MIGRATION SOUNDSCAPES

I have been in the U.S. a total of five years in small increments of time. My first couple of times here were Wisconsin 2015 & Massachusetts 2019-20. Then, when graduate school started, I was able to stay for three consecutive years: Massachusetts 2021 to this day. That particular distribution of time doesn’t allow for much linear storytelling. Yet sounds shape an immersive landscape instead.

When I think about my life’s soundscapes, it's impossible to steer it away from the perpetual nostalgia and longing of homesickness. Sounds help make sense of it by virtue of their ethereal and intangible nature. Migration can be a process of much dissociation. In order to adapt sometimes you need to escape into the confines of your mind to stay tuned with familiar resonances. By tracing airplane engines, bed songs, YouTube playlists, silences, and second hand CDs, here I make a conscious effort to map out the soundscapes of my migration.

At risk of sounding cliché, loud airplane engine noises as they take off the ground marked my aural memories in a myriad of ways. The first time I flew, I felt small and at the mercy of sounds so heightened and industrial that made me viscerally aware of my vulnerability. My mother helped me emotionally navigate the panic by holding hands. Later, during my first solo traveling I had that memory to keep me grounded. Suddenly airplane engine reverberations became merged with an inner sense of propulsion and hunger for new adventures, people, and routines. The machine-heavy symphony was the first step in the take off to another version of myself. Yet the last time I boarded a plane returning from Lima to the U.S. after a brief visit, I was thankful for how the loudness of airplane engines graced me with a deafening storm to drown my own inconsolable crying.

Whenever the paralyzing panic tried to take over my body over the realization of my support system’s absence in a foreign land, my nervous system would resort to my childhood’s sounds to soothe. “Nicaragua, Nicaraguita'' by the Godoy brothers was my bed song. Arranged to incorporate a string ensemble and the accordions, alongside harmonizing voices, in this version Godoy captures the best of my father’s political imaginaries and tenderness in building futurities where my brother and I had our own version of life. It works a dual function. When he sang it to me, it felt reaffirming and validating. The lyrics elaborate on a mellow simple melody to offer an ode to a Nicaragua free of dictatorial ruling; one in which she can actually blossom.

When I hum or sing it to soothe, it serves as an hymn of self love. I am Nicaragua. The fact it is meant to be sung collectively allows for all the parts of me to sing along. My father, my childhood self, the worst versions of myself, and my most fearful ones as well. They essentially celebrate the beauty of a nation’s freedom. The way its delicate guitar strumming and lead riffs intervene allow me to dial inwards. I am Nicaragua and was Nicaraguita (little Nicaragua). I am the territory. I am the territory where I came from and, although at times it can hurt, it is only under conditions of freedom one can blossom. And that freedom, despite nationalist appropriative narratives in Latin America and the U.S., lies within everyone of us.

Put your soul on, the day will come. –said poet Cesar Vallejo. He wrote about longing for Peru like no other. From his exile in Paris, he captured the dark mood of reckoning with modernizing violence poured in Peruvian people’s psyche. Everyone in my lineage was privy to it. Doomer music playlists offer the right kind of ennui for the occasion, recreating the soundscape of my mother’s living room cooking and mourning her losses while preparing a Sunday meal. Here, the lamenting tones are rich in capricious and dexterous guitar and women’s high pitched voices. When in need to cry and hallucinate, these playlists are still a way to access my early teens following around the smells and lamenting of each note to try and decipher my mother’s own demons; the ones that I wishfully thought wouldn’t end up becoming my own.

Thinking about my life’s soundscapes requires a meditation on the role of silence. Most of my time in Peru, silence was a scarce resource. I remember the joy it gave me to explore my college’s library and the sepulchral silence I had never imagined beyond my wildest dreams. I clearly remember my troubled and misplaced longing for it under the shapings of erudite and elevated aesthetic modes leading me to believe knowledge production had a single specific imagery.

I thought silence was the preferred method of intellectual cultivation, until I met U.S. suburban silence. To me, suburbia is an aural limbo that carries ghosts of what is left unspoken and goes to die in the atmosphere. It is the soundscape of isolation, distancing, and the unknown. After spending over two months stranded in the U.S. due to Covid-19 border closings, the silence of suburbia became the decibels of opulence, whiteness, and hurt from the unspoken differences of body language and gestures. Silence became a catatonic experience. Now, as I live in Boston and reconstruct my relationship with a self of many wavelengths, silences are a mix of dissociative invitations, provocations of the imagination, and the unspoken performance of unfamiliarity people carry themselves with in the train.

The sonic atmospheres of my teenage years and early adulthood were precious gravitational magnets for the collage of my personality. Living close to the Coolidge Corner area in Boston, I found a record store selling1$ CDs. At first, I was hesitant. One thing you learn early as an immigrant is that your life needs to fit in a bag (just in case). Storage is a luxury of permanence that is afforded to us in a different timeline. Yet, I indulged in perusing.

My teenage heart became ecstatic at finding albums not only in great condition but with an intact original accompanying booklet for 1$. What to many in the U.S. may be the bare minimum when thinking of CDS, felt to me like heaven on earth. In my teenage years, to get an original album (the only kind with the booklet included) you needed to cover tax, importing costs, and regular price. The first original album my parents bought was of Latin American folklorist Mercedes Sosa. I remember it clearly because, for me, it was an occasion. I made it into one. I was ready to sit with the experience and make it into a session. To follow lyrics, understand their original meaning, look into the authorship of arrangements, be attentive of production intervention, and most importantly see visually depicted the artist’s process.

Back then, I could at best afford pirated CDs from local stores and while the music was still there for me to enjoy, the experience remained incomplete. To truly submerge into the album as an art piece, I needed the accompanying booklets. I remember staying in my room for hours on end immersed and enamored with the experiences, futures, and scenarios the aural roadmaps took me through. From Nirvana to Iron Maiden, from Buena Vista Social Club to Milton Nascimento, from Stevie Nicks to Janis Joplin. Sounds enabling my younger self to invite dexterous, defiant, and strident modes of being. Speaking to me in the language of rhythms, drumming, pauses, repetition, dance, and synths.

In engaging with my newfound CDs I reimagine my pasts and futures. I actively start delineating the sonic landscapes of my present in a way that allows for much more than borders can. How to explain a sensibility that moves from Stevie Nicks’ “Age of Seventeen” to Willie Colon’s “Plástico”? What is excavated in those two pieces that could bridge their coexistence for a single psyche? How do you move from ethereal witchy non dancy alternative rock to an explosive concatenation of rhythms alternated with solo moments and a roller coaster of dancy paces? Well, they allow me to access an intangible form of resistance. One stubbornly shaped by the nostalgia for lost futures.

In her book “Magical Realism”, Vanessa Angélica Villareal expands on how for colonized peoples “to begin the impossible project of tracing our ancestry through the empty fields of national amnesia is to acknowledge what haunts us; to grieve the futures we’ve lost; to grieve our dead”. Through my CDs I touch base with a past self that found herself lost and found in the midst of chords and rhythms of different kind. I let her know this time we build ourselves a different possibility, an approach that will allow us to craft an even more sublime experience. It is also, Villareal continues, “to imagine the fantasy of home; to imagine our collective futures; to look power in the face and examine its violence through language.” In my case, the fantasy of home is an ethereal space between Peru, Brazil, and Massachusetts, cumbia and indie, reggaeton and salsa, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. It is very much a work in process where in order to reimagine my relationships in this world and the rhythms of my migration it is necessary to carry the sounds of where I’ve been.