Sounds of the Street Vendors: Collaborative Ethnographic Filmmaking and the Urban Soundscape of Havana

Sounds of Street Vendors, a short documentary in the observational style recreates the urban soundscape Havana through the everyday practices of vendors that sing pregones (streetcries) to sell their goods. In this article, we will discuss the collaborative filmmaking process of street vendors from the points of view of an ethnomusicologist and a filmmaker and to how this type of multidisciplinary and multimodal approach of doing ethnography can create "different ways of knowing and learning together" (Chio 2023). Collaborative and multimodal ethnography also refers to move away from text centered research, one that recognizes the multisensorial and performative nature of the phenomena we explore in the field, and to the power of film to capture this multisensoriality and performativity in ways text can't (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamon 2019). In the article we will also unpack the various underlying themes compressed during the documentary.