Pop Convergence 2021

Session Players/Latina Feminist Critics: Nine Songs for Public Health (Room B: Oscillator)

Licia Fiol-Matta, Deborah R. Vargas, and Alexandra T. Vazquez

At this roundtable we are both session players and Latina feminist critics. The session player is a position that we collectively aspire to, as one who can and must go where the work is, without the fanfare of fame or social media profile or, just as often, credit. They go undeterred from bringing everything they’ve got, doing it properly, or in the words of our poet laureate Tego Calderon, “Dai, pero elegante” to any assembly. The Latina feminist critic is less an identitarian position--we don’t want to distract ourselves or you with scars we’ve accumulated in battle—but more a shared repertoire that we’ve been lucky to play together for some years, across the scalene area of Texas Mexico, Cuba Florida, Puerto Rico New York, the multitudes that have entered and left it, and the attention their stories deserve and require--not for a special issue of race, gender, and place in music--but for being more attuned to life and the living.