Being Brown Soundscapes
Lázaro Lima
"The Being Brown Soundscape"
The soundscapes included in this virtual playlist reference key sonic audiotopias in Sonia Sotomayor's biography that have largely been absent from the discussion of her emergence as one of the most influential Latinx figures of the day. For Josh Kun, "audiotopias" refer to the experience of being transported to different worlds through soundscapes and sonic registers associated with with places, people, and feelings as perceived by listeners (Audiotopia: Music, Race and America, 2005). The curated soundscapes I archive here attempt to tell an aural history of an era under erasure. "The Being Brown Soundscape" both curate and speculate the sounds I imagine surrounded Sotomayor's formative years--from NYC, to New Haven, Connecticut, to Washington, DC, back again and beyond--in order to archive what will likely soon be erased with time.
But like any curatorial intervention it is not disinterested or objective. I left the States in 1988 after graduating from college for a sojourn in Vienna, Austria. The goal of my self-imposed exile in Vienna was simple. First, as the queer Brown child of a single immigrant mother, I didn't want to die before she did. Having endured abandonment and divorce with her, I thought I could protect her from a yearning I couldn't name or understand. But defamiliarization, understood by Shkhlovsky as both the experience of exile and homelessness, takes on the value of personal experience to the degree that, say, a compass takes to gravity. It prefigures you before you can give it narrative direction or texture. Fulfillment will always leave an empty space where your old desiring self used to be, pointing to the other imaginary elsewheres of repetition compulsion. Second, I paradoxically wanted to find something resembling sexual fulfillment in the age of AIDS. As a queer Brown man-boy I had a lot to learn.
So I went to Vienna because I met a German lover who lived and worked there. The only way I could stay "legally" was as an exchange student, so I taught myself German and went to the Universität Wien where I studied Anglistik. It's the equivalent of American studies, more or less. Clearly, I wasn't ambitious, just practical about my limits and the vast expanse of my unfulfilled yearning. Where else could I pass convincingly for an American but in a place like Vienna, circa 1988? Certainly not the US. The self-imposed exile was an attempt to escape both the emerging specter of AIDS in the States, as much as it was an attempt to run toward what I thought was safety. But there is no such thing as either a safe space or escaping AIDS. My German lover died when I was 22 and so I came back home and went to NYC to study at Hunter College, CUNY. Libido and thanatos are interchangeable when language leaves you stumbling through Spanish, English, and a German you once knew. So I went to what was both familiar enough and what I could live with that was dangerously inviting enough. There is an ellipses here that will find expression elsewhere. For now, I leave you this audiotopia.
I do so because it is part of the lesson, at least a lesson. It is not proscriptive but it is an invitation to imagine what moves you. What is your question an what is the rhythm that sustains it? What makes you get up and move toward your affective fulfillment when the evidence before you narratively prefigures failure? What is your audiotopia or soundtrack? I believe Sonia Sotomayor has her own answesr, mostly, and I believe I do as well, mostly. At least at my best. This soundscape is then the memory of a an audiotopia I can only hope accompanied Sotomayor at her loneliest through the years framed in Being Brown. But I would have listened to whatever she wanted share, even as I asked her to refine her ear to my rhythms.
Prelude
Soundscape 1. Ana María Martínez, "María la O" (2018 performance)
Puerto Rican soprano Ana María Martínez (1971 - ) interprets Cuban/Cuban-American composer Ernesto Lecuona y Casado's zarzuela at the San Antonio Symphony Concert Hall in 2018.
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado (1896-1963) introduced Afro-Cuban and Cuban rhythms and instruments to the largely static repertoire of classical music between the two World Wars. His zarzuela, "María la O," premiered in Havana, Cuba, on March 1, 1930, at the Teatro Payret. In "María la O" Lecuona attempted to translate and convey writer Cuban Cirilio Villaverde's novel Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Ángel (1882 [Cecilia Valdés or Ángel Hill]) story of racialized sexual violence through sound and timbre so that hearts could understand what eyes could not see.
Cuban racism was so normalized into national complacency that, for Lecuona, only sonic registers could counter what historical blindness had obscured. Lecuona, whose work requires the attention of performance studies and music history scholars, was one of the first composers to understand the value of transcribing cultural and historical memory vis-à-vis sound.
The novel itself attempted to fracture Spanish colonial racism through the story of a white privileged creole, Leandro de Gamboa, and his beloved, Cecilia Valdés, who, unbeknownst to him, is his half sister. Cecilia, who is Black but passes for white, is Leandro's daughter conceived through forced rape. Failed love, illegitimate governance, and ill-conceived nation building, were the results of Spanish colonialism's legacy for both Villaverde and Lecuona.
The colonial subservience to whiteness, as the structuring principle for love and nation, were so stunning to Lecuona that he felt that only locally inflected historical harmonies could repair historical discord. "Hear me," implores the zarzuela "María la O," or be doomed to failed romance and perpetual bondage. In the name of the zarzuela itself, "María la O[tra]," Maria the O[ther], Lecuona lays bare the Caribbean as the resting place for the Atlantic slave trade's original sin: slavery.
Soundscape 2. Fernando Varela, "En mi viejo San Juan" and "Preciosa" (2017 performance)
Introduction. On Being Brown in the Democratic Commons
Soundscape 3. The Ring, "Savage Lover" (1979)
By the time Sonia Sotomayor graduated from Yale Law and joined the Manhattan District Attorney's office in 1979 NYC was experiencing an epic crime wave. The infamous Studio 54 was spinning some of the era's most iconic underground synthesizer hits of the year and "Savage Lover" by The Ring coincided with what became known as the "Tarzan" murders and robberies of NYC that helped to solve.
Soundscape 4. Cerrone, "Supernature" (1977)
The French composer and record producer Ceronne had two hits that enveloped NYC record stores and soundscapes in 1979. If Sotomayor ventured into West Village where she lived, the ambient soundscape would no doubt have included Cerrone's "Supernature" which had already hit big in England as early as 1977, but settled stateside in late 1978. Along with Ceronne's "Love in C Minor" (1976), both were a fixture of down NYC life everywhere you went. While it is hard to imagine from our vantage point, in the absence of privatized soundscapes first introduced by SONY with the Walkman in 1979, someone else's musical tastes always wound up in your sensorium if they possessed the bass and the speaker strength to pump out the sound.
Soundscape 5. ESG, "Moody" (1981)
Like Sonia Sotomayor, the group ESG (short for Emerald, Sapphire and Gold) emerged in the South Bronx. Sisters Renne, Valerie, and Marie Scroggins created a Brown alternative to the music of the era through sheer will because they lacked the resources to buy musical instruments. Instead they used borrowed synthesizers, bass and sheer talent to forge Latinx audiotopias. They're "Moody" is a syntho-disco alternative to the overproduced disco music of the day and was a fixture at the Paradise Garage, itself an epic Black and Brown queer house-music space in NYC that was demolished in 2018.
Soundscape 5. John "Jellybean" Benítez, remix of Babe Ruth's "The Mexican" (1984)
During Ronald Reagan's two-term presidency (1981-1989) public education subsidies were slashed and the neoliberal order enshrined austerity for everyone but the wealthiest as corporate taxation exemptions rose in measure with deregulation. The emergence of the "one-per-center" billionaires ballooned as waged labor stagnated under a minimum wage of $3.35 that was supported by the president.
Puerto Rican John "Jellybean" Benítez's remix of "The Mexican" reinterpreted Latinx and Black resistance to stagnant labor, and rising higher educational inequities just as the 1984 reelection campaign for Reagan kicked into high gear. John Wayne, Reagan's favorite movie-star and alter-ego, had stared in film western The Almo (1960) which distorted the history of U.S. and Texan occupation of Mexico prior to the U.S. Mexico War of 1846-48.
The remix became a house and clubhouse anthem of resistance for urban youth who were introduced to a sonic hero, Chico Fernández, who refused U.S. imperial expansion. The remix of "The Mexican" was a circuit venue hit while Benítez was a DJ at NYC's Funhouse, the Roseland Ballroom, Studio 54 and popularized on NYC dance radio station WKTU which reached into Long Island and southern Connecticut. "The Mexican" was also a staple that year at NYC clubs and Fire Island, NY, where Sonia Sotomayor vacationed as told in her memoir, My Beloved World (2013, Chapter 24, pgs. 226-27).
Soundscape .
Part I. A Latina for the Nation
Soundscape 4. Marc Anthony y La India, "Vivir lo nuestro" (1993)
1. Sonia Sotomayor and “the Latino Question”
2. Sonia Sotomayor’s Elusive Embrace
Soundscape. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, "Born in the USA" (1984)
During late spring in 1979, when Sonia Sotomayor was about to graduate from Yale Law, the biggest concert to hit New Haven, Connecticut, was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band at Toad's Place. Bruce Springsteen performed a version of "Born in the USA" at Toads in anticipation of the release of the eponymous album which was released on June 4, 1984. A peon to easy nationalism for some, a confrontation with Reagonomics to others, Sotomayor couldn't have avoided it if she tried.
Part II. Losing Sonia Sotomayor
3. Sonia Sotomayor, the Mediapheme
4. Sonia Sotomayor and Other States of Debt
Soundscape. Eurythmics, "17 Again" (17 year-old Celina Baéz leaves Puerto Rico at the heals of World War II)
La Macha Colón
Coda. Thinking Otherwise: Sonia Sotomayor and the Emergence of Latino Legal Thought
Soundscape.
Acknowledgments
"The Being Brown Soundscape"
The soundscapes included in this virtual playlist reference key sonic audiotopias in Sonia Sotomayor's biography that have largely been absent from the discussion of her emergence as one of the most influential Latinx figures of the day. For Josh Kun, "audiotopias" refer to the experience of being transported to different worlds through soundscapes and sonic registers associated with with places, people, and feelings as perceived by listeners (Audiotopia: Music, Race and America, 2005). The curated soundscapes I archive here attempt to tell an aural history of an era under erasure. "The Being Brown Soundscape" both curate and speculate the sounds I imagine surrounded Sotomayor's formative years--from NYC, to New Haven, Connecticut, to Washington, DC, back again and beyond--in order to archive what will likely soon be erased with time.
But like any curatorial intervention it is not disinterested or objective. I left the States in 1988 after graduating from college for a sojourn in Vienna, Austria. The goal of my self-imposed exile in Vienna was simple. First, as the queer Brown child of a single immigrant mother, I didn't want to die before she did. Having endured abandonment and divorce with her, I thought I could protect her from a yearning I couldn't name or understand. But defamiliarization, understood by Shkhlovsky as both the experience of exile and homelessness, takes on the value of personal experience to the degree that, say, a compass takes to gravity. It prefigures you before you can give it narrative direction or texture. Fulfillment will always leave an empty space where your old desiring self used to be, pointing to the other imaginary elsewheres of repetition compulsion. Second, I paradoxically wanted to find something resembling sexual fulfillment in the age of AIDS. As a queer Brown man-boy I had a lot to learn.
So I went to Vienna because I met a German lover who lived and worked there. The only way I could stay "legally" was as an exchange student, so I taught myself German and went to the Universität Wien where I studied Anglistik. It's the equivalent of American studies, more or less. Clearly, I wasn't ambitious, just practical about my limits and the vast expanse of my unfulfilled yearning. Where else could I pass convincingly for an American but in a place like Vienna, circa 1988? Certainly not the US. The self-imposed exile was an attempt to escape both the emerging specter of AIDS in the States, as much as it was an attempt to run toward what I thought was safety. But there is no such thing as either a safe space or escaping AIDS. My German lover died when I was 22 and so I came back home and went to NYC to study at Hunter College, CUNY. Libido and thanatos are interchangeable when language leaves you stumbling through Spanish, English, and a German you once knew. So I went to what was both familiar enough and what I could live with that was dangerously inviting enough. There is an ellipses here that will find expression elsewhere. For now, I leave you this audiotopia.
I do so because it is part of the lesson, at least a lesson. It is not proscriptive but it is an invitation to imagine what moves you. What is your question an what is the rhythm that sustains it? What makes you get up and move toward your affective fulfillment when the evidence before you narratively prefigures failure? What is your audiotopia or soundtrack? I believe Sonia Sotomayor has her own answesr, mostly, and I believe I do as well, mostly. At least at my best. This soundscape is then the memory of a an audiotopia I can only hope accompanied Sotomayor at her loneliest through the years framed in Being Brown. But I would have listened to whatever she wanted share, even as I asked her to refine her ear to my rhythms.
Prelude
Soundscape 1. Ana María Martínez, "María la O" (2018 performance)
Puerto Rican soprano Ana María Martínez (1971 - ) interprets Cuban/Cuban-American composer Ernesto Lecuona y Casado's zarzuela at the San Antonio Symphony Concert Hall in 2018.
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado (1896-1963) introduced Afro-Cuban and Cuban rhythms and instruments to the largely static repertoire of classical music between the two World Wars. His zarzuela, "María la O," premiered in Havana, Cuba, on March 1, 1930, at the Teatro Payret. In "María la O" Lecuona attempted to translate and convey writer Cuban Cirilio Villaverde's novel Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Ángel (1882 [Cecilia Valdés or Ángel Hill]) story of racialized sexual violence through sound and timbre so that hearts could understand what eyes could not see.
Cuban racism was so normalized into national complacency that, for Lecuona, only sonic registers could counter what historical blindness had obscured. Lecuona, whose work requires the attention of performance studies and music history scholars, was one of the first composers to understand the value of transcribing cultural and historical memory vis-à-vis sound.
The novel itself attempted to fracture Spanish colonial racism through the story of a white privileged creole, Leandro de Gamboa, and his beloved, Cecilia Valdés, who, unbeknownst to him, is his half sister. Cecilia, who is Black but passes for white, is Leandro's daughter conceived through forced rape. Failed love, illegitimate governance, and ill-conceived nation building, were the results of Spanish colonialism's legacy for both Villaverde and Lecuona.
The colonial subservience to whiteness, as the structuring principle for love and nation, were so stunning to Lecuona that he felt that only locally inflected historical harmonies could repair historical discord. "Hear me," implores the zarzuela "María la O," or be doomed to failed romance and perpetual bondage. In the name of the zarzuela itself, "María la O[tra]," Maria the O[ther], Lecuona lays bare the Caribbean as the resting place for the Atlantic slave trade's original sin: slavery.
Soundscape 2. Fernando Varela, "En mi viejo San Juan" and "Preciosa" (2017 performance)
Introduction. On Being Brown in the Democratic Commons
Soundscape 3. The Ring, "Savage Lover" (1979)
By the time Sonia Sotomayor graduated from Yale Law and joined the Manhattan District Attorney's office in 1979 NYC was experiencing an epic crime wave. The infamous Studio 54 was spinning some of the era's most iconic underground synthesizer hits of the year and "Savage Lover" by The Ring coincided with what became known as the "Tarzan" murders and robberies of NYC that helped to solve.
Soundscape 4. Cerrone, "Supernature" (1977)
The French composer and record producer Ceronne had two hits that enveloped NYC record stores and soundscapes in 1979. If Sotomayor ventured into West Village where she lived, the ambient soundscape would no doubt have included Cerrone's "Supernature" which had already hit big in England as early as 1977, but settled stateside in late 1978. Along with Ceronne's "Love in C Minor" (1976), both were a fixture of down NYC life everywhere you went. While it is hard to imagine from our vantage point, in the absence of privatized soundscapes first introduced by SONY with the Walkman in 1979, someone else's musical tastes always wound up in your sensorium if they possessed the bass and the speaker strength to pump out the sound.
Soundscape 5. ESG, "Moody" (1981)
Like Sonia Sotomayor, the group ESG (short for Emerald, Sapphire and Gold) emerged in the South Bronx. Sisters Renne, Valerie, and Marie Scroggins created a Brown alternative to the music of the era through sheer will because they lacked the resources to buy musical instruments. Instead they used borrowed synthesizers, bass and sheer talent to forge Latinx audiotopias. They're "Moody" is a syntho-disco alternative to the overproduced disco music of the day and was a fixture at the Paradise Garage, itself an epic Black and Brown queer house-music space in NYC that was demolished in 2018.
Soundscape 5. John "Jellybean" Benítez, remix of Babe Ruth's "The Mexican" (1984)
During Ronald Reagan's two-term presidency (1981-1989) public education subsidies were slashed and the neoliberal order enshrined austerity for everyone but the wealthiest as corporate taxation exemptions rose in measure with deregulation. The emergence of the "one-per-center" billionaires ballooned as waged labor stagnated under a minimum wage of $3.35 that was supported by the president.
Puerto Rican John "Jellybean" Benítez's remix of "The Mexican" reinterpreted Latinx and Black resistance to stagnant labor, and rising higher educational inequities just as the 1984 reelection campaign for Reagan kicked into high gear. John Wayne, Reagan's favorite movie-star and alter-ego, had stared in film western The Almo (1960) which distorted the history of U.S. and Texan occupation of Mexico prior to the U.S. Mexico War of 1846-48.
The remix became a house and clubhouse anthem of resistance for urban youth who were introduced to a sonic hero, Chico Fernández, who refused U.S. imperial expansion. The remix of "The Mexican" was a circuit venue hit while Benítez was a DJ at NYC's Funhouse, the Roseland Ballroom, Studio 54 and popularized on NYC dance radio station WKTU which reached into Long Island and southern Connecticut. "The Mexican" was also a staple that year at NYC clubs and Fire Island, NY, where Sonia Sotomayor vacationed as told in her memoir, My Beloved World (2013, Chapter 24, pgs. 226-27).
Soundscape .
Part I. A Latina for the Nation
Soundscape 4. Marc Anthony y La India, "Vivir lo nuestro" (1993)
1. Sonia Sotomayor and “the Latino Question”
2. Sonia Sotomayor’s Elusive Embrace
Soundscape. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, "Born in the USA" (1984)
During late spring in 1979, when Sonia Sotomayor was about to graduate from Yale Law, the biggest concert to hit New Haven, Connecticut, was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band at Toad's Place. Bruce Springsteen performed a version of "Born in the USA" at Toads in anticipation of the release of the eponymous album which was released on June 4, 1984. A peon to easy nationalism for some, a confrontation with Reagonomics to others, Sotomayor couldn't have avoided it if she tried.
Part II. Losing Sonia Sotomayor
3. Sonia Sotomayor, the Mediapheme
4. Sonia Sotomayor and Other States of Debt
Soundscape. Eurythmics, "17 Again" (17 year-old Celina Baéz leaves Puerto Rico at the heals of World War II)
La Macha Colón
Coda. Thinking Otherwise: Sonia Sotomayor and the Emergence of Latino Legal Thought
Soundscape.
Acknowledgments