Vivir Quintana – a revolution powered by music
Which might be why I acquired various suggestions about my recommending her music “Period El o Period Yo” final week – principally optimistic, and far of it very considerate.
So who’s the lady whose songs appear to stir folks up and entice so many listeners?
First, Vivir Quintana is among the feminine voices transferring into Mexico’s historically male regional music scene—norteña, corridos, and banda. However she is greater than that. She blends these regional folks traditions with poignant social commentary—a form of regional Mexican rap in its lyrical thrust.
Born Viviana Monserrat Quintana Rodríguez in 1985 in Coahuila, she grew up in a household that valued schooling and music. Vivir started enjoying guitar at 12 and later studied music formally in addition to Spanish—she has a level in it—and labored as a center faculty Spanish instructor. As guidelines and customs round girls singers loosened, she step by step gained recognition performing in bars and collaborating with revered Mexican artists.
Her music—particularly her corridos—displays activism rooted in actual lives and struggles, shifting the main target away from glorifying violence to honoring the tales of girls. She actually turned the regional Mexican ballad, the corrido, on its head. The few girls who sang corridos as much as then, like Chavela Vargas or Amparo Ochoa, typically sang conventional songs. Quintana modified this together with her album “Cosas Que Sorprenden A La Audiencia” (Issues That Shock the Viewers)—a set of first-person narratives of girls imprisoned for defending themselves in opposition to abusers, providing not simply empathy however a name for societal reckoning and transformation. She was the primary to make use of the corrido as a platform to demand justice, dignity, and schooling to struggle gender violence and, as she demonstrated in “Period El o Period Yo” (It Was Both Him or Me), she nonetheless is.
In the event you don’t perceive the Spanish however have an interest, as I’m, in how music can and does change societies, translate the lyrics on-line and comply with alongside. You possibly can watch a revolution within the making, powered by music.
Patrick O’Heffernan
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