The Latin American 19th-century Literature Division and Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment has selected for a collaborative session titled “Soundscapes of Latin America’s Long 19th-century: Soundscapes of Travel and Resistance” four presentations that focus on the ways in which sounds were encoded and produced through travelogues, novels, sketches of manners and phonographs to produce exclusions and resistance in turn of the century Mexico and Argentina. The four papers proposed visit different texts and archives —US travelogues to Mexico, Argentinian phonograph recordings, social novels and short stories— to evaluate sound and its representations as a conduit to produce unified -or dismembered- sonic portrayals of the nation, the Latin American region and the American hemisphere. By placing recordings alongside canonical and non-canonical literary texts, as well as US travelogues to Latin America, this collaborative session crosses over borders and questions national boundaries from a stand point rarely taken by literary and cultural studies from a hemispheric approach: sound as represented as an inventor of commonalities —shared affectivities and places— but also, built on that, a political energy that excludes —Afro-Argentines, Indigenous Mexicans- from the share soundscapes of the nation, region, hemisphere.

This is a panel that works in tandem with another titled “Soundscapes of Work and Nation”. Both compose a dialogue on Sound Studies in Latin America with an ecocritical bent, as they explore how sound shaped landscape production during Post-Independence and until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. More broadly the two panels focus on new political organizations emerging from wars and social conflict produced (and responded to) new structures of feeling. Sounds, noises, voices and music emerging from new political realities —republicanism, abolitionism, civil war— and technological advancements —trains, steam boats, phonographs— changed also the ways in which landscapes and texts were represented, felt and consumed in the region. In dialogue with the field of Sound Studies, this double panel dwells on the multiple forms in which sound traversed and shaped the literatures and cultures of the long 19th century in Latin America, from the representation of the voice to the sounds of modernization passing through the deafening silences of the sublime or the hum of the dead.

In the first of the four panel presentation of “Soundscapes of Travel and Resistance”, “Mexican Soundscapes through the Ears of U.S. American Travel Writers in the Late Nineteenth Century”, Sara Lucía Hernández Angulo (PhD Candidate Washington U at St. Louis) analyzes the unedited travel writing pieces of Irene Wright and Owen Wallace about Mexico in the turn of the 19th century. In her presentation she will delve into the representations of Mexican soundscapes, paying special attention to the transcription of indigenous voices and the racial-temporal imaginaries constructed through them. Her exploration aims to reflect upon the interconnections/ruptures of visual and aural imaginaries in the period. This critical exploration establishes a dialogue with scholarship on the politics of visual representation in late-nineteenth-century Mexico and the traveler’s gaze in order to incorporate the oft-overlooked aural dimension into the discussion and reflect upon the interconnections/ruptures of visual and aural imaginaries in the period.

In the second presentation, “Early Phonographic Culture and the Sonic Staging of Blackness in Argentina”, Rodrigo Viqueira (PhD Candidate Washington U at St. Louis) focus on the performing duo “Los Gobbi” –formed by the couple Alfredo Eusebio Gobbi and Flora Rodríguez de Gobbi– to reflect on the connection between sound media, racial narratives, and popular culture in early twentieth-century Argentina. With this repertoire, the duo reshaped practices and traditions from nineteenth-century entertainment culture -theater, carnival, circus, popular literature- and turned them into aural commodities integrated into the new phonographic culture that was burgeoning at the time. In other words, their records represented and shaped the soundscape of Argentine popular culture at the turn of the century. Among these records, “Los Gobbi”
recorded comic scenes and songs that staged the voices of Black characters, participating in the long tradition of performing linguistic blackface. It will explore how voices recorded by “Los Gobbi” staged Blackness, analyzing their ambivalent relationship with the official discourses of the period that presented Argentina as racially white and ethnically European.

The third presentation by Julio Enriquez-Ornelas, Visiting Associate Professor of Spanish at Wabash College, turns to Mexican serialized novels from the turn of the 19th century novels —a period commonly referred to as El Porfiriato— as diverse and understudied such as Rafael Delgado’s La Calandria (1890), and Azuela’s María Luisa (1907). During this period, there was an explicit effort from the Porfirian government to regulate public opinion and morality, and often this included sound. He will present on key soundscape moments in each text helped highlight how social behaviors were normalized or deviated from the heteronormative discourses of the time. Finally,

Finally, Sandrine Moudouas Graduate Student, Gothenburg University) in her presentation, “Sonic Panorama of Water Workers in Mexican Costumbrismo”, makes us aware how Mexico City has always had an intimate yet problematic relationship with water (Castro y Soriano Salkjelsvik 2018). By focusing on water workers, a well-established group in Mexican cultural heritage and socio-economic structures, this presentation aims to illuminate how the relationship between gender and labor is depicted in sonic environments in order to ask: how do these soundscapes influence how gender identities are constructed and performed among water workers within the context of Mexican Costumbrismo.