Research

Leal is an author, composer-performer, and scholar born and raised in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. He pursues cultural research that integrates creative music-making with critical nonfiction. Practically, this involves designing and creating works that extend across media forms, presentational genres, and intellectual traditions, including collaborative albums and standalone musical pieces, books, live performances, installations, sound design for theater, films, and new media projects. As Leal works on these projects, many of them collaborative, new research questions often emerge that then travel across various sites of creative activity—archives, recording studios, bandstands, concert halls, classrooms, writing desks, and more—in turn sowing seeds for new projects. This ongoing practice propels Leal's investment in creative resistances to bordered life.

Music and Sound Studies; Cultural History; Comparative Media Poetics; Modernity/Coloniality; U.S.–Mexico Border Poetics and Narratives; Chicanx and Latinx Media and Cultures; Relational Studies of Race and Ethnicity; Critical Nonfiction; American Popular Cultures