Pablo Vila

Professor

730 Gladfelter Hall

Download my vita.

 

My central research topic is the social construction of identities. I try to understand both theoretically and empirically how people construct their identifications in order to understand who they are. My theoretical work tries to decipher the complex relationship between narrative identities and social discourses. My empirical work has two different geographical locales: Argentina and the U.S.-Mexico border. In the case of Argentina my work has dealt with the relationship between music and identity, and I have studied how different musical genres have helped different kinds of people to construct valued social identities: how tango helped European immigrants to acculturate in xenophobic early twentieth century Buenos Aires; how folk music did the same with immigrant mestizos from the countryside in the 1950s; how rock nacional was used by young people to resist a dictatorship that killed 30,000 youngsters between 1976-1983; and currently how cumbia villera is used to negotiate gender relations among the more disfranchised inhabitants of Buenos Aires.

 

On the U.S.-Mexico border my research deals with how people construct their ethnic, racial, national, regional, gender, class and religious identifications in a complex environment where two different countries and cultures meet. I develop my teaching around these research interests, therefore I usually teach courses on identity theory, race and ethnicity, sociology of music, music in Latin America, and qualitative methods, with special emphasis on photo-elicitation, the main method I used in my research on the U.S.-Mexico border.

 

 

Recent Publications

 

Troubling Gender: Youth and Cumbia in Argentina's Music Scene. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2011. 

 

Border Identifications: Narratives of Religion, Gender, and Class on the U.S. Mexico Border. University of Texas Press, 2005.

 

"Neoliberalism and Rock in the Popular Sector of Contemporary Argentina," pp. 261-289 in Rockin' Las Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America edited by Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste and Eric Zolov. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Co-authored with Pablo Seman and Cecilia Benedetti.

 

"Cumbia villera: una narrativa de mujeres activadas." Cuadernos de Investigaciones Etnograficas, Centro de Investigaciones Etnograficas, Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Ano 1, No 1. Junio 2008. ISSN 1851-9970. Also available here.