A UTRGV alumna has released a music video with her band about the modern political climate of living in a border town and other global issues based on her book of poetry.
Amalia Leticia Ortiz wrote the book, “The Canción Cannibal Cabaret” (Aztlan Libre Press, 2019), which includes a poem titled “La Frontera Te Llama,” which she turned into a music video that was released Aug. 30.
Ortiz graduated in May 2016 with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She is the theater arts director for SAY Sí in San Antonio.
SAY Sí is a creative youth development organization “committed to creating a premier, inclusive, dynamic and nurturing educational environment for San Antonio’s youth,” according to its website.
The song is performed by Ortiz’s band, Las Hijas de la Madre. Members of the band are Jacque Salame, backing vocalist; Amalia Leticia Ortiz, lead singer; Maria Ibarra, backing vocalist; UTRGV Bilingual and Literacy Studies Associate Professor Kip Austin Hinton, bass; Lorenzo Beas, drums; and Leticia Rocha-Zivadinovic, guitar.
Pepe García Gilling, a UTRGV alumnus, directed the first of three videos Ortiz and he will release, with the others under production.
García graduated in Fall 2017 with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He is chair in the South Texas International Film Festival Committee and director of programming.
Asked what inspired him to direct the video, García replied he thought what Ortiz was doing is something important.
“She has a really unique voice that I think more people need to be aware of, and if anything, I feel that art, including video and the new media, helps us divulge the voice and the messages,” he said. “I think Amalia’s message is really super important and necessary and I figured that helping her do a video would help us just to send it out to the world.”
García said the video focuses on the band Las Hijas de la Madre playing at the border, with clips of a little girl that reflect the immigrants who cross to the U.S. while holding a sign that expresses the lyrics of the song.
“Then, she appears next to her mother, who stands richer, to create this image of resistance and power and struggle,” he said. “So, she looks up to her while we intertwine [the video] with other parts of the border and the river and a few shots from the border crossings. We receive them as entering the country while the band plays at the same time.”
García added the overall theme for the video is the power of Latinos and the hard work immigrants put into crossing into the U.S. and the struggle they go through to make a life for themselves.
In an interview with The Rider, Ortiz said her inspiration for the poem in her book was growing up in Rio Grande Valley for most of her adolescence.
“I ended up living away for about 20 years and when I moved back, I was in graduate school and hearing the original song, ‘London Calling,’” she said. “It hit me in a new and different way because I was living back on the border. And I think similar to the way that the band, The Clash, they were kids in the ’80s feeling like their world was out of control. Moving back to the border and dealing with being a Chicana living in an area of political turmoil and also dealing with so many memories of growing up here, I felt similarly out of control and that’s why I wrote this song.”
Ortiz used the melody of “London Calling” but added her own original lyrics.
In the first and second stanzas, she talks about poverty on the border, militarization and fracking in South Texas.
“Then, I mentioned Juarez, [Mexico], which is also still about dealing with, to a certain extent, how undervalued Mexican bodies are,” Ortiz said. “Over a decade, women have been dying and disappearing in Mexico and right across the border, in the United States, people don’t care.”
Lyrics also include topics about racial disparities in incarceration rates, the Black Lives Matter Movement, climate change, mass shootings, cartels, gun control and eight-liner machines.
Ortiz said she would want students to be inspired creatively on different things they can do with assignments.
“I understand that academia could feel very rigid but I feel that if you can defend your creative decisions academically, you could do some very creative things within those boundaries,” she said. “Another thing students can get out of assignments is to think, ‘How can this assignment be a vehicle for giving power to issues that I feel powerless to change?’”
Las Hijas de la Madre will perform from 8 to 9 p.m. Friday on the Chapel lawn on the Edinburg campus.
