“past is prologue”

I. Cumbia de Mi Barrio

For millennia, indigenous civilizations like the Olmec, Téenek, Nahua, Otomi, and others thrived in the region now known as Veracruz, an agricultural center with a major port on the Gulf of Mexico. The area, even before colonization, boasted a uniquely diverse collection of mesoamerican societies rich in linguistic, engineering, artistic, and architectural innovations.

By the early 1500s, however, European colonizers would come to invade and claim Veracruz, declaring the port the first Spanish town in what was to be New Spain. It was upon this land that (among other colonial projects) the transatlantic slave trade would also take place. In 1570, Gaspar Yanga, an enslaved member of the Gabonese royal family, led a successful rebellion against his enslavers and once freed took refuge in the highlands of Veracruz. For almost 40 years, this self-liberated community grew, becoming a gathering site for other escapees in the region until the Spanish military, fed up with the group’s supply raiding, attacked in 1609. Yanga’s community fought back their attackers, and the Spanish would end their conflict, if the rebels agreed to cease the raids. Yanga accepted, and the settlement, since renamed for its founder and liberator, became the first freetown in all of the Americas.

Today the Mexican state of Veracruz, home to Yanga, home to the port city (now named Heroica Veracruz in tribute to its defeat of French invaders nearly 200 years later), is an important site of Mexican collective memory, and a nexus for Indigenous, African, Italian, Cuban, and Spanish cultural influences. It is from this historical soil that the rich musical style of son jarocho would come to be, and the sonic-cultural crossroads at which the East Los Angeles-based, Afro-Mexican infused, Chicanx band Las Cafeteras would locate themselves creatively.

Founded almost 20 years ago, Las Cafeteras took their name from the community center where their friendships began, and where they first learned how to play son jarocho music—the Eastside Cafe. The band is made up of seven members: Hector Flores and Denise Carlos (co-founders, lead vocalists), John Calanchini (piano), Jonny Jyemo (drums), Jorge Mijangos (lead requinto, leona, vocals), Jasmine Lopez (violin, vocals) and Moises Baqueiro (bass). For the past two decades the group has existed at the intersection of culture, activism and artistry, recording love ballads, songs about LA pride, and protest anthems.

“death is not the end, it’s just the beginning”

II. La Llorona

The band is currently preparing for its multidimensional performance Hasta La Muerte at The Ford this October with Flores, Carlos, and Baqueiro serving as Creative Director, Artistic Director, and Music Director for the production, respectively. This will be Las Cafeteras’ third season performing the show centered around Día de los Muertos, an annual Mexican cultural holiday, typically observed in early November, where departed loved ones—now ancestors—are remembered and honored over the multiple day festival-style celebration. “It’s an indigenous practice and also a universal practice because I feel like every culture and peoples has a way of remembering their loved ones and their ancestors,” says Hector Flores.

Modern expressions of the celebrations use dance, music, vibrant dress, ancestral altars, and more to hold space for loved ones who reside at the far ends of the expanse that separates life and death.

Hector described the design of the evening, “the first half is life, grief, death, loss…and so in the second half we’re in the afterlife, and actually the afterlife is a celebration. Death is not the end, it’s just the beginning. Death is not a place to grieve. It’s actually a place of peace and celebration,” says Flores. During Día de los Muertos, the boundaries between life and afterlife collapse, allowing communion of the living and the dead to take place within the shared space of the festival. It is a bridge—a crossing—and the ritual of music and dance become a technology for transcending the borders of space-time. Las Cafeteras artistically resides at this site of “in-betweenness.”

“we actually don’t come from one place”

III. Nepantla

The band draws inspiration from several places, but the work of the late author, poet, and artist Gloria Anzaldúa loomed large as the members began constructing not only this season of their creative output but this specific performance. They credit Anzaldúa’s reflections from her acclaimed book The Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza for providing language for understanding the complexities of Mexican-American life. The book focuses on, among many other things, the mestiza and Chicanx experience of living inside of "borders" constructed by systems: spatial, socio-political, and spiritual.

Denise Carlos has explored the tension of being situated at two or more interlocking identities and struggling to live up to the "approved performance" of those identities be they cultural, gendered, vocational, or religious. It is an experience many can relate to, and the band hopes that the specificity of their members’ lived experiences resonate universally. “In college I understood, [Chicana] is not just a social or cultural identity, but it’s also very much a political identity. It also meant that you protected your people, you showed up for your community. [But] there were no real tools that were given to me on how to attend to that trauma of not being good enough, and for me, that’s where I understood the in-betweenness of having to choose,” explains Carlos. “And so in this album and then the song ‘Nepantla,’ we’re kind of saying, ‘I’m not afraid to be who I am anymore. I’m actually taking all the beauty of all the parts. I am claiming those, even if they don’t claim me, I’m going to claim them and I’m going to create something different.’”

The album Carlos references is the band’s 2024 release Night in Nepantla, itself a nod to Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, which theorized and popularized the Nahuatl word “Nepantla” meaning “to live in-between.” The album and Hasta La Muerte both represent the group’s embrace of Anzaldúa’s concept of “mestiza consciousness.” Essentially, it is a framework that promotes a transformative conception of “bothness,” “hybridity,” or holding two sometimes contradictory identities at once in order to bring forth something new (individually, politically, or spiritually). “We understand that we come from different places, that we are the oppressor and we are the oppressed, that we come from pain and we come from privilege,” explains Flores.

“the dance is the fight”

IV. Vivas Nos Queremos

As we learn more about the performance, it becomes clear that dance will play a central role in moving the audience through the evening’s various states. While Day of the Dead makes space for the collective navigation of death and loss, the dance ritual will mediate grief as well around the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW) during the performance of Las Cafeteras’ original song “Vivas Nos Queremos.” The use of red veils, both in the show and in the MMIW movement, is meant to draw attention to the absence of notice from media and law enforcement, especially in cases when the missing victims are Black and Brown. The intentional timing of including this performance in the show should also bring to mind the ongoing, violent increase of state sanctioned racialized disappearing of migrant community members in Los Angeles that started this summer.

“I’m grateful because I have this avenue of creating, I have people in my camp who are like, let’s create, let’s write, let’s make songs, let’s hold space with our Brown bodies and movement—the dance is the fight,” says Carlos, “the way that people transform on a stage, it makes me cry...the juxtaposition of who we are, in everyday life on the street and then what we do on a stage and how we honor these stories in our bodies, in our presence. It’s all the people before us coming through in this moment.”

“to live in the borderlands”

V. El Camino

For Las Cafeteras, Día de los Muertos operates as a space for reflection as well as joy. It represents a spiritual liminality, and the dance rehearsals also function as their own liminal space: a train car, bridge, a purgatory—caught (or suspended)—between the world of rest and the world of performance.

Through this presentation of Hasta La Muerte, the group looks to provide us with the collective tools of lament, art, dance, and community to heal in the midst of loss and death. In a moment in the city when there is so much to grieve, Las Cafeteras challenges us to celebrate life and perhaps in the act make connection with the liberatory spirit of the Veracruzian ancestors who began this son jarocho story. “The Day of the Dead stories [are] really meant to be a social commentary to the death of innocence, the death of justice and how we deal with, grief, loss, and love,” explains Flores, “If you want to know where we come from, come stay the night in Nepantla, in this world in-between. And get a sense of the world we live in, how we talk, and yell and scream and cry and sing. It’s not a physical space, it’s a spiritual space. And everybody has their own in-between.”

About the author: Yemi Seyi (he/him) is a social practice artist, working in archive, portraiture, documentary photography, filmmaking, and is based in Pasadena, California. A Black Image Center alum, Yemi’s photography and film work explore spatiality, spirituality, the history of social movements and bodies in states of transit. His community archival practice exists in conjunction with his work at The Center for Restorative Justice.

This photo essay is supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture.