About
Dr. Peter J. García is Professor at California State University Northridge where he teaches in Anthropology, Music, and Chicana and Chicano Studies. His research in U.S. Latinx and Mexican borderlands focuses on indigenous and settler music-culture intersectionalities and contact zones between and among New Mexican, Northern Mexican and Southwest Native American (indigenous) communities and immigrant barrios on both sides of the US/Mexico border. García is also faculty advisor, directs and performs with the CSUN Latin/x music ensemble and Mariachi “el Matador.” García was Fulbright García-Robles grantee to Mexico in 2007 and continues ethnographic research on the annual peregrinacion (pilgrimage) in Magdalena de Kino (Sonora). Education
Ph.D. Ethnomusicology (Latin America with emphasis in Southwest Borderlands including northern Mexico) The University of Texas at Austin. August 2001.
Dissertation: “La Onda Nuevo-Mexicana: Multi-Sited Ethnography, Ritual Contexts, and Popular Traditional Musics in New Mexico.”
M.M. Ethnomusicology, The University of Texas at Austin. 1996.
M.M.Classical and Concert Saxophone Performance and Pedagogy, The University of Arizona (Tucson). 1989.
B.M.E. Instrumental Music Education with Departmental Distinction, The University of New Mexico. 1986.
Publications
Forthcoming: Decolonizing Enchantment: Lyricism, Ritual, and Nuevo Mexicano Popular Music (University of New Mexico Press).
Forthcoming: “Latin/o Musics in the United States” Oxford Bibliographies in Music.
Performing the U.S. Latina and Latino Borderlands edited by Arturo J. Aldama, Peter J. García and Chela Sandoval. Indiana University Press 2012.
Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Live. 81: Arizona Biopower: Ya Basta! With State Sponsored Racial Thuggery. Arturo J. Aldama and Peter J. García, editors 2011.
Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture edited by Cordelia Chávez Candelaria, Arturo J. Aldama, and Peter J. García, Westport, CN: Greenwood Press 2004.
Book Chapters
“Bailando Para San Lorenzo: Nuevo Mejicano Popular Traditional Musics, Ritual Contexts, and Dancing during Bernalillo Fiesta Time,” in Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos edited by Norma Cantú, Olga Nájera-Ramirez, and Brenda Romero (University of Illinois Press) 2009.
“Ay Que Lindo es Colorado’”: Chicana Grounded Aesthetics from the Colorado Borderlands as Latina Diasporic Musical Intervention” in Colorado Ethnic Histories and Cultures edited by Arturo Aldama (University of Colorado Press) 2010.
“Te Amo, Te Amo, Te Amo”: Lorenzo Antonio and Sparx Performing Nuevo México Music in Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands edited by Arturo Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter J. García (University of Indiana Press) 2012 .
”Performing Indigeneity in the Nuevo Mexicano Homeland: Antiguo Mestizo Ritual and New Mestizo Revivals, Antidotes to Enchantment and Alienation” with Enrique Lamadrid in: Comparative Indigeneities of the Americas edited by Arturo J. Aldama, M. Bianet Castellanos, and Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera. (University of Arizona Press) 2012.
“Twenty-First Century New Mexican Road Trip: Reclaiming Ceremony, Music, Time and Land” with Chela Sandoval forthcoming in The Un/Making of Americans: Citizenship, Cultural Politics and The Neoliberal State edited by Ellie Hernandez and Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson. (Palgrave) 2014
“Decolonizing New Mexico’s Indo-Hispano Racialized Dances and Fandango Diversions: Recovering Northern Río Grande Sones, Jarabes, and Danzas through the mid-20th Century” in Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song and Dance. Spaniards, Natives, Africans, Roma. Editor(s): K. Meira Goldberg, Walter Aaron Clark, Antoni Pizà. Cambridge Scholars Press 2019.
“Southern California Chicanx Music and Culture: Affective Strategies within a Browning Temporal System of Global Contradictions” in Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization edited by Jesus A. Ramos-Kitrell Lexington Books 2019.
Projects
I recently accepted an invitation from Arturo and Frederick Aldama who are co-editing a book entitled Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities which seeks to put front and center the significant impact of gender and sexuality in decolonial epistemologies and practices. This book seeks to at once show how the dominant and Latinx culture can and does reproduce toxic masculinities as well as how strategic Latinx un-gendering practices disrupt otherwise restrictive normativities. It seeks to demonstrate differences between Latinx masculinities experienced within different historically and regionally located communities and the intersectional struggles between Chicanx and Latinx subjectivities. It seeks to reveal how a complex, living, experiential-based theory of Latinx masculinities within a hemispheric, decolonial perspective generates new meaning, affirms complexity within our communities, and offers social and political critique.
I’ve already submitted an abstract to this volume. “Decolonizing New Mexico’s Archaic Heritage, Brown Masculine Historical Subjects, and Indo-Hispanx Ancestry” considers the recommendation made by Chicana novelist Sandra Cisneros during her July 2016 visit to Albuquerque which made national news when she stated that New Mexico should start a “truth and reconciliation commission” like South Africa to address the history of violence between the state’s Hispanics and Native Americans. New Mexico state historian Estevan Rael-Galvez suggests that “reconciliation and recovery will require the continuing effort to pull back the layers of the old stories and to tell new ones.” According to Chicana theorist Irene Blea, “Southwest Chicanos are very able to discuss their Indian and Spanish traditions.” My contribution shows how without professional discipline and scientific corroboration, the phenomenon of historical fantasy emerges in its place, responding more directly to collective and personal desire and the perennial pursuit and construction of identity. Folklorist Enrique Lamadrid highlights a series of cultural renaissances that reclaim and celebrate various gendered heritages linked to the patriarchal/colonial past of New Mexico. They are the legacy of Spanish triumphalism, Neo-Azteca tradition, the rediscovery of Crypto Judaism, and the genízaro legacy. The territorial era of 1846-1912 in New Mexico which began with the military invasion of the United States and ended with New Mexico’s incorporation to be admitted as a state in 1850 when Congress made it a territory, the political process of statehood dragged on for more than half a century. Impatient with the long wait, territorial governors, artists, and writers initiated a Hispanophilic discourse to distance the New Mexican population from its Mexican past and promote its more-distant gendered (masculine) Spanish colonial heritage. Being “sons of the conquistadors” was the best remedy to counter virulent American racism against Mexicans. Observing the same phenomenon of “whitening” in California, journalist Carey McWilliams named it “Spanish fantasy heritage.” Upcoming Talks and Conferences
NYU Professor Símon Trujillo invited me to collaborate with him on a panel addressing “Latinx indigeneity” for the Latina/o Studies Association (LSA) Conference at the University of Notre Dame on July 15-18, 2020. LSA’s theme is: “Beyond Borders: Latina/o Studies in Times of Crisis.” I’ve already accepted Trujillo’s invitation and will begin working on a paper that asks: How might a rigorous conversation about intersectionality help us further elaborate Latina/o/x studies, its exclusions, and its contributions? In her article “Dyad or Dialectic? Deconstructing Chicana/Latina Identity Politics” (2014), Alicia Gaspar de Alba points out the problem with the obfuscation of the terms Chicana and Latina. She explains how “it rewrites our history and makes us all immigrants; we all become border crossers into the United States, and we erase the history of the conquered Mexican North, the history of “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” which represents the history of over 100,000 Mexicans who found themselves north of the Rio Grande on February 2, 1848, the date the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by representatives of both governments the conquerers and the conquered.” According to Gaspar de Alba, “the politics of identity, then asks a simultaneous contradiction, “who am I the same as,” and “how am I different?” From these understandings of subjectivity, it is easy to see how critics of identity politics, and even some cautious supporters, have feared that it is prone to essentialism especially in terms of Chicano indigeneity and cultural nationalist uses of indigenismo as a political strategy.
Panel Chair and presenter, Peter J. García and Chela Sandoval (UC Santa Barbara)Coyote Deliberations from me-Xicanx Borderlands: De-colonizing Perform-antics, and “Storytelling-Witnessing/World-Art-Performance-as-Activism. Philosophies of Liberation Encuentro Meeting of the Asociación de Filosofía y Liberación (AFyL), USA CASA 0101 and Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, CA| May 18-19.
Panel Chair and presenter, “Coyote Deliberations from U.S. Latina/o Borderlands and ChicanX Studies: Musical Promiscuity, Sonic Border Activism, De-colonizing Performatics, and Story-World-Art-Performance-as-Activism,” I presented “Musical Memories of La Leyenda de Nuevo Mexico— Adios Al Hurricane, Decolonial Activism, and Echoes of New Mexico Popular Music” at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology on November 15-18, 2018, at Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Invited Guest Lecturer with mariachi demonstration: “Que Viva Los Muertos! Mexican Day of the Dead as Ritual Observance and Mariachi Music in Disney Pixar’s “Coco” at The Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado Friday November 2nd 5:30-6:15 PM
“Chicano Music Discourses from Southern California: Nationalism and De-Colonial turns to Latinidad and Hispanidad in a post-Chicano era” American Musicology Society/Society of Music Theory Annual Meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin November, 2014), Leonora Saavedra, Chair; Alejandro I. Madrid, Respondant.
“Inda/o-Hispana/o Popular Music and Culture of New Mexico and Southern Colorado” at the Hilos Culturales Teaching Symposium at Adams State College, Alamosa, Colorado. July, 2014.
“On Ethnomusicology, Comparative Musicology, and the Anthropology of Music-De-colonial Turns and Performance Ethnography” Guest Speaker for CSUN Anthropology Exposition “Scape: Space, Sound and Context in Anthropological Research” Thursday, March 27, 2014.
“Nuevomexicana/o Ballads and Singers from the Rio Abajo” Symposium: “Violence, Poetry, and Memory: Corridos, Inditas, and Cuandos of New Mexico and Colorado” University of Colorado at Boulder College of Music, April 14, 2014, Brenda Romero, Coordinator, Enrique Lamadrid and David Garcia, participants. Memberships
Society for Ethnomusicology
American Folklore Society
Latino Studies Association
National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies
American Musicology Society
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
Hilos Culturales
Tewa Women United
