BORDERS, BRIDGES, AND THE CHOIR

Ahmed Anzaldúa

MUSIC:​ Bright Ideas - Shin Suzuma

ANDRÉ:​ Support for The Choral Commons comes from the University of San Diego, the Karen
and Tom Mulvaney Center for Community, Awareness, and Social Action and the College of
Arts and Sciences Arts Engagement Initiative.

EMILIE:​ USD’s Arts Engagement Initiative supports artistic action embedded in and responsive
to ever-changing social, cultural and political circumstances, deep and meaningful engagement
with community, and increased access to the arts on the USD campus and beyond.

ANDRÉ:​ The Choral Commons is a community where choral music practitioners and
organizations can gather in order to envision equity-centered choral futures. With our
community and creative partners, we hope to empower choral practitioners with additional
strategies for innovation, grounded in culturally responsive, critical and equity-centered values.

EMILIE:​ My name is Emilie Amrein,

ANDRÉ:​ And I’m André de Quadros,

EMILIE:​ And this is the Choral Commons Podcast.

AHMED:​ When I wrote my dissertation, I remember there was a sentence there that really
triggered my committee, because I wrote something about that we need to take off our blinders
to this idea that choral music is universally good, because choral music and the way it's
practiced in many of our countries is modelled around, you know, colonialism, it’s modelled
around so many things that are not ethical or valuable. And there's, and there's no better model
for that, I mean, no better evidence for that than the fact that you know totalitarian regimes love
choral music-- you know the big cantatas and nationalistic stuff, they love choral music because
it enables them to promote conformity, to promote this idea of propaganda, of furthering a
culture so it's not, you know, universally good. We have to be conscientious about the values
that we promote in a rehearsal space, in our programming. So I really feel strongly about this
idea that as choral directors and practitioners of this music that we have to be deliberate about
our actions and about our relationships.

MUSIC:​ ​Scaling Borders, Building Bridges -​ Common Ground Voices / La Frontera, produced by
Emilie Amrein

EMILIE:​ ​In her book, Borderlands/La Frontera, the great Chicana poet, author, and activist,
Gloria ​Anzaldúa​ writes, “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to
distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line…The prohibited and forbidden are its
inhabitants.” Recently, the field of choral music has begun to extend the work of social justice to
borders and the harm they cause. As we struggle for ways to understand the lives of refugees,
immigrants, and the displaced through music, we find ourselves seeking to engage deeply with
the prohibited and the forbidden. How can we get close? How can we listen deeply? How can
we compassionately reflect these stories in our music-making?

EMILIE:​ Ahmed Anzaldúa is a Mexican choral conductor, classical pianist, and music educator
of Egyptian descent. He is the director and founder of ​Border CrosSing​, a Minnesota based
organization dedicated to integrating historically-segregated audiences, repertoires, and
musicians through the performance of choral music. ​Founded in 2017, Border CrosSing
envisions fundamental change in classical music culture, so that every concert, every audience,
and the artists on stage truly reflect the cultural reality of the community. Their work provides
opportunities for people from different backgrounds to understand each other in new ways
through their multi-lingual Puentes concert series, educational programs in schools, and
collaborations with Minnesota-based arts and cultural organizations.

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MUSIC: ​Bright Ideas - Shin Suzuma

EMILIE:​ So Ahmed I'm wondering if, you know, I think that there have been these conversation
threads with several of our recent podcast guests with regard to kind of racial, cultural and
ethnic identity and how people negotiate identities that are both dynamic and changing and
intersectional. I wondered if you could talk just a little bit about the idea of diaspora, right? This
idea of being a part of a community, do you identify, like what is your experience in regards to
diaspora?

AHMED:​ What I've found is that as I come to a new place, my identity is sort of slapped on me
by the society where I'm in because, you know, being, at least being sort of Mexican, Arab,
White, it's, it's intersectional and kind of ambiguous. So if I'm in Mexico, I am white. I am not, no
one will see me and say OK he is indigenous, he is Raramuri, or Mexica, or Purepecha like I'm,
I'm white. I'm very sort of European passing sort of Anglo. So, my entire time learning in Mexico,
I just thought, well, I'm white. I'm one of the white people. And then as soon as I came to the
United States, it became very clear to me that, at least in my interactions with, with employers
with other people with friends with society at large I was not white, I was some sort of other
thing. So then you start having to be a little bit more careful about the way you present yourself,
whether you are enforcing certain stereotypes or not, or fitting a certain mold and how you want
to play it up or play it down, and that was also my experience going to Spain. When I was in
Spain, studying there for four years, there is extreme racism against South American immigrants
there, in particular people from Peru and Ecuador. They just call them sudacas, and people
would call me sudaca and they would say, well, I'm from Mexico because they would notice my
accent and then they were like, OK, so you're one of the good sudacas and so. And when I was
in Egypt not being a fluent Arabic Speaker, and even though I very much looked like most of the
my Egyptian friends, I was also not very, at least not considered as Egyptian, and definitely I
have known, I know that here in the United States, whenever I get into, whenever I go to a
majority like a mosque or even when I get into an Uber that's being driven by someone from a
Muslim country, I will get chastised because they will immediately ask me if I speak Arabic and
want to, and when I they found out I'm not Muslim, I'll get scolded at and they'll start saying that
my mother didn’t educate me correctly or something so. So diaspora it's odd. It's just odd and
fluid, and at least from my perspective it is so, it is so centered around, around constructs that
people just sort of pull out of thin air that have no basis in reality.

AHMED: ​Just thinking about the, just thinking about family history. So my first name Anzaldúa.
So the Anzaldúas were sort of Spanish, Spanish explorers who arrived in northern Mexico with
the Franciscan Friars, and they sort of populated the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas and
northern Mexico, and, in the 1700s. And something that happened is that a lot of Anzaldúas
were farmers in that area, and then the Mexican American War took place in the mid 1800s
border was redrawn and then a lot of Anzaldúas all of a sudden weren't American anymore,
they were Mexican. And then some of them had to cross the border without documents to get
work at the farms that they had owned a few decades before, that their grandparents had
owned. So, overnight they became something else and, and it's just, I guess, a byproduct of
living in that border between the two countries and, for generations. When I wrote my
dissertation, I remember there was a sentence there that really triggered my. My committee
because I wrote something about, about that we need to take off our Blinders to this idea that,
that choral music is universally good, that just, that it is that there is an, I very, because choral
music, the way it's practiced in many of our countries, is modelled around, you know,
colonialism is modelled around so many things that are not ethical or valuable, and there's, and
there's no better model for that, I mean no better evidence for that that the fact that you know
totalitarian regimes love choral music, you know the big cantatas and nationalistic stuff they love
choral music because it enables them to promote conformity, to promote this idea of, of
propaganda of furthering a culture so it's not, you know, universally good. We have to be
conscientious about the values that we promote in a rehearsal space, in our programming. And
so, so I really feel strongly about this idea that, that as choral directors and practitioners of this
music that we have to be deliberate about our actions, and about our relationships and so for
me it is very, very difficult to, it is extraordinarily difficult, if not, I would say nearly impossible to
completely disassociate yourself from these structures, because they're structural, because they
are so deeply embedded in the way we think and everything we do, I catch myself having in so
many biases and blind spots and things that I do, that are, that looking back I realize did
damage to someone or are violent in some way, so my what I've come to realize overtime is
that, that, for my own practice, it really helps to focus very intensely and very deliberately on this
idea of personal relationship and justice in personal relationship, and that applies to how I relate
to singers, how relate to audiences, but also how I relate to a piece of music.
ANDRÉ: ​Can we go back to, so you talked about three things: how you relate to singers, how
you relate to the audience, and how do you relate, how you relate to the music, so yeah, exactly
so the music can give us examples of yeah, give us examples of all three.

AHMED: ​Well, so that's central. So for example, as a pianist, you know I was hammered into
this idea that you play Debussy a certain way, and this Debussy exists in a vacuum and I really
didn't start to work out what music could be or mean until I start to see that through a lens of
personal relationship. Me and Debussy. The fact that he was a complete jerk to every single
woman in his life. The fact that he lived in this society where he had a certain place in that
society, trying to empathize with motive, trying to connect on a personal note with not only him
as a person but maybe other performers that have done that music and people that have been
inspired by it. So in terms of the music, this idea that we, a lot of the time and I think in a way
that's very centered around, around fallacies around the scientific method you know and
objectivity we get taught to downplay this emotion and personal relationship aspect. And I
believe that that's absolutely central to overcoming structures that are, you know, antithetical to
our values. So even in the way I relate to singers, I, here in the United States I found and, I
found that there is a certain expectation of what professionalism means. That there is a certain
distance that you have to keep and but, and for a long time I tried to really, really do that
because I saw many of my teachers doing it and maybe the conductors I admired doing it like
OK, they are about the music, they, they're about the music they, I remember like one very
important conducting teacher had once told me, don't conduct the people, conduct the music
and and I lived by that mantra until I realized that that was just complete ignorance because the
music is the people, the people that made it, the people are playing it, the people that are
listening to it. So making a concerted effort to learn my second Sopranos Dogs name and to see
how she's feeling that day, and you know, that is the sort of thing that, that ultimately results in
music making that is fulfilling and, and, and that really goes somewhere, that really connects.

ANDRÉ: ​But does that, does that change the way in which decisions are made in the
ensemble? Is the process different in that sense?

AHMED: ​It does, it does in a sense that that there is, it does in a sense that, that things are
talked about. It doesn't make sense that at least whenever we, so for example, right now we're
trying to figure out what performing during COVID-19 looks like. What is our next season going
to look like? And the way we've been approaching it is conversations within the ensemble. So
we have a big zoom meeting where we're going to, I'm going to propose, you know, this is what
I've been thinking about our plan, what do you think? Let's go back and forth and negotiate and
come to an understanding, So it does affect but at the same time, there's a, it's, uh, there's
there's, doing things that way has also led to people trusting whomever is conducting or
whomever is the soloist or so, a lot of the way I was taught was that centering our music making
on personal relationship is inefficient and compromising the quality of the product. That it wastes
rehearsal time and that it makes it not sound so good essentially. And I, at least in my own
music making, I found that is not the case at all. It is actually the opposite. It's more efficient
because when there's trust and mutual trust, that means that there are more people that are
working together towards that joint vision and I found that, at least in our performances, it's
,when there is a personal investment that's more compelling for the person listening.

ANDRÉ:​ I want to take us to the conversation on race. We are thinking about race and we
should think about race. The brutality for centuries against African Americans is profound. The
normal, so called normal that we have had in the past is not a normal at all. We need to go for a
new normal. A different, Humane, compassionate, just normal. The question is that we think
about identity very very much in, in a particular way and whatever that way might be, and I want
to ask you as somebody who inhabits more than one identity, in other words, your background
as an Arab Muslim. Your identification as a Mexican immigrant brings you into a much larger
conversation about race and it also brings you to larger conversation with marginalization and
dispossession. You must have obviously an affinity with undocumented workers, we can talk to
in different kinds of ways. You understand what they were they are fleeing from. Can you talk
about the way in which this complex conversation wide identity plays into race and therefore
plays into the way in which you think we as a profession need to be making music.

AHMED:​ I mean here in the United States and everything is about race. I mean race is so
deeply embedded in the history of this country in, I mean, in much of the Western world, I mean
it's all somehow related to race, so that's such a complex question. My thought here is, here in
the United States we, when I, what I said is when I came to the US I realized that that, at least
to the people around me, I was some sort of other, even though if you compare, you know
melanin levels, maybe we're pretty equally white. And when the George Floyd killing happened
and the uprisings happened, something that I saw in the week following was that I got a whole
bunch of requests from people that I, you know, trusted and knew and worked with, too,
because they wanted to get my take on race relations on what happened. And it never
hammered the point so clearly to me that for some people, no matter how enlightened or how
much I admired them, black, and Latino, indigenous, it's all sort of the same. It's all other. It's all
non white and my standard response to a lot of that was you do realize I'm not black. I don't.
Why would I have, like...

ANDRÉ: ​That’s exactly what my question is about.

AHMED: ​I can't talk about, you know the African American experience? I'm not black, I can talk
to you about the relationship between the Mexican American Latinos in South Minneapolis that
sort of were part of this gentrifying movement with the African American community that lived
there before. I can talk a little bit about that, maybe I can talk about immigration, but I'm not a
black person that grew up in the United States as a black person. But the fact that I had to
explain something like that, which to me seemed very, very obvious just from looking at me,
really brought home just how basic and how, how basic the understanding of race and of society
the average white American has. It's where it's all sort of the same, and so when we're talking
about...

ANDRÉ: ​It’s cast within established binaries, isn't it?

AHMED: ​Yeah, and it's all so much about, well, this must be good, and this must be bad and so
much with this conversation is grey areas and exceptions, and you see it on the conservative
side, and you also see it on the liberal side: his action to take a knee jerk action and cast things
aside and it's, it all comes from this place of not knowing nuance and not having this experience.
So this all plays into race and I've had my run-ins with the race conversations just on Border
CrosSing. I mean our first, when I came to the Twin Cities I came to the University of Minnesota,
all my colleagues were white. Or at least none of my colleagues at the University of Minnesota
were black, in the conducting Department, and most of their friends were white and most of the
choral singers I knew were white. So when I formed Border CrosSing and we performed our first
concert made up of Latin American music, all my performers were white and the first criticism I
got from many friends was, well that's just a white group performing Latin American Music and I
said, well, yeah, that's what we are right now. So I don't know. I guess that if we are, if we're
talking about how race plays into all this, we need to be able to talk about nuances. But more
importantly, we need to be able to very clearly talk about realities to say, to say to clearly
identify what we are talking about when we say diversity. What we are talking about when we
say inclusion or we could say equity, or because these sorts of broad fuzzy nebulous things
don't really help anyone.

ANDRÉ: ​Right. And these words get trafficked in different kinds of ways and they become
badge words for all kinds of ways of thinking. And when we unpack them we might discover that
we use the same word to mean entirely different things, things. Gloria Anzaldúa said
“​Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar​” and this idea that you build the bridges
as you go forward, and this idea of being creative and compassion and really having an eye to
culturally dispossessed people, and so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about, first of
all, does Gloria Anzaldúa have a relationship with you.

AHMED: ​Yeah she is my aunt, right, the Anzaldúa? Yeah, yeah, that's one of my favorite
quotations from, from my Tia. So I'll just start by saying we didn't have any sort of close
relationship. So Gloria Anzaldúa was the very weird aunt. She would show up at family reunions
once in awhile and the older people wouldn't talk about her? She smokes cigars. She said bad
words. She drove a big car. She was very brash and I thought she was a cool aunt, you know
growing up and then in college after she had passed away I finally read what she wrote and just
totally fell in love. So that quote, that's a play on this famous ​Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar,​ so you walk or there is no way you make the path as you walk. But
she talks about bridges, so it's not about making the path and then looking back at the path you
created, it's about seeing where you're going and creating that bridge to where you're going.
She, so it really is about having this vision of what things could be, and the problems that we're
facing are so structural they’re so deeply embedded that that vision has to be radical, and it has
to just exhibit so much imagination. And it is, if we talk about what things could be, it'll sound like
pie in the sky. It'll sound like utopian, and ridiculous and if you were magically going to travel in
time and talk about the abundance of resources or electricity or that sort of thing to someone
300 years ago that would have sounded completely ridiculous. So I think that, that yeah, I think
that quote is specific about having that radical vision of what the world could be and then
making that bridge.

EMILIE: ​What I love about the idea of kind of this envisioning of another possible world is, also,
what I think Gloria Anzaldúa like is pointing to with the concept of border thinking that like
people who are in this kind of ambiguity of identity that these identities that, as you already
mentioned, are kind of imposed by social constructs that are pulled out of thin air. That this kind
of experiencing of living in the border region I mean specifically, but also kind of metaphysically,
the idea of kind of border thinking as a space of possibility, and that this visioning of another
possible world might come from the ambiguity of these identities and intersections. Because as
you know, André and I both also work at the border. I'm living here in San Diego County. One of
the things that we've experienced kind of in terms of crossing the border is just the geography
and you alluded to this a little bit already. And what it feels like to physically cross the border
with this kind of militarization that has been built up overtime. This, the, the border wall and the,
the physical, the violence of this border right is, I mean, I don't mean this as a pun in any way,
but like concretised in the entity of this border wall, right? I think about this in terms of
monuments. So I have this really great book about the border wall as architecture and as like
this kind of structural entity that can be interpreted in the same way that artistic monuments can
be, I mean, of course it's like not doesn't have the same intent in any way, but to kind of look at
it as something that's created and communicates something right. And what that communicates,
of course is this brutality and the manifestation of these policies that have been meant to deny
and exclude and, and inflict harm upon other people. I'm wondering, and this is something I've
really been struggling with recently, right? In a lot of ways, the prevailing choral practice and the
affection that this practice has for music of the past, in many ways it feels like a complicated
relationship with a monument, right? A historic monument. And when we've been talking about
monuments recently in kind of the discourse you know, acknowledging the history of
monuments, for example monuments to Robert E Lee. I'm wondering, how do you feel about
like the idea of kind of historic music as monumente rebuilding and rebuilding and replicating.

AHMED: ​There's a difference between a monument that celebrates or commemorates versus a

relic of the past versus an artifact, because I think that people, the problem right now is that
people don't know, know too much history, right, they need. So, so when I perform, I perform a
lot of Baroque music from Latin America and a lot of the time I'm very intentional about making
sure that the composers are, are, include indigenous voices that grew up in that system that
maybe were third generation people that knew no other system and wrote within that system.
And I am, and we never performed this music without context. So it's so much about this story
that surrounds it than just about presenting just a piece of music. So going back to all this, I
mean the, everything is personal relationship. Everything we're doing is talking about people,
how they lived in their world, how they reacted to their world, how they managed to get through
life, because that's what an audience and an artist now will connect with. The idea of this
composer lived in Peru during this when there was an inquisition where there was forced
conversion of this community where we are presenting this hymn to the Virgin Mary that has
references to kitra entities, Inca entities and kitra, embedded all throughout, hidden in plain sight
that so, so it's it's, we're talking about how this person coped with their reality, how they put forth
the things they believed in, you know, so it's about this story.

AHMED:​ The idea of monuments, of the way these structures are there of, of, of the border
everything you want to talk about, what I'm mostly interested in because the important part is
how do they reflect how people think, how people feel, how people relate to each other, and
that's what we work in with music. If I'm performing, you know Beethoven's ninth, what am I
saying by performing Beethoven's nine? What story am I trying to get across through performing
Beethoven's nine? Why am I choosing this work over this other work? It's, it's not so much
about, it's a, it's about this idea of there's something here that I want to connect to, that I want
musicians to connect to that, that says something that's universal or not, or, rather than, I will
never perform Beethoven's ninth because I think this is a masterwork of humanity, and here it is.
Got a lot of that when I was a piano, you know a pianist, a concert pianist where we have our
big repertoire list that we all perform our Rachmaninoff concertos, and are Beethoven Sonatas,
and it's just like, well, we perform them because this is the masterwork.

AHMED:​ Now going back to this idea of the border, we see the drones and we see the concrete
walls and we see the you know, the big fences and the guns and you know Gloria Anzaldúa’s
writing about the border about, you know being a scar where things are laid bare and you can
see the difference between the places, for me, so I've been interacting with the border since I
was since I was a kindergartner. You know, we came to the United States back then. Then we
came back later. We would literally cross the border maybe once a month to shop. And what
I've seen in the last three decades hasn't been, I mean, I've seen a progression, you know, in
the fences are getting bigger, the wall guns are getting more whatever, but what's really been
alarming to me, and all of those fences and guns and radar and sentries, they’re reflections of
what people feel and think. And when you are, when you, I remember that when I was a
teenager, applying for a J2 Visa to come to the United States as a family member was like going
to get your driver’s license. It was a civil transaction you put together your papers, you took
them to the place, the officers there, they are checking to see if you have all your papers, if you
dotted your “i”s, it's not a contentious relationship. It's just a relationship where you're trying to
say well, do you have all the papers you need, or do you not know you don't have them? OK, go
back. You have six more months to do it or you need this other paper, I'm sorry. But what I've
seen the huge escalation is that it's gradually become more and more an adversarial
relationship. So when you apply for a J2 Visa now, the person that you're facing there behind
that window isn't there to check whether you have your papers, they’re your adversary. They're
trying to catch you in a lie. They're trying to keep you out. They’re trying to inflict violence on you
in some way and prove that, and in this entire process, having gone through this immigration
process constantly for years, I've seen, I’ve felt more and more dehumanized, even if the actual
rules and regulations that are on paper are mostly the same in the last three or four years there
have been some really gradual changes to, to the way you know visa processing works and all
that, but most of the changes haven't been like big eye catching things like the daca, I call it
betrayal, you know, or that sort of thing, but these constant little tweaks that make the process
more inhumane and more adversarial.

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EMILIE: ​André and I spoke with Ahmed Anzaldúa in early August. You can learn more about
him at his website www.​ahmedanzaldua.com​ and his work with his ensemble Border CrosSing
at www.​bordercrossingmn.org​.

MUSIC:​ ​Scaling Borders, Building Bridges -​ Common Ground Voices / La Frontera, produced by
Emilie Amrein

MUSIC: ​Bright Ideas - Shin Suzuma

EMILIE:​ The Choral Commons Podcast is hosted by Emilie Amrein and André de Quadros,
produced by Emilie Amrein in partnership with Chorus America and the Eric Ericsson
International Choral Centre, and supported by listeners like you.

ANDRÉ: ​Additional institutional and creative partners include the Harvard Choral Program, St.
Olaf College, University of Hawai’i Choirs, the University of San Diego, Manado State University
Choir, Na Wai Chamber Choir, and Voices 21C.

EMILIE:​ If your organization would like to join our list of sponsors, please reach out to us at
thechoralcommons@gmail.com. Or consider joining our community of supporters on our
website, where you can schedule regular donations of 5 or 10 dollars a month to help us offset
the costs of producing these programs.

ANDRÉ:​ The Choral Commons aims to provide a space for choirs and conductors to envision
innovative and equity-centered practice. We produce podcasts and interactive webinars and
offer curated resources on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

EMILIE: ​The music you heard throughout this episode featured singers from Mexico, the United
States, and the Dominican Republic who regularly perform with Common Ground Voices / La
Frontera. The text source for this piece was a quote from the book This Bridge Called My Back
by Chicana poet, author, and activist, Gloria Anzaldúa. You can learn more about this song and
our creative partners on our website, www.thechoralcommons.com.