Listening to the Border: “’2487’: Giving Voice in Diaspora” and the Sound Art of Luz María Sánchez
Statistics of death can startle a reader. As tidy yet powerful numeric representations statistics are often used as tools of persuasion, cited routinely by journalists and politicians alike to strengthen or belittle a political objective. According to professors from Wharton’s School of Business, statistics are also gaining in importance as our society attempts “to make sense of an increasingly large and complex barrage of information.” Many have argued, quite provocatively, of the gendered and racialized nature of statistics as objective, “hard,” facts. In “2487: Giving Voice in Diaspora,” the artist Luz María Sánchez uses sound-based art to trouble a statistic brought on by institutional violence on the U.S./Mexico border.
In 2006 Luz María Sánchez used a lone statistic from 2004 – 2487, the number of bodies found dead throughout the border region of the U.S. and Mexico – to create a sound-based art installation for the San Antonio Artpace (now available as an online exhibit). The museum invited audiences to sit in sparsely furnished rooms with strategically placed speakers in order to experience the exhibition. The online access, however; makes certain the exhibit travels beyond the geographical boundaries of Texas, bellowing from the private devices of laptops. Seemingly simple, the crux of the project involves the artist stating each of the 2487 names. Its complexity, as mentioned below, lies in the actual organization of the names. The voice of Luz María Sánchez within this artistic expression reminds us, as Brandon LaBelle states, that sound “leaves a body and enters others” and is never merely a “private affair.” The use of sound forces spectators to listen closely to a statistic and in doing so, directs attention towards the parts of the sum.
The topic of immigration has become a staple of news network channels. Its somewhat mundane presence has served to lump immigrants together into one sound bite: “them” sapping social services; “them” taking away our jobs; or “them” having those anchor babies. The reporting of immigrants as a block serves to dehumanize and delegitimize intentions of family reunification held by many immigrants. Indirectly, “2487” tackles the verbal “them” head on.
Buried within discussions of immigration policy and arguments for increased border enforcement on the U.S./Mexico border are the statistics of those who have died crossing the treacherous dry desert. A series of shifts in immigration policy and increasingly anti-immigrant public sentiment have produced record setting budgets that intensified efforts to beef up border control. The once urban points of crossing in Tijuana or Juarez are now heavily discouraged; the visual yellow and black warning of a family running an insignia of those times. Many immigrants take greater risks as they walk through the Sonoran desert in southern Arizona, now considered the busiest gateway for immigrants where temperatures easily mount well into the 100s.
Within 2487, it is not merely the statistic that serves to astound, it’s the ingenuous yet powerful act of listening to the full name of each body that can engulf the listener.
José Salomon López
Francisco Torres Santiago
Leticia Torres Solis
Adolfo Sánchez
Enrique Soto Pacheco
Guadalupe Valdez Sandoval
Antonio Sánchez Morales
Juan Antonio Sánchez Reyes
Patricia Trinidad
Narrated by the artist herself, each name is voiced individually with a dignified, strong tenor. The text itself – the names – mark this sound piece as solemn. It’s as if one is listening to an obituary read out loud, a roll call with no response, or – a tradition many Latinos identify with – a rosary in honor of the dead. Despite studies that explain a Latina’s public wail as a sign of pain and grief, this piece in its parallel focus of honoring the dead stands out as the artist’s female voice never quivers, trembles, or abandons its strength. In naming each person, listeners may not necessarily focus on their death – represented numerically in 2487 – but may also find themselves imagining their risk as they hear each name. Under the website’s database tab, lies a detailed chart of each name, the location of their body, presumable age, known origin, and the cause of death. Many of the columns are listed with a tag of “unknown” or left blank except for their names.
It’s a forced, almost-awkward, tension-laden, and heavy listening experience. Sánchez makes certain that any semblance of passive listening is disrupted, disturbed, and therefore nearly impossible since the names voiced do not follow a pattern or rhythm. The eight piece sound compilation offers no sense of monotony since it is played continuously and at random. Pauses are sometimes short, long, pensive, and altogether distressing. Names are voiced either in isolation or in an overlapping manner, said to model the “organic patterns of migration itself”; an audible gesture towards the word “diaspora” itself. Because of the deliberate variation of the names, the listener can make out the names of some yet not detect the names of others.
Even as Sánchez gives voice and dignity to a statistic based on dead bodies, the topic of death certainly is not easy to translate. Regina Marchi’s “Day of the Dead in the USA” argues that the public commemoration of death by Latino communities has slowly begun to transform American Culture’s views of death. According to Marchi, Americans tend to be “removed from death” or lack positive modes of relating to those deceased. A popular case in point is the plethora of euphemisms used to characterized death: moved on, no longer with us, watching over us now, passed away. Día de los Muertos or Day of the Dead (on November 1) has become a multicultural method of publically viewing and even embodying death as different communities construct altars, dress as the dead, and openly pay tribute to those who have died. The use of art galleries, the mass media, and community centers have become public venues for these celebrations since their inception by Chicano artists in 1972.
Despite, or (perhaps more precisely) because, honoring the dead is so frequently a visual custom these sonic remembrances are that much more significant. A politicized eulogy for immigrants who have died while crossing the border merits the weight of listening. The 2487 statistic encompasses two thousand and eighty seven bodies and each, according to Luz María Sánchez, had a name that deserves our listening attention.
by Dolores Inés Casillas, UCSB
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Hearing Queerly: NBC’s “The Voice”
“Brittany and Santana Lesbian Kissing Scene from Glee” by Flickr user LesMedia available under Creative Commons license 2.0
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 turned out to be a red-letter day for prime time Sapphism. The Fox smash, Glee, continued its hamfisted campaign against teen bullying with a subplot about the label-averse Santana scheming to bring her lesbian (or “Lebanese”) love for Britney to fruition. Airing opposite this “Born This Way”-anchored, supersized Glee, was the debut of the vocal reality competition series, The Voice on NBC. Remarkably, not one, but two out lesbians survived the first elimination round of the show’s blind auditions: Vicci Martinez from Tacoma, WA, and Beverly McClellan from Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
The Voice pitches itself as the democratic alternative to FOX’s American Idol. Whereas Idol’s early audition rounds derive considerable schadenfreude from oddball characters excluded from the expansive realm of what is deemed “pop hot”–remember Kenneth Briggs, the infamous “Bush Baby”?–The Voice eliminates looks altogether from the audition process, including the panel’s ability to look at the singers onstage. Seated in hydraulically-controlled swivel chairs evocative of Dr. Evil’s high-backed perch, the celebrity panel of coaches (not “judges”)–Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine of Maroon 5, and country hunk, Blake Shelton–have their backs to the stage at the beginning of each performance. Only when the singer’s voice sufficiently moves a coach does he or she press a button to swing around and face the talent. If none of the four coaches turns around before the song ends, the singer is eliminated and sent away with only two-and-a-half glorious minutes on national TV as a consolation prize.
Vicci Martinez
While latter-day Idol has increasingly focused on the “total package,” sometimes excusing vocal defects for good looks, performance prowess, and passion (“I had fun with it” is the mantra of anyone who’s suffered a tepid response from the judges, and “you look great tonight” is what a judge says when someone biffs their vocals), The Voice purports to strip away the smoke and mirrors of performance—at least in the live selection process—in order to focus exclusively on vocal talent. Furthermore, as “coaches,” the celebrity panel is meant to cultivate talent rather than simply eviscerate bad performers for the audience’s amusement. As Cee Lo opines in the premiere episode: “it’s not about the judgment; it’s about the journey.” (Has reality competition taken a critical turn from the critical turn? But that’s another topic.) Idol has been explicitly called out on the show, from Adam Levine’s reassurance to dejected contestants that “The people we are not turning our chairs around for could win American Idol,” to the sensational rehashing, ad nauseum, of Frenchie Davis’s disqualification from the Idol competition for nude photos nearly a decade ago.
As the anti or alterna-Idol, The Voice–complete with kitschy, faux Futurist set pieces–would have us believe that truly anyone from anywhere could be a vocal superstar, whether they’re fat, thin, chinless, hirsute, gorgeous, hideous, straight, gay, Mormon, or dykey. The disparate optics offered by Vicci Martinez and Beverly McClellan, the two lesbians who won the celebrity panel over with their raw-throated rock vocals (right in the pocket of what we might call the Etheridgean mode), would seem to affirm the show’s “blind” ethos. Martinez’s audition was shot so that just like the coaches, the TV audience couldn’t see the singer until she was selected. In the package leading up to her performance, we are made privy to her coming out story, offered a glimpse of her skinny jeans and boots, and invited to “listen along with our coaches and see if you would pick Vicci Martinez.”
As it turns out, Martinez is quite a little hottie: a lesbian heartthrob in the making with a cute asymmetrical shag, winning smile and sensibly curated fashion (think PacNorthwest sportif meets urban hipster enclave).
McClellan, meanwhile, offers an “edgier” look that complements her ethos of fighting–in her own words–“against the man.”
TV audiences see McClellan before hearing her, creating some element of narrative suspense: we anxiously await “the reveal” should one of the coaches select McClellan for their team, only to swivel around to confront a bald, bad-ass dyke with ample tattoos, piercings and leather wrist accoutrement, chewing on Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” with barroom tenacity.
The queer blogosphere has certainly picked up on Martinez and McClellan’s success on the show. (As of this writing, Martinez has already advanced passed the “Battle Rounds” to the live shows where audience members are are allowed to vote). After Ellen and Unicorn Booty posted items immediately, encouraging queer audiences to tune in, while After Ellen followed up with extended interviews, first with Martinez, then with McClellan. Both were asked about whether or not the format of The Voice made it “easier” for queer contestants to succeed without being judged for their appearance. Martinez famously bowed out of the Hollywood rounds of American Idol because producers asked her to buy a new wardrobe (read, “femme up” a bit), so she offered a more affirmative response in line with The Voice’s own rhetoric of leveling the playing field. McLellan, meanwhile, offered a goofy “one love” answer to the question, evoking a universal vibe of human generosity. Different as their public temperaments may be, both have been praised for amplifying lesbian visibility on network television.
Levine listens to McClellan on
Though some robust, “score two for the team” chest-bumping is surely in order after the success of these Sapphic sirens, how might we actually move past the greater frenzy for queer visibility to better grasp how lesbianism fits, or inevitably fails to fit, within the pop landscape? In other words, what would happen if we weren’t so quick to celebrate these “aren’t-we-GLAAD?” moments of prime time visibility, but instead took to heart The Voice’s premise about prioritizing listening?
Throughout the institutional life of queer studies, debates about lesbian visibility have unfurled in elaborate fugue-like variations. Rather than rehash them here, allow me to commit the theoretical heresy of constructing a binary in order to highlight some key positions. In the “real” world of mainstream LGBTQIA organizations and cultural producers, quantifying positive representations of queer folk qualifies as measuring progress. The more gays and lesbians we see on screens big and small, the logic goes, the better the world gets. In the more rarified realms of queer theory (my own habitat), this desire for representation and belonging calls forth the very crisis inherent in politicizing visibility as an end in itself. Film and media scholar, Amy Villarejo, explains this dynamic best when she remarks in Lesbian Rule that “the common sense of visibility is that it does both [parlays representation’s double meaning as ‘portrait’ and ‘proxy]: by appearing, so it would go, we belong…[but]…to present lesbian as image is to arrest the dynamism such a signifier can trigger” (14).
What, then, would be the sonic dynamism of lesbianism? Is it a transformative “grammar” that modifies the terms with which it becomes intimate? (Villarejo explores this possibility in her book.) Is it in the grain of a voice?
Far be it from me to theorize the “butch throat” here, as my dear pal and colleague Elena Glasberg already has with more eloquence and profundity than my mind can muster these days; but even if we hadn’t been primed by the show’s intro packages, might we not have heard the lesbianism in Martinez and McClellan’s throats? In their urgent, tremulous and toothsome strivings through the repertoires of “fierce females” like Adele and Janis Joplin?
There is something marked, and remarkable, in the yearning and temporal drag (see Elizabeth Freeman’s work) modeled by Martinez and McClellan’s respective vocalities, voices that could only break the surface in a format that (at least initially), thwarts the edicts of visibility: of fashion, generic niches, and the avant sensibility demanded by pop. Instead of being one step ahead, Martinez and McClellan constantly pull us back to something we’ve heard before, often in a half-empty bar that reeks of Bud and Marlboros (both Light). And for letting us hear this again, I’m willing to give The Voice the benefit of the doubt, despite its unwieldy format, liberal use of Carson Daly, and trumped up feud between Adam Levine and the real Xtina. Just maybe in this singing competition’s overdetermined relationship to blindness, we will find enough insight to hear queerly.
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