Description: Author Jacqueline Avila looks at the ways that Mexican cinema and its music during the silent and early sound periods continuously reshaped the contested, fluctuating space of Mexican identity, functioning both as a sign and symptom of social and political change.
Review Quotes: "Cinesonidos is one of those rare first-of-a-kind books, due to its original work engaging Mexico through lines of musicology that are coming into their first dialogue with the work of Latin Americanist scholars working in cinema and communications. In doing so, Avila proposes an original, scholarly sound and intellectually valuable account of sound in Mexican cinema, one that will not only be an obligatory reference to scholars, but that opens new lines of scholars working on cinema and sound outside of Hollywood and Western European paradigms." -- Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, author of Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988-2012
"Avila's deeply-textured and interdisciplinary analysis shows how filmmakers, composers, and onscreen musicians tapped into a broad web of widely understood political, social, and historical references that aurally shaped the very idea of Mexican modernity and the role of the Mexican film industry in an expanding global market.ÂÂHer work offers an important challenge to the current Hollywood-centric hegemony of film music scholarship and encourages us to look-and listen-beyond national boundaries in narrating histories of music and the moving image." -- Susan Thomas, Director of the American Music Research Center and Professor of Musicology, University of Colorado-Boulder