds, emotional wellbeing, and novel participatory aesthetics.

I co-authored "Portraits-in-Place from the Sotavento: A Photo-Dialogue between Abraham Bosque and J.A. Strub" with photographer Abraham Ávila Quintero for eTropic. This piece reflects on his visual documentation of the Sotavento region, exploring the interplay of ecology, vernacular music, and place-making through a dialogic lens.

My exhibit review, "Ilustrando Música del Gran Caribe: Alec Dempster - Gráfica Sonoridad: La música en su obra gráfica 2006-2021", was published in Caribbean Conjunctures. This piece examines Alec’s visual representations of Caribbean musical cultures, discussing his approach to musical memory, graphic storytelling, and the relationship between sound and image. Alec, a friend and collaborator, also designed the cover of ¡Maldito Coronavirus! and the poster image for the Encuentro de Saberes y Sabores de la Huasteca.