Martha Gonzalez will lecture during the week of March 10-14, 2025.
A highly regarded scholar, Grammy-award-winning musician, and community activist, Martha Gonzalez’s research lies at the intersection of Chicana feminist theory, Chicana music, transnational musical dialogues, performance studies, ethnomusicology, and feminist development theory. Her scholarship articulates the various ways in which Chicano/a, Latino/a and other communities of color (in the United States and transnationally) utilize music and other forms of creative expression as necessary dialectic tools toward various social justice ends. Professor Gonzalez is associate professor of Chicanx-Latinx Studies at Scripps College and director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute. She is also the lead singer, songwriter, and percussionist for East Los Angeles’s rock band Quetzal.
Dr. Gonzalez has been one of the key motivating forces behind the transnational son jarocho revival movement, which for the last fifteen years has been creating opportunities for professional performers, grassroots communities, scholars, and cultural critics to collaboratively discuss the role that music and performance should have in the conversations on issues such as migration, identity, and community formation. Applying a scholarly framework to these artistic practices, Dr. Gonzalez’s book Chican@ Artivistas: Music, Community, and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles (UT Press, 2020) examines how participatory forms of music and dance can produce dialogues that result in social justice action. Recent publications in the Journal of American Folklore, the Journal of Ethnomusicology, the Journal of Aztlán, and the American Music Journal are evidence of the quality and breadth of her scholarship. Other publications include “‘Coyote Hustle’: Street Vendors and Gentrification in Boyle Heights” in Kalfou (2017) and “Caminos y Canciones in the City of Los Angeles” in The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles, edited by Josh Kun (UC Press, 2017).
As a Grammy-winning artist, Gonzalez has collaborated with important American musical icons like Tom Waits, Taj Mahal, and Los Lobos, as well as with notable Latin American artists, including the Afro-Cuban percussion masters Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, the multi-Grammy and Latin-Grammy Oaxacan singer and activist Lila Downs (Mexico), and noted Afro-Peruvian musician, scholar, and former minister of culture Susana Baca (Peru). While her early exposure to the diverse musical genres of Mexican culture shaped her, she achieved most of her musical acclaim through her Grammy Award-winning Chicano rock band, Quetzal, which uses its music to tell the multifaceted stories of individuals facing societal challenges from a feminist and socially active perspective. Quetzal’s more recent work includes the album The Eternal Get Down (2017), Puentes Sonoros (2020), and Memory and Return (in progress) with David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. The traveling exhibit “American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music,” sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute, featured Quetzal as leaders and innovators of Chicano music.
Dr. Gonzalez’s work has received wide recognition through prestigious awards such as the Fulbright-García Robles Scholarship (2007-2008), Ford Foundation Fellowship (2012-2013), Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (2016-2017), the United States Artist Fellowship (2020), and the MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.