{"id":1976324,"date":"2025-08-23T16:29:29","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T16:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1976324"},"modified":"2025-08-23T16:29:29","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T16:29:29","slug":"always-in-motion-new-professor-studies-the-flow-of-music-across-borders-and-cultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/always-in-motion-new-professor-studies-the-flow-of-music-across-borders-and-cultures\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Always in motion\u2019: New professor studies the flow of music across borders and cultures"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As a young kid growing up in Mexico City, UC Berkeley Professor Chris Batterman Ch\u00e1irez would always hear music \u2014 it seemed to be playing everywhere he went, a kind of soundtrack to his daily life.<\/p>\n

Born to a Mexican mother and an American father, Batterman Ch\u00e1irez 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\u2019s when he first noticed how music travels across borders, influencing the cultures it comes in contact with in complex ways. \u201cThe music moved with my family,\u201d said Batterman Ch\u00e1irez, who\u2019s joining the music department this fall as an assistant professor of ethnomusicology.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

After college, Batterman Ch\u00e1irez 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 Michoac\u00e1n, where he lived with Indigenous P\u2019urh\u00e9pecha communities to play and learn about their traditional music, called pirekua.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Batterman Ch\u00e1irez is teaching the course Music, Movement and Migration in Latin America this fall.<\/p>\n

Courtesy of Chris Batterman Ch\u00e1irez<\/p>\n

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When he went to pirekua performances, Batterman Ch\u00e1irez 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. \u201cSeeing this confirmed music\u2019s importance and the fact that it\u2019s always in motion with people,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This fall, Batterman Ch\u00e1irez is teaching the course Music, Movement and Migration in Latin America<\/a>. 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 \u201ctransnational,\u201d like reggaeton, which emerged from dialogues between New York hip hop scenes and traditional music in the Caribbean.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How music flows with migration patterns is a topic that Batterman Ch\u00e1irez said he\u2019s especially excited to teach to Berkeley students as they try to make sense of the current global migration crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re 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,\u201d he said. \u201cThe 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\u2019s through their own parents or their friends and families, and I\u2019m hoping everyone can see themselves in the course a little bit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As part of the class, Batterman Ch\u00e1irez is asking students to create their own musical movement maps. For some, it\u2019ll involve tracing their journeys across different parts of the world, and for others, it\u2019ll be a single jump from their hometown in Ohio to Berkeley.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope people will explore their own connections to migration, and reassess their relationship to music and movement and how it has impacted their lives,\u201d Batterman Ch\u00e1irez said. \u201cMusic is in everyone\u2019s life in some way.\u201d<\/p>\n

By understanding how music influences the ways others move through the social world, Batterman Ch\u00e1irez hopes that students will turn the looking glass back on themselves and ask, \u201cHow does this change the way I think about music?\u201d In broadening their knowledge of the music they love, he said, the end goal is for them to take stock not only of the differences among cultures, but in the similarities we all share.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source news.berkeley.edu \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a young kid growing up in Mexico City, UC Berkeley Professor Chris Batterman Ch\u00e1irez would always hear music \u2014 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 Ch\u00e1irez moved with his family to the U.S. at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1976325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1976324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\u2018Always-in-motion-New-professor-studies-the-flow-of-music.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1976324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1976325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1976324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1976324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1976324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}