Redemption Songs: How Philly creatives are looking to the past to dream of the future
Cassie Owens
The band is an Aries, Mariposas Galáticas’s lead singer, Maria Paz Ordoñez, proudly says. They became a unit at a birthday party in FDR Park on the April side of Aries season back in 2023. They blend cumbia, klezmer, and punk music with the boldness associated with the sign.
This amalgam of genres isn’t just a meeting of cultures for Mariposas Galáticas; it’s an intentional anti-fascist, anti-Zionist collab. Proceeds from their EP, “Asi Se Goza con Las Mariposas,” benefit local immigrant rights organizations. A multilingual eight-piece ensemble, the group has developed a reputation for high-energy, eclectic shows.
Following the completion of a regional three-city tour, the band found time to chat with D.U.B. Philly as they prepared for their largest local show of the summer at Spruce Street Harbor Park. Ordoñez, guitarist Gary Galapagos, and clarinetist/vocalist Ariel Goodman reflected on the web-like intersections of music and resistance.
“We do have a lot of moments in our set where we do chants that are directly connected [to what] we have also been chanting in the streets,” Goodman said.
Mariposas Galáticas’s music holds “a very fluid connection with the world of movements,” Goodman continued, “and it adds something that a protest or chant doesn’t add, because I think it’s a space for refuge, refuge of our spirits as band members.”
Ordoñez shared that one of the band’s newer songs, “La Desesperación,” speaks directly to the times. Its lyrics bear the grief that ICE-led detentions and deportations have wreaked on their communities.
¿Hasta cuando vamos a tener
Que obedecer
Con las manos atadas?
¿Cuantas de nosotras vamos a desaparecer
Y así como si nada?
Pero vamos a seguir
Cruzando fronteras
Paro vamos a seguir
Con nuestras banderas
Vamos a resistir y no olvidar
Translation (provided by the band):
How much longer will we have
To obey
While our hands are tied?
How many of us will disappear
As if nothing happened?
But we will continue
Crossing borders
And we will continue
Flying our flags
We will resist and not forget
The stories we tell, like the people who tell them, can be connected. Studies show that the coordination, collaboration, and synchronization that come with music build interpersonal bonds. The act of singing together, practiced across cultures since time immemorial, might have been an evolutionary solution to the very human challenge of social cohesion that other primates didn’t share.
In a 2022 interview for The Progressive, historian Robin D.G. Kelley described art and cultural production as “collective freedom dreaming” and “the glue that sustains movements.” Music and art can mobilize people to push for the futures they’ve envisioned, to find new ways of living together, argues Kelley.
Observers of popular music have spent the years since the 2020 George Floyd uprisings following the ebbs and flows of protest music. Philly’s DIY music scene and its movement ecosystem both brim with resistance. Across interviews for this story, there wasn’t one single overreaching lyrical theme, but rather multicultural melodies for the multiple intersecting movements happening at once. As different songs resound, local creatives, knowingly and unknowingly, share the practice of remembering the music, from protests and from war, that came before.
The “old rhythms,” Ordoñez explained, still ring true.
“We want to make it live longer because sometimes [traditional music] gets lost,” the lead singer said, noting that klezmer and cumbia were sounds their grandparents would have listened to. “We want to bring this music to the younger generations.”
The old jams are crucial to the work over at VietLead, a local nonprofit that supports Vietnamese communities in solidarity with other communities in Philly. The organization runs an art and culture program for young people, some immigrants, some not, between the ages of 14 and 19.
“We do like to talk about the type of music that’s trying to get us through, and it’s a very large scale of different things,” said youth program lead organizer Lani Nguyen. “A lot of Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, and Sam Cooke. We’ve been bumping a lot of ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’ and getting very emotional about it because it’s those types of words, that storytelling makes us feel really hopeful for a future that is hard to imagine right now.”
They’ve also been exploring Vietnamese soul, funk and surf, genres that surged in the ‘60s and ‘70s due to the influence of U.S. servicemen, music that was subsequently banned when the war ended. Nguyen emphasized the importance of making present-day connections between that era’s Vietnamese music and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Something as natural as putting on some background tunes for a cooking project brings fresh opportunities for rethinking cultural histories that can, in turn, strengthen political education.
“What we’re trying to do at the very bare bones of this is to give Southeast Asian kids a particular sense of belonging, that they can have a deeper understanding politically of what is going on and how they’re being impacted by the different systems,” they said. “And how to navigate this world hopefully in a different way than what is being taught to them in their schools right now in Philly.”
Tsehaitu Abye is a multihyphenate creative who was raised in the Northwest and now calls West Philly home. There hasn’t been a time in her life where music was absent.
“It weaved through my life like an element,” Abye said. A musician in her own right, Abye’s musical taste runs the map. You might find her listening to Nas and Damian Marley, the 9-year-old Chicago rapper Young Roddo, or the U.K. singer-songwriter Alewya, who, like Abye, is part of the Habesha diaspora.
Abye’s millennial Mt. Airy childhood saw her in a Pan-Africanist family where reggae and movement music flowed. The child of an African American mother, Ethiopian father and Jamaican stepfather, Abye has spoken about the family separation she experienced, as well as her father’s deportation. A founder of both the consultancy BDBC Services Co. and the Black Dragon Breakfast Club, Abye is also a longtime activist who often works with Black immigrant communities.
In times of social unrest and ICE raids, where many Philadelphians don’t feel safe, music is more than sound.
In times of social unrest and ICE raids, where many Philadelphians don’t feel safe, music is more than sound.
“Sometimes the lack of safety can feel like a lack of community and support,” Abye said, as music generates connection between people, but also something bigger than any one person: “It’s like a spiritual rhythm and frequency too.”
She’s seen a shift over the last decade organizing and working with artists: There weren’t as many artists bringing their identities into their music ten years ago as there are now. The similarities between telling a clear story to mobilize for a cause and the storytelling that happens during artist development, she explained, are more apparent now.
“We actually all have power in our different spaces,” Abye says. “We just have to connect the dots and leverage our power collectively.”
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Cassie Owens is a journalist and filmmaker who lives and works in Philadelphia.