“It’s a daily struggle to keep an identity,” Quetzal’s song “20 Pesos” opines. “I don’t want to be folklore.” The third track on their new album, Sing The Real (Vanguard), also followed the opener at their Chicago debut, in which a modest crowd of mainly 20- and 30-something Latinos (like the band) chilled to the eight-piece combo’s deep excavations of son Mexicano and Afro-Caribbean rhythms delivered with R&B/soul stylistics matching ranchera fervor from lead duet Martha and Gabriel Gonzalez.
The song speaks to an experience at the templo mayor in Mexico City, in which admission price becomes the wage of broken memory to “walk through the ruins of my soul.” As the band ran through a lineup largely culled from the latest release, the crowd quietly vibed for the most part, responding most raucously with dancing and gritos for the recognizably Mexican sounds of zapateado (with Martha Gonzalez stomping on a tarima platform) and string combos (requinto jarocho, violin, and jarana).
Ironically, such traditional flourishes — most closely associated with Mexican national identity — were easier to respond to and join in for the audience than the somewhat elegiac yet powerful mixtures of son and soul that, like “20 Pesos,” simultaneously capture urban African-American and traditional Mexican vocal emotive dynamics.
Surely, the lyrics of such pieces as “The Social Relevance of Public Art”(with typical couplets that rhyme “community” and “ideology”) demand quiet consideration, since they speak to the challenges of discovering and re-inventing cultural identity from the wreckage of colonialism and anthropological erasure. The members of Quetzal reflect the makeup of the audience — largely Mex-Latino but sometimes mixed genetically and all over the map culturally, inspired by this country’s developing demographics and a global sense of cultural context as much from pan-Latino awareness as advanced education in the humanities. Aware of how Western social sciences and the museumification of culture can turn a living, breathing people into quaint folk curios, Quetzal attempt artistic production with academic insight through a prism of folkloric heritage and the “real” that so many claim to keep in Afro-urban culture.
Though the gravity of the music derives from lyrics and a mission inspired by Latin American nueva canción — equivalent in some ways to U.S. folk-protest music — variable rhythms (hip-hop and rock) inflect the talented vocals that are straight out of the L.A. Chicano/doo-wop tradition. Recognition and reveling in African culture by way of both U.S. and Caribbean sources make Quetzal more than an anthropological experiment or activist band. Their debut at the HotHouse — at turns, like a musicology seminar and lounge session — demonstrated the exciting space between intellectual understanding of Latino heritage and its artistic expression as a kind of nouveau “son rocklórico,” perfectly expressed in the closing acappella, barrio-harmonicized ranchera by the Gonzalez siblings.
21 April 2002, Illinois Entertainer
