La Santa Cecilia
Latin Culture, Rock, and World Music
Combining creativity, hybridity, and a sheer love of life.
La Santa Cecilia makes a way out of many ways.
As they sing about love, loss, and everyday struggles,
something new emerges. The many become one and
are increased by one, song by song, giving hope
for those who might otherwise be discouraged.
Its process theology in musical form.
La Santa Cecilia website: http://www.lasantacecilia.com/
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Born from Immigrant Parents
Born from Immigrant Parents Learning to Sing Loud |
Olvera Street in LA Love of Life as Inspiration for Creativity |
Building Relationships through
Sounds, Spaces, and Stories
La Santa Cecilia at Scripps College (Oct. 12-2017)
"Prior to their performance, La Santa Cecilia band members invite the 7C community to partake in a panel discussion on music, art and the importance of protecting hope in our communities.The concert and panel discussion are presented in conjunction with “A Great Day in East LA: Building Relationships Through Sounds, Spaces and Stories” exhibit.
This event is presented by This event is made possible by Assistant Professor Martha Gonzalez, Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies, Scripps College Humanities Institute, Professor Thomas Summers Sandoval, Digital Humanities @ Claremont Colleges, Scripps College Dean of Faculty Office, Clark Humanities Museum and the Office of Public Events and Community Programs." |
Creative Hybridity: Making a Way
out of (Almost) Every Way
An Open Horizons (Process) Appreciation of La Santa Cecilia's Creative Hybridity
The members of La Santa Cecilia are proud -- very proud -- to be from the City of Angels, and from immigrant parents. They know that there are countless struggles in immigrant communities. But It's not all about struggle. As Marisol Hermandez puts in in her interview: "There is beauty, not just the nonsense."
The mystery at the heart of the universe -- the divine Tortilla Maker -- is in the business of making beauty out of difficult situations. She is all about blending different ingredients into wholes that bring life to the circumstances. The theologian Monica Coleman calls it Making a Way out of No Way. Musicians might also call it Making a Way out of Every Way. Beloved Community A final confession -- some of the recipes from Betty Crocker sound awful to me. I am a vegetarian and I've needed to modify each recipe in my mind. But even then, some of them just don't sound good. Still I am reminded that in the house of tortillas there are many rooms, and that not all -- even if vegetarian -- need to be tasteful to everybody. This is another feature of the divine Tortilla Maker. The very life of God is enriched by diversity: ethnic, musical, artistic, sexual, racial, and religious. Let there be as many different kinds of people as there are items for sale on Olvera Street, all mixed together and each unique, with no one left behind. It's called beloved community. According to the New Testament that's what the Tortilla Maker really loves. This, then, is the beginning of a tortilla theology. There is so much more to be said. We need to talk about the pain felt by the Tortilla Maker about the way immigrants who treated in the United States and other nations. We need to talk about the power of corporations and colonizers to render all things beautiful into money and profit. We need to talk about relations of beauty and music to justice. But somewhere in the process we simply need to enjoy the tortillas themselves, one bite at a time, in the presence of friends and family, who provide sustenance for life. Humans cannot live by tortillas alone. But I'm not sure we can live without them either. -- Jay McDaniel |
The festive mood of La Santa Cecilia reminds me of a meal I had at a restaurant on Olvera Street in Los Angeles, which is close to where the lead singer --Marisol Hernandez -- grew up. The restaurant was filled with a kind of aliveness I associate with Latin culture, and its food was delicious. I was in seminary at the time, and a friend who ate with me, a seminarian herself, was a connoisseur of tortillas. She had grown up in Mexico and tortillas were her comfort food. While eating at the restaurant we teasingly challenged ourselves to create a theology of tortillas. We never did it, but hearing La Santa Cecilia on NPR and seeing the picture of them eating on their Facebook page, I am reminded of the challenge. What follows is a feeble attempt to offer the general contours of such a theology, with certainty that someone more talented than I can build upon it and improve it. Or perhaps create something more complex: a theology of enchiladas.
Relational Tortillas The New Testament tells us humans cannot live by bread alone. Sometimes, when in the presence of homemade flour tortillas, I have doubted this. It has seemed to me that, in the moment of eating, the tortilla is an incarnation of heaven on earth. It can sound kind of Buddhist, and that’s fine. But I think it is also Christian. Call it the sacrament of the present moment. Or perhaps better, the sacrament of the present tortilla. Nevertheless, I usually eat tortillas with friends, and I realize that the very presence of friends makes the tortilla's taste better. We humans cannot live on tortillas alone; we need friends and family, clean air and water; health care and employment, education and exercise. It takes a village to make a tortilla. God as Tortilla Maker I think God plays a role in this, too. Some people think of God as a policeman in the sky, but not me. I think of God as a cosmic Tortilla Maker who is everywhere at once, and whose hands are made of love. Admittedly, we humans make the flour tortillas, but God makes the heavenly tortillas and these tortillas are as real as the palpable ones. The heavenly tortillas are the fresh possibilities that emerge in our lives, moment by moment, for making the best of the situation at hand. In times of despair they are possibilities for hope; in times of fear they are possibilities for courage; in times of resentment they are possibilities for forgiveness; in times of self-absorption they are possibilities for getting out of our skin and doing something for others, like making homemade tortillas for them. But of course these possibilities cannot actualize themselves. The cosmic Tortilla Maker requires our participation for her will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We must do something with the possibilities we receive from God and help make them real. The Need to Mix Tortillas with Other Ingredients Usually this involves combining the tortillas from God with an assortment of other ingredients that come from our lives. We must do something cool with the tortillas. Sometimes the cool things we do are wonderfully repetitive. Our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers made breakfast quesadillas out of flour tortillas, and we do it the same way. It becomes a tradition, predictable and beautiful. There's beauty in a repetition of the familiar. But sometimes, like La Santa Cecilia, we develop new dishes with the tortillas. La Santa Celia does this with their music. Describing themselves as kids of immigrants, they combine their roots in Latin culture with rock and world music. They do what immigrants the world over do: they create something new. Glocalization and Novelty Anthropologists call this glocalization. It combines local influences with global influences in unpredictable ways. There is a lot of novelty in this, which is one characteristic of the fresh possibilities received from God. The novelty does not sever roots in the familiar, but it adds something new to those roots, albeit with a local flavor. La Santa Cecilia calls it Music and Love from LA. |