Where Sound Meets Skin is an ethnographic and multimedia study that explores how queer and trans individuals in Oaxaca, Mexico, navigate citizenship, belonging, and visibility within a landscape shaped by racialized nationalism, queer tourism, and ongoing structural violence. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2022 including collaborative digital media projects, podcasting, and soundscape creation, the book argues that queer citizenship in Mexico is not defined solely by legal recognition or visibility but emerges through everyday, place based practices shaped by race, class, regionality, and colonial histories.

At the heart of this work is the concept of “geographies of echoes,” a framework that traces how queerness reverberates across bodies, spaces, and stories often in dissident, contradictory, and creative ways. Through intimate and communal practices like cruising, craft making, and podcasting, the book highlights alternative queer imaginaries that challenge dominant rights based models of inclusion.

Methodologically, the project blends traditional ethnography with experimental media including two key collaborative initiatives: The Unconditional Love Podcast, which gathers personal narratives of queer becoming and belonging, and Herencia de Colores, a soundscape project co created with queer and trans artisans. These multimodal practices expand the boundaries of anthropological research, offering a model for decolonial, affective, and community rooted scholarship.

Where Sound Meets Skin contributes to queer of color critique, Latin American and Indigenous studies, and the anthropology of citizenship by foregrounding voices often marginalized in both Mexican and U.S. queer discourses—Indigenous, working class, non visible, and transfeminine subjectivities. It also offers a methodological intervention in the use of sound, digital media, and collaborative storytelling to document and theorize queer life beyond the written word. Ultimately, this book reimagines queer citizenship as a living archive of dissidence, resistance, and creative survival.

The concept of “geographies of echoes” is central to Where Sound Meets Skin. It provides a framework for understanding how queer identities, experiences, and forms of belonging resonate through bodies, spaces, and stories in ways that are often non linear, affective, and layered. Rather than fixed or confined to specific locations, these echoes reveal how queerness is relationally enacted across multiple geographies that vary  spatially, socially, and temporally. 

This concept challenges dominant, static notions of space and identity by emphasizing the reverberations of memory, desire, and resistance that travel through places like homes, streets, digital platforms, and public venues. It highlights how marginalized queer and trans communities create alternative forms of citizenship and community through everyday practices such as cruising, storytelling, craft making, and sound.

By attending to these “echoes,” the framework foregrounds the complex, often contradictory ways queerness inhabits and transforms space that capture and echo its vibrancy, dissidence, and creative survival within broader social and political contexts.

Where Sound Meets Skin makes a significant contribution to the fields of queer diaspora, citizenship, and ethnographic research by centering the lived experiences of racialized queer and trans communities in Oaxaca. It challenges conventional understandings of queer citizenship that focus narrowly on legal rights or visibility, instead highlighting how belonging is enacted through everyday, embodied, and place-based practices.

This work advances queer diaspora studies by exploring how queer identities and communities resonate across borders and geographies, shaped by histories of colonialism, migration, and resistance. Through innovative ethnographic methods that include sound and digital media, the project expands the possibilities for collaborative and community-engaged research, offering new ways to document and theorize queer life beyond textual forms.

Ultimately, this study deepens our understanding of how queer citizenship operates as a dynamic, affective process grounded in local contexts but connected to global diasporic flows. It provides important insights for scholars and activists working to dismantle normative frameworks of inclusion and to imagine more just, creative futures for queer diasporic peoples.

Dispara Las Chelas: Chacales and Non-Queer Sexual Subjectivities

Published in Anthropology News, this article dives into the world of "chacales" or non-queer, hyper-masculine men in Mexican sexual culture. It looks at how alcohol acts as a way to "heat up" sexual encounters, creating a temporary space for intimacy between men. But chacales also use strategies to "cool down" the heat, like stepping away to shower or sanitize their bodies to keep their masculinity intact and avoid being labeled as gay. These rituals help maintain sexual energy while keeping the encounter within the boundaries of heteronormativity. The article connects to my larger research by exploring how these non-queer sexual subjectivities navigate and negotiate their identities within Oaxaca's queer and non-queer spaces.

Through this book, I hope to give voice to queer experiences that often go unheard, showing the world how much queer people matter in the larger tapestry of society. It’s not just about my own voice but about creating a space for other queer voices to be heard, especially those that are marginalized or silenced by dominant narratives. My goal is to challenge traditional understandings of queerness, identity, and belonging by sharing a diversity of lived experiences, showing how queerness intersects with race, class, and culture in complex and meaningful ways. By publishing this work, I aim to contribute to a more inclusive, nuanced conversation about queer life, one that goes beyond mainstream visibility and engages with the lived realities of queer people in all their forms. Ultimately, I want to leave behind a legacy that not only showcases the power of queer narratives but also opens the door for future generations to continue to claim space and amplify their own voices.