Winner of the Marcia Herndon Prize (Gender and Sexualities Studies Section), Society for Ethnomusicology, 2024

In Sonic Strategies, author Christina Baker highlights the tactics employed by contemporary performance artists in Mexico in response to the violence surrounding the nation’s War on Drugs. The introduction opens with a description of the 2007 reenactment of the Grito, or “cry,” of independence, a moment fraught with sonic sparring, setting the stage for how each subsequent chapter focuses on themes related to war and violence. Each chapter focuses on the works of one or more performance artist, and taken together, the case studies illuminate how critiques of the nation’s rising death tolls, governmental corruption, and gendered violence very literally sound, whether in Música de balas, a post-dramatic piece by Hugo Salcedo; the lamentations of the nation’s Antigones in works by Violeta Luna and Lukas Avendaño; satirical revisions of Mexican Golden Age film in the cabaret piece Nosotras las proles; or the story of transfeminicide in César Enríquez’s La Prietty Guoman by way of US pop music.

Written in an accessible style grounded in theater studies but interdisciplinary by design, Sonic Strategies will appeal to literary critics, students, musicologists, and theater and performance scholars alike. By paying close attention to planned and spontaneous sounds within live and textual experiences, Sonic Strategies contends that conscientious listening reveals dynamic practices that reside beyond the linguistic and embodied gesture.