Third Text

19 May 2023

I struggle to remember, in the silence of this room, the moments I heard my mother sing as a way to respond to a question – the most mundane of all: how are you? – in one of our daily phone conversations. She is now retired after several decades working in several of Los Angeles’s fashion district factories, still living with my father who continues to work in a local grocery store while struggling with lifelong alcoholism. It is a precarious living arrangement, no doubt, but by no means a novel circumstance. I understand the dynamics, even though it has been years since I have shared a home with them. So, yes, the question of how she is on any given day is never an easy one to respond to. It is not her words that she employs in her answer. I hear her singing-as-parenthesis in conversation often: a curation of songs that facilitate the conversation, or remind one of its lack. Sometimes a melody, an existing one, drives the response. She begins, in head voice, ^[1] to sing a classic bolero norteño ^[2] familiar to most fans of Los Cadetes de Linares: ^[3]

No, no te preocupes por mí,
aquí todo sigue igual,
como cuando estabas tú ^[4]

No, don’t worry about me
Everything is the same
As when you were here

My mother funnels the response into other people’s words, ‘No Hay Novedad’/ ‘There’s Nothing New’, singing the chorus of a song that addresses a loved one who is no longer around: no, don’t worry about me, everything is the same, as when you were here. That is, simultaneous denial and supplication, or denial as supplication, an attempt to assuage not the listener but the self, in the reality of distance or estrangement. It is a song about a nothing we try to create out of the something that is the un/bearable toil of the everyday. Her voice is not spectacular, not especially strong or striking, nor particularly memorable. It emerges from the head more than the chest. She cites and sings the words in her head voice and quickly moves on to another topic. She does not dwell in the song; rather, it forms part of a larger strategy, a habitual but not-quite absent-minded practice, a reflex in our greeting. ‘No Hay Novedad’ is one of the many musical resources she employs, fleetingly, in the beginning or midst of our conversation, when the wind is steady, when, indeed, ‘aquí todo sigue igual/ here everything is the same’.

The recurrence of song, to a repertoire of songs, in our conversations brings up questions of how we record our everyday, and the records that propel us through it, the memory that is not only transmitted but its palimpsests. The sheer paradox of it all (simultaneous documentation and erasure) drives this meditation. The definition of archive, ‘the place where records are kept’, invites one to consider the manifold meanings of ‘record’, particularly the nouns, the (generalised) document and the musical product. I emphasise the musical product as it is remembered, rehearsed, forgotten by the living body. The place where records are kept does not reference a state-of-the-art building nor a simple shoe box, but the body that remembers (and dismembers) records in singing. Singing is itself a practice that recalls and reconstitutes. This corporeal archive is a place that is not a destination but is itself a flesh and bone phenomena that inhabits and haunts spaces real and imagined, an ear that has perceived, a hand that recalls. It is a body that interacts with other bodies, near and far, forgotten and endlessly conjured.   

That place, a body, my mother, has amassed not just weight and history, but an affective archive whose contents she sings as a way to self-regulate and negotiate. ^[5]  Such an act is widespread, a common strategy of subjectivity. If song composition can be considered an archival practice – that is, ‘constituting valued sites for the deposit and retrieval of historical styles and practices’ ^[6] – then singing these songs, not just listening to them, in everyday life (not in entertainment contexts) is to access a sonic artefact that one has housed, has curated, that one uses as a building block in one’s subjectivity, an element of one’s rage or loneliness, an artefact that exists somewhere in between memory, place, people, an artefact that becomes itself (as it destroys itself) in the singing voice, in breath. Independently of the history of the song itself, but intertwined with it, is the subject’s own history, which as a history is connected to the song. The singing voice here becomes a function of an archive my mother animates in particular flashes, in momentary bursts, which despite their ephemerality constitute the manifestation of, in this case, protest, reprimand or longing. How can we think of the singing voice as an archive? I pursue this paradoxical notion because what I present here is a series of songs intertwined with the lived intimate, songs that are neither random nor trivial, songs that have a logic emerging from the subject that has curated them as meaningful artefacts which facilitate communication: how I miss you! I noticed you said that! Well, enough… Here, there is no archive without a voice that enlivens it through the larynx and then reverberates through other senses.

Songs such as ‘No Hay Novedad’ move through my mother’s experience and her history as the other, in a country where she has worked in clothing factories since she arrived, applying her tailoring skills to machines, her focus so intense she deals with repercussions, nothing del otro mundo, no big deal, ‘no te preocupes por mi’. The pleasures of seeing your children grow, even if it means a distance between her desk and ours. A country where she understands English but has not achieved a laudable bilingualism. And thus, music fills a lacunae of communication. She does not keep the song, she does not play it on any device, she moves and manipulates these melodies as a way to say and not say…

‘No Hay Novedad’ functions as a proxy for a certain feeling or mood, one she expresses and forecloses. A pattern of paradox. Let me sing another’s words to convey something about my own. She inserts her performance like a parenthesis in the conversation, at times solemn, at times wistful, at times defiant. These tunes interact with her realities; she beckons them to supplement questions and rationalisations, silences and sighs. Even as the song itself does not encode humour, her singing elicits the playful, almost campy self-deprecating gesture, somewhat deriding the song, somewhat deriding herself. ‘No Hay Novedad’ reconstructs the dismissals of those that have sacrificed something: don’t worry about me, nothing to see here. It is the no that means yes, it is the paradox emerging from day-to-today disappointment and hope, the faith despite the rotten fruits falling from her husband’s tree in the backyard.

‘No Hay Novedad’ is a song of nostalgia from the 1980s, musically and lyrically, its melody driven by the plaintive accordion evoking the imaginary of the borderlands. If we attend to the history of the norteña, then the music evokes the geography where the music first developed, the arid landscape of the US–Mexico borderlands. Part of its history is now attached to that place from where she speaks to me, the crowded, boisterous neighbourhood of a southeast LA street where I grew up and where I heard the music first, music of immigrant working people’s leisure, the coda of the party – music as familiar as my own breath, it houses memory. 

If you look for ‘No Te Preocupes Por Mi’ on any given platform with user commentaries, one learns not from facts but from an affective field that makes sense of the song, and thus of loss and longing. Anthem of drunken sorrow, the musical index of pain and catalyst of elders’ memories: ‘My grandfather is gone and this was his favourite song’; ‘I listen to it because it reminds me of my father… my grandmother… all of us here, haven’t we all lost someone that will never come back?’  Thus, my mother’s interpellation of ‘No Hay Novedad’ evokes a significant cultural history. In our case, in this conversation I have with her, she becomes that speaker addressing the one that’s gone, insisting that there’s nothing new here, everything is the same, surely a little better, surely a little worse.

The rest of her repertoire consists of modern pop songs that she recycles into a vernacular practice, emphasising the lyric as poetry. She does not house an extraordinary number of songs, or songs of the ‘best’ kind. But they outline sentiments one would rather not divulge so openly. She archives the songs as much as the songs archive her experiences. ‘Hipocresía’ (Hypocrisy) is a song that registers another genre, cosmopolitan ballads, the 1970s electric guitar appearing across the globe – in this case, a Peruvian band, Los Pasteles Verdes (The Green Cakes). ^[7]  Despite the story it tells of witnessing a former lover with a new flame, and feigning a smile or even indifference despite raging with jealousy, it is the title of the song, that ‘hypocrisy’, that she cites, that she sings or desires to sing, when she experiences similar acts of duplicity and insincerity in her familial milieu. The song becomes part of the story of what happened, part of what she may relay to me: ‘and then, once we were back home, I sang [the words] “Hi-po-cre-si-aaaaa!!”’ At times, only the melody is enough, as the song is familiar to both, its sign transformed to become not mere melody but reprimand itself, a method to relay a message: I saw what you did, I heard what you said. It declares knowledge and awareness in spaces where for various reasons, calling out otherwise is not an option in that moment, in that time.

These same songs may be housed elsewhere, perhaps together; the songs of Los Pasteles Verdes, the songs of Los Cadetes de Linares may be available on commercial platforms like Spotify, on private collections or digital playlists by an enthusiast, on any given assortment housed in universities or similar institutions across the world. They may be arranged and categorised using the logics of genre or geography or time. What is different about considering the repository of/in the corporeal? What changes about these songs when she sings them, vis-à-vis when they become manifest in analogue or digital reproduction? What happens when the assemblage of the voice and body are what animate the song, mediating it to distorted, or unexpected or amusing, sublime effect? I am speaking here about listening to a song as another sings it in social intimacy, neither a serenade nor an otherwise sustained effort. I write here about fleeting moments that happen again and again as part of one’s relationship with the self and with the world.

No one would know (this body, my mother, her voice) that this is the place where those records are kept, only the listener that happens to be in their vicinity, in their life. Those (reluctant) listeners do not seek the archive, they are not there to find it (for isn’t an archive a place that we know about, a place on the map)? This archive is unmapped and has no address but nevertheless saturates space, even as it gathers and keeps and won’t let go of some melody. I write here about the archive beyond the reaches of the microphone or the recorder, the one that neither seeks it nor posterity. Names are forgotten, authors are not needed, years are unimportant, such information is rendered, here, useless. It is the voice, its crevices and horizons, its grooves and its echoes, produced through a body, a sedimented body with a name and with consciousness, and its take on the lyric and melody; it is thus a temporary house, a tenuous housing, a fragile infrastructure, an archive constantly appearing and disappearing.

To close, and in contrast to feelings of nostalgia and disappointment, I turn to a tune of defiance in the records my mother houses, one enveloped with optimism before the violent potential of a society where she has mostly been seen as one to serve. With ‘Ni Princesa Ni Esclava’ (Neither a Princess, nor a Slave), ^[8] singing is a form of brazenness. Aware of her own predicament in having to deal with the addictions of another, when such addictions lead to unspoken violence, she will turn up the music in the backyard, the outdoor space that amplifies the sound through the neighbourhood. This is what everyone does, there in that street; it is not uncommon to hear another’s music as if it were one’s own, because of the loudness or familiarity. There, while her husband finishes another bottle, she will sing while passing through, passing by, emboldened by the powerful voice of Vikki Carr, while her partner, the neighbourhood, this part of the world, listens, or doesn’t:

I’m only asking
To feel well loved

Loved, as I love
With fire, with passion

I wish they would understand
That I’m looking for someone
That would give themselves
As I have

I’m neither a princess, nor a slave
I’m simply a woman
 

^[1]    The term ‘head voice’ is often used in vocal pedagogy contexts, and refers to the ‘top’, lighter notes that the voice can produce and/or the vibrations of the voice resonating more in the cavities of the head, even if it does not necessarily designate higher pitches. Thus, I wish to emphasise the softness of her rendition, as if she were singing a lullaby.

^[2]   Norteño music, or música norteña, emerges in the US–México borderlands as a modern genre in the mid-twentieth century. Accordion, bajo sexto, electric base and drums constitute its typical instrumentation. Norteño songs are popular across the Americas, and in the United States are beloved sounds, especially among ‘non-assimilated’ Spanish-speaking immigrants. This music ‘synthesizes a Mexican border ballad tradition with… lyrics that merge themes of border crossing, experiences of migration, sociopolitical commentary, and the real and imagined exploits of modern-day bandit heroes, drug smugglers and undocumented travelers’ (see Cathy Ragland, Musica Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation between Nations, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2009, p 4)

^[3]   Los Cadetes de Linares (The Cadets of the town of Linares) are a band of now legendary stature, despite their relatively recent success. This norteño band was commercially active between 1968–1982, touring extensively across Mexico and the United States. Linares, their hometown, is located in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, bordering Texas. Their tunes, such as ‘No hay Novedad’, can still be heard on the airwaves of ‘Mexican regional’ radio stations in the United States.

^[4]   S Gabriel Jimenez, 15 Exitos Originales, Univision Music Group, 2007

^[5]   See Tia DeNora, ‘Music as a Technology of the Self’, Poetics, vol 27, no 1, October 1999, pp 31–56

^[6]   See Carol A Muller, ‘Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song’, Ethnomusicology, vol 46, no 3, Autumn 2002, pp 409–431, p 410

^[7]   Giordano, Alfieri, Correa, 15 Exitos de Los Pasteles Verdes, Discos Gas, 1982, LP

^[8]   Rubén Fuentes, Rancheras 16 Exitos Originales, Vikki Carr, CBS Records, 1989, LP

Lorena Alvarado is Assistant Professor of Global Arts, Media and Writing Studies at the University of California, Merced. She has previously published her work in Women and Performance, The Journal of Popular Music Studies and The Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018)