Sophia Enriquez showed up at Alexandra Landeros’ new house ready to play son jarocho music.
It was 2021. Landeros, a folk musician who had spent time in the storied music scene of Austin, Texas, had just moved to a new spot in Durham. Enriquez had just started work as an assistant professor at the Duke University Department of Music. When they sat on Landeros’ porch playing the traditional music from Veracruz, Mexico, Landeros knew she had found the kind of collaborator she had been seeking. For one, they both knew how to play a region-specific form of Mexican folk music. More importantly, Enriquez was a talented and knowledgeable musician – without ego.
“She’s played professionally. She could easily take up space, but she doesn’t,” Landeros says. “I think by nature of the music that she’s studied, and perhaps how she was raised, that’s just not who she is.”
Enriquez has played music since early childhood: first piano, then trumpet, building to the variety of instruments she knows as an adult. She’s also a lifelong student of music as a cultural phenomenon. Yet this ethnomusicologist doesn’t draw a line between the scholar and the musician. She would get FOMO – fear of missing out – if she only studied music but didn’t play it, she half-jokes. The reality, though, is this is simply who she is.
“My scholarship doesn’t exist without the artistry,” Enriquez says.
Enriquez grew up in the westernmost county that’s considered part of Appalachia in Ohio. Her mother’s family has lived in Clermont County for generations. Her father’s family originated in Mexico, migrating to Mississippi in the 1930s. Enriquez grew up on her family’s farm, raising goats
and cows.
“There’s a lot of bluegrass in southwestern Ohio,” she says.
Young Enriquez heard rancheras, boleros and corridos, but also the Nashville sound that she and her friends loved. She fondly remembers going down to the Ohio River to see country bands play. It’s in her blood.
“Most of my aunts and uncles on my dad’s side, of my grandfather’s generation, were musicians who learned from my great-grandfather, who was a pretty prominent fiddler in [Mississippi] from the ’50s to the ’80s,” she says.
When Enriquez began studying ethnomusicology, she didn’t see stories reflecting families like hers. The Mexican American side of her family has been in the United States nearly a century, playing country music in the Deep South and farming in Appalachia, yet contributions like theirs to American music had been understudied.
“In the historical narrative there was still something missing,” she says. “I realized that the something missing were stories that looked more like those from my own family, which didn’t fit neatly into a box.
“A lot of people are surprised to learn through my work that there’s a history of Mexicans in a place like West Virginia,” Enriquez says, mentioning the state of her undergraduate education. “But why is that so surprising?”
As a scholar, she studies stories like her own – in Appalachia, yes, but increasingly also in the Deep South. Through family archives and lore, she aims to “paint a more complete picture of the Mississippi Delta, a place that is so essential for understanding the history of American music.”
Landeros, who works in finance, came to folk music her own way. She was raised in Los Angeles by Mexican immigrant parents and was as likely to hear mariachi as Neil Diamond at home. By the time she and Enriquez met in 2021, each had spent a lifetime steeped in music. Together, they formed the organization Son de Carolina, which has hosted the Fandango de Durham since 2022. The local community, Enriquez notes, includes many families from Veracruz.
“It’s important to think about your role in this place while you’re here,” she says. She’s referring to her approach with her students, as her Duke classroom blurs with the Durham Latino community, but this philosophy seems to guide Enriquez while her love of music drives her. “It’s people first,” Landeros says of her friend. “Music just happens to be the thing that we’re doing, the same way people come together to eat food.”