In her ‘multisited project over more than a decade’ (p. xvi), Amanda Minks has contributed an impressive, detailed trajectory of Indigenous and Latin American music collecting and collections, mostly archival, but also mentioning private collections. An Introduction is followed by Chapter 1, ‘Between the Ear and the Letter: Oral History and US Borderlands’; Chapter 2, ‘Radio, Recording, and Inter-American Indigenismo in Mexico’; Chapter 3, ‘Folklore, Region, and Revolution in Nicaragua’; and Chapter 4, ‘Indigenous Collections and Integrative Arts in Chile’. A brief ‘Epilogue’ concludes the work. The four case studies follow ‘historic shifts’ in the Caribbean, 1492; Texas, 1821; Cuba, 1898; and New York City and Washington, DC, 1928 (pp. 24–6).

Minks credits Colombian ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa for the term ‘Indigenous audibilities’ (pp. xix, 17), a term that takes on different connotations over the course of the book as the author asks ‘what becomes audible and what remains inaudible, particularly in the context of the unequal relations stemming from colonialism? And how did these discourses contribute to ideas about heritage?’ (p. 2). Further, ‘The idea of “Indigenous audibilities” draws attention to listening as a key technique for representing Indigenous music and voices through various modes of inscription, including writing, composition, and sound recording’ (p. 5).

Minks names inter-American music projects and agencies and the scholars who created them, sketching a detailed and well-documented history of interactive ‘discourses’ (p. 16) in ‘heterogeneous, conflictive spaces where diverse personalities vied for their own agendas’ (p. 18). We learn about the work of important Indigenous and Latin American music scholars both in the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean, among them Henrietta Yurchenko, Isabel Aretz and cultural actors/researchers like Violeta Parra (among others, mostly men). And we learn more about the work of Charles Seeger (a founder of ethnomusicology in the 1950s). We also learn something about aspects of Minks’ background that helped provide impetus for this work, including coming to terms with her inherited settler positionality – a welcome acknowledgment:

The Introduction names the organisations and their primary movers to be discussed in the following chapters. We first learn about the collection of volumes named América Indígena, ‘the primary research publication of the Inter-American Indian Institute, founded in Pátzcuaro, Mexico, in April of 1940’ (p. 1). The supportive role of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) at that time is reflected in the work of John Collier (then a progressive Commissioner of the BIA) and D’Arcy McNickle (Canadian Cree and Irish (p. 1, note 2), after whom is named the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies of the Newberry Library in Chicago). Minks emphasises ‘heritage discourse’ as ‘counterhegemonic’, capable of disrupting ‘dominant structures of representation’ (p. 2). This will become a thread of continuity in discussions about the historic shifts mentioned above, in which Minks historicises ‘theoretical paradigms in the overlapping disciplines of ethnomusicology, folklore, and anthropology’ (p. 4) via ‘stories’ or ‘deep histories’ (p. 5) primarily surrounding the US Works Progress Administration, the Inter-American Indian Institute and the Pan American Union (pp. 3–4), but also in non-institutional collections such as Violeta Parra’s in Chile.

In a succinct paragraph, the author introduces the conceptual areas of the book, citing ‘the effects of inscribing Indigenous music through various technologies’, and its reproduction in compositions (by non-Native composers), as in ‘projects of preservation’ (p. 5). This leads to larger forces in the form of ‘institutions, networks, and power structures’, with references to ‘Walter Benjamin’s concept of historical constellations’ to establish a broader view of the case studies (ibid.). The discussion later turns to transforming ‘archival thinking’ by directly engaging with the collected musical sound through listening, citing Dylan Robinson’s 2020 groundbreaking work (p. 16).

Minks discusses the representation of Indigenous music in the United States and Latin America, citing a difference between nineteenth-century indianista music and early-twentieth century indigenista movements, both of which romanticised the distant past (p. 11), bringing John Cage into the conversation on Mexican composer Carlos Chávez (pp. 13–14). Minks attests: ‘My social-historical method – listening, reading, and thinking beyond the archived object – opens up some of the concrete human experiences that are contained or represented by collections’ (p. 14). In an accompanying note, Minks aligns her methodology ‘with the Russian sociohistorical school of Bakhtin, Moloshinov, and Vygotsky, who focused on the analysis of heterogeneous voices and social hierarchies in discourse, communication, and cognition in the early twentieth century’.

The case studies are full of interesting information that demonstrates the care with which the author conducted research – too much to mention in a brief review. If limited in any way, although Minks mentions ‘colonial tensions between Hispanic and Anglo heritage claims’, it is mostly to highlight US expansionist projects in the mid-nineteenth century (p. 25). This calls attention to continuing ‘inaudibilities’ in barely addressing practices of captivity that gave rise to mestizaje within persistent US racial hierarchies, and that diminish Hispanos as much as Indigenous individuals of mixed ancestries in New Mexico and throughout the Southwest (see p. 55, note 62). This is recorded in archived indita ballads, which have formed the basis for a few regional studies. Nevertheless, this book should be required reading for students in Borderlands Studies, Ethnomusicology, Museum and Archival Studies, American Indian Music, Latin American Music, American and Inter-American Studies, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, American Indian Studies, Latino and Latin American Studies, Folklore, Linguistics and Interdisciplinary Studies.