“…a call to self-determination for Mexicanos in both Mexico and the U.S.”
Inspired by traditional son arocho music of Veracruz, Mexico, and spiked with urban rhythms, rock and R&B, East LA Chicano group Quetzal will release ‘Imaginaries’, its 5th album and 1st for Smithsonian Folkways, on Feb. 28, 2012. Quetzal, called “provocative, heartfelt and strikingly original” by the LA Times and founded by guitarist Quetzal Flores, rose from the ashes of uprisings in LA in 1992 as a vehicle for social commentary and activism.
Mobile Mural Lab co-founder Roberto Del Hoyo describes what murals and muralism in Los Angeles means to him as an artist and an educator.
As part of its ongoing L.A. Xicano exhibitions in the Getty’s city-wide “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980” initiative, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center held its first “Undocumented Event” at the Boyle Heights Farmers Market. This free event was co-produced by the Mobile Mural Lab (MML), a mobile art space created by Los Angeles-based artists to foster dialogue and engage community around matters of public art. L.A. Xicano artist Sandra de la Loza was a co-organizer of this event.
This Undocumented Event engaged issues around the Los Angeles mural moratorium, instituted in 2002 but under review by the City Council for possible revision. The MML truck included a question-driven chalkboard piece for public commentary, outdoor video screenings, a mini-exhibit and research center, and dialogue with artists about the history of muralism in Los Angeles and its role in community development.
11 Year-Old Carries On Family’s Aztec Dance Tradition
San Francisco Mission District resident Connie Xochiquetzalli “Xochi” Peña has been an Aztec dancer all her life.
As a 2 year-old, she danced an entire parade route. Now 11, Xochi sometimes steps in for her mother and teaches dance class at the Mission Cultural Center.
She comes from a long line of Aztec dancers. Her great-grandfather on her mother’s side was also a dancer in her family’s native Toluca, Estado de Mexico.
Xochi has big plans for herself, ones that include practicing either law or medicine. If dancing parade routes as a toddler and teacher classes while still in the sixth grade is any indication, we’re sure she can do anything she sets her mind to.
Mosquita y Mari is a coming of age story that focuses on a tender love between two young Chicanas that struggles to find its place in their lives and in today’s world. Yolanda and Mari are growing up in Huntington Park, Los Angeles and have only known loyalty to one thing: family.
Before he came to Southern California in 2002, Fidel Bernabe played trumpet in a small town in Mexico and believed himself to be very talented.
Los Angeles had many bandas — Mexican brass bands that play dance music at parties and nightclubs — that worked year-round. Surely there must be a band that could use his gifts, he thought.
But once here, he found competition intense. Bernabe rarely found two nights of trumpeting work and had to take a day job in a sewing factory.
“You come to get out of the hole,” he said. “You think you’re going to grab money in piles. You get here and you realize it’s not as easy as you imagined.”
Then, by accident, Bernabe found the tuba. He saw a deal for one in L.A. and bought it for his brother, a tuba player in Chicago. When his brother couldn’t pay, Bernabe kept the instrument and decided to learn it on his own. For more than a year, he practiced for hours after his sewing job.
Tubas were in growing demand. By 2007, he was playing five gigs a week — sometimes two a night. He found all that he’d imagined in America. He quit his job, got married, had three kids and supported them with his tuba.
“The tuba has radically changed my life,” he said.
Bernabe is part of what he and other banda musicians are calling Southern California’s “tuba revolution.” The mania for the instrument arrived from Mexico several years ago and is fueled by the large number of house parties that occur here every weekend. Immigrants who once were too poor to hold such parties in their homeland now view a tuba-equipped banda as a sign of having arrived.
Tuba players say partygoers now throw wadded dollar bills into their instruments — sometimes so many that they clog the pipes.
“We have millions of people in Southern California of Mexican origin,” said Jesse Tucker, a banda tuba player in Pomona. “They all throw parties. They all have quinceaneras; they all get married. And every group can use a tuba.”
As thousands gathered in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California in November of 2009 in honor of Día de los Muertos, a group shared what seemed to be a zombie-inspired performance piece.
It’s a warm evening at Tia Chucha’s Bookstore in Sylmar, in California’s San Fernando Valley, not far from the neighborhood where Ritchie Valens created a rock ‘n’ roll version of the most famous son jarocho tune “La Bamba.” Tonight, Aaron Castellanos is one of eight students in a music class held at the store. He’s learning to play the eight-string jarana, the main instrument in the musical style of son jarocho.
“I like the way that the jarana sounds,” he says. “I like how son jarocho invokes so much energy into the playing and into the singing.”
Son jarocho comes from Veracruz, a state in the Gulf Coast region of Mexico, where three different cultures — Spanish, indigenous and African — came together more than 500 years ago. Castellanos is actually learning the “mosquito,” one of the smallest jaranas, which has a noticeably high pitch.
“This is the first instrument that I’ve ever learned, so I want to keep playing,” Castellanos says. “I want to buy my own jarana and just continue practicing.”
Castellanos’ teacher is Cesar Castro, a key figure at the center of the Son Jarocho explosion in Los Angeles. Castro says that, since he moved to L.A. from Veracruz eight years ago, the number of son jarocho musicians has been growing, and the quality of the music has been improving.
“When we had the first fandangos here in Los Angeles, the music was not that good. But the energy, the will to do these fandangos, it was very strong,” Castro says. “The music is getting better, still in a very respectful traditional format.”
Espinoza Paz is blowing up, and deservedly so. Paz, whose given name is Isidro Chávez Espinoza, is possibly the most popular Mexican musician in both Mexico and the United States right now, but his journey to such stardom has not been easy.
As a teenager, Paz emigrated from his hometown of Angostura, Sinaloa to the rural town of Dixon, California, where he worked for several years harvesting oranges, olives, and grapes.
Paz was one of the millions of Mexican workers helping to feed both family in Mexico and American consumers. Such a story deserves recognition.
Great news today for thousands of students and advocates of the DREAM Act. Late this morning, California Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 131, the second half of a two-part bill that will make financial aid available to students who otherwise wouldn’t qualify due to their residency status.
Of the various components in previously proposed Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) bills, the DREAM Act has garnered the most popular support nationwide. Credit goes to organizers and advocates for raising awareness for the cause of college students, but it brings up an important question: What about the others?
The DREAM Act movement proposes preferential status for college students, leaving the vast majority of young people to fend for themselves. Aside from elitist, this approach emboldens reactionaries and fractures the efforts of organizations working toward CIR.
In the past, national organizers of the DREAM Act have framed their struggle as not being “just about ‘those Mexicans.’” This is beyond troublesome. Also troublesome is the ultra-patriotic assimilationist message amongst most involved in the DREAM Act movement.
Although, state versions do not involve military service, the federal version has been explicitly written to target Mexican American youth from low-income communities for requirement into the military.
From Mexico City to Soweto, students have led the cause of freedom and justice for the entire community, not just themselves. It is time the DREAM Act movement, especially Mexicans, reassess their strategy and direct their efforts at serving the greater good.
A recently published article has returned attention to the Oaxaqueño community of Greenfield, California. Lost in the account of a city struggling to find its identity is the story of a community preserving its traditions in the face of staunch opposition.
Triqui community leaders have turned to what has sustained them through similar struggles: culture and tradition. Groups such as La Unión Indígena are organizing Sunday gatherings to teach traditional weaving and music to the children of the community.
Such efforts will surely one day see results in the trilingual sons and daughters of Oaxaca living in Greenfield.
Every Sunday, Juan Enriquez, a former farmworker from Mexico, shows off his culinary art, sculpturing sweet white meat from young coconuts with a knife and briskly sprinkling it with salt and lime.
“It is better than working in the fields,” Mr. Enriquez said of his new job as a vendor at the Madera Flea Market. “Here at least there is shade.”
At the market, the stress is often disguised with beauty. Sitting beside a mountain of chiles, Socorro Guiterrez was selling crepe-paper flowers that she fashions by hand. Her deepest sadness, a serious injury and the death of nine companions in a van accident while coming home from the fields, was not readily apparent — invisible in colorful crepe-paper petals, as delicate as life.
