Saturday December 6, 2025 | 1:45PM-3:30PM

LBC 208 Korach

Presenters

• Gabrielle Corona (Princeton University), “State Surveillance and Historical Erasure in Los Tigres Del Norte at Folsom Prison (2019)”

“Como Johnny Cash, venimos aquí para traer luz a este lugar oscuro,”1 a member of Los Tigres Del Norte reflected in Los Tigres Del Norte at Folsom Prison, a documentary film covering their 2018 tribute to Cash’s performance at California’s Folsom Prison in 1968. In the five decades between these two concerts, the amount of new prisons in the United States rose to unprecedented levels, prison rebellions swept the nation, and an influx of Latin American immigrants came to the U.S. amidst increasing state violence at the Southwestern border. The documentary opens and closes with references to Cash’s 1968 concert without mentioning that Los Tigres performed their first U.S. concert at California’s Soledad Prison that same year. This paper argues that Los Tigres Del Norte at Folsom Prison is a carefully crafted form of propaganda that improves public relations for California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. In service of constructing a tribute and emphasizing the prisoner demographic change between 1968 from majority white American to almost half Latinx in 2018, the film marginalizes the history it purports to elucidate. I historicize this film by turning to archives from the 1960s Chicano Movement era to document how prisoners and their outside co-strugglers sought to build solidarity with one another through their musical engagements. I discuss the interconnected themes of migration, censorship, social movements, and cultural production through an analysis of the papers of Raúl Salinas, newspaper coverage, and the film, in dialogue with literature from documentary studies, sound studies, and Latinx history.

• Jacqueline Avila (University of Texas at Austin), “Los sonidos de medianoche: Music, Soundscape, and Familial Drama in Apple TV+’s Familia de medianoche (2023)”

 Based on the 2019 documentary of the same name, Apple TV+’s Familia de medianoche provides an alarming glimpse into Mexico’s healthcare system, using the Tamayo family as a conduit for this exploration. The Tamayos run a private, for-profit ambulance, operating predominately in the evenings and competing with other for-profit ambulances in the quest to not only help people, but to also survive as a working-class family. The series is narrated by Marigaby (Renata Vaca), a member of the Tamayo family who is a paramedic and UNAM medical student. Marigaby guides the audience through the turbulent nights of working as a paramedic and how this work both impacts her family life and her future career as an emergency room doctor. Music and sound design aid considerably through these moments. As the family move around several neighborhoods, the soundscape abruptly changes, functioning both as a musical accompaniment to their movements and experiences and also a commentary on the sonic landscape of the city. Intriguingly, the music and sound design for the series borrows strategies from the Latin American road film, offering audiences a more nuanced and intricate construction of Mexico City and to the communities who live there. This paper explores the eclectic and complex soundscapes constructed in selected sequences from this ten-episode series, where one of Mexico City’s untold stories is played out and musicalized, highlighting the diversity of the city and the multitudes of struggles faced by its residents.

• Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), “‘En la caliente’ multimedia series: Releasing pressure in Santiago de Cuba”

“En la caliente” is a multimedia series composed of photographs, soundscapes, and video clips gathered by Boudreault-Fournier during June and July 2025 in Santiago de Cuba. Using the metaphor of the pressure cooker, the presentation explores the “valves” through which Cubans release the pressures of daily life amid ongoing social and economic strain.

This work reflects on the circulation—or stagnation—of air as a way to engage with the lived impact of Cuba’s current energy crisis. Drawing from over twenty-five years of ethnographic research in Eastern Cuba, the presentation considers various forms of pressure—blood, air, sound—through an audio-visual format that looks both backward at enduring struggles and forward toward emerging challenges.

Rooted in lo real maravilloso, as articulated by Alejo Carpentier, En la caliente moves beyond documenting hardship. It taps into the realm of the invisible, the imaginative, and the poetic to examine how Cubans creatively navigate, subvert, and momentarily escape the intensities of daily life.

• Isdanny Morales Sosa (Tulane University, chair and moderator), “Sugar Intimacies in Contemporary Cuba: Remembering the Mill on Facebook Groups”

Isdanny Morales Sosa holds a Ph.D. in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Universidad de Chile, where she wrote a dissertation on dead time in post-Soviet Cuban cinema. Her research interests include film, digital media, visual arts, and literature from Cuba and, more broadly, the Hispanic Caribbean, as well as topics such as temporality, memory, the plantation, and migration. She is currently pursuing a second Ph.D. in Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She is one of the editors of the forthcoming book “Memory in Contemporary Cuban Film and Digital Media: Entangled Temporalities”, to be published by University Press of Florida in 2026.