The Latinx Sound Map Project

The Latinx Sound Map Project is developed in the Sound in Latinx Culture undergraduate course at the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago where students develop critical, intersectional, feminist and decolonizing ways of listening to attend to ways of knowing and being with and through sound in majority working-class, immigrant, Latinx communities across Chicagoland and beyond.

This project contributes to a larger Latinx soundscape archive initiated by artist and scholars Amanda Gutiérrez, José Flores Fuentes, Eric Silberberg, the Latinx Sound Cultures workgroup, and more broadly is influenced by the intent of The World Soundscape Project.

Under the direction of Prof. Esther Díaz Martín students are encouraged to use mix rasquache methods to capture, experiment, and define what  we might hear and how we might listen when we conjure the notion of "Latinx Chicago". The result is a developing collection of mapped soundwalk narratives and soundscapes captured since 2019. Listeners tap into the soundmarks, sonic artifacts, and sound details that hold collective joy, histories, as well as sites of injustice and political struggle. Recordings span the COVID-19 pandemic, the coming of age of a Mexican American majority demographic, and the changing soundscapes of a community under siege by the latest anti-Latino immigrant mass deportation campaign.

While the term "Latinx" continues to be adopted, rejected, and debated. We use it here as an umbrella term to capture the distinct demographics of the Chicagoland folks who share a background as Brown, internally colonized subjects with roots in Northern Mexico prior to 1848 (the current US West and Southwest), Mexico, Central America, El Caribe, and South America. Latinx encompasses folks that speak Indigenous languages, as well as English, Spanish, Spanglish, Portuguese, and variations in between. We make up 19% of the US population, 9% in the Midwest, and 21% in Chicago. At the University of Illinois Chicago, a top R1 destination for first generation university students located in downtown, Latinx students are 36% of the student body largely of Mexican descent.

The "x" in Latinx is a gesture toward inclusion and centering folks whose intersectional subject position across racial, gender, class, disability and legal status are most marginalized within our communities. For more about the course and the methodological framework of this project read prof. Díaz Martín reflexion pedagógica.

This project is open to all listeners, "soundies," and audiophiles. To contribute read the guidelines and follow the instructions in the “contribute” form linked in the menu. 

A special shout-out to the Spring 2025 cohort who laid the groundwork for the website, digital map, and other logistics of the project.