# @ucberkeleyofficial on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DObXl7sEYMP
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/64635405-ucberkeleyofficial-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/76d7639a36.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-09-10T15:59:52.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** UC Berkeley (@ucberkeleyofficial) — https://gondola.cc/ucberkeleyofficial

## Caption

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 traditional music, called pirekua.

When he went to pirekua performances, Batterman Cháirez was fascinated by how concertgoers would livestream the music for their families who had migrated to the U.S., to places like California, North Carolina and Illinois. “Seeing this confirmed music’s importance, and the fact that it’s always in motion with people,” said Batterman Cháirez. 

This fall, Batterman Cháirez is teaching the course Music, Movement and Migration in Latin America. It looks at the ways music has moved with migrants over borders, including between the U.S. and Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia, and the Caribbean islands. It also explores the origins of specific genres of music that he considers “transnational,” like reggaeton, which emerged from dialogues between New York hip hop scenes and traditional music in the Caribbean.

“I’m hoping people will explore their own connections to migration, and reassess their own relationship to music and movement and how it has impacted their lives,” Batterman Cháirez said. “Music is in everyone’s life in some way.”

#ImABerkeleyan #UCBerkeley

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