Flyleaf Music Series – Sophia Enriquez, Latinx Appalachia

Sophia M. Enríquez (she/her) works at the intersections of Latino and Appalachian music, migration, and regional culture. She is the  Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of music at Duke University and holds a secondary appointment as Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She teaches courses in the Program for Latino/a Studies in the Global South. Sophia earned her PhD in ethnomusicology at the Ohio State University as well as graduate certificates in Folklore and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies.

Sophia’s dissertation titled “Canciones de Los Apalaches: Latinx Music, Migration, and Belonging in Appalachia” is the first full-length study of Latino creative practices in the Appalachian region. She is currently working on a book project that expands this work and shows how longstanding narratives of Appalachia as a monolith have obscured the movement of Latino people to and through the region over the past century.

​Sophia is passionate about community-engaged scholarship and has worked on a number of public folklore projects across the Appalachian region with the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and ONLO (Oral Narratives of Latinos in Ohio) initiative. She is also a practitioner of both Mexican and Appalachian folk musics. Sophia has performed as part of a female folk trio, the Good Time Girls, in Columbus, Ohio, and regularly performs with the Lua Project, a Mexican-Appalachian fusion band in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sophia recently co-founded Son de Carolina, a Durham, NC-based collective dedicated to the study of the Mexican folk music tradition son jarocho, with Alexandra Landeros, and is co-director of the Fandango de Durham. Learn more about Dr. Enriquez and her work here.