Reviewed by: Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño by Alex E. Chávez Kristina M. Jacobsen Alex E. Chávez, Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 440 pp. Alex Chávez's Sounds of Crossing looks at the way the genre of music called huapango arribeño humanizes its primary participants—Mexican migrants—in a deeply dehumanizing political moment. Using the genre of huapango arribeño as an ethnographic text and treating huapangueros—the performers of this genre—as ethnographers, Chávez employs the lens of "aural poetics" to look at the way marginalized and often undocumented musicians perform this genre of sung poetry to voice their presence in a world that otherwise silences their place in it (9). In this multi-sited ethnography, Chávez himself regularly crossed the border, conducting fieldwork in Indiana, Texas, Arizona, and in the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Querétaro, and San Luís Potosí. Chávez focuses in particular on the all-night performance contests between two huapango ensembles, an event called a topada. In these contests, two ensembles engage in "musical and poetic flyting" (100), a highly stylized marathon that can last anywhere from seven to twelve hours. Integrating the fields of border studies, border ethnography, and borderland theory with transnational studies, ethnomusicology, and the anthropology of music, Chávez shows us an intimate portrait of the genre and how, when words are sung in public spaces, humanity, intimacy, and movement are regained not only for huapangueros but for the 5.6 million unauthorized migrants currently residing, working, and creating lives north of the border. Sounds of Crossing is also auto-ethnographic: Chávez himself is the child of Mexican migrants and the grandson of a famous huapanguero. Thus, throughout the ethnography, Chávez is in conversation not only with his parents' experience as migrants to Texas, but also with his grandfather [End Page 269] Mauro, a character whose shadow has loomed large in not only Chávez's life but in the genre of huapango arribeño at large (27). Chávez notes: "ethnography, for me, has thus been a dynamic process embedded with an inescapable personal history, a struggle to understand and negotiate my entanglement with this powerful precursory cultural memory" (26). Sound, and the "sounds of crossing" that are voiced in musico-poetic form, invokes place and nostalgia for place, but also allows practitioners and listeners to exceed the limitations of time and space, particularly in situations where legal and physical barriers prevent them from actually crossing the border. Huapango arribeño allows huapangueros and their listeners a reprieve from the alienation that comes with migrant existence, even if for only a brief moment, and therein lies its affective power. Chávez provides detailed context for the genre of huapango arribeño. Meaning "atop the wood," huapango arribeño is often accompanied by zapateado, a dance style that is done on top of a wooden platform or raised bench called a tablado. Comprised of improvised, multiple ten-line stanzas or décimas, huapango arribeño is a sung genre of music, typically performed by men (although there are sometimes also female participants), and is related to the stringed music genre known as son. Huapango arribeño is most typically a four-person instrumental ensemble, with the singer accompanied by two violins, a vihuela or jarana huasteca, and an eight-stringed, double-coursed bass guitar called a quinta huapanguera. In the introduction, Chávez analyzes the idea of "noise," an "evaluative category for sounds that are, at best, considered culturally incomprehensible or, at worst, deemed to possess unassimilable and alien meanings thought to be of no social value," (10) and he elucidates the ways in which Mexican music in the US is often heard as "foreign Spanish-language noise" (10). The first chapter focuses on how the United States has come to "hear" Mexico via essentialized sounds in the genre of Mexican cinema known as comedia ranchera and epitomized by the first film in this genre, Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936). Chávez forcefully demonstrates how the "traditional huapango sound...