Alex E. Chávez

Biography

Artist-scholar-producer, Alex E. Chávez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. His research explores articulations of Latinx sounds and aurality in relation to race, place-making, and the intimacies that bind lives across physical and cultural borders. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke University Press, 2017)—recipient of three book awards, including the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018), the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology's Book Prize (2018), and the Association for Latina and Latino Anthropologists Book Award (2018).

He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of academic research and publicly engaged work as an artist and producer. Chávez has recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores, worked closely with Smithsonian Folkways, and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated artists.

He recently released his solo debut album, Sonorous Present (Artivist Entertainment 2024). An immersive poetic and musical passage, Sonorous Present extends sonic meditations across America’s borderlands. What began as an improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s award-winning book Sounds of Crossing (Duke 2017)—has been reimagined as a studio album with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores. Created through a collaborative, immersive and ethnographic research-based process, this suite of compositions takes up the cultural theme of Borderlands to meditate on issues of race, migration, and mourning as key dimensions of the ongoing process of cultural exclusion and inclusion so much a part of defining what America is. Through integration of a range of scholarly disciplines and communities of artistic practice, Sonorous Present uniquely reimagines what a studio album should sound like, what live performance should accomplish, and the forms scholarship should take.

Recorded in Los Angeles and Chicago, dynamic explorations of Mexican Regional and Latin American sounds are deepened on Sonorous Present by avant jazz arrangements and field recordings, alongside poems written and recited by renowned author and poet Roger Reeves (Guggenheim fellow, National Book Award finalist, and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Griffin Poetry Prize recipient). The project also features luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, jazz, and R&B—including, Martha Gonzalez (2022 MacArthur Fellow), Aloe Blacc (2015 Grammy Award nominee), Ramón Gutiérrez (of Son de Madera), and Lucía Gutiérrez Rebolloso (Winner of the 2022 Sarah Vaughn International Jazz Vocal Competition). Listen to the album HERE, and watch a stunning making-of documentary HERE, in addition to VIDEOS for the album’s first three singles.

Chávez is also co-editor of the recently published volume Ethnographic Refusals / Unruly Latinidades, which grows out of an Advanced Seminar he co-chaired at the School for Advanced Research in 2019. A Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, in 2020 he was named one of ten Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and also recently concluded a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He currently serves as a Governor on the Chicago Chapter of the Recording Academy (Grammys).