The music of the “dissonant divas” will be the focus of the next Chican@ History Lecture when Deborah R. Vargas presents “Sounding Chicana Borderlands Imaginaries” on Wednesday, May 4, at Cal State San Bernardino.
Vargas’s talk, presented by CSUSB's History Club/Phi Alpha Theta, will take place from noon- 2 p.m. at the John M. Pfau Library, room PL-4005. The program is free and open to the public; parking at CSUSB is $6.
The talk will be based on Vargas’s award-winning book, “Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda” (University of Minnesota Press). An associate professor of ethnic studies at UC Riverside, Vargas on her faculty Web page described the book as drawing “on Chicana feminism, cultural studies, and queer of color analysis to examine the ways in which Chicana singers push the heteronormative limits of what I refer to as sonic imaginaries of borderlands music.”
Vargas will discuss the singers and musicians — “dissonant divas” — whose representations of gender and sexuality are irreconcilable with canonical Chicano/Tejano music, or what she refers to as “la onda.”
The talk will provide some historical overview of Mexican American/Chicano borderlands music as a way to introduce under acknowledged Chicana singers in this musical canon. Vargas will focus on the ways Chicana singers push what she refers to as the heteronormative limits of borderlands sonic imaginaries produced by Chicano historiographic musical projects.
“Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda” was awarded the Woody Guthrie Prize for Best Book in Popular Music Studies by The International Association for the Study of Popular Music; Award for Best Book in Chicano Studies by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies; and Honorable Mention for Best Book in Latino Studies from the Latin American Studies Association.
Vargas’s publications have appeared in many journals, including Aztlan: Journal for Chicano Studies; Women and Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory; and American Quarterly. She has conducted several oral history interviews with Chicana singers for the Smithsonian Institute’s Latino Music Oral History Project and is author of the biography of Lydia Mendoza for Mendoza's United States Postal Service commemorative stamp.
The Chican@ History Lecture Series was conceived and organized by the students of the CSUSB History Club and Phi Alpha Theta history honors society, led by Rocio Gomez, Maria Figueroa, Brian Ayala and Jasmyn Murrell.
The series began in fall 2015 and included programs featuring National Humanities Medal recipient and UC Irvine history professor Vicki Ruiz, historian Tomás Summers Sandoval of Pomona College and political scientist Armando Navarro of UC Riverside. It is made possible with help from the CSUSB Department of History, the University Diversity Committee, the Teaching Resource Center and the CSUSB John M. Pfau Library.
For more information, contact Maria Figueroa at figum306@coyote.csusb.edu.
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