Resonant Souths: Latino Musical Life in Appalachia and the southern U.S. (forthcoming 2027 from University of North Carolina Press)
Sophia is currently completing her first book, Resonant Souths: Latino Musical Life in Appalachia and the Southern U.S., an interdisciplinary ethnographic study of music, migration, and belonging across Appalachia and the U.S. South. Blending archival research, collaborative ethnography, folklore studies, and ethnomusicology, the book traces how Latino communities have shaped the cultural and sonic landscape of the region across the past century.
Moving between historical archives and contemporary community music-making, Resonant Souths follows musicians, organizers, and families whose creative practices challenge longstanding narratives of Appalachia and the South as culturally homogeneous spaces. From Mexican coal miners and migrant farmworker musicians to son jarocho collectives, “Mexilachian” performance projects, and community festivals, the book explores how music becomes a way of navigating migration, memory, labor, and political uncertainty while cultivating deep relationships to place.
Grounded in long-term collaborative fieldwork across West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Veracruz, Mexico, the project argues that Latino musical practices are not peripheral to Appalachian and Southern culture, but central to understanding the region’s past, present, and future. Through these stories and sounds, Resonant Souths reimagines Appalachia and the South as interconnected “Souths” shaped by movement, resonance, and everyday practices of belonging.
Photo by Jared Hamilton
Caption: Musicians from Veracruz, Mexico participate in a jam at the Mountain Fiesta, an annual event that celebrates Latino and Appalachian culture in Cumberland Gap, Tennessee.
HonkyTonk & Hot Tamales: The Making of Mexican Mississippi
Sophia's second project, in its early stages and tentatively titled, centers the untold Mexican cultural legacy of the Mississippi Delta. Blending story-telling approaches from historical ethnomusicology, oral history, and folklore, this work specifically explores Sophia's family history as Mexican sharecroppers and musicians in the Mississippi Delta in the early twentieth century. Sophia tells the story of her great-grandfather, Nicolas Enriquez, a fiddler and tamale maker who migrated to Mississippi from the Texas-Mexico border in the late 1920s. There, he married Maria Vargas and they raised their twelve children, many of whom also became musicians of both traditional Mexican and southern music. Nicholas (Nick) was active at regional fiddle contests, including the Mississippi state fair fiddle contest, and started a fiddle/country/honky-tonk jam in his backyard shed in the 1950s. The jam continues to this day as "Tuesday Night Pickers" in Cleveland, Mississippi, where many members of the jam remember Nick and his weaving in and out of Mexican and Southern musical worlds. As scholars of Mexican migration to the south such as Julie Weise have shown, the Enriquez family is just one example of the profound impact Mexican laborers made on the political, ecnomic, and cultural currents of the South in the twentieth century. This project uncovers a wider Mexican musical history of the Mississippi Delta that has been lost to mainstream narratives of the U.S. South while also documenting how more recently arrived Mexican families to the Mississippi Delta express their southern Mexican culture through music.
Photo courtesy of the Enriquez family archives
Photo courtesy of the Enriquez family archives
Caption: Maria Vargas Enriquez and Nicolas Enriquez (center) with their twelve children in Pace, Mississippi. Early 1960s.
Caption: Nicolas Enriquez competes at the Mississippi State Fair fiddle contest in Jackson, Mississippi. Late 1980s.
