Audible Ancestors provides a new understanding of music performance and the inheritance of Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies in Greater Mexico.

By examining the audibility of Indigenous ancestry in the negotiation of Mexican subjectivities through danza performance, author Luis Chávez-González amplifies muted Caxcan Indigeneity rooted in the sounds of Regional Mexican music through tamborazo-Zacatecano, a drum-centered style originating from northcentral Mexico.

Based on extensive musical ethnographic research between the US/Mexico border, this book offers an inter-musicological depth to Indigenous sound studies, Indigenous performativity, self-determination, decolonizing methodologies, and borderlands research. This new research considers Indigenous sonic cartographies that continue to that defy erasure amidst US and Mexican colonial normative paradigms by musically crossing, re-crossing, and reimagining place and belonging.

Luis Chávez-González is a postdoctoral fellow at Bard College, USA. He is an interdisciplinary musician and scholar whose research bridges music and sound with narrative performance by focusing on the expression of danza, fiesta, and Indigenous self-determination in the Americas. Other research interests include Indigenous research methodologies and ways of knowing, Nahua history and culture, and Native language revitalization (Nahuatl). He is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and the Arts.