As a Chicana artivista, music and the power it invokes is at the heart of my practice as a musician, scholar, and activist. Fandango and collective songwriting as empowering methodologies have helped me and members of my communities summit into new forms of analysis and thus action. Music as a tool of dialogue. Music and its respective dance as a participatory practice are generative and artivistas like myself see these and similar practices as part of the lexicon of social justice movement. Like most fellows I want to acknowledge that I have never learned, worked and or played music in a vacuum. That my intellectual and physical labor, passion for music and activism was nurtured in local and transnational communities. I am indebted to them as well as my family, mentors, teachers, and maestr@s in the US, Veracruz and Chiapas, Mexico.

Featured Image: Portrait of Martha Gonzalez. Photo by Pablo Aguilar.