Herman Luis Chavez (he/him/his) is double majoring in Ethnomusicology and Comparative Literature. His research considers the use of music as a tool for constructing ideology, focusing especially on race, ethnicity, and power in Latin America and the United States. His current thesis project looks at echoes of colonialism in the musical ideologies and institutions of late 20th century Bolivia. He looks at composer and musicologist Atiliano Auza León, understanding his works through postcolonial theory and placing them in the sociopolitical context of Bolivian arts at the time. More broadly, his research interests include popular music, critical race studies, folkloric and Indigenous music, diaspora and migration, poetics and queerness, decolonial and postcolonial theory, queer of color critique, U.S. Latinx studies, and Latin American, Bolivian, and Andean cultural studies.