What do you know about Latino popular music? How can we enjoy music while listening critically? Please join Frances Aparicio, former director of the Latina and Latino Studies Program at Northwestern University, in a celebration of the 15th Year Anniversary of the University of Illinois Press Latinos in the Chicago and the Midwest Book Series. As its founding editor, Professor Aparicio will share the history and impact of this groundbreaking series and her passion for Latina/o popular music. Through guided listening to music, she will introduce us to Latino music forms as we learn how to be music critical listeners. Through entertainment, we will explore the politics of sonic traditions, the construction of Blackness, and the role of women in popular music. She will reveal the ways that local music traditions help Puerto Ricans’ grief and healing after Hurricane Maria in the midst of colonial neglect and abandonment.
Dr. Frances Aparicio is Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese and was Director of the Latina and Latino Studies Program at Northwestern University. She is author of the award-winning Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music and Puerto Rican Cultures (Wesleyan 1998), and co-editor of various critical anthologies, including Musical Migrations (Palgrave, 2003). A founding editor of the Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest Book Series at the University of Illinois Press, she has facilitated and fostered book publications and new research on Latino/as in the Midwest. Her recent book in this series, Negotiating Latinidad (2019), explores the lives of “intralatino/a subjects” in Chicago, individuals who are of two or more national Latin American origins.
A reception celebrating the series will follow.
