Connectivity: Chulas Fronteras

Juan Antonio Cuéllar was born in Los Caños, Aguascalientes, Mexico, raised in Santa Cruz, California, and later moved to San Francisco. After working in the city’s hospitality industry, he pursued music, touring and playing valve trombone with the San Francisco-based bilingual punk band La Plebe. During this time, Cuéllar worked at the Arhoolie Foundation as head digitizing engineer for the Strachwitz Frontera Collection, the largest repository of commercially- and independently-recorded Spanish-language music. Over two decades, Cuéllar digitized more than 160,000 recordings and later helped curate the collection, processing and cataloging hundreds of photographs, videos, and printed materials to expand public access. His work centers on Mexican and Mexican American vernacular music and the role of archives as spaces for community memory. He has contributed to oral history projects and digital exhibitions, including Historias de la Alondra and Rumbo a California. Cuéllar is pursuing a master’s degree in library and information science at San José State University and is the Archivist and Digital Asset Manager at The Los Cenzontles Music and Art Academy in San Pablo, California.

Maureen Gosling has directed, produced, edited, recorded sound, and distributed documentaries since 1972. A graduate of the University of Michigan (BA, Social Anthropology), she began as a sound recordist with Les Blank, beginning a twenty-year collaboration in which they made over twenty films. Their films include Burden of Dreams (co-filmmaker, editor, sound), winner of the British Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1982, and I Went to the Dance: The Cajun and Zydeco Music of Louisiana (co-filmmaker, editor). Gosling’s feature documentary Blossoms of Fire (2000), which celebrates the Isthmus Zapotecs of southern Oaxaca, Mexico, was broadcast on HBO Latino. Her more recent films as director/producer/editor include the feature-length docs The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane (2023), about jazz/blues/folk singer/activist Barbara Dane, and This Ain’t No Mouse Music! (2013, with Chris Simon) on roots music record producer Chris Strachwitz, which premiered at SXSW. She is director/editor of Del Mero Corazón and assistant editor/translator of Chulas Fronteras.

Gallo Armado is the musical project of Fernando Ríos, a corrido artist and songwriter from Monterrey, Nuevo León. In 2025, Ríos made history as the first corridoartist to win Nuevo Talento Nuevo León, the region’s prestigious talent competition, with his composition “El Corrido del Aire,” a song advocating for environmental protection for the air and rivers in Monterrey. The success of this song demonstrates that the new wave of corridos could serve as storytelling vehicles for contemporary socially-conscious themes. His songwriting centers the experiences of working-class communities, from orange vendors in Montemorelos, to mothers searching for disappeared loved ones, to environmental and territorial activism. He is currently working on his debut album La Ciudad es Nuestra (“The City Is Ours”), crowdfunded by family, friends, and supporters, as well as an upcoming 7” single release with Trucha Soul and Sabotaje Media. Gallo Armado represents a new generation of musician that is redefining regional Mexican music, offering strong counter-narratives of emerging corrido music with stories of dignity, resistance, and everyday survival.

David Novak is Associate Professor in Music and Director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music at UCSB. His award-winning book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke UP, 2013) has been translated into five languages, and his research has been supported by Fulbright, SSRC, NEH, NSF, AIFIS, and the Japan Foundation. His current book project, entitled Diggers: An Archival Counterhistory of Popular Music, explores the globalization of music through networks of record and cassette collectors, informal sound archives, reissue labels, and sound recording digitization projects in the Global South.