Yesterday was "Noche de Rabenos"; night of the radishes. One of the most well-attended and most interesting of Oaxaca's many fiestas, it is juried, and the prizes are large. For those of you who don't know what goes on, look it up on the Web or in past Newsletters. Suffice it to say that we have not missed one in seven years, until this year. Instead, we went to what was, in my experience, one of the finest wing-dings ever. The crowd was the most trans-cultural I have dined with. Lila's mother comes from the mountains; the Mixteca Alta. She is a Mixtec indian, and her dark skin marks her as indigenous in caste- and race- conscious Oaxaca.. Lila's father (now deceased) was a gringo professor of art from Minnesota. Lila was raised as a Catholic. Paul's mother and father were Jews (both he and his brother had Bar Mitzvah) living in New Jersey (he died, she married a Catholic, and recently converted to Christianity). Both families were represented,...

Lila Downs, ayer en Madrid. CLAUDIO ÁLVAREZ FERNANDO NEIRA Madrid 1 SEP 2001 Lila Downs es mujer de sonrisa franca y mirada profunda. Esta mexicana de 33 años viste a la manera del pueblo mixteco, al sur de su país, e irradia esa misteriosa fuerza interior que sólo brota de las fuentes tradicionales. Su tercer disco, Border (La línea), que en España verá la luz el próximo 17 de septiembre, promete situarla en la misma confederación de excelsas voces hispanoamericanas que integran la dominicana Xiomara Fortuna, la peruana Susana Baca, la chilena Mariana Montalvo o Totó la Momposina, de Colombia. Downs añade unos textos comprometidos, a medio camino entre la reivindicación y la metafísica. De ella sólo se conocía en España su segundo álbum, el apreciable Árbol de la vida, que apenas gozó de difusión. El presente Border, un alegato en torno a ese fenómeno universal de la emigración, encierra 15 composiciones tan arrobadoras como refinadas en su factura: el folclore indígena y ...

Lila Downs dedica su reciente disco a aquellos que han muerto en la frontera JAIME WHALEY La espléndida voz de Lila Downs, artista orgullosamente oaxaqueña pero que no reniega de su raigambre sajona -su padre es oriundo de Minnesota- vuelve a escucharse en el CD La línea, en el que la cantante-antropóloga toca temas conmovedores, inspirados en la vida en la frontera, la de México y Estados Unidos desde luego, con los que intenta tejer un puente entre estas dos culturas. Lo dedica a los espíritus de aquellos que han muerto cruzando la linea. Nacida en San Juan Mixtepec, hija de un estadunidense que se enamoró de una mujer mixteca cuando vino a filmar las migraciones de patos canadienses que vuelan hasta la península de Yucatán, Lila, en esta su tercera producción discográfica en los escasos cuatro años que tiene de haber incursionado en el terreno de las grabaciones, presenta 14 canciones (mas una de obsequio, un bolerito tradicional: Quizás, quizás) que en algo tienen que ver c...

LILA DOWNS  Album Title: Border  Producer(s): Paul Cohen and Lila Downs  Genre: WORLD MUSIC  Label/Catalog Number: Narada World 70876-15333  Source: PRINT  Originally Reviewed: July 14, 2001  Lila Downs' dramatic debut album, Tree of Life, released last year by Narada, drew heavily on her exotic Mixtec Indian background, delivering a profoundly moving performance that immediately thrust her into the world music spotlight. With Border, she has wasted no time taking her repertoire to another level. She does two songs in English—"Pastures of Plenty"/"This Land Is Your Land" and "Smoke." The latter is very much in the populist folk tradition, as is "Pastures." "This Land," though, comes from a jazzy rock idea and actually flashes hip-hop at a couple points. Downs pulls off a very torchy bit of Latin pop with "Perhaps Perhaps" that would make for a nice rhumba on the dancefloor, and she shows an adroit comman...

BY JOSH KUN WORDS THAT HURT: Downs's new album documents the war on the Mexican-American border. Susan Sontag began her recent acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer who examines the relationship between freedom and individuality, by talking about words. She spoke of how words are never just words, especially words that are big and over-arching and general. These words, she said, can come to “resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand or cave in.” Because they mean so much, they can end up meaning so little. She gave as an example “peace,” a word that can mean either victory or defeat depending on who employs it and who it is employed against. It is of course no coincidence that she offered her comments in the Middle East, at yet another moment of crisis in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Such moments force us to re-evaluate how the world becomes narrative, how society is transformed by the language that pretends to represent it;...

Pedro Luis Munguia, The News Staff - 7/12/2001 The truly exceptional composers intricately subsume the beauty and complexity of their cultures in their musical interpretations. For singer-songwriter Lila Downs, of Mixtec-America background, the beauty of the two cultures that shaped her life cannot be any better demonstrated, nor can the presentation of such cultures be more beautifully interpreted. In Lila's music, we are privy to her many cultural secrets. The pulsing rhythms of Sandunga transport the listener to a remote Mixtec village, to a Mexican City and to the heartland of the U.S. When she first arrived from the United States and settled in Tlaxiaco, on the Mixtec Oaxaca mountain chain, people in the vicinity would come to ask her to translate letters written in English. Once she was caught off guard when a woman wanted to know what was on a letter she had received from U.S. authorities. It stated her young son had been killed while attempting to swim across th...

WORDS THAT HURT: Downs's new album documents the war on the Mexican-American border. BY JOSH KUN Susan Sontag began her recent acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer who examines the relationship between freedom and individuality, by talking about words. She spoke of how words are never just words, especially words that are big and over-arching and general. These words, she said, can come to “resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand or cave in.” Because they mean so much, they can end up meaning so little. She gave as an example “peace,” a word that can mean either victory or defeat depending on who employs it and who it is employed against. It is of course no coincidence that she offered her comments in the Middle East, at yet another moment of crisis in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Such moments force us to re-evaluate how the world becomes narrative, how society is transformed by the language that pretends to represent it...