The Office of Advancing Mentoring and the Professoriate presents

President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program Seminar Series featuring

Bernard Gordillo Brockmann

Visiting Scholar, University of California, Riverside

The Mission Soundscape: Church Bells, Spanish Colonization, and California Indians, 1769–Present

This talk explores a longue durée history of sound and the Spanish Franciscan missions in California. From 1769 to 1846, the cast suspended metal bell, or church bell, served as a crucial tool of the California mission system. Adapted from the Western European tradition, church bells with “sound and voice” defined the mission soundscape—shaping time, space, and discipline—in which California Indian peoples negotiated colonization. Much later, the mission bell came to represent “fantasy heritage” aesthetics of belonging for many Californians. Yet, more recently, California Indian truth-telling has sought to reckon with its legacies. For centuries, sound marked the power relations between Indigenous communities and newcomers in the Americas. Without the church bell, European colonization and its afterlives would have scarcely been possible.

About

Bernard Gordillo Brockmann, a native of Nicaragua, is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Riverside. He is a historian of the Americas, with an emphasis on culture, colonialism, and power. His current book project, Canto de Marte: Music, Culture, and US Intervention in Nicaragua, 1909–1933, is a history of Nicaragua that examines the cultural impact of early twentieth-century US political paternalism, fiscal and financial protectionism, and military occupation. The monograph is under contract with Oxford University Press. In development, his second monograph will be a history of sound and colonization in California. His research interests include sound and expressive culture in the Americas; US intervention in Latin America; the Cold War in Central America; and Spanish and Mexican California. More broadly, he is also interested in the history of Latin America and the United States as a mutually constitutive relationship. He serves as Central America area editor for the Oxford University Press Grove Dictionary of Latin American and Iberian Music. He has forthcoming journal articles in Ethnohistory and the Pacific Historical Review, as well as chapters in edited volumes with the University of California Press and Cambridge University Press. He holds a Ph.D. in Music (Musicology) from the University of California, Riverside. He recently completed a two-year appointment as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He previously served as a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at Yale University.