Policing Mexico City’s Supernatural Soundscape -A lecture by Alex Hidalgo, Texas Christian University

Professor Alex Hidalgo (Texas Christian University) will offer a lecture on the following topic:

The voice and the range of modulations it produces was the most important technology of sound in central New Spain. It served to instruct, reprimand, evangelize, and govern as well as to ridicule, praise, threaten, and intimidate. Analysis of a series of public sentencing trials, known as autos de fe, in seventeenth-century Mexico City reveal institutional anxiety over a range of sounds Inquisitors considered dangerous. Vocal modulations such as curses, incantations, speaking in tongues, and false preaching threatened to disrupt public and private spaces of ritual and social interaction. Use of subversive vocal sounds by religious minorities and the city’s mixed-race population speak forcefully about how the audible elements of everyday life guided social behavior.

This seminar organized by R.A. Kashanipour and Alex Hidalgo is part of the activities of the Southwest Seminar on Colonial Latin America. The Seminar meetings will prioritize new research and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding colonialism in different geographic, social, and political spaces in Latin America.