Listening to Digitized “Ratatas” or “No Sabo Kids”
This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@. Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas
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This post is co-authored by Sara Veronica Hinojos and Eliana Buenrostro
Cardi B eloquently reminds us that our español, as US Latinxs, might seem “muy ratata;” an apt phrase, heard lyrically within her music, used here to characterize inventive, communicative Spanglish word play. Yet, the proliferation of hashtags used to shame and silence second and later generations of Latinx kids runs counter to Cardi B’s ratata blessings.
The hashtags #nosabokid #nosabokids #nosabokidsbelike #nosabokidsorry #iamanosabokid represents a collective acknowledgment of Gloria Anzaldúa’s “linguistic terrorism.” Featured on NBC News, Locatora Radio, the Los Angeles Times and, surely, referenced within familial discussions, #nosabo has brought, once again, to the fore the coupling and, we fiercely argue, the need to decouple language (“proficiency”) from that of Latinx identities. The phrase “no sabo” – a non-standard Spanish conjugation of the phrase “no sé” for “I don’t know” – has become a stand-in as both a linguistic (bad) sign of Americanization and/or a (good) marker of ethnic, bicultural pride.
Anzaldúa has long warned us that, “[e]ven our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca [want to put locks on our mouths]” (1999, 76). In many ways, the “no sabo” label silences or “locks” one’s mouth. The institutional attempts to Americanize Spanish-speaking individuals constitute a form of violence that has led to the erosion of Spanish spoken among Mexican and Latino families in the United States. Today, children of immigrants are ridiculed for speaking “broken” Spanish, yet, for decades Mexicans raised in the United States experienced harsh consequences and blatant discrimination for speaking Spanish in public; this racism continues today.
As scholars of Latinx listening, these social media posts can be incredibly frustrating. They remind us of the sad reality that many Latinx people do not know their own history or better yet futures. Anzaldúa would describe the intraethnic linguistic policing as, “peleando con nuestra propia sombra” (fighting with our own shadow) (1999, 76); it’s both unproductive and self-inflicting. Poet Michele Serros describes her experiences being policed in her 1993 poem “Mi Problema”:
Eyebrows raise
My sincerity isn’t good enough
when I request:
“Hable mas despacio por favor.”
My skin is brown
just like theirs,
but now I’m unworthy of the color
‘cause I don’t speak Spanish
the way I should.
Then they laugh and talk about
mi problema
in the language I stumble over [. . .]
–Opening stanza of “Mi Problema” from Chicana Falsa
Applied to speakers (mostly kids) whose Spanish is identified as grammatically wrong or heard with an Anglicized accent, “no sabo” hashtags can encourage people to police each other’s tongues. Social media videos even show parents testing their children’s Spanish. When a child cannot remember or (mis)pronounces a Spanish word, or worse, uses a Spanglish iteration, they are disparagingly called “no sabo kids” (Stransky et al. 2023). Other posts reveal Latinx users’ fear of having and raising a “no sabo kid” or not wanting to date a “no sabo kid.”
Lastly, other posts proudly admit to being a “no sabo kid.” The latest series of “no sabo kids” hashtags are also unapologetic declarations that their language does not define the totality of their being or experiences.
Indeed, speaking Anglicized Spanish as Latinx can surface feelings of embarrassment, disappointment, and mockery from presumed “perfect” Spanish speakers or self-appointed “real” Spanish-English bilinguals. Televised instances of Latin Americans chastising the Spanish spoke of Latinx speakers or the public praise thrown at Ben Affleck for his spoken Spanish in comparison to the public side eyes given to wife, Bronx-raised, Jennifer Lopez are both hyper-mediated instances of #nosabokids.
White people might be praised for learning Spanish – no matter how Anglicized their accent – yet Latinx people whose Spanish is detected as Anglicized, are (racially whitewashed) “no sabo kids” (Urciuoli 2013). And yes, the use of the word “kids” alone infantilizes the speaker as some social media posts point to both children and adults as “no sabo.”
Irrespective of the proficiency in English or Spanish, Latinx individuals share experiences of being corrected in educational settings, at home, or online. The misuse of verb conjugation, such as using “sabo” instead of “sé,” is a developmental challenge encountered even by Spanish-speaking children who are learning solely Spanish. In other words, it is not an exclusive practice among Spanish-English bilingual speakers, despite what social media posts insist. The public discourse that some Latinx social media users are battling is what Jonathan Rosa calls “looking like a language” and, in this case, not “sounding like a race” (Rosa 2019).
Speaking, listening, and living “muy ratata” with inventive modes of Spanish and English in the U.S. is clearly heard as threatening. For instance, knowledge of another language has always challenged monolingual conservative speakers. Bilingual speakers and listeners routinely teach us how to resignify language practices and ultimately, the meaning of being a “no sabo kid.” (Or how Nancy Morales argues about Los Jornaleros del Norte and Radio Ambulante in the ways they offer new forms of belonging by understanding themselves and respecting each other.)
Entrepreneurs with Chicana and Latina feminist identities are modeling refashioned ways of belonging. For example, Los Angeles-based brand Hija de tu Madre created t-shirts and crewneck sweatshirts with the words “no sabo” to counter the ridicule heard and circulated within social media and to loudly claim a racial, linguistic identity that has nothing to do with shame. Similarly, the card game “Yo Sabo,” founded by a first generation college student of Mexican descent, Carlos Torres, looks for ways to improve his Spanish and simultaneously creates another way to connect with immigrant family members. Labels like “no sabo ” that are intended to categorize people in harmful ways are being repurposed to build community.
The podcast Locatora Radio: A Radiophonic Novela released an episode on April 12, 2023, Capítulo 160: No Sabo Kids, detailing historical reasons why Latinx ethnicities have structurally been banned from learning and speaking Spanish. Perhaps most importantly, Locatora Radio shares with listeners lengthy listener-recorded testimonios.
They provide diverse personal reasons for identifying as a “no sabo kid.” One listener, Paula, is a transracial adoptee whose first language was Spanish. However, because of forced family separation and the foster care system in Virginia, she “lost” her Spanish. Paula was enrolled in Spanish language classes throughout her formal schooling and accepts that her reclaiming of culture and language is a lifelong process. The use of verbal testimonios, a format that makes it possible for podcast listeners to listen to fellow listeners, moves away from posts above that wag their digital finger at “no sabo kids” and instead gives them a space to speak for themselves.
The intense personal and communal fear of losing aspects of culture or language makes it difficult to understand how shifts in language practices and accents are important new forms of belonging as Latinx in the U.S. If we cannot accept our own linguistic diversity, how do we expect others to listen to us?
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Featured Image: A selection of TikTok #nosabo memes from @marlene.ramir, @yospanishofficial, and @saianana
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Sara Veronica Hinojos is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Her research focuses on representation of Chicanx and Latinx within popular film and television with an emphasis on gender, race, language politics, and humor studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates the racial function of linguistic “accents” within media, called: GWAT?!: Chicanx Mediated Race, Gender, and “Accents” in the US.
Eliana Buenrostro is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She received her master’s in Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research examines the criminalization, immigration, and deportation of Chicanes and Latines through the lens of music and other forms of cultural production. She is a recipient of the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellowship.
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Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas
Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness—Esther Díaz Martín and Kristian E. Vasquez
“Don’t Be Self-Conchas”: Listening to Mexican Styled Phonetics in Popular Culture*–Sara Hinijos and Inés Casillas
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Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body
This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@. Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas
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My Puerto Rican grandmother used to sing Pedro Infante’s “Las mañanitas” to all the women in the family on their birthdays, so naturally I grew up thinking this was a Puerto Rican song. Not quite – it’s Mexican. When my family came to New York City from Puerto Rico in the 1950s, they were starved of warm waters, mountains, and family members, but they were not starved of Spanish-language music and media thanks in large part to Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema. In the Bronx, Puerto Ricans would go the theaters to watch movies like Nosotros los Pobres (1948),which popularized boleros like “Las Mañanitas.” This movie-going ritual in the wake of relocation and diaspora has provided the birthday soundtrack to my life.
My mother grew up listening to her father sing boleros, and she would later sing with the Florida Grand Opera Chorus when I was a child. My early knowledge of opera came from her. Growing up in Miami Beach, I would also listen to reggaetón and hip-hop in afterschool programs. The Parks & Recreation department would host dances for us, and that was where I first learned to dance perreo. My early musical surroundings represent what it means to be a colonial subject, to hear the Italianate vocal legacies of opera mixed with the Afro-Diasporic and Indigenous rhythms of reggaetón. This post contextualizes my experience within bolero’s colonial history and legacy particularly its operatic disciplining of brown and Black bodies and voices. Reggaetóneras provide models for sonic subversion by being ronca, raspy, or breathy, and thus overriding internalized Eurocentric dichotomies of feminine and masculine vocal timbres.
When I began my own operatic training in college, I was constantly told to “purify” my voice, to resist vocal “fry,” and to handle my acid reflux by avoiding spicy foods. I was steered away from singing the pop songs I had grown up with, and kept many musical activities secret, like when I soloed for the tango ensemble and my a cappella group. In graduate school, thanks to my Latina roommates, I began listening to reggaetón again. I reunited with the voices that raised me and was reassured that their teachings of resistance would always present themselves when I needed them.
After 20 years of listening to Ivy, I have located the descriptor that most closely encapsulates the way her voice sounds to me: ronca. This is Spanish for hoarse, and in my experience, it’s been used colloquially, mostly by women, to describe moments when their throats might feel sore, and their voices sound raspy, or masculine, even. Ronca has been articulated as an epistemology of vocal sounding in the artistry of lower-class Black reggaetón creators like Don Omar and more recently, Ozuna. Sounding ronca is a signifier of realness, of truly knowing the struggle of race and class oppression. It is a vocalization of full-body rage fueled by poverty and colonization.
Ivy’s voice is so special to me because she sounds like my aunt when she’s had a long day, my mom when she’s yelling, and my grandma after years of having long days and yelling at people. She sounds like the raw, unfiltered power that comes from exhaustion. She sounds like inner will and justified fury. She sounds like yelling at landlords and ex-husbands for hot water and child support. She sounds like age. And she always has, even when she was “young.” And this sound is even more beautiful and life-giving to me after 4+ years in a classical voice program that told me it was bad to sound hoarse or raspy, surveilled my eating, and perpetuated the colonization of Native and Black peoples through musical subjugation.
Operatic training utilizes mechanisms that are opposite of what is “natural” for me as a poor Latina from the barrio. It asks me to lift my voice, clarify it, and feminize it. This, to me, is antithetical to the girl who laughs really loudly, gets raspy often from yelling and eating too many Takis, and loves to sing from her chest. Ivy’s voice empowers my place as the antithesis. Even as I sang classically in college, my voice was still often described as “soulful,” “hoarse,” “raspy,” “throaty.” My voice, although in a moment of attempted cleanup in college, was read as having previously engaged in genres that disrupt colonial dichotomies of “art” and “noise.” The sonic Blackness– in particular the exoticized and tropicalized Blackness of Latinidad in the U.S.- of my timbre was legible, and perhaps even hyper-audible, in moments when I was trying to adapt to European art forms. Raquel Z. Rivera asserts in New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (2003) that Latinidad doesn’t take away from Blackness but adds an element of exoticism to the Blackness. Thus, I have come to understand ronca voices as representative of a Latina/e liberatory sonic and embodied praxis that resists the derogatory discourse around racialized voices predicated on European ideals of cleanliness.
The ronca voice is negotiating suciedad, Deborah Vargas’ analytic for how queers of color may reclaim their abject bodies and social spaces. Readings of my voice in predominantly white spaces were contextualized by my queer ambiguously-brown body, which in direct opposition to whitening regimes, was sounding suciedad. This is what ronca voices do, and what I conceptualize as “ronca realness”: the tendency of Latinas/es to not hide behind the voice but rather keep it real with the audience via their vocal timbre. Ronca voices sound another option to Barthes’ hegemonic article “The Grain of the Voice,” which has been applied to Ivy Queen and Don Omar in Jennifer Domino Rudolph’s “‘Roncamos Porque Podemos,’” and Dara Goldman’s “Walk like a Woman, Talk like a Man: Ivy Queen’s Troubling of Gender.” I intend ronca realness to be understood as a queer of color vocal analytic born from community and lived experience.
Ronca voices reflect emotional states, flip colonial gendered vocal scripts, reveal if the singer had coffee that morning and Hot Cheetos the night before, and navigate tough musical contours with strain and stress; most importantly, they refuse to be white(ned). In college, my ronca realness was not always a choice. Keeping it real, in general, is sometimes undecided upon prior to the act of realness; it is an additional and deeply engrained responsibility that queer people of color have in white spaces to sound their dissent, or else face the continued exploitation of their communities. Further, these acts of realness may not even be legible as such but are often coded as bad behavior or an attitude problem.
Within communities of color and (im)migrant communities, it’s important to recognize that Ivy Queen’s ronca timbre was permissible because she was light-skinned, thin, and usually took on the masculine role of the rapper, rather than the feminine role of the dancer, in several of her videos. These privileges have left Afro-Latina ronca reggaetóneras like La Sista in the shadows.
La Sista has veered away from sounding ronca in recent years, but in her debut album, Majestad Negroide (2006), she praised Yoruba goddess Yemaya and Taino cacique Anacaona with a hoarse, raspy, bold sound. She is the Afro-Indigenous Latina many of us needed growing up, and her absence speaks to the ways in which Black ronca voices are policed and erased within Latinx culture and elsewhere. Let us praise her now.
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Featured Image: Still image by SO! from RaiNao’s “Tentretiene”
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Cloe Gentile Reyes (she/her) is a queer Boricua scholar, poet, and performer from Miami Beach. She is a soon-to-be Faculty Fellow in NYU’s Department of Music and earned her PhD in Musicology from UC Santa Barbara. Her writing explores how Caribbean femmes navigate intergenerational trauma and healing through decolonial sound, fashion, and dance. Cloe’s poems have been featured in the womanist magazine, Brown Sugar Lit, and she has presented and performed at PopCon, Society for American Music, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch, among several others.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Contra La Pared: Reggaetón and Dissonance in Naarm, Melbourne—Lucreccia Quintanilla
“How Many Latinos are in this Motherfucking House?”: DJ Irene, Sonic Interpellations of Dissent and Queer Latinidad in ’90s Los Angeles—Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr.
Unapologetic Paisa Chingona-ness: Listening to Fans’ Sonic Identities–Yessica Garcia Hernandez
SO! Podcast #74: Bonus Track for Spanish Rap & Sound Studies Forum
Cardi B: Bringing the Cold and Sexy to Hip Hop—Ashley Luthers
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