Ana Tijoux.
As a Latina growing up in Chicago, I was told to think a certain way and execute womanhood in a way that would lead me to marriage. Novelas or Soap Operas, dictated a performance for many of us Latinas growing up in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Despite knowing how institutions, family values, and novelas wanted me to act, these depictions of womanhood were unsettling. At an early age, I critiqued gender roles and double standards, machista notions, career and education options, or the liberty to explore sexuality. As I grew older and while attending college, I began to decolonize the gender structures I was taught. I became acquainted with writers like Gloria Anzaldua and Bell Hooks who laid out a feminist perspective and developed my intersectional politics. As I became more involved in social justice initiatives in the community, I became more conscious about defining my womanhood. I was often asked in both my professional and personal relationships to exemplify womanhood in a way that society found acceptable. I was led to believe: “you can be a successful Latina but not so successful that you become a threat to your male partners.” Despite the push back I experienced from various people in my life, I sought out women of color who were on the same journey of defining their womanhood and unapologetic about their successes. In that process, music became an extremely important part of my life that helped me to heal from personal and professional experiences.
During my healing, I came across the music of Ana Tijoux. Her lyrics addressing injustice, inequity, and female issues validated my experiences as a woman of color. Ana is a Chilean hip-hop artist and musician born in France in 1977 to parents who were jailed and later left Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Ana’s work is deeply political and addresses a range of social ills from women rights, people of color and indigenous people, colonization, and education rights. Although her music is engineered perfectly with jazz, Andean flutes, brass horns, drums, and guitars, Ana confidently vocalizes the experiences of the nobodies from the nobodies’ perspective. Her message about female equality is loud and clear in her song “Antipatriarca,” “independiente yo nací, independiente decidí. / Yo no camino detras de ti, yo camino de la par aquí.” Her collaboration with Palestinian rapper Shadia Mansour in “Somos Sur,” fiercely addresses the unity in Africa, Latin America, and Palestine. Ana’s political education and music has allowed her to dialogue with women like myself who are in searching for alternative approaches in addressing womanhood and equality of the sexes.
Ana’s lyrics made profound sense and made me realize the need for intentional artist that rethink and reshape how to approach the role of women in today’s society. As I have navigated social structures (education, work, and family — to name a few) I recognized that both women and men lack a sound conscious foundation of how to address gender roles without allowing media and stereotypes to hurt and wound personal and professional relationships we carry out on the day to day basis. These experiences helped me understand that as women of color, we need to carve out safe spaces were we can comfortably dialogue, appreciate, recognize, and acknowledge the significance of female identity.
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Jennifer Juárez is from Chicago and is currently an educator at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is a graduate of UIC where she concentrated her studies in Communication, Sociology, and Gender and Women Studies and a Master’s in Education in Youth Development. She sits on various committees’ at the university and in the community that address Latina/o student success in higher education.
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Ana Tijoux will perform at Thalia Hall
on Sunday, April 19th at 7:30 p.m.