[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]
On one importantly
specific and one beautifully universal layer to my favorite song on the album.
In this
May 2021 post I both highlighted a number of prior posts on Gloria Anzaldúa
and her book Borderlands/La Frontera and added some additional thoughts.
I’d ask you to check out that post if you would, and then come on back here for
a couple of ways in which Springsteen’s “The Aztec Dance” can be
put in conversation with that author and text.
Welcome
back! I could spend all day listing things I love about Borderlands/La
Frontera, but high on the list would have to be Anzaldúa’s use
of language, mythology, perspective/narration, and many other stylistic
elements to capture the presence of indigenous
history, spirituality, sexuality, and more in her identity as a Mexican
American woman. In “The Aztec Dance” Springsteen uses a conversation between
two Mexican American female characters to do much the same: when teenage
Teresa, wearing a traditional flower crown and performing the titular dance at
her “high school gym,” righteously complains to her mother that “Ma they call
us greaser, they call us wetback/Here in this land that once was ours,” her
mother responds (for the rest of the song’s lyrics) with an extensive
descriptive of Aztec culture, community, and history. She concludes by
recognizing both what has been lost but what endures in her daughter: “Our city
gone and left in ruins, they cry bitter tears in another world/But here in this
world, my daughter, they have you.” I don’t think even the great Gloria Anzaldúa
could have said it any better.
That’s a
powerfully specific layer to this wonderful song, and I don’t want to minimize
it in any way. But I also believe that this song, like Anzaldúa’s book as well,
is an incredible rumination on universal themes of heritage and memory, loss
and persistence, that are present for each and every person, family, and
community. That’s probably true everywhere, but it’s unquestionably true here
in the United States, a nation defined by both the inspiring cross-cultural
transformations I traced in
my second book and the tragic discriminations I’ve written about throughout
my work. In the best and the worst ways, the story of America can make it
difficult for us to hold onto the heritages that pre-date our contemporary
American experiences and identities, something I’ve thought about a lot when it
comes to my own Eastern
European Jewish ancestry on my mother’s side for example. But as
Springsteen’s beautiful song, and especially its very moving conclusion,
reminds us, those heritages are still with us whether we overtly remember them
or not—they are literally and figuratively embodied in the young Americans who
carry them forward into our vitally diverse future.
Next
InyoStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?
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