Jones Studio Alumni
Fall 2025
The Jones Studio is proud to present the current work of Alumni Ms. Gema Valencia-Turco,
who graduated from UTEP with a major degree in Piano Performance and minor degree in Dance Performance.
We asked her, "What is your research?"
(pages from the Cantares Mexicanos)
Words as Sound and Movement Containers: The Case of Cantares Mexicanos
My main object of study is a 16th century Mexican manuscript called Cantares mexicanos (Mexican Songs) containing 91 song-poems in the Native Mexican language of Nahuatl. Throughout the 20th century, scholars have described such content as poetry and Pre-Hispanic “literature.” The problem with such interpretations is that they reduce a multidimensional cultural expression to a literary text. Just because the language is a written version of Nahuatl, that doesn't make it pre-Hispanic, and just because song-poems are preserved in book form, that doesn't make them European. In recent decades, historians and linguists have recognized that the alphabetical content reflects the lyrics of performative chants that included dance, music, costumes, and community participation. If Cantares mexicanos consisted of dramatic-ritual-musical performances, a textual lens relegates its performative and sonorous aspects as secondary or lost. Hence, the uniqueness of this early-colonial artifact requires a multidisciplinary methodology to broaden the lens of analysis.
Additionally, the format of an alphabetical container may seem to limit the acoustics and the movement within the words; but this is a matter of an untrained ear and eye rather than the absence of sound and movement. Therefore, I ask, what would we be able to perceive and appreciate when we read through our ears and bodies?
I am choosing Literary Sound Studies and Historically Informed Performance Practices (HIPP): interdisciplinary approaches that will offer a multi-sensorial turn as well as providing the tools to develop a more encompassing act of reading. My final goal of a performative and sonorous interpretation of a collection like Cantares is not to reproduce the voices or performances of a distant past, but to gain a broader understanding of the written “song-poems” by expanding research methodologies and frameworks.
To be continued…
Gema Valencia-Turco
University of Pennsylvania
March, 2025
Mi futura tesis doctoral, "Words as Sound and Movement Containers: The Case of Cantares Mexicanos," propone una nueva manera de interpretar el manuscrito del siglo XVI titulado: Cantares Mexicanos. Su contenido consiste en 91 “canciones-poemas”, los cuáles han sido reducidos a proyectos literarios, etnolingüísticos e históricos. Sin embargo, este manuscrito es el testimonio de un ''cantar'' Nahua (o cultura de habla Náhuatl, el idioma de los pueblos originarios en el centro de México). Dicho “cantar” (cuicatl) se refiere a una experiencia cultural completa, que no separa la música, la voz y la letra de la danza, los sonidos, la procesión, la respuesta y la participación comunal. “Cantar” es una demostración cultural tridimensional. El manuscrito, no es sólo un texto, sino la huella de una experiencia complejamente tridimensional. La problemática que presento es que la lógica académica o el raciocinio occidental-europeo divide las artes y la noción de experiencia tanto en una realidad material vs lo inmaterial, así como la separación del intelecto vs cuerpo. Estos elementos no se fragmentan en la cosmovisión indígena, por tanto, al leer los "Cantares" es necesario contar con una visión completa, no fragmentada. Para ello, me enfocaré en estudios de sonido literarios ("literary sound studies"), musicología y "historically informed performance practices."
Gema Valencia-Turco was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, México. With her husband Francis, the Philadelphia area is currently "home." Gema is completing her PhD in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also a Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies Graduate Fellow and collaborates with the Penn Museum’s Academic Engagement Department. Gema has a background in the performing and visual arts, graduating cum laude in Piano Performance and a minor in Dance from the University of Texas at El Paso, as well as completing her MA in Movement Studies at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, UK. Her academic journey has informed her interest in the blurring of boundaries between different forms of artistic manifestations. Consequently, she has come to see Hispanic literature studies as the common structure that encompasses areas such as language, art, music, religion, history, and anthropology as integrated within literary texts. She is focusing her research on early colonial Mexican manuscripts through the lens of performance and literary sound studies.
We'll keep you posted on the "to be continued....." All our best for your project, Gema!!!
