Description
My thesis focuses on disrupting mythologies through Latinx music and enables us to imagine alternative futurities. My research on three Latinx bands, Las Cafeteras, Flor de Toloache, and Chicano Batman, implements a queer feminist lens to illustrate the transformative futures they create through their music for new generations. My research questions highlight how borderlands identities are reflected in the music. The bands embody a borderlands identity through which they create counter narratives via their songs. Furthermore, I utilize queer theory in order to understand how Latinx identity and music are queer, meaning going against the status quo. This research illustrates how the bands challenges norms that continue to oppress the Latinx community. With this understand of borderlands identity and queerness within Latinx lives and music, I explore mythologies that affect Latinx identities and lives, by exploring how the bands invoke, disrupt, and challenge them. I focus on undoing oppressive myths that demonize immigrants, womxn, and workers. Various dominate myths are the fabrication of colonial, white-supremacist, and sexist ideologies that marginalize people of color. In this thesis I research the mythologies of “La Llorona,” “American Dream,” and “good versus bad immigrant.” Influenced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s, Gloria Anzaldúa’s, and Chela Sandoval research I was able to capture how storytelling can happen through music and reimagine the way we look at the world. With this project I was able to demonstrate the transformational work of Latinx musicians. Specifically, I highlight the potential four songs and additional related cultural productions have to renegotiate Latinx identities through dispelling myths constructed by colonialism, white-supremacy, and sexism. For individuals who immigrate to a new country music like this may help bridge the gap between their intersecting identities. Through mass media bands circulate indigenous knowledges, immigrant stories, and ultimately teaches Latinx youth about their intersecting oppressions such as: police violence, machismo, immigration and the constant struggle being stuck between clashing identities.
