Sonic Latinidades in Latinx Theater and Performance

doi:10.1017/9781009314091.018

Chapter 14 - Sonic Latinidades in Latinx Theater and Performance

from Part III - Emerging Media

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2025

Marci R. McMahon

Edited by

William Orchard

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William Orchard: Affiliation:
Queens College, CUNY

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Summary

This chapter “listens in detail” to hybrid Latinx literary forms, including drama and spoken word poetry, as they respond to neoliberal anti-immigrant policy, whiteness, and homophobia from 1992 to our current global pandemic moment. The chapter registers how Latinx literature turns to hybrid texts that perform sound (language, accents, music), utilizing the sonic an agentive site to respond to neoliberal constructions of citizenship and to articulate new forms of belonging. Josefina López’s play Detained in the Desert (2010) shows the affective experiences of a second-generation Chicana tuning into border language, Spanish-language radio, and musical soundscapes to resist the racist and sexist profiling of her body in the aftermath of Arizona’s SB 1070. Tanya Saracho’s El Nogalar (2013) demonstrates how Latinx border communities wield silence as a strategy to survive narcoviolence. Virginia Grise’s Your Healing Is Killing (2021) amplifies the intersectional and structural traumas that shape BIPOC communities’ access to health care. These inequities speak to the continued need for collective self-care.

Keywords

Latinx Chicanx theater performance sound studies citizenship autoethnography Josefina López Virginia Grise Tanya Saracho

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Type: Chapter
Information: Latinx Literature in Transition, 1992–2020 , pp. 258 - 278

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314091.018 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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