‘Always in motion’: New professor studies the flow of music across borders and cultures

As a young kid growing up in Mexico City, UC Berkeley Professor Chris Batterman Cháirez would always hear music — it seemed to be playing everywhere he went, a kind of soundtrack to his daily life.

Born to a Mexican mother and an American father, Batterman Cháirez moved with his family to the U.S. at an early age, and spent a lot of time going back and forth between the two countries over the years. That’s when he first noticed how music travels across borders, influencing the cultures it comes in contact with in complex ways. “The music moved with my family,” said Batterman Cháirez, who’s joining the music department this fall as an assistant professor of ethnomusicology.  

After college, Batterman Cháirez lived in Atlanta and Brazil, where he played upright bass in jazz ensembles and picked up other gigs where he could. In graduate school at the University of Chicago, he returned to Mexico, this time in the western state of Michoacán, where he lived with Indigenous P’urhépecha communities to play and learn about their traditional music, called pirekua. 

When he went to pirekua performances, Batterman Cháirez was fascinated by how concertgoers would livestream the music for their families who had migrated to the U.S., to places like California, North Carolina and Illinois. “Seeing this confirmed music’s importance and the fact that it’s always in motion with people,” he said. 

This fall, Batterman Cháirez is teaching the course Music, Movement and Migration in Latin America. It looks at the ways music has moved with migrants over borders, including between the U.S. and Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia, and the Caribbean islands. It also explores the origins of specific genres of music that he considers “transnational,” like reggaeton, which emerged from dialogues between New York hip hop scenes and traditional music in the Caribbean. 

How music flows with migration patterns is a topic that Batterman Cháirez said he’s especially excited to teach to Berkeley students as they try to make sense of the current global migration crisis.

“We’re in a moment in U.S. political history where the discourse around migration is so vitriolic, and migrants themselves are in such a precarious position,” he said. “The Bay Area has historically been a huge destination for migrants coming from around the world to make a home here. Many Berkeley students have a connection to migrants in some way, whether it’s through their own parents or their friends and families, and I’m hoping everyone can see themselves in the course a little bit.” 

As part of the class, Batterman Cháirez is asking students to create their own musical movement maps. For some, it’ll involve tracing their journeys across different parts of the world, and for others, it’ll be a single jump from their hometown in Ohio to Berkeley. 

“I hope people will explore their own connections to migration, and reassess their relationship to music and movement and how it has impacted their lives,” Batterman Cháirez said. “Music is in everyone’s life in some way.”

By understanding how music influences the ways others move through the social world, Batterman Cháirez hopes that students will turn the looking glass back on themselves and ask, “How does this change the way I think about music?” In broadening their knowledge of the music they love, he said, the end goal is that they take stock not only of the differences among cultures, but of the similarities we all share.