Lila Downs Sings Mexico's Blues And Joys On Album, "Frida" Film

By SUSAN FERRISS / Cox Washington Bureau
07-04-01

MEXICO CITY -- Blending borders is hip now, with America's latest Census figures confirming the explosion of Latin influence north of the border.

But Mexico City-based singer Lila Downs has been living cultural fusion all her life.

The daughter of a Mixtec Indian woman from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca and an American art professor raised in Kansas, the sultry-throated Downs has become one of the Mexican cabaret scene's most celebrated divas.

"I grew up in our Oaxacan home listening to that classic album, Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue,' " said Downs, 33, summing up her bicultural rearing, borne from parents who didn't even speak each others' languages when they first met.

Downs is getting noticed on both sides of the border and in Europe, whether she is singing Gershwin show tunes in English or Mexican folk songs in Spanish or in one of this country's more than 60 indigenous languages.

The singer's third solo album, produced by Milwaukee-based Narada label, hit stores this week. She already is planning tours across the United States.

Called "Border" and, in Spanish, "La Linea," the album mixes folk and love songs, imaginative arrangements -- Woody Guthrie sung in a samba groove -- with lyrics that dig into the public conscience and the raw pain of Mexico's Indians and migrant workers.

It is dedicated to Mexican migrants who have died crossing the border to reach a Promised Land, where many find a measure of prosperity -- if they can make it.

Downs remembers working in her mother's car-parts shop in Oaxaca, where Mixtec Indians would come to show off the bit of English they had learned as farm workers in "El Norte," the north. She is haunted by the memory of a man who entered the shop and asked her to translate a death certificate that had accompanied the body of his son, who had died trying to swim across a canal.

"I felt like it was my job to write about this," Downs said. "There's a lot of faith in those stories about what you can find in the United States."

Downs also is appearing as a singer in the Mexican actress Salma Hayek's upcoming film on Frida Kahlo, the artist and wife of muralist Diego Rivera.

At the invitation of the American director and musical composer for the film, who heard one of Downs' previous albums, she appears singing a tango, a rollicking Mexican "ranchera" number and the mournful "La Llorona," the "Weeping Woman," a Mexican folk staple.

Downs' journey as an artist is as rich as her family's unusual history. Her mother was forced into marriage at 14 and ran away at 15. She learned Spanish as a young adult, while working as a maid and cabaret singer in Mexico City.

Her father, more than 20 years her mother's senior, saw the dark beauty singing in a club when he was in Mexico to film a wildlife documentary.

Within a few years, he had taken Downs' mother back to Minnesota, where he was a university professor in the early 1960s.

Bob Dylan was one of her father's students, Downs said, and he introduced her as a child to Dylan's records. Downs' childhood was split between Oaxaca and the United States, in Minnesota and one year of high school in Los Angeles.

At her mostly non-Indian school in a small city outside Oaxaca, Downs recalled, "They called me the Indian's daughter."

She described an atmosphere in which racism and shame of Mixtec origins is still strong. Educated, wealthier mestizo, or mixed-blood, people seemed more proud of grand pianos they owned from Austria then of their pre-Hispanic roots.

Singing was in Downs' blood, and her parents cultivated her talent. They paid mariachis to play while their young daughter sang rancheras in plazas. They placed her in opera-singing classes and exposed her to American jazz greats.

Downs' father died suddenly when she was 16, and her eyes still glisten at the memory. Her father's death thrust her more into the world of her mother, she said, and she realized how much she had ignored her indigenous heritage.

Her mother insisted she attend college in Minnesota, as her father had planned, and she started out studying music. She later switched to anthropology and returned to Oaxaca to study traditional indigenous weaving and its symbolism.

Observers have described Downs as a beautiful, Frida Kahlo look-alike, especially since she often wears the famous Oaxacan tunics and skirts that are embroidered with lush, intricate flowers.

But Downs' mother always dressed her in Indian clothes and began a collection of the tunics that covered the walls of their home when Downs was growing up. At her Mexico City apartment, also decorated with textiles, she enthusiastically shows samples of the weavings Oaxacan women still create to document history and contemporary life.

Downs plunged into rock music, too, while in college, and even followed the Grateful Dead briefly. She returned to Oaxaca to live after college and eventually was asked to play with local Mexican and expatriate jazz groups, as well as with folk bands.

There, she met Paul Cohen, her romantic partner and musical arranger, who is originally from a Jewish family from New Jersey. Downs now makes a mean chopped liver, yet another flavor added to the ethnic stew influencing her art.

On "Border," Downs' voice ranges from full-bodied jazz to the high-pitched Mexican folk sound. She even sings a comic tune in Maya about a man who leaves his love because she "smells like an armadillo."

But most of the album is dramatic and reflective -- just like her stage performances.

On stage, with her long braids, silver earrings and sumptuous embroidered outfits, Downs thrills even Mexican audiences when she croons such American jazz standards as "The Man I Love."

In a Spanish-language love song with a gentle country-western slide guitar on "Border," she imagines lonely Mexican women left behind in villages devoid of men because they all have become migrant workers.

In one of the album's angry songs, "Good for Nothing," Downs paints a mural of the Mexican experience and chides Mexicans for their angst.

"Don't go too far and look in the mirror because you won't like what you see," she sings. "Your face is dark, but you want to be white, but you really like your taco and tortillas."

In "Land," she combines Woody Guthrie's odes to Dust Bowl migrant farm workers with her own English-language lyrics sung from the Mexican immigrant's perspective: "I came to help you grow, to harvest your crops. I came to build your roads, your cities, your thoughts . . . Now that you have all the things you want, did you ever look around to see who you forgot?"

"I know there's a reason for me to be here," Downs sings. "Dust is to dust, hail thee memory. Even if they grind me, dust I will be."

FUENTE