In Wild Tongue, writer, scholar, and musician Jonathan Leal invites readers to the Texas borderlands to witness contemporary sonic cultures and expressive forms of Latine struggle and world-making. Blending autoethnography, music criticism, and border theory into an epistolary mixtape, Leal depicts the borderlands as a generative place made by its inhabitants, a geography where creativity and cultural performance engage powerfully with politico-aesthetic issues, create communal identity, and challenge xenophobic and nationalist dominance. Across the mixtape’s contrasting “tracks,” Leal situates living artistries within longer, local arcs of borderlands creativity, amplifying Gloria Anzaldúa’s durable, pathbreaking observation, “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.” Combining lyric nonfiction, artist interviews, archival research, transdisciplinary analysis, and popular music criticism and production, Wild Tongue presents an exhilarating, embracing account of freedoms pursued between worlds.

Jonathan Leal is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision.

“Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape is an exuberant, taste-scrambling, and joyful book. Through its deep cuts, distorted notes, genre leaps, and potent longings, Jonathan Leal reminds us of our power to read, listen, write, sing, and create our lives, and worlds, anew.”
-- José David Saldívar, author of Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love

dear x—  1
00. a mix for open wounds  3
when the sun sets and the songs begin  14
01. magic // valley: notes on names, fantasies, and refusals  15
02. flooded: on crises real and imagined  28
i think of our endless wanderings  41
03 the art of sonic place-making: song as autohistoria-teoría  42
04. heirloom: una memoria  62
toward the horizon  66
05. the archive is a promise: notes on preservation  67
06. one hundred searing dawns: un cuento  75
07. rocket debris: resisting astro-capital  80
on loop  80
08. beat theory: home, chopped and flipped  90
09. infinite set: DJs beyond category  108
10. platform sickness: dispatch from the digital maw  122
i find myself reaching  128
11. review corner: five records for transport; or, a music-critical interlude  129
12. toward freedom: microprofiles in self-consonance  136
in the spaces between  146
13. the world becomes as we dream it  147
for us, together again  154
14. a mix that won't be tamed  155
Acknowledgments  157
Notes  163
Bibliography  181
Index  203