Anthropologist Falina Enriquez was recently named one of 24 winners of the University’s Vilas Associates Competition. The award recognizes new and ongoing research of the highest quality and significance. Recipients are chosen competitively by the divisional Research Committees on the basis of a detailed research proposal. Funds associated with the award will support a two-year research project. All tenure-track assistant professors and tenured faculty within 20 years of their tenure dates are eligible. Prof. Enriquez will use the award to complete her book, Por un Amor: Linda Ronstadt’s Canciones de mi Padre, a monograph about Canciones de mi Padre (1987) by Linda Ronstadt, the bestselling non-English music album in U.S. history. The book brings together an analysis of the album’s music with archival materials and new interviews of musicians and fans who were in/directly influenced by Canciones. It asks: what cultural and political conditions made the album possible, and what are its legacies? Grounded in an interdisciplinary analysis of the cultural politics of music and emotion, the book shows that while Canciones is an expression of love for family, community, and culture, this love both shapes—and is shaped by—the political conditions of the album’s production, circulation, and reception.
Falina Enriquez is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and a CLS governance faculty member. A cultural and linguistic anthropologist, she studies music and language as an ensemble that helps us understand how people construct the world and emplace themselves—and others—within it. In 2022, she published an ethnographic study of musicians in Recife, Brazil titled The Costs of the Gig Economy: Musical Entrepreneurs and the Cultural Politics of Inequality in Northeastern Brazil with the University of Illinois Press.