Musical Weaving Extravaganza – We did it!!

This past Saturday I had an extraordinary experience.

What was extraordinary for me was not so much the chain of events that unfolded (of which there were many: singing, playing, weaving, spinning, telling stories and jokes, dancing and clapping, working with the audience to design an art piece, sending a weaving sailing across the room, conducting a thread-smashing rendition of Land Baby from atop the treadles of my loom… all in the company of a group of stellar musicians!).

That was all incredible, and I had the time of my life doing it. But that wasn’t the extraordinary part. The extraordinary part, as I realized late that night after the show and finally had a moment of quiet – the extraordinary part is that I was ABLE TO DO IT. And not only that, I was ABLE TO ENJOY IT, fully and without fear.

Outpost Performance Space, March 7th 2020

Here’s a little context:

Three years ago, singing for an hour would put me out for about a week.

Two years ago, I rested for a week in preparation for a ten-minute set at the New Mexico Music Awards. After the awards, I was out for 2-3 days recovering from the event.

On tour with Carlos Medina, March 2019

One year ago, as I struck out on tour in a supporting role for Carlos Medina, I did my darnedest to stand up tall and sing my best for him and my bandmates even when my body was fighting me. I was happy and loved doing it more than anything – but there were a couple of instances where, in the same moments that the song was emerging from my lips, I was also focusing all my tiniest muscles, agarrando fuerza from I don’t even know where, thinking one singular thought: “Don’t fall down, don’t fall down, don’t fall down, don’t fall down.” ...And I didn’t! Not once. When it was all over, I got home and I thought, “Ok. I think maybe I can do this.”

After Saturday’s show, in that quiet moment looking up at the moon I thought, “Wow. I can’t believe I did that.” I did everything I’d wanted to do, and then some. Yes, I was still wearing my medical compression stockings during the show. But not once did I waver or brace myself – even after having played another show the previous night, then gone into a full day of preparation, cooking, packing, loom hauling, dealing with people, extensive sound check and stage setup, merch table setup, quick wardrobe and makeup, eating (which can knock me out all by itself on bad days), and then 3 minutes left to do my hair before we had to go on.

The loom and spinning wheel transport crew: Dad, Mom Aunt Toni, John Rodriguez

After that initial moment of realization, another one hit me: Yes I did it, but also: “WE” did it!

I had so much support from Tom, Alicia, Jalila, Chad, Andres, and everyone at Outpost Performance Space. Beautiful musical souls Jefferson Voorhees, Justin Bransford and Jordan Wax had faith in me and my ideas and worked hard to make them shine, and Enrique Lamadrid and Miguel Gandert stepped up to document the whole shebang. So many friends and fans attended the show and participated with gusto — perhaps due in part to the enthusiastic coverage by the wonderful folks at KUNM Radio. And finally and most importantly, these two groups: My loom and wheel transport crew – Mom and Aunt Toni, Dad and John, without whom this whole endeavor would not have been possible at all — and my friends Alejandro Tomás Rodriguez, Lloyd Bricken and Agnieszka Kazimierska, who over the course of several performance work sessions have helped me encounter once again a part of me that I thought was lost.

I am filled to the brim with gratitude. I don’t know when, or if, I’ll do another weaving-singing extravaganza like this. But that doesn’t mean I’m done. Who knows what will emerge next from LaraLandia? ¡Dále gas, 2020!

Borderlands

Ready for portrait day in my favorite shoes

When I was around three years old, my mother abandoned me.

Or at least, that’s what I thought at the time, during the roughly five minutes that it took her to find me.

I’d been asleep, down for an afternoon nap, when my the sound of a pickup truck door slamming shut and engine starting up yanked me out of my reverie. I don’t remember who else was there. For all I know, the babysitter was in the next room. But my young mind didn’t register any of that. The truck door closed, my eyes popped open and I went immediately into full freak-out mode. I jumped up and ran out of the house and into the driveway and then the street, chasing the truck breathlessly as it drove out of sight. Even though Mom came back momentarily, everything was explained (she was just hauling a few bags of trash down the street), and life went on, I’ll never forget the horrible feeling that I felt that day: the sheer panic and terror that sets in when you think your whole world – which, at that age, consists almost solely of your relationship to your parents – is ending.

This type of early childhood experience is not uncommon. The little traumas of day-to-day life are, to a degree, part of growing up and learning to live in an often unpredictable and chaotic world. I can handle the idea that difficult things happen accidentally. What’s a lot harder to swallow is when deliberately cruel acts are carried out intentionally and systematically, by someone who has a clear upper hand in the relationship of power. On this 4th of July, Independence Day, in the wake of the most recent of many migrant crises – the intentional, systematic, and trauma-inducing forced family separations at the border – I’m finding it difficult to cheer for my country.

A few days ago, on the other side of the world in the country of the Netherlands, my album Land Baby was reviewed by Richard Wagenaar of thenextgig.nl. In his review, he described the album as follows: “In addition to being very beautiful and very varied with both folk and Spanish-language songs, Lara Manzanares’s new album Land Baby is also particularly relevant to the discussion on migration. (…) An album as a plea for a bridge and against a wall.” (Full review here - it's in Dutch, full translation coming soon: http://thenextgig.nl/lara-manzanares-land-baby/) Track nine of Land Baby is a song titled “Borderlands.” On this Fourth of July holiday, I have decided to write about that song. (There is a music player at the end of the blog post where you can listen to the song in its entirety.)

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Photo: Julie Mendez

I wrote Borderlands during a busy summer in San Francisco. For a few months, I spent the majority of my waking hours hiking around the city as a Census Taker. I planned my route each day as I knocked on ten, twenty, thirty doors and asked my neighbors in English and Spanish about their ages and races and whether they rented or owned their homes. Often, at the end of a day out on the streets as a Census Taker, I would come home, trade my satchel for a guitar case, and head back out into those same streets to earn a few more dollars busking (performing on the street for tips). I was interacting with people of all sorts, all day long – listening to stories. Sometimes the stories came in the form of data points on my census sheet. Other times they were silent facial expressions and gestures, conversations (or sometimes threats) about why someone did not want to open the door, or, on some delightful occasions, how happy someone was that I had stopped by, and would I like to come in and have something to drink? 

Busking with my friend J. Michael Combs. Photo: Huracán Gomez

Out on the streets as a musician, the stories continued. People would stop to talk to me, and tell me about memories that the songs I was singing brought to them. Sometimes they would stop and sing along and ask me how I learned the songs – mainly old Mexican rancheras and corridos that I had heard on the radio in Northern New Mexico and sang with my family as a teenager. I met several friends this way – people whose friendships I still cherish to this day.

Aside from these friends, however, the majority of the people on the street told only very brief visual stories, parsed out in just a few moments as they drifted by on their way to and from somewhere, their minds still dwelling on where they had just been or fixed on where they were going. The street itself is not generally thought of as a destination itself, but rather a means to arriving at another place. There are exceptions, of course: some businesses spill out onto the sidewalk with outdoor patios, and the street can become a temporary destination if it’s blocked off for a festival or other event. But in general, people use streets to get somewhere – and ultimately, at the end of each day, to get home. 

Haight St. in San Francisco. Photo: Lara Manzanares

In addition to the friends and strangers that I encountered while singing on the street, I also interacted with a third group: those for whom the street is their home. We as a society have collectively delineated spaces like the street – along with highways, borders and the fences and walls that mark them – as being “in between” spaces. As a Census Taker that summer I navigated passage across hundreds of thresholds into peoples’ homes. As a busker musician on the street, my focus was not on passing through borders but rather on arriving at in-between places and sticking around there for a while.

24th St. in San Francisco. Photo: Lara Manzanares

For those who lived in the open air around me, I was basically showing up and playing in their living room… and/or their kitchen, front hallway, coat closet, bathroom, garden, etc. (All temporary, of course: During my time in San Francisco I was witness to the passing of the Sit/Lie city ordinance, which was designed to allow city cops to crack the whip on anyone they found sitting or lying on the street by issuing a fine or just generally harassing them. I did not vote in favor of the ordinance, and I never witnessed it being enforced with any enthusiasm in my neighborhood – but it drove home the fact that for those who live on the street, their only home of any permanence is the body they live in.)

Front door stoop in San Francisco's Mission District. Photo: Julie Mendez

Self-expression in the Mission District. Photo: Lara Manzanares

It was in this atmosphere that I wrote Borderlands: Out on the streets and at the thresholds of strangers, singing into the borderlands of my neighborhood – a place where you are both here and there, and also in neither place, all at the same time. When this space is your place of residence, and there is no “home” to travel across the earth toward or from, where then can you go? 

Two days in the borderlands
And the well has run dry
Only two ways to go from here
Into the earth and into the sky

What emerged in music and lyrics was a reflection of what I was living at the time. Of course, no artist lives in a void, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the influence that Leonard Cohen’s work had on this song – a connection that I myself didn’t make until recently. Thanks to my Dad, I’ve been a fan of Cohen for years and usually cover a couple of his songs when I play out. In his earlier works, Cohen touches repeatedly on themes of shelter and refuge. In Borderlands, the refrain takes on a similar tone:

Fragment of a mural in the San Francisco neighborhood I lived and worked in.

Take her down to the harbor
Wrap her sorrows up in clouds
Nebulous impressions of a time
The frantic stillness of now

Over the last few months, a few people who have heard my album have asked me, “What’s Borderlands about?” I usually just smile in response. The song isn’t “about” any one particular thing – that’s not the point of it. While some of my songs have a definite narrative bent, Borderlands is more about encapsulating a human experience – one that is ancient in its origins, and still relevant today. Where do you go when there is no forward, and no backward? When your home no longer exists to return to, or a return means entering a state of nonexistence (i.e. Death)? Or, as in the most recent crisis at the U.S./Mexico border, when the ultimate “home,” the home that transcends geography and environment – the “home” of family and parents – is ripped away from you? Where, psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally, do you go?

Nebulous impressions of a time
The frantic stillness of now

I still vividly remember the agony I felt thirty years ago as my parents’ yellow 1979 Chevy Silverado pickup drove steadily away from my hysterical little feet – running, screaming, sobbing with all my might – but in vain, as the vehicle pulled further and further away and then rounded a curve out of sight. There I was, completely vulnerable, a four year old kid standing alone, completely out of my mind, in the middle of the street. I couldn’t reach my Mom, who had disappeared before my eyes, and I couldn’t go back to the house, which was now, without her in it, an empty void in my mind. 

Storytime with Mom

There’s a happy ending to my childhood story. Our neighbors, a couple who ran a small store across the street, witnessed the scene from their storefront window. They came out into the street, took my hand, and led me inside the store. They gave me a candy and comforted me. “Don’t worry,” they said as they patted my head, “she’ll be right back, everything will be okay.” And it was. Mom came back and scooped me up before I had even finished my candy. I was lucky. My world had ended for a few minutes, but it started up again momentarily.  

And now, today, we find ourselves in the position of my childhood neighbors, looking out our window at multitudes of people who are living this experience of complete and total vulnerability, full time, 24/7, all day every day. As we begin another year of existence as the United States of America, what kind of neighbors will we be? 

Take her down to the harbor
Wrap her sorrows up in clouds
Nebulous impressions of a time
The frantic stillness of now

Mmmmm
Mmmmm
Mmmmm
Mmmmm

Nap time with Dad

~ Many thanks to J.D.R. for helping me gather the courage to post this piece. ~

Land Baby!

Well, here I am... a year later, a year healthier, and with an album under my belt!! If someone in 2016 would have looked into a crystal ball and told me that I'd be releasing an album in a year, I would've laughed (or maybe cried) them off their chair. But yet, here I am. Say hello to Land Baby!

Land Baby is available on iTunes or at https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/laramanzanares

Land Baby is about movement – not only physical and geographical movement, but also emotional and cultural. I was raised on a ruggedly beautiful but isolated sheep ranch in Northern New Mexico, with my parents’ 1960s and 70s folk and rock record collection to keep me company. I grew up hearing both English and Spanish and speaking Spanglish. The stories, customs, and traditions of my childhood were rooted in the distinct culture of northern New Mexico: a deeply complex mixture of old-world Spanish, Mexican, Native American, and Anglo-American ways of being, all held together by a deep connection to the land. 

When our family wasn’t hiking across the mountains behind the sheep, we were in our living room having rock n’ roll dance parties led by my Dad. The Doors, The Beatles, The Supremes, Simon and Garfunkel, Linda Ronstadt, Johnny Cash and more melded with local spanish polkas and chotizes played on the piano by my great-grandfather, the classic country and bluegrass fiddle tunes of my grandmother, and the Garth Brooks-era country and Mexican rancheras and corridos that wafted over the local radio waves. The haunting and mournful alabados of the penitentes at our local religious ceremonies provided a beautifully mournful undertone to the wild, pulsing freedom of the landscape, and the beats of our neighbors in the Pueblos and on the Navajo and Apache reservations permeated the oftentimes dusty air.

I left New Mexico at 18 and headed out into the world. I spent my 20s in transit: Appleton Wisconsin, Washington D.C., Granada, Spain; Milwaukee, Chicago, and finally, six years in San Francisco. I did all the things you’re supposed to do in your 20s: I lived, loved, learned, made music, and danced my socks off. I met amazing and interesting people, began and ended relationships, and forged strong friendships. Family secrets were revealed and dynamics shifted. I learned about new cultures and fell in love with new music. I sang Mexican rancheras on the streets. I was questioned about my cultural background. I confused people with my answer. I got knocked down a few times but always found a way back up through my music.

This movement – across land, across time, across cultures and languages, and through emotional space – is what this album is about. People still ask questions about my identity. I try to explain it with words, but my answer never stays completely still… and so I just sing it instead!

I'm a land baby, desert baby
Cactus-eatin' sand lady
A land baby, desert baby
Cactus-eatin' sand lady... ;-)

What now?

Lucile Boyd, my grandfather's aunt, in California. She contracted Tuberculosis and planned to travel to New Mexico to heal. She passed away a few weeks before the trip.

Well, Lucile? What now? Things aren't exactly going according to plan.

I knew this would be hard, but this is not what I was expecting. My body has never failed me like this before. You were right to tell me to get myself home. Here I have family, a doctor, people to help me heal. But I just wasn’t expecting to have to heal this much. I wasn’t expecting the headaches or the blurred vision or the aching eye sockets, even though they came along with me on the ride home. You gave me the last ounce of energy I needed to finish the journey. You were there with me when I pulled off the freeway that night in the U-Haul: blurred vision, teeth gritted, unable to breathe, scared to death that at any moment I might pass out and careen off the freeway. I found an exit, somehow fumbled through the process of putting the truck into park and turning off the ignition, and promptly passed out. I don’t know how long I was out. When I came to, I realized that I hadn't locked the cab doors.

Later that night, at a Days Inn in Holbrook, Arizona, I sat in the hot tub and sang a homecoming song. You were there with me too, Lucile. I sang to the rocks and the dirt; to the air, the sun, the clouds, the rain, the rivers and streams, the little droplets of water that gather in the mornings, the plants and their roots. I sang to the trees, shrubs, bushes, blue grama grass, chamisa, indian paintbrush, piñon, sandstone, lizards, rabbits, even the damned coyotes. In that little tiled pool of gas-heated, chlorinated water, inside an old building with dank carpet and free breakfast on the side of the freeway, I sang with all my heart. 

Headed home in a U-Haul

When I entered the Navajo Nation, I could breathe again. When I crossed the New Mexico state line, we celebrated together. The sky became brighter, the grass a more vibrant yellow. Suddenly all the other cars on the freeway seemed friendly. I stopped for gas in Gallup and, for no other apparent reason than to be nice, a stranger waved and guided me as I backed the U-Haul into my spot at the pump. “This is it, Lucile,” I said proudly. “This is New Mexico.”

Albuquerque northward was like falling into an old lover’s open arms. “I’ve been waiting for you,” the mountains said. “I knew you would come back. I love you.” 

“I love you too,” I said.

I didn’t know exactly what life had in store for me, but when I looked at the mountains, I knew that this was where I was supposed to be. I had a strange juxtaposition of feelings that I didn’t quite understand. At times I would break into silent wails: “I have nothing… I have nothing…” But from behind the wails, a deeper feeling would rise; a feeling beyond words; an immensity that ground my puny wails into silent, tiny, dusty pebbles:  

“I have EVERYTHING.”

View of the Sandia Mountains from my home

On difficult or lonely days in those first few weeks, I would send up a silent cry to my rocky lover: “Why did you call me here? Why? What do you want from me? What did you bring me here to do?” The mountains and the rivers felt my pain and appreciated it, soaked it all in. And every time, the reply was the same: 

“Wait.”

Okay. I get it. But what am I waiting for? I need to get a job, get a place, get going, meet people, make things, get a move on! I have to get my life going, “pull myself up by the bootstraps,” as they say. In January, after the holidays were over, I felt well enough to start going to the gym again. For a couple of weeks, I felt great.

Oh, Lucile. Why didn’t you warn me?

I wasn’t expecting the crash. I wasn’t expecting to wake up one morning, stand up, then collapse on the couch, gasping for air in long sighs and losing all sense of time. I wasn’t expecting to feel like someone was grinding their heel into my head, or like my eyes were being squeezed out of their sockets. I wasn’t expecting to not be able to feel my arms and legs. Why can’t I breathe, Lucile? Why can’t I do anything without gasping for air, getting shaky, and collapsing? Why do I have purple circles under my eyes, and why won’t they go away? 

I’ve been banned from exercise and have donated a couple of pints of blood to science. I’m taking a boatload of vitamins and am starting a round of anti-parasitic medication, but we still don’t know for sure what’s wrong. My bank account has bottomed out again, but my job search is on hold. Bootstraps, bootstraps... What does a person do when bending over to tie her shoes (much less pull up "bootstraps," whatever they are) sends her heart into overdrive and her brain into unconsicousness? I can't do this alone. 

It’s spring in Corrales, and the apple blossoms are beautiful. I’m jealous of the eager green shoots and buds that are popping up all over town, bursting with energy and new life. I want to be there with them – growing, glowing, reaching joyfully toward the sun, marching into life. On good days, I bask in the glow of their vibrance. On bad days, I wail silent longings into the chalky dust at my feet, a modern-day La Llorona shuffling through the village and weeping for her lost energy. When will this end? What’s wrong with my body? Where am I going? “I have nothing… I have everything… I have nothing... I have EVERYTHING...“

So, Lucile... What now?

Lucile

After six wondrous and productive years in San Francisco, I am physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. During my last few months in the city, I felt a persistent sense of impending doom in my stomach and bones. It seemed to be telling me that if I didn’t go back to the Southwest NOW, something really bad was going to happen… like I was going to get sick or have an accident, or someone was going to die, or some kind of disaster was going to hit that would prevent me from ever going back again. I wrestled with this feeling for a while, but no matter what I did, it wouldn’t go away. So I finally just did it: I packed all my stuff in a U-Haul and set out on my own to New Mexico.

At the start of my trip, I stopped in at my Aunt Sally and Uncle Frank's house near Santa Cruz for the night. Aunt Sally’s brother (my Grandpa Richard) used to like to tell us the story of how his father’s family first came to New Mexico. I'd heard him talk about someone named Lucile several times, but never could quite get a handle on who she was, or why exactly he was talking about her. After a breakfast conversation with my aunt and uncle, I finally understood who Lucile was.

Lucile Boyd was the older sister of my great-grandfather Dick Boyd. She was apparently "loads of fun," and Dick loved her dearly. In her late teens/early twenties, Lucile contracted tuberculosis. Her doctor told her that her only hope for survival was to relocate from Sierra Madre, California to New Mexico, a place with a temperate climate and dry air.

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Lucile in Sierra Madre, CA, 1913.

After breakfast, Aunt Sally showed me some photos taken in Sierra Madre that seem to have Lucile's handwritten letters on the back of them. One of them, dated October 1913, says: "The Dr. says there is no hope for me if I stay here this winter. He considers the summers here ideal but the winters are too changeable. So we go to New Mexico."

Another says, "Papa and I hope to start for New Mexico next Tuesday for the Dr. says I stand a chance there – but have none here. (...) Dick comes from Antelope [Oregon] today to have a farewell 'chat' with us..."

Finally, a third photo, with only my great-grandfather Dick’s handwriting, says: "Lucile Boyd, Sierra Madre. Died 1913 or 1914."

Lucile was 21 years old when she died. She never made it to New Mexico.

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Some years after Lucile's death, Dick also contracted tuberculosis. When his doctors told him that he had six months to live, he didn't waste any time—he hitched it out of California and headed straight to New Mexico. Unlike his sister, he did recuperate, and even met his future wife George — also a TB patient — in the sanatorium where they were both recuperating. After returning to Sierra Madre briefly to collect his herd of horses, he settled in New Mexico, married George, and had two children (my Grandpa Richard and Aunt Sally, whose full name is “Martha Lucile”).

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Handwritten notes on the back of Lucile's picture, 1913. 

Packing up a U-Haul and driving a couple thousand miles is nothing compared to the trip that Lucile or Dick would have had to make 100 years ago – but it’s still an arduous journey, especially when taken alone and running on fumes. I can’t say for sure, but I like to imagine that my great-grandfather Dick had the same refrain in his mind that I did as he made his journey to the wild, healing lands of New Mexico:

This one’s for you, Lucile. 

Lucile Boyd, 1912/1913.