UC Alianza MX Awards $150K for Binational Music and Community Project

Led by faculty from UC Irvine and UC San Diego, Cauces Sónicos explores collaborative artmaking and education across the U.S.–México border.

IRVINE, Calif., May 12, 2025 — Funded with a Latino Studies Research Project award from the University of California Alianza MX Initiative, Cauces Sónicos: Creative Music Making Across the Borderlands is a two-year project co-directed by UC San Diego Professor Wilfrido Terrazas and UC Irvine Department of Music Chair Michael Dessen of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. The project will leverage collaborative musical experimentation to explore a kaleidoscopic, expansive notion of the US-México borderlands, engaging communities and deepening institutional partnerships both directly on the border and as far south and north as Ensenada, Baja California and Orange County. 

"Music is at the core of everything I do in one way or another, and my work at UC Irvine is centered in the Department of Music in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts," said Dessen. "I also love working at UC Irvine because of the many interdisciplinary connections I can pursue here, and I'm grateful to be affiliated with the Connected Learning Lab, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the newly emerging Alec Glasser Center for the Power of Music and Social Change, all of which point to different aspects of a project like Cauces Sónicos."

For Dessen, this project brings artistic and pedagogical experimentation into dialogue, building on previous projects as Telematic Bridges, a series of workshops he co-led with artistic collaborators in Colombia that connected high school music students from Santa Ana High School with peers in the South American country to experiment with cutting-edge music technologies. As he describes it, Cauces Sónicos will be grounded in music making, including creating new, collaborative works with guest artists and doctoral students, while also exploring new forms of learning and community engagement through a novel undergraduate course and community-based workshops.  

“Connecting people on both sides of the border and fostering transnational collaboration is simply what I do and have done for a long time. I have witnessed firsthand, many times, how these collaborative processes help us grow together, understand each other and see each other as equals,” said Terrazas. “This project builds and expands upon previous work on an unprecedented level, incorporating a formal educational aspect which I believe is potentially groundbreaking and has never even remotely been tried before at this scale anywhere across the borderlands.”

Image: Professor Michael Dessen (left) works with students at Santa Ana High School and in Manizales, Colombia, as part of a previous project, Telematic Bridges, in 2021. Photo by Teerath Majumder.

Having grown up in Ensenada, Terrazas' creative and educational work has long been connected to the complexities of the borderlands. In recent years, he has collaborated with Baja California-based artists' collectives and institutions in the organization of two festivals and multiple concerts and workshops, many of them transnational, most notably the Semana Internacional de Improvisación (International Improvisation Week) in Ensenada, which will celebrate its 10th edition later this year. Terrazas also started collaborating last year with the UCSD Community Stations, a program of the UCSD Center on Global Justice led by Professors Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, leading a series of workshops and a performance involving local community members at the border neighborhood of San Ysidro.

Beginning in 2025, Cauces Sónicos brings together diverse professional and institutional partners and is designed around several layers of interrelated artistic, educational and community engagement projects. The first phase in summer 2025 will focus on creative workshops with members of the San Ysidro community, developed in collaboration with UC San Diego Professor Teddy Cruz and the UC San Diego Community Stations that Cruz has helped develop as imaginative urban interventions around the border. 

In parallel, Terrazas and Dessen will also lead a collaborative group of faculty, doctoral students and professional artists, including Esther Gámez and Iván Trujillo (co-directors of the Semana Internacional de Improvisación), to develop new musical works that will be premiered in fall 2025 at the Neofonía Festival in Ensenada, which is directed by Prof. Álvaro Díaz (Universidad Autónoma de Baja California).

Extending the project into the undergraduate classroom, Professors Terrazas, Díaz and Dessen will teach a fall 2025 undergraduate course spanning their three campuses (UABC, UC San Diego and UC Irvine). Working together both via telepresence and through supported opportunities to travel across the border for an in-person, weekend intensive, students will create new, collaborative works inspired by life in the borderlands, including reflections of diverse communities as well as the ecological interdependence that defines the region. As a final phase of the project in winter 2026, Terrazas, Dessen and collaborators on the project's creative team including Fabricio Cavero, a UCI PhD student in Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology (ICIT) in the Department of Music, will participate in collaborative, artistic workshops with migrant workers staying at UC San Diegos's Alacrán Community Station, an emergency housing site in Tijuana, aiming to establish a transformative, empowering dialogue for all participants.

These activities will continue into a second-year cycle, building on what was learned during the first year and strengthening foundations for future work and partnerships. Cauces Sónicos builds on past work that key team members have been facilitating successfully in the borderland regions, and that emphasizes validating local and community knowledge while using music and intercultural collaboration to serve diverse populations of youth, seniors, migrants and local neighborhoods. These projects include the Semana Internacional de Improvisación (SIDIMPRO) in Ensenada (Terrazas, Trujillo, Gámez), the yearly Fronteras event held at the UCSD-Casa Community Station in San Ysidro (Terrazas, Cruz), the Neofonía festival in Ensenada (Díaz), the Instituto Contemporáneo de Música de Baja California (ICMBC) in Ensenada (Trujillo) and Puentes Telemáticos (Dessen).

“Thanks to the support of the Alianza Mx Program we will build a multi-generational, multicultural, multidisciplinary, and innovative creative corridor across our region, in which students, artists, institutions, and community members can come together in art and music making, while at the same time reflecting about the uniqueness of these lands and their social and ecological challenges,” said Terrazas.

To learn more about the UC Alianza MX Initiative, visit alianzamx.universityofcalifornia.edu. To learn more about UC Irvine’s Department of Music, visit music.arts.uci.edu. For information about Michael Dessen, visit his Department of Music bio page here. For information about Wilfrido Terrazas, visit his UC San Diego bio page here.