UCLA

My master's thesis is an in-depth look at a video production by the collective Quetzal Beats that includes my role as co-producer. This six minute video production was organized alongside Ana Pano from Fresno, CA and Chiapas, Nancy Escalante from Los Angeles, El Salvador and Honduras, and myself, Paula Ayala from Fresno, CA and El Salvador. Quetzal Beats formed as a sonic space between and with the lineages of ancestral lament opening into pluriversal worlds. As said by the EZLN, ‘a world where many worlds fit’ in (what I posit as) a central Abyssmerica/Yala. This video project invites listening viewers to enter into worlds that sense-think memories, people, land, color, sound and the continuities of socially defying death. The ‘sonic collage’ allows an unraveling of the illusory formulations of settler innocence. Centering the question, “How do the grounded knowledges of experiential opposition to oppression throughout the isthmus, detail what I deem, a condicion istmica? Herein perspectives and actions realize hemispheric convergences with many processes of definition, positionalities, obstructions, and epistemes. This text will offer insights into a six-minute audio-visual curation of 500 years of colonial sonic resistance. My research offers an autoethnographic and communitarian testimony that recovers over 10 years of documentation, archival sources, primary sources, and photographic and sonic collages witnessed in Quetzal Beats’ video. A portion of this thesis is meant to articulate to readers how Quetzal Beats has formed as a collective in various projects, and for the purposes of this thesis, to fully explain how it was that we produced the sonic-collage “Caminxs del Sur.” As author of this piece, I have used my own voice and memory to recount these processes, and have consulted with most interlocutors mentioned here, about the writing for this thesis. Artist, community worker and journalist once described as the “the octopus of Leimert Park,” Ben Caldwell’s KAOS THEORY, is a testament to the power of documenting one's processes of artistry in relation to the socio-political forces and communities one engages and lives among. This thesis may or may not become one of the earliest treaties on Quetzal Beats’ visual and sonic productions made by and about Central Americans.