Peter J Garcia

Credentials

Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Peter J. García completed his Ph.D in Latin American ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin 2001 with a research specialization in Southwest Borderlands music-cultures including Native-American, Chicana/o, Anglo-American, Afro-American, and "new mestizo" immigrant and indigenous communities. His dissertation supervisor was the late Gerard Behague and he also studied with ethnomusicologist Manuel Pena.

Garcia's research interests include Indo-Hispano-Chicano-Afro-Latino and Mexicana/o folk, radical avant-garde, and popular and protest musics and sacred dancing, decolonial ritual studies, borderlands consciousness, gender/sexuality, semiotics, and music ethnography.

He is also a concert saxophonist, mariachi guitarist/vocalist, and regularly performs Chicana/o folk music from Mexico and the Southwest Borderlands.

His monograph Decolonizing Enchantment: Echoes of Nuevo Mexicano Popular Musics is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press in Fall of 2009. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic, oral historical, and at times reflexive investigation of the dialectic of struggle and change in transnational Southwestern Borderlands and U.S. Latina/o music-cultures.

Original field research on a central Indo-Hispano ritual dance; the matachines danza, is published in an edited volume titled Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, co-edited by Olga Najera-Ramirez, Norma Cantú, and Brenda Romero.

More recent oral historical work on Colorado Borderlands singer Michelle Lobato examines Chicana grounded aesthetics, and is forthcoming as a book chapter called “Ay Que Lindo es Colorado” in Colorado Ethnic Histories and Cultures, edited by Arturo Aldama.

Garcia is currently co-editing a book entitled: “Performing the U.S. Latino Borderlands” with Drs. Arturo Aldama and Chela Sandoval, which should be forthcoming next year. This work focuses on Mexican-American, Chicana/o, and Latina/o cultural performances including music, dance, street theater, and spoken word.

Additional publications apply interpretive theories and critical geographies to specific music-cultural practices. “Reconsidering the Early New Mexican Folklorists Contributions to Songs of Intercultural Conflict” addresses important questions asked by previous generations of borderlands folklorists in relation to intercultural conflict that is expressed through ballads heard in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. This article is published in The Latin American Music Review. A second article examines the important corridos and Chicana/o ballad subgenres that are central to the music-culture and ethnohistory of Greater Mexico/U.S. Southwest Borderlands. This article is entitled: “Violent Ballads as Border Representations: The Aesthetics of Violence in the Mexican and Chicana/o Corrido.” It is published in Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life and considers the social and historical dimensions central to various corrido subgenres. This journal recently published a third article of mine on the United States Presidential Election 2008: “Bill Richardson and the New Mestizo- A Case Study in Racial Contradiction,” which can be found on-line.

Dr. Garcia was awarded a Fulbright García-Robles grant to conduct research on the annual peregrinacion (pilgrimage) in Magdalena de Kino (Sonora) beginning in the summer 2006. Throughout the fellowship, he was in residence at the Universidad de Sonora (Hermosillo) where he lectured and performed music concerts for undergraduate students during the Fall 2006. He returned to campus mid-year during the Spring 2007 semester.

Since his appointment to the Chicana/o Studies Department in 2007, he was invited to speak on a panel along with Dr. Mary Pardo entitled: “Implementing Queer Chicana/o Latina/o Studies in the CSU System” at the 2nd National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Joto Caucus conference at California State University –Los Angeles (October, 2008). This important panel considered the impact of sexuality and queer studies scholarship in Chicana/o Studies and the curricular impact that recent textbooks, media, and scholarship is making in Chicana/o cultural studies.

Garcia has also worked as a consultant with the Smithsonian Folkways on the 1998 Festival of American Folklife and is currently an editorial advisor for the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latina/o folklore, edited by Maria Herrera-Sobek.

Dr. Garcia is also co-editor of one of the foundational reference textbooks on popular culture that is utilized in Latin American and U.S. Latina/o studies. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture was released in October 2004. This two volume academic reference tool is designed to provide general research based information on a variety of Latina and Latino popular culture topics and issues that have influenced North American culture.

He enjoys swimming, weight-lifting, reading, traveling and cooking. He lives with a canine friend and Chihuahueno companion named Mojo who enjoys traveling, eating, belly-rubs and long walks on the beach.