Sounding Early Modern Mexico City: Local Musics, Oceanic Currents and the Global Stage, by Sarah Finley
February 27, 2026, 15:00 Central European Time. Online via MS Teams
As the administrative and commercial center of the viceroyalty of New Spain, Mexico City played a crucial role in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. It served as a continental hub for the Manila Galleon and West Indies fleet trades, linking Asia and Europe via ports at Acapulco and Veracruz. Along these routes, Mexican silver flowed to Asia while goods like porcelain or spices entered the Americas and then circulated onward to Europe. European books, religious materials, firearms, textiles and more likewise crisscrossed these nexuses of global exchange. As a central junction, Mexico City fostered the development of merchant networks and international markets that shaped the circulation of commodities and ideas across trade systems.
Despite early modern Mexico City’s vast interconnectedness, research on the region’s sound culture has long privileged Atlantic currents. The focus has resulted in narratives of local music that amplify Western European links while marginalizing global resonances, particularly Pacific ones. This presentation responds by examining entanglements of musical performance and the city’s maritime identity in visual and literary representations of the viceregal capital’s sounds. By attending to watery motifs and allusions to transoceanic contexts in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century depictions of Mexico City musicking, I tease out broader representational patterns that link these traditions to the worldly material goods consumed by elite Creoles and Europeans.
Sarah FINLEY is Associate Professor of Spanish at Christopher Newport University. Her research on the early modern Hispanic world—particularly Mexico—delves into intersections of music and literature, and she is active in both fields. Finley is the author of Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) and Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024). In addition to these studies, she has published articles and book chapters in Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States, including an award-winning biography of Sor Juana’s musical patron the Countess of Villaumbrosa. Finley’s current projects include: a co-edited special issue of Atlantic Studies dedicated to sound in the 17th– and 18th-century North Atlantic, a book-length translation and commentary of Sor Juana’s musico-poetic works and an exploration how oceanic flows shaped early Mexican music. She currently serves as President of the Grupo de Estudios sobre la Mujer en España y las Américas (pre-1800) and represents the Colonial Latin American Literature Forum on the Modern Language Association Delegate Assembly.
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