Ireri Chávez Bárcenas (Assistant Professor of Music, Bowdoin College)

“A altas e inteligibles voces: Sounds of Blackness in the Christmas Feast in New Spain”

Wednesday, 13 November 4:30-6:00 pm, Fulton Hall 

Abstract:

This talk traces the performance of Blackness in Christmas villancicos from Puebla de los Ángeles in the early 1600s. By situating this polyphonic genre within the listening experiences of the growing Afro-diasporic population in New Spain, the presentation reveals defiant voices and expressions of collective identity and the persistent efforts to silence them.

Ireri Chávez-Bárcenas is Assistant Professor of Music at Bowdoin College. She holds a doctoral degree in musicology from Princeton University and a master’s degree in religion and music from Yale University. Her book project Singing in the City of the Angels: Race, Identity, and Devotion in New Spain received the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Award and was selected for the RaceB4Race First Book Institute. Her current work focuses on the performance of villancicos within the institutional and social fabric of Puebla de los Ángeles and develops a new methodology for the study of function, meaning, and transmission of the vernacular song tradition in the Spanish empire. She has published journal articles and essays on the intersection of villancicos and early modern ideas of race, religion, and identity in New Spain, and the adaptation of conflicting historiographical interpretations of the conquest of Mexico in Vivaldi’s opera Motezuma.