Wild Tongue

“Jonathan Leal’s approach to borderlands musics is expansive and innovative. With an elegant command of language, Wild Tongue is equally punctuated by elements of the aural and the spatial in breathtaking ways. Like a revered mixtape, this book is the perfect pitch of insights to sway us with the precise critical moves for navigating complex circumstances.” - Richard T. Rodríguez, author of A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and U.S. Latinidad

“Wild Tongue is an adventurous, wonderfully experimental, ethnographically-attuned portrait of the Texas borderlands—its music, sonic cultures, and expressive forms of struggle and world-making. Jonathan Leal offers a compelling account of how artists and activists utilize both new and heritage media, the complex channels of capitalist exchange, and circuits of globalization to build community, rearticulate public meanings, and live out alternative ways of existing in the borderlands.” - Alex E. Chávez, author of Sound of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño