The border is never far from Alex E. Chávez’s mind. The musician, writer, and professor — known for his work with the Chicago band Dos Santos — has long immersed himself in thinking and scholarship around the complexities of migration. His latest project, his debut album, Sonorous Present, goes deep, offering an intimate reflection of borderlands, memory, and both literal and figurative passages.
Across Sonorous Present, Chávez dives into musical traditions from across Mexico and Latin America, turning them over and mixing them with other forms, like jazz and rock. Chávez recorded a lot of the record during the pandemic, opening up space to think about mourning and loss and his own experiences growing up near the border in Texas. Throughout the project, Chávez interrogates his experiences as a first-generation Mexican American, while also reckoning with the death of his parents and his sister. All of it was a new, intimate process for the musician. “In my other work, I hardly ever write very personal stories,” he says. “I rarely write in the first person. This album is all of that. It does feel a little different, a little vulnerable, a little raw.”
Below, Chávez talks to Rolling Stone about the creative process behind Sonorous Present and what it taught him about tradition, grief, and migration.
Issues of immigration and both literal and figurative borders constantly come up in your work. Tell me how you were thinking about those themes on this project.
Some of this material was written in the wake of my mother’s passing a few years back. I was doing research for what became my book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño, and I was already in this world of traditional Mexican music. When she passed, being in that universe was a way to process it. And there were other things that came up and felt connected to this: My older sister passed when I was very young. She was the victim of domestic violence. So, over these past few years, that’s been kind of a through line for me: writing and mourning and holding on to these memories. But a lot of that was always entangled with my thinking and my very kind of visceral experience with borders: My folks were undocumented when I was a kid, and that being the experience of being from west Texas, the border being so close, all of that is context for me.
Fast-forward to me publishing the book, which deals with lot of traditional Mexican music, I was trying to find a way maybe to extend this notion of scholarship of what counts as scholarship. I play music, I’ve been doing that my whole life, so it was about trying to marry these two things. And that’s where the first ensemble came together, so all of that was just swirling there: my work, my thinking about the border, ends up on the record.
You worked with Quetzal Flores on the production side, and you collaborated with a ton of other artists on this project. What was the process of bringing so many musicians in like?
There was a lot of creative freedom there. Just opening it up for people lets you look at different ways you might approach the music and I’m genuinely a fan of everybody who ended up being on the record. Quetzal is part of that legacy of Chicano music in Los Angeles that’s very much tied to activism. And he’s a Grammy Award winner and all the rest, but more than anything, he’s an activist. He’s someone who works in the traditional arts. I’ve known him for a long time, and his partner, Martha Gonzalez, who who’s also on the record, is amazing. You’ve got them and others carrying on this legacy of Chicano music who are also inspired by like political movements in Mexico.
Aloe Black [worked on this, too], which is kind of crazy. He and Quetzal know each other, and we started thinking we wanted other people singing, even though these are my lyrics and all that. And with the song “Dirty Hands,” Quetzal was like, “How about Aloe?” And we asked him, and he did it. Aloe is of Panamanian descent, so he grew up speaking Spanish, but he’s never recorded in Spanish, so this is the first time. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Ramon Gutierrez, who is this killer in the son jarocho world. It’s touching for me because you spend time making music and building community and it was really nice to call upon people and people being enthusiastic about participating.
You’re working with so many genres that are considered “traditional.” How did working on this project change or deepen your relationship to these sounds with deep roots?
I don’t know if my perspective changed so much because I think for a long time, I’ve always had this approach of wanting to pull at the edges of tradition. At the end of the day, I’m a first-gen Mexican American, right? And don’t get me wrong, when I started learning to play huapango, I learned from old timers and I’ve been in the trenches of, of doing that at work. But at the end of the day, I’m not just that and I would never claim to be just that because I am a first-generation kid of immigrants who grew up in west Texas, who loves country music and post-punk just as much as I do a good huapango. I love son jarocho as much as I do hip-hop. Maybe this also speaks to us as Latinos, but we’re fans and experts in a number of genres. I think I’ve always kind of been conscious of that. So when I’ve approached these things in my own projects, I’m like, “Well, I’m going to bring this other thing to it,” because that’s just natural to me. I think if anything, so much of my perspective changed, but I think it was having the opportunity to do it in a way that was uniquely like my own.
Quetzal and I play different traditional instruments, and when we were tracking things, they were all laid out. It was like a folklorist’s dream. We’d be tracking and laying things down, and I’d be there in the moment, and it was an easy but interesting act of restraint. “Could we put all the traditional instruments on this? Yeah? Are we going to? No.” You don’t need to put all the jaranas and everything; it doesn’t serve the composition. It was being like, “We know tradition, but we don’t need to do it.” On the other end, we’d be listening to something, and we’d be like, “Why don’t we ask Martha to do zapateado and build the rhythm off that?” There are no drums on this, but we’d be like, “Let’s sample Martha’s feet stomping.” So that’s a different way of thinking about tradition.
Now that the project is done, how does having completed something that deals with personal loss and mourning — as well as the trauma that can come from borders — impact you as an artist?
It’s been a slow-rolling thing over the years because some of these pieces have lived with me for a while. It’s felt like I’ve lived in this space, but to get to record and put this together, there is some catharsis there, especially with some family of mine. As the singles dropped, family members have reached out, and that connection is meaningful.
To be honest, having it out in the world, it does feel raw. In other projects, I do write about politics and the border in that creative work. But I think it’s necessary to put that on display and to be really honest for a few reasons: One, I landed in this space because during the making of the record, my father passed too, so there was an added layer of emotion. Two, I hope it translates whatever sadness and mourning and grief because I don’t think we do that enough publicly. Covid-19 happened, and that’s a trauma we have not processed. We were terrified for two years, and we went back to the pachanga right away, but we haven’t talked about it. So hopefully these moments through art and congregating offer some reflection. This record is my own mourning and grief, but I hope it can provide a moment for people to work through their own losses.
