ASU researcher explores role of music in U.S.-Mexico border encounters

Adriana Martínez, faculty associate in Arizona State University's School of Music, in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, recently participated in a seminar for college and university faculty that explored the history of North America’s border and borderlands. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar was hosted by the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies in Chicago. The four-week seminar took a “broad geographic approach, framing borderlands as distinct places at particular moments in time where no single people or sovereignty imposed its will,” according to the Newberry website.

Martínez was one of 16 participants, including historians, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, legal scholars and philosophers.

“The seminar director and guest speakers are leading figures in the field and our discussions were some of the most intellectually stimulating I have ever had,” she said. “The resources of the Newberry are incredible and helped me to advance my research agenda. The main project I worked on is a book I am writing, which will examine the role of music in the U.S.-Mexico encounter at the borderlands. Overall the seminar was an extremely positive experience for my teaching and research.”