Category: Musical Portraits

Homeland Celebration delivers “taste of the world” Pae Xiong: "We are trying to tell people that we exist"

photo by Yucheng Tang
Hmong dancers during the Thursday Night Market.

by Yucheng Tang
posted Sept. 13

On stage at City Plaza, 13 Hmong girls from Oroville, dressed in traditional attire, performed a dance to the Hmong song, “Hello, Hello, I Like You.” Below the stage, audience members took pictures, recorded video and applauded. This was the opening performance at the Sept. 12 Homeland Celebration event.

“Our girls love to perform. It’s a good experience for them,” Passion Chue told ChicoSol. She works as a program supervisor at Oroville’s Hmong Cultural Center and oversees all youth programs, including the dancing team. Chue said the girls practice dancing at the center after school in a limited space and without mirrors. read more

Say their names: honoring the “deportees” Highway 99

photo by Lindajoy Fenley
The grave marker now has the names of all who perished in the crash.

by Lindajoy Fenley
posted May 31

In folk music circles, most people know Woody Guthrie’s song “Plane Crash at Los Gatos.”

But few ever visit Fresno’s Holy Cross Cemetery where a mass grave holds the remains of 28 farmworkers who died in the fiery 1948 plane crash that the song is about.

The song bemoans the fact that the farmworkers who were being deported to Mexico had no names in either news reports at the time of the crash or on a diminutive stone that marked their common grave at the edge of the little graveyard. The media reported only the names of the plane’s crew and the immigration officer who died in the crash with them. In protest, Guthrie made up generic names for the migrants and his 1948 words were put to music 10 years later by Martin Hoffman. read more

Debajito brings diverse mix of rhythms to Chico dance floors Popular band mixes Latin American musical styles with hip hop and more

photo by Ken Smith
The five-member band Debajito adds diversity to the Chico music scene.

by Ken Smith
posted Feb. 29

If not for some creative thinking on the part of its members, Chico’s Debajito could have been just another creative casualty of the COVID-19 crisis. An early incarnation of the group played just one show at Tender Loving Coffee before the virus – and accompanying shutdowns – struck our area. With the standard venues shuttered and indoor gatherings prohibited, the members of Debajito started their own pandemic-era scene.

“As soon as you could have gatherings outdoors, around the spring of 2021, we started having these ‘Backyard Boogies,’ which were outdoor, family-friendly parties with friends in backyards,” said front-man Pablo “Kee” Cornejo, who describes the band’s hard-to-pin-down sound as “multicultural, multi-instrumental music without borders.” read more

Tribute to a Latin American Icon

by Tania Flores

The words and melodies of Facundo Cabral have haunted me for almost a year now, surging and welling up in me on days when I can feel wistfulness in my muscles and the folds of my skin tingle with the touch of fabric or the cool wooden surface of my desk. I could not stop listening to “No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá” after discovering this recording, could not help but sink into the song, the back of my throat prickling.

Cabral’s words, the tension between the verses of his songs, have the capacity to evoke visceral responses; Cabral touched on what was palpable, present, and sensory, the details that constitute what is pleasurable in life. His music articulated a simple and abiding love of life, a love of the experience of being human, as well as distaste for the excess and infrastructure and false needs that distance us from that experience. read more

In the Western Sahara, Music is a Bridge


by Washington Quezada

In 1975, Spain abandoned its position as colonizer of the African Northwest, producing an intense instability among the people in the region. Morocco took advantage of this situation by invading the land that belonged to the Saharawi people, who had to live from then on in refugee camps in Algeria. Mariem Hassan, who had been part of the clandestine parties celebrating Saharawi culture during the Spanish colonial period, became a messenger for her people, communicating the living conditions they suffered, isolated in the refugee camps. She traveled with a group of musicians to let the world know about the Saharawi situation. read more

Musicians Reflect their Roots in Lumbalú

 

by Washington Quezada

( lu =collective, mbalu = melancholy in the Bantu Africana language)

Lumbalu are the funeral ritual chants used by the community of African descent in San Basilio de Palenque in Northern Colombia.

With this same name, there is also a musical group founded in 1984 by a group of young people interested in their roots. The members of Lumbalú started a field study of traditional music and dances from the Afro-Colombian communities on the coasts of their country. Learning from the masters, they began making their own presentations, and thanks to the support of the people who listened to them, they became a musical group on their own. Already with the name of Lumbalú, they recorded their first album, “Fandango Alegre,” in 1993, and in 1997 the second one called, “Balada de un tambor sobre el mapa del caribe.” read more