Season 04 - Episode 01: "I'm Indigenous Not Mestizo" The Art & Activism of Rapper Jaguar Arreola - Part One (The Planning)
In this three-part series, Brown University PhD Students Benjamin Salinas and Adelaida Tamayo examine questions of art, activism, and identity in conversation with Jaguar Arreoloa, an Indigenous-Chicano rapper based in Los Angeles, California.
In Part One (The Planning), the series begins with a conversation between Adelaida and Ben as they prepare for their interview with Jaguar.
TRANSCRIPT:
SPEAKERS
Anar Parikh, Adelaida Tamayo, Benjamin Salinas
Anar Parikh 00:00
Anthropological Airwaves is the official podcast of the journal American Anthropologist, whose main offices are located on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Nacotchank, Anacostia, and Piscataway peoples. The Anacostia and Potomac rivers have long been places of trade and gathering for Indigenous peoples, and Washington DC is now home to diverse Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. American Anthropologist has published material throughout its history that have taken knowledge from Indigenous peoples for a scholarly audience and has not required its authors or editors to be good relations to Indigenous peoples and communities. Acknowledging territory is only one step in repairing these relationships. The Editorial Collective of the journal is committed to deep listening and engagement with Indigenous scholars, peoples, and communities to explore ways to be a better relation.
Anar Parikh 00:50
Today’s recording is the first of a three-part episode that was produced on the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island. This piece of the series was recorded, edited, and produced on the occupied ancestral lands of the Narragansett in what is now called Providence, Rhode Island. As its original inhabitants, the Narragansett people have stewarded this land since time immemorial and continue to do so today. Parts of this episode, including this recording, were produced from the traditional territories of the Catawba, Waxhaw, Cheraw and Sugaree people. While many descendants of Cheraw, Waxhaw, and Sugaree communities eventually joined the Catawba peoples, today, the Catawba Nation continues to thrive in what is now called Rock Hill, South Carolina.
[intro music]
Anar Parikh 01:53
Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Anthropological Airwaves, the official podcast of the journal American Anthropologist. This is season Four, Episode One, Part One.
Anar Parikh 02:07
My name is Anar Parikh, I am PhD candidate in Anthropology at Brown University. Some of you might already recognize me and my voice, but in case we haven't had a chance to be acquainted yet, I'm the Associate Editor of the podcast at American Anthropologist and the Executive Producer of this show. I use she/her pronouns. After a few months on hiatus, and a little teaser a few weeks ago, I'm so excited to have a full episode titled "I'm Indigenous Not Mestizo: The Art and Activism of rapper Jaguar Arreola" to share with y'all today.
Anar Parikh 02:42
The episode you’re about to hear actually has three distinct parts. It’s kind of a “before, during, and after” situation brought to you by my colleagues Adelaida Tamayo, and Benjamin Salinas from the Anthropology Department at Brown University. In the Spring of 2021, the two of them worked together to create a multi-modal podcast and video final project organized around an interview with Jaguar Arreola, an Indigenous-Chicano musician based in Los Angeles, California for Professor Ieva Jusionyte’s “Violence, Governance, and Transnationalism” seminar. They recorded the entire process: not just their interview with Jaguar, but also their planning session and their post-interview debrief conversation.
Anar Parikh 03:24
I’m so excited to be publishing a version of Adelaida and Ben’s project on Anthropological Airwaves because in addition to enlightening conversations, in each of these segments they explore overlapping questions of art, activism, and identity. I think they give us a rare and honest glimpse of how anthropological knowledge is made: logistically, affectively, and intellectually. And to share it with y’all, we’re actually going to be doing something a little different for the first episode of Season 4. Let me explain.
Anar Parikh 03:56
Typically, multi-part Anthropological Airwaves episodes are dropped over the course of a couple of months, but for this series, Adelaida, Ben, and I agreed that, to the extent possible, it was important convey a sense of the short periods between each of the three conversations while also breaking it down into more digestible segments for listeners. Today, Monday February 21, we’re dropping Part One – The Planning. Part Two – The Interview (with Jaguar Arreola) will drop on Wednesday February 23, and Part Three – The Debrief, will go live on Friday, February 25. If you’re tuning in as these episodes drop, make sure you come back for the next installation in a couple of days. If you’re tuning in from the future, feel free to listen to the episodes in order, or jump straight into the interview with Jaguar in Part Two!
Anar Parikh 04:46
I'm itching to hand over the mic but before I do, let me introduce our hosts for this series. Ben is a third-year PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Brown. Based in Abya Yala, or Latin America, his research focuses on the Indigenous language Hip Hop movement known as rap originario, where indigenous rappers use hip hop to promote language revitalization and the remixing of Indigenous identity. He explores this movement through questions of poetics, listening practices, and Indigenous migration. Ben hopes to continue producing collaborative, multimodal projects throughout his research with Indigenous rappers. Adelaida Tamayo is a second year PhD student in anthropology at Brown. She researches Colombian women’s resistance to state violence, with a special focus on how women use art forms like singing and embroidery to resist dominant narratives of the Colombian civil war. Her research takes place with activists, artists, and musicians in her hometown of Bogota, Colombia on Muisca lands. Making this podcast was an exciting way to find connections between Jaguar’s ideas as an Indigenous Chicano rapper, and Colombian activist ways of knowing and fighting.
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Adelaida Tamayo 06:51
The first audio you will hear happens early on in the project. We were planning the interview and what we wanted to focus on. Do you want to talk about that? Like, while we're recording about the like, the process of like securing interviews and...
Benjamin Salinas 07:09
Yeah.
Adelaida Tamayo 07:12
Kind of like the precarity of online interviews. How like, I feel like there's a sense to which like when you're doing interviews online, it feels a bit more like I'm just here for the interview. You know, it's also the personal connection. So, it's not like we have a like date to get coffee with him or something. It's like we just have a phone call, which is very easy to cancel.
Benjamin Salinas 07:40
Yeah.
Adelaida Tamayo 07:41
I don't know if you've had that experience with other online interviews.
Benjamin Salinas 07:46
Yeah. Yeah. When I was doing my MA this summer, that was the thing that like, would happen a lot. I would like schedule it. And then I'd be waiting in the Zoom room and they'd be like, "Oh, sorry," like, "I decided to travel to Mexico City today," and like, that kind of thing. And it's like, there's something about not having a grounded physical setting of like meeting another person that like, makes the interview, I don't know, seem less, less meaningful or less important, at least on like summons.
Adelaida Tamayo 08:17
Yeah, I agree. And I think obviously, this the situation we have, where we don't know if he's gonna cancel or not, like, speaks to that. On the other hand, like, there's something awesome about online interviews, which means that you can interview anyone around the world, right? Like, on the flip side, if we just aren't in LA, so we wouldn't be able to do a in-person interview with someone that in LA if it wasn't for Zoom and all of that stuff. And, and I'm, I'm also thinking about how this is kind of true for like, transnational activism and stuff, you know, like, there is an element of like, transnational communication and like the transnational wave of feminism that happened because of the internet, and because of, you know, online chats and forums and discussion that could happen, like between the Global South [and] Global North. But I wonder if there's something lost, like, obviously, there's so much strength and those transnational solidarities right, but I wonder if there's something lost when we're not focusing on the local? I dunno.
Benjamin Salinas 09:29
Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's interesting, because one of the things that was interesting to me about Jaguar was that he was doing all these, like live streams, these like, Instagram live streams, and he would just, like, bring people on from anywhere. So, we had people, mostly people from the United States, but they would just talk about like, I know, one of the things they were talking about was like the idea of mestizaje, or Latino, depending on you know, whatever country you're in. And so like, I think I was like a perfect example of that where there was like, this really like, kind of rich cross-cultural engagement, right? But it was like, I mean, it was it was grounded in different locals. But at times, it felt like it was almost detached, right? It was about mestizaje, it was about kind of this is more transnat- and these more transnational identities: Latinx, Latino, Latinidad. And like, it's interesting, because it was almost like, they were talking about how those erased the local in some ways, but they were also like, by replicating this discourse, in some ways they were they were also doing erasu-, erasing themselves. You know what I'm saying?
10:37
Yeah, totally. No, no, it's interesting. And it's, it reminds me a bit of this tension that I was, that Jonathan Rosa in his book, The, Looking like Language, Sounding Like a Race. This tension that he writes about, of how it's so difficult to establish these categories, right, these, who's Latino, who's Hispanic? Who's Spanish, right? Like, that's, I know, in my public school, like, it was "the Spanish kids," you know, no one said, "Latino," no one said "Hispanic," it was just like, "are the Spanish kids coming to the party or not?" And it literally just meant, like the Puerto Rican and Central American kid. Then in academia, like that makes no sense because Spanish is Spain. But anyway, he's talking about how these categories are really difficult to define, and part of the difficulty is that they are very much colonially inscribed, so they all depend on like, colonial ways of knowing. And there's, it's just difficult because there's, so the one on the one hand, it's really useful to make a clear cut distinction of who has more power, who has less power, like Latini dad is a thing with respect to oppression in the United States. But on the other hand, like, reinforcing these categories very strictly and almost like disciplining people, if they use the wrong word, or if like, they consider themselves white, when really they should be saying they're Black, you know, this is something that happens a lot with Dominicans, I guess is also recreating the disciplining of colonialism. Right. So it's, I don't know, yeah, there's a similar tension there, I guess.
Benjamin Salinas 12:27
Yeah. Yeah. And that's, like, bringing Jaguar back into this too. Like, that's what's interesting about his, like, calling himself Indigenous, calling himself Native, this whole refusal of those, which, but I mean, even Indigenous is still like, this colonial term. Like, reclaimed in its like, obviously, it means a lot to people, but it still has, you know, colonial roots. It's used, was used in science first right to talk about plants endemic to a certain area. So, I think I think that's like, at least the least, it was used at the same time in that same kind of way. And so there's this like, I don't know, I feel like for especially, I mean, kind of in all of the Americas, like people who are labeled Latinx or Indigenous always have to balance all these different, like, colonial...
Adelaida Tamayo 13:13
Yeah
Benjamin Salinas 13:13
...that do violence to themselves, but like, mobilizing in certain ways to like, like, resist that violence. I just, I think that's so fascinating.
Adelaida Tamayo 13:22
Yeah, totally. And it's like, sh-, Indigenous has colonial roots, and yet Jaguar, like, within the context of Latino discourse, you could say, it is a refusal to call himself Indigenous, right? Especially I can imagine in the context of like, LA Latino activism, like calling yourself Indigenous, maybe some people are doing, but it might not be the mainstream thing to do. And in the national stage, like a national politics, it's not the mainstream thing at all right? It's, yeah, there is very much like a division of Latino interests and then Indigenous interest is like, discussed as a whole different thing, which...
Benjamin Salinas 14:09
Yeah, like I, this is kind of like simple but I found, I saw like, some quote the other day, that was like, if, like, if, if Spain had colonized like North America, like, everyone that's considered indigenous United States would be considered Latino or Latinx or in some way. Like,
Benjamin Salinas 14:28
It's like a crazy, like, kind of like geopolitical, like,
Adelaida Tamayo 14:28
Yeah.
Adelaida Tamayo 14:32
yeah,
Benjamin Salinas 14:32
Rendering of all these different identities.
Adelaida Tamayo 14:35
Yeah. Yeah. But it definitely speak, yeah, it just speaks to the way that these Yeah, just like these...Yeah, it's a delicate balance of these categories of not reinscribing colonial disciplining, but using them as like, a way to build solidarity for empowerment. Yeah.
Benjamin Salinas 14:58
One thing I thought about is the affordances of different media in these projects. And thinking about how in Zoom, we can see all of us together in the gallery view. But when the viewer records through zoom, it only shows the speaker view. Watching back Zoom recordings, and gallery view seems like so much closer towards seeing an interview in a cafe. So we're probably going to want to record the screen at the same time that we do the recording through the Zoom so we can get both of those perspectives. And kind of similarly, John Jackson worked with a lot of people across the world in his ethnography. And as such, he talks about ethnography as a stack of frames. Ethnography for him is never completely chronological, raw or unedited. He says it's a new queer Timespace. And it is a, a set of frames and snapshots gathered from a particular kind of attention to everyday life. And I just feel like that this is an important formulation for this project and for multimodal multimodal methods in general.
Adelaida Tamayo 15:54
Yeah, cool. Yeah. And that, to that extent, like video making is literally that. And I'm guessing that sound editing can be that way very much to, right? Which I think brings us to kind of like, the choice of method and the choice of using media. One way that I've been kind of justifying, wanting to do, use experimental and like multimodal methods, in my master's thesis, my proposed master's thesis, which doesn't exist yet [laughter], is to is that basically like visual kind of art making, and creative storytelling is already the way that the women I'll be working with in Colombia, see the world and, it's already the tool that they're using to tell their stories, to do political advocacy, you know, they make videos, they make embroidery pieces, to share their stories. So using these methods for my ethnography kind of aligns with the way that they already have of seeing the world. And it's, therefore allows for better collaboration, and allows for my work to be legible both to these activists and in academia, right. And I guess this relates to what we're saying in the sense that, like, it's worth, yeah, it's worth kind of making sure that our work is is is legible to whoever we're interviewing, right? Like in the sense that if we make a video, like it might be cool for Jaguar to use it later on, in a way that I'm guessing a anthropology paper might not be right, like it. Yeah, there's something inclusive about media.
Benjamin Salinas 17:52
Yeah, I agree. Like I think about, like, I've been getting more and more into following like, smaller hip hop artists, here and just kind of all over the world, actually, I just kind of click follow anytime I find anybody. And a lot of like, a lot of what people do on social media is like, promote themselves, right? It's like, use like, little bits of music videos, or like bits of themselves in the studio, and, like, edit it together into these kind of like, promo videos. And, you know, they're, like, very dramatic and have like, no, the flashing screen with the date and everything. And, like, I guess that like, that's all some of the thinking about, like, maybe that's how we'll use our, our, like, the video we give him or even like sampling, right, like, just sampling a portion of him talking into a song that he does, because he like, maybe he articulated something like, well, that he wanted to but like, you know, with the media with like, on Zoom, you actually get to save that and download it as an audio file. And he could even like, you know, like, turn that into a song, which, you know, not giving, like fresh ideas on like,
Adelaida Tamayo 18:57
Year, but that'd be sick. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also cool to think about how like in hip hop this is like the sampling and this using clips for promotion, everything like it's already happening, you know, it's not like anthropology; experimental anthropology isn't discovering this right. Like there's, yeah, I think it's important to keep in mind, to be very careful at this idea of like discovery or like, of coining a method and stuff like that, right. Like it's when we talk about multimodal anthropology, we might as well be talking about like sampling clips, or like [overlapping speech]...
Benjamin Salinas 19:32
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Adelaida Tamayo 19:35
Yeah, so that that just made me think of this like it's like, things are only experimental to a certain extent. Like there's already we have to always have to keep in mind like there is a whole world of artists and like there is these activists like using embroidery already. I've just like happened to be an anthropologist that wants to do it, but yeah, yeah, for sure.
Benjamin Salinas 19:56
That me think like when you're just talking a few minutes ago about like collaboration and how like these methods open up for, like, new modes of collaboration, like not not only in like the actual, like, thing that you're studying, but like if we're making a film like, I don't know what, like, I'm trying to link together what we were just we talked about a few minutes ago too, about how, like, those small decisions can get buried, or anything, but like talking, if you were like, say, we actually, like this probably won't happen for this project. But if we were like, editing this video with Jaguar, like, like, what would his small decisions be in? Like, how can we incorporate that and like, I feel like that's the kind of thing that couldn't happen with writing necessarily, because it's a very, like, writing academically is a very particular genre of writing. And, like we could mean up use poetry and other kinds of more fictional writing to that people, like, engage with, but I think there's something about like media and like sound, especially if you're interviewing a musician, that like them being involved in the process of editing and putting together the film would like, one be interesting, and also to allow them to have a say in how they're represented and like, give it a more multi like, show that it is actually a multi vocal project. Rather than having just like our names being like, author is of the pe-, like we;re authors of this project to study these people. Like, no, we're all like, producing a media project together.
Adelaida Tamayo 21:23
Right. Totally. And it makes me think about how historically anthropologists have been very comfortable in writing and complicated terms about a population who can't read it right. And making a film opens up a whole new world of possibilities, making a multimodal collaborative piece opens up a whole new world of feedback, right. And I think to that extent, that's why it can be a little scary, or it's, it requires it, but it can be scary, but it also requires holding yourself accountable, right. And it allows your participants to hold you accountable, the folks who are studying to hold you accountable for how you are representing stories and narratives and lives.
Benjamin Salinas 22:15
Yeah.
Benjamin Salinas 22:19
As we talked, we came to the idea that media and artistic projects invite different ways of knowing the world into the world of anthropology. On top of that these multimodal and artistic projects are inherently collaborative, and invite more community participation and engagement with our work.
Adelaida Tamayo 22:34
Yeah, and I think it's so much more like talk about methods working for like, your way of knowing the world. Like, it's just feels so much more natural to me than writing a paper in a way, you know, like, I feel like I'm still coming up with ideas, but it's just like, a cool new way to present it that fits with my way of knowing the world. Right, like,
Benjamin Salinas 23:00
Yeah.
Adelaida Tamayo 23:03
So often, I like the way that idea we come up with ideas and understand them is through, like bouncing them from each other. And it's kind of cool to not have to worry about translating the initial exciting idea into full fledged text.
Benjamin Salinas 23:23
Yeah, no, I, I totally understand that. Because sometimes, like, I feel like I have like, ideas. And I like, I know them in my head. But then I like start writing it down. And just like, it gets so tangled and messy. And like, I eventually like get to it. It's just kind of like is it like it doesn't have the same force to it...
Adelaida Tamayo 23:43
Yeah the excitement. Yeah. And I mean, I admire anthropologists who can write with emotion, and it makes it writing exciting. But it's really hard. And I think that something we haven't talked about is like emotions and affect. And I think that's something that is, at least that's the reason I like art a lot and video making is that you're able to, I see making films and art as a way to showcase or share my emotions or kind of try to connect with the viewer through emotions. And I think that we don't talk about it often. But I think a lot of academic ideas I have are exciting to me, and are actually tied to specific emotions of you know what I mean? Like what we were talking about earlier about, like the categories of Latinos, like, I have a lot of emotions tied up with that, like, figuring out who I am, it's like a whole it's like a very emotional element so I can write about it and talk about it. But there's also kind of like an emotional tinge to those sorts of discussions that it's kind of cool to think about how it might come across in my voice or inflections or what I say, you know?
Benjamin Salinas 25:14
Yeah, no, I was just thinking about like, intonation and like facial expression. And like all these other kind of, like, forms of communication that aren't like, text, like textual, right? Like, this is something I've tried to like, think about and like, then implement, but then it's hard to like, write about that disconnect, right? It's hard to like, like, say, that disconnect, or, like, show that disconnect without actually like, seeing our faces light up, when we're talking about something or see, like, you know, see people's facial expressions, or, like, I get excited like that, da da da, you know, all these things are, like, really powerful, and really, like, important moments of like, of communication, and like, you're doing anthropology, right. Like, that's, I know, like, that's an important part of also how we relate to people like to relate to the people we're working with. It's it's not a completely textual relationship so to reduce it down to text sometimes feels like a, almost like an injustice or like a disservice.
Adelaida Tamayo 26:13
Right? No, totally. Yeah, and I think that, especially with the ideas that have to do with justice, right, like, the stuff that Jaguar like raps about, and like that, when we were listening to him, we're like, oh, shit, this is awesome. Like, that kind of emotion is also an important way those emotions are what, like, lead to movements, succeeding leads to like, solidarity and like marches, you know, like marches for justice are very emotional. And I think yeah, I think that any medium that is able to conveys these emotions is like a powerful tool for justice. Right. So that's a cool way to think about it, too, that I hadn't thought about before.
Adelaida Tamayo 27:03
At this point, we found out that Jaguar was gonna to have to reschedule the meeting.
Benjamin Salinas 27:09
He, he just messaged me back. He said, "can we please move our meeting for a time later this week? My brother just got jailed last night and I'm handling his bail. I won't be available today. My apologies."
Adelaida Tamayo 27:23
Yeah, for sure. That sucks.
Benjamin Salinas 27:24
I'm totally down.
Adelaida Tamayo 27:25
I'm so sorry! Yeah,
Benjamin Salinas 27:27
Yeah no, I like, don't know how to respond.
Adelaida Tamayo 27:30
Yeah, um, just be like, "I'm so sorry, thinking about your family." And like, "Absolutely. No worries."
Benjamin Salinas 27:36
Yeah.
Adelaida Tamayo 27:39
We talked about this moment for a while. It struck us that despite our connection through social media and Zoom, we were living very different lives. We realized that a part of an engaged anthropology can include making a material or economic difference when we are able, and so we decided to provide compensation for the interview. As you'll see in a moment, the simple action of redistributing wealth and resources is at the center of Jaguars own activism...
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Anar Parikh 28:10
Thanks for listening to another episode of Anthro Airwaves. The next installment of this series will be in your podcast feeds on February 23. This episode was edited and produced by Adelaida Tamayo and Benjamin Salinas. Anar Parikh is the Executive Producer of Anthropological Airwaves and the Associate Editor of the Podcast at American Anthropologist. This episode features music by Benjamin Salinas. The intro and outro music you hear is titled “Waiting” by Crowander.
Anar Parikh 28:43
Thanks for listening to another episode of Anthro Airwaves. The next installment of this series will be in your podcast feeds on February 23. This episode was edited and produced by Adelaida Tamayo and Benjamin Salinas. Anar Parikh is the Executive Producer of Anthropological Airwaves and the Associate Editor of the Podcast at American Anthropologist. This episode features music by Benjamin Salinas. The intro and outro music you hear is titled “Waiting” by Crowander.
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