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Author Jacqueline Avila looks at the ways that Mexican cinema and its music during the silent and early sound periods continuously reshaped the contested, fluctuating space of Mexican identity, functioning both as a sign and symptom of social and political change.
About the author
Jacqueline Avila is Associate Professor in Musicology at the University of Tennessee. Her research focuses on film music and sound practice from the silent period to present, and the intersections of cultural identity, tradition, and modernity in the Hollywood and Mexican film industries. Dr. Avila was the recipient of the UC MEXUS Dissertation Research Grant, the American Musicological Society's Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, the UC MEXUS Postdoctoral Fellowship (2014-15), and the University of New Mexico's Robert E. Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar Award (2016). Her publications can be found in the Journal of Film Music, Latin American Music Review, Opera Quarterly, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History.
Summary
Author Jacqueline Avila looks at the ways that Mexican cinema and its music during the silent and early sound periods continuously reshaped the contested, fluctuating space of Mexican identity, functioning both as a sign and symptom of social and political change.
Additional text
Avila's deeply-textured and interdisciplinary analysis shows how filmmakers, composers, and onscreen musicians tapped into a broad web of widely understood political, social, and historical references that aurally shaped the very idea of Mexican modernity and the role of the Mexican film industry in an expanding global market.Her work offers an important challenge to the current Hollywood-centric hegemony of film music scholarship and encourages us to look-and listen-beyond national boundaries in narrating histories of music and the moving image.
