Alexa Torres Skillicorn

In Latin American cities reshaped by neoliberal displacement, communities mobilize sound to contest erasure and negotiate relations to place. The tension between jazz’s global reach and local emplacement offers a revealing lens for analyzing how sound mediates spatial politics. This project examines the circulation and localization of jazz as a territorial practice that reconfigures urban space and belonging amid neoliberal spatial restructuring. Through ethnography, computational network analysis, and participatory mapping, it traces both situated sonic practices and the continent-wide translocal jazz circuits within which they are embedded. Participant-observation, sound mapping, and semi-structured interviews in Mexico and Chile examine how jazz musicians leverage sound's affective, material, and social properties to claim space. Theoretically, the project thinks sound through “cuerpo-territorio”––rooted in decolonial and communitarian feminism––to reveal how musicians integrating Indigenous and Afro-mestizo sonorities enact counter-hegemonic place-making through embodied performance.