“In My Life”: Loving Queerly and Singing Across Generations
December 1975.
The cold winds staked their claim over Toronto, where my parents had recently arrived from the Philippines. They were underdressed and making their way down Parliament Street. Despite being warned of a shift in temperature, they were not expecting the brutal intensities of Canadian winter. I’m not sure how anyone anticipates the sharp sting of negative temperatures when they are arrivants used to tropical climates. Undeterred, my mother and father headed to a small Filipino grocer, hoping to encounter a semblance of domestic familiarity. Pressed against the biting winds, my mother abruptly stopped, looked at my father and said, “Tumutolo ang sipon” – you have a runny nose. To which my father replied, “Ikaw din” – you do too! They both started laughing and laughed again when they retold me this story 48 years later. When faced with the challenges of migrating to a new and very cold country, they managed to mine humour from a deep well of difficult circumstances. We had been listening to the song “In My Life” by the Beatles (Lennon & McCartney 1965). Something in its expression, melody, and feeling caused my parents to be transported to this small but important moment.
In her conversation with Christine Bacareza Balance, “‘Revolutions in Sound’: Keynote Duet” (2022) Alexandra T. Vazquez writes: “The popular…leaves so much room for engagement with sound artists (musicians without the gallery). None of them need theorists to argue for them, to argue for their mattering because to so many, they already do. How do they instead invite theorists to take part in something alongside them?” (12). I was never a big fan of the Beatles, but regardless of my opinions, they were popular. As a relentlessly oppositional teenager, I was put off by their mass popularity. As Vazquez suggests, despite one’s musical taste, songs are invitations, not scholarly conquests. The memory re-opened by my parents’ connection to “In My Life” was an invitation for me to take stock of the song’s affective and, for them, diasporic trajectories. As Balance (2022) suggests songs request us to “listen long so we hear where another is coming from” (15). For her, “long” describes temporality and commitment. To “listen long” implies that duration and attention are the pretext for empathic relations.
“In My Life” was released in 1965. My mother was fifteen years old when she first heard the song on the radio in a boarding house in Marbel, Philippines. One year later, on July 16, 1966 the Philippine Free Press would announce, “The Beatles Are Coming” (de Manila as cited by Robert Nery in “The Hero Takes a Walk” 2018). At that time, Ferdinand Marcos was the newly elected president of the Philippines, and Imelda Marcos was his First Lady. The Marcoses would later unleash an era of violent dictatorial power and impose Martial Law in 1972, escalating political suppression (Burns 2013). My mother recalls that the band’s first and only appearance in the Philippines was remembered by many less for their two scheduled concerts and more for their “snub” of Imelda. The Beatles were noticeably absent at a lunch reception they were expected to attend with the First Lady at the Presidential Palace. Their absence, attributed to a communication error between the concert promoter and the band’s manager, incited public disapproval and resulted in the sudden disappearance of their security escort and hotel and porter service. Unlike in other cities, the band was refused room service and was forced to carry their own luggage (Nery 2018).
What is striking about this moment is that it breaks from preoccupations with Filipinx desires for assimilation and mimicry of Western imperial projects. In Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, British travel writer Pico Iyer (1988) famously stated that Filipinx people are the “[m]aster of every American gesture, conversant with every western song…the Filipino plays minstrel to the entire continent (153)” Turning against imperial scripts and the band’s documented disdain of “Mosquito City” and even worse, John Lennon’s comment that a return to the Philippines would require “an H-bomb,” the soured residues of their visit marks a queer rupture in Beatlemania. The public decried that Filipinx people deserved better from the band, capturing what Balance describes in Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (2016), as “disobedience” in that “disavows a belief in the promises of assimilation” (5). For me, Filipinx non-compliance textures the sonic substance of “In My Life.” While the shadow of the Marcoses cronyism and corruption is an inescapable footnote, it is the defiant voices of hotel employees, dismayed fans, and airport workers that insisted on the “ordinariness” (Wofner & Smeaton, 2003) of the Beatles that holds the song’s queer decibels.
There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better. Some have gone, and some remain.
“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965).
January 2018.
I am sitting on my couch watching a Toronto Raptors game. The television emits light that flickers through a large window that frames a bright winter moon. I am 41 weeks pregnant at this point (feeling similarly shaped and sized as the moon outside). My stubborn queer resistance to the Beatles somehow dissipated during my pregnancy, and the song “In My Life” made its way to me. I would quietly sing the song to my pregnant belly. Then, that January night, I felt a snap inside my body and a rush of water down my legs. I won’t go into much gratuitous detail other than to say that at 12:49 pm the next day, Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija was born at home.
And these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new.
“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965)
Sometimes, I needed to couch the queerness of pregnancy in words that were not mine. The distance between these words and the ones I had yet to find would help to structure my unfolding love for Asa. Here, queerness presented a modality of encounter with uncensored desires. Queerness is often theorized as a utopian impulse; the queerness of my pregnancy jostled both the hopes and fears brought up by the unknown terrain of parenting amidst heteronormativity. For me, “In My Life” is riven by sentimentality and nostalgia, but it also gave melody to a tender relationship with myself and my new role in the world. This was the sonic throughline to my parents, a queer inheritance of tension made from the hopes for kinder contexts amidst the limitations of harsh realities.
December 2022.
I was invited to perform as part of the Queer Songbook Orchestra’s holiday fundraiser. The Queer Songbook Orchestra is a chamber pop ensemble that hosts an annual concert focused on songs and stories about “chosen family and queer joy” (Queer Songbook n.d.). At that time, Asa was four years old. He is a child of the pandemic. He’s a kid with two moms, a present and kind donor, and is dearly loved by his Lolo and Lola, his grandparents, aunts, titas, uncles, cousins, kuya, ate, and his beautiful chosen family. My partner, Hannah, and I sometimes worry about how his world will be affected by reactions to the makeup of our family, but mostly, we know he’ll be sure he’s loved by many.
To me, the song “In My Life” offers a useful sonic response to homophobia. As a baby, after Asa’s baths, I would often wrap him in a towel, and while rocking him back and forth, I would sing these lyrics from the song: “Though I know I’ll never lose affection for people and things that went before, I know I’ll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more” (Lennon & McCartney 1965). To me, this statement is a queer ethos. We know that 2SLGBTQ+ people have necessarily and creatively reworked and reimagined the organization and expression of kinship. When family is so often bounded by what Julianne Pidduck calls “constraints of relationality” in “Queer Kinship and Ambivalence”(2008: 441), the lyrics “In my life, I love you more” are a call to action. More is a word used comparatively to insist that there is something greater, something more exists, something more is possible. I embrace the challenge to love more. My queerness urges me to love more, and parenting Asa does, too. On the evening of the performance, indexed by my parents’ struggles and our shared disdain for the chill of winter, Asa and I performed “In My Life” together. The video of our performance will remain a treasured sonic archive that I will return to often, and as Asa gets older, I hope it reminds him of how beautiful he’s always been.
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Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Her current research examines sound as a mode of affective, psychic, and social representation, specifically in relation to diasporic experience. Drawing on sound studies, queer diaspora studies and Filipinx Studies, her research considers how sensorial encounters are enmeshed and disciplined by social and psychic conditions. In this work, she theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. She is also a musician and filmmaker whose work has received several accolades and has been presented internationally.
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The Cyborg’s Prosody, or Speech AI and the Displacement of Feeling–Dorothy Santos
Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Chris Chien
Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness—Esther Díaz Martín and Kristian E. Vasquez
Moonlight’s Orchestral Manoeuvers: A duet by Shakira Holt and Christopher Chien
Enacting Queer Listening, or When Anzaldúa Laughs–Maria Chaves Daza
Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas
The Queerness of Wham’s “Last Christmas”–Justin Burton
Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?–Wanda Alarcón
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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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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes
From Spanish to English to Spanish: How Shakira’s VMA Performance Showcases the New Moment in Latin Music “Crossover”—Petra Rivera-Rideau and Vanessa Díaz
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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