Abstract
Building on literature dealing with memory and hermeneutics as they relate to music and musical experience, this thesis explores the role of music and memory in the negotiation of place within the context of displacement through the life history of Eulogio Leonidas Lara (Leo), an Ecuadorian immigrant musician currently residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Active as a musician, social activist and educator alongside his spouse, Kathy, since the early 1970s, Leo maintains a strong connection to his homeland through music and his use thereof despite his estrangement. Through his work as a musician, he not only bridges his life and experiences within Ecuador and the United States, but with the greater community as well. In so doing, he manages to fashion a unique sense of place that, while fundamentally rooted in his experiences as a musician within Ecuador, traverses both worlds. In the end, I argue that it is through music and memory, as they inform perception and understanding, that Leo negotiates his sense of being and place as an individual living in diaspora.
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