From the Inquisition’s prohibition of the chuchumbé in colonial New Spain to contemporary efforts to criminalize Brazilian funk, the politics of obscenity have marked the reception of music deemed vulgar both inside and outside Black and mestizo working-class communities in Latin America. What social grounds shape the consumption and prohibition of this so-called vulgar music? What kind of work does obscenity perform as a category of judgment, and in which spaces do sounds become intelligible as obscene? These questions serve as the departure point for a study of the stakes involved in the obscene rendering of sonic cultures. Drawing from archival research and interviews conducted in Brazil and Mexico, I argue that obscenity acts as a mechanism of cultural distinction that produces and legitimizes social hierarchies. Scholarly literature has examined obscenity as a legal complement to pornography, noting the importance that juridical censorship acquires in discursive constructions of the obscene. In my research, I have found that the questions I posed are better understood by looking at how historical modes of listening actualize power. The issue is not a subject that has power but rather the ways historical practices of listening actualize power, thus undergirding a rationality that cannot be understood simply as coming from “above,” that is, juridical power. Looking through and beyond the juridical foundations of the obscene, this research expands the scope of inquiry beyond music-centered analysis and top-down controlling systems to consider how everyday listening practices regulate sonic and sexual propriety. I begin by looking at the introduction of obscenity into the juridical lexicon of the New Spain Inquisition as a category to regulate sexually transgressive music and dance in the mid-eighteenth century. In Chapter 2, I document the demonization of Afro-Brazilian sacred expression in a Pentecostal church in Brazil, situating this demonization within the centuries-long juridical persecution of Afro-Brazilian musical practices. In Chapter 3, I investigate how obscenity operates within the neocolonial script of ethnopornography, as a lettered elite sets out to write about the sonic and sexual pleasures of its research subjects in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Brazil. Chapter 4 examines the sociopolitical implications of the Brazilian New Right’s political stagings of obscenity within contemporary discourses of truth, showing how this staging falsely constructs New Right leaders as truth-tellers amid economic crises and political corruption. Linking these seemingly disparate yet related historical contexts, I suggest, is a way of relating the obscene through specific listening practices.