Noches de Canto y Poesia
Cada 1ero, 3ero y 5to Viernes @ 8-10pm
Noches de Canto y Poesía son un tiempo dedicado a músicos, poetas y cantantes de la comunidad para que expresen su arte en español o con influencia Latina. Esto incluye pero no es limitado a boleros, baladas, rock en español, folklórico, latinoamericano, ranchera, trova, canto nuevo, jarocho, huapango y más. Todos están bienvenidos! Entrada gratis.
Last Friday a plane deposited Carly and I in Los Angeles, land of inexpensive tacos and unbearable traffic, for the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Rv originally approached me in February about attending the festival to debut my chapbook, do some networking, and book some readings. Once I decided Los Angeles was a thing I needed to make happen personally/professionally/financially, Rv got on his hustle searching for poetry shows in the area. Over the course of the next month a handful of dates, times, and venues filtered through our scattered communications. Among them was an open mic opportunity at Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural.
Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re preparing to give an important performance or presentation, and very slowly it dawns on you that nobody in the room speaks a language you understand, and maybe you’re not wearing pants? That accurately describes the small animal of worry gnawing through my sternum as I put my name on the reader list. Except for the pants, thankfully I had those.
The man sitting next to me in the back row spoke beautifully accented English, and emitted a laidback sense of ease. He started and ended every sentence with “man” or “brother”. They called him the Conga Poet, and he pounded a flawless beat on three enormous drums while performing his spoken word piece “Latin Smiles”. Smiling the whole time. His performance kicked off three hours of beautiful language that I understood very little of. Since I couldn’t appreciate the meaning of their words, I read their bodies and faces. The young woman with gorgeous, long hair and dark eyes. The old man with a mumbling singsong voice, his hearing aid shrieking against the microphone’s feedback. The woman who wrote to survive, reading about cigarettes and rain. The man speaking seamless Spanglish about prison and heartbreak.
Growing up in Montana I have witnessed plenty of racism, intentional and otherwise. But as a white girl growing up in Montana, it’s never been directed at me. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve intimately experienced my Otherness, and almost always that Otherness resulted from my sexual rather than racial or cultural identity. To be honest my racial and cultural identity haven’t existed to me; they’re invisible in my realm of reality, defined by absence rather than substance. Sitting in Tia Chucha’s, I was profoundly aware of that absence. Embarrassed by it.
A week later writing this, I’m still embarrassed and I’ve struggled to identify why. But like most embarrassment, I think it boils down to fear. Fear of sounding ignorant or privileged. Fear of making too much or too little of this experience. Fear of the backlash. Fear of reducing this story to a lets-all-hold-hands, feel-good moment. Fear of carelessly appropriating something that doesn’t belong to me. Fear because I can choose to be ignorant of my culture without repercussion, when so many humans cannot. Because being a minority made me uncomfortable. Because until my racial identity exists to me, I can’t possibly be aware of the privileges it affords me.
Because appropriation. Because whitewashing. Because “I don’t see race”.
My performance slot was halfway through the show, and I felt foolish approaching that microphone. I felt like an uninvited houseguest, intruding into a community that didn’t belong to me; something I’d been content to observe from the outside. But under the spotlight, in that dark room I was welcomed into an artistic community that transcended cultural and linguistic barriers. We were in a safe, creative space. Everybody invited to feel each others’ words pulse through a microphone, and hang heavier than a heartbeat in the air.
By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon. – Marcel Proust, Time Regained
I’ve never felt so grateful for a room full of smiling faces and nodding heads. If I can come home to a roomful of strangers in a Sylmar, California strip mall I feel like I can come home anywhere. This is my heartfelt thank you to the hosts and participants for their warmth, generosity, and support.
Until next time, kittens.
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