Isa Cruz

On Wednesday, the Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (LACLaS) department hosted the “Every Song an Invitation: Music, Listening and Cultural Inquiry” talk featuring Jorge Leal, professor of history at University of California, Riverside, and Jonathan Leal, professor of English at the University of Southern California. The event focused on the role of music in forming identity and solidarity among different Latino immigrant communities.

The talk was initiated and organized by Alexandra Camargo ’25 as a part of her honors thesis. Camargo, a LACLaS major with a minor in history, is currently examining how music, media and popular culture can reinforce or resist colonial racial narratives—specifically in Black and brown communities.

Jonathan Leal is a Latino author, critic, composer and producer from the southern Texas borderlands whose work integrates the arts and literature to highlight music and its relationship to cultural expression. Jorge Leal is a cultural and urban historian who currently works on examining how transnational youth cultures reshaped Southern California Latino communities in the late 20th century.

“I thought it was really important to have this talk here, because Bowdoin is committed to the Common Good, and as we’re seeing in our political landscape, the humanities, especially [diversity, equity and inclusion and] anything racialized is under attack,” Camargo said. “I think it’s important and incredibly pertinent to continue to have these conversations on the public humanities and public histories and make them inclusive for everybody.”

In his work, Jorge Leal looks at a genre called “Rock en Espanol,” Latin American rock music.

“What I see with this cultural production is that along with the music, music videos and articles printed in independent publications that were shared between Latin American and Los Angeles [Latinos, is that] these serve as bridges to create solidarity between Latinos of different national origins within a metropolis,” Jorge Leal said. “What I find really interesting in my work is how these immigrants and also first generation Latinos map out their cities, map out their communities.”

Jorge Leal’s research shows how young Latinos in Los Angeles created their own version of the rock genre called “Rock Angelino” as a way of cultural expression and solidarity. He analyzes how this music, flyers and ephemeral performance spaces, such as restaurants in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, brought together Latino communities of different national origins and citizenship statuses—helping immigrants and first-generation Latinos map their communities and navigate changes in economic and anti-immigrant policies.

Jonathan Leal studies place-based songwriting and music in the Texas-Mexico borderlands where he grew up. He spoke about the hypervisibility and invisibility experienced by border communities in media coverage, which according to him, music can counter.

“According to one book-length study of media representations of [the Rio Grande Valley] portion of the U.S.-Mexico border … over 85 percent of news stories [on] this place focused on violence from Mexico, drug smuggling, corruption spreading from Mexican law enforcement and cartels, poverty, inadequate healthcare, communities with poor nutrition [and] unchecked, undocumented immigration,” Jonathan Leal said. “So you can imagine what it might feel like to grow up in a place like this, and every time you turn on the news, you see these stories about where you live. You see these stories about your community, your people, but they’re not your stories.”

According to Jonathan Leal, in response to such underrepresentation and misrepresentations, songs and music help offer information about locals that cannot be found anywhere else.

“In this border region, songs have functioned as repositories of local knowledge,” Jonathan Leal said. “They’ve offered forms through which people have not only entertained one another, but also informed one another about local events, memorialized local figures and events, and articulated visions of self.”

Jonathan Leal introduced some important figures such as Américo Paredes, Ramón Ayala and Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work he deems as crucial in understanding the borderland life.

“If you look at news footage from what was happening, it was not being told by the people who really lived in those communities,” Jonathan Leal said. “Not by Mexicanos and Mexican-Americans…. If you wanted to get that story, you would have to listen to the songs. And so they’re preserved on record.”

Jonathan Leal also introduced and played bits of his co-produced album, “Wild Tongue,” which is inspired by Anzaldúa’s book. His album features musicians from nine different genres regarding lived borderland experiences. The project illustrates the diversity of border music, countering stereotypes and emphasizing the value of songs as a storage of untold stories.

Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Margaret Boyle, director of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and Camargo’s advisor for her honors project, commented on why this event was important.

“We wanted to be able to showcase their intersections with [Camargo’s] work, have a bigger discussion about public humanities and then also offer mentoring to our large cohort of Mellon Mays students across the College about what it means to be a faculty of color,” Boyle said.

Liam Rodriguez ’28, who studies music at Bowdoin, valued the talk’s ideas of the distinct perspective artists of color bring to the table.

“Something I appreciated and learned was that, as musicians with unique cultural backgrounds, we have a duty to convey our own experiences—not for what sells best or fits into an algorithm best, but for what is able to make a genuine impact on the people and to make something that will cut through the noise of unilateral, algorithmic, mainstream expression,” Rodriguez said