Jotería Listening

Abstract

This essay is a mapping of Latinx queer listening practices and spaces, such as bars and restaurants, as forms of resistance to gentrification in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Using a framework called “joteria listening,” and following the route of a performance event and ritual called LA Queer Posada in 2011, the author charts a sonic trail composed of sounds, songs, and memories of places and people in Silver Lake displaced by gentrification and historical erasure. Drawing from sound studies, performance studies and joteria studies, and using oral histories, interviews, archival sources, and ethnography, this essay offers innovative ways to think of queer Latinx sound and space as it adds layers to the palimpsestic map of Silver Lake and beyond. While listening to urban hauntings, sounds of loss, celebration and resistance, it offers new ways of remembering, performing and imagining community, futurity, and a more just world.