In Mexico, musicians have had to negotiate issues of social justice and violence, both symbolic and physical, during much of the twentieth century and through the present day. Musical products and performances in this context participate in a complex, transhistorical process of coding and recoding notions of violence within issues of cultural and state legitimacy. In this book project, entitled Sounding Violence: Music, Politics, and the Idea of Justice in Mexico, I explore in what ways do notions of violence and death emerge as an ever-changing, yet familiar part of culture? I am interested in exploring how violence contributes to the rupture of the presumed social contract while providing continuity to an assimilated and interiorized state of violence, and how violence becomes a specter that haunts Mexican society, where the notion of “aftermath” is never only an “after” but a process of continual emergence, a liminality in which people must relearn how to live their everyday lives. I am particularly interested in how a quotidian activity such as listening to music or attending a concert merges with such liminality. Lastly, I aim to articulate how music and musicians contribute to the structures that enable death and violence to become a continued reality, and where stories of massacres, disappearances, and violent encounters become themes, re-coded tales and motifs from which cultural products derive, produce, and negotiate value.
