Growing up in Mexico City, UC Berkeley Professor Chris Batterman Cháirez would always hear music — it seemed to be playing everywhere he went, a kind of soundtrack to his daily life. Born to a Mexican mother and an American father, Batterman Cháirez moved with his family to the U.S. at an early age, and spent a lot of time going back and forth between the two countries over the years. That’s when he first noticed how music travels across borders, influencing the cultures it comes in contact with in complex ways. “The music moved with my family,” said Batterman Cháirez, who’s joined the music department this fall as an assistant professor of ethnomusicology. After college, Batterman Cháirez lived in Atlanta and Brazil, where he played upright bass in jazz ensembles and picked up other gigs where he could. In graduate school, he returned to Mexico, this time in the western state of Michoacán, where he lived with Indigenous P’urhépecha communities to play and learn about their traditio...