Music and Art Against Ice
Also in this edition: Eighty kinds of tamales! No ICE at the Winter Olympics and the World Cup. The Mexican government is looking for options to send crude oil to Cuba.
Lea La Jornada Internacional en español aquí.
Soundtrack of Resistance
In Minneapolis and around the country, the beat at resistance rallies and marches protesting abuses by ICE is set by brass bands, choirs, batucadas, and a myriad of other sonic expressions, the contemporary face of a long musical tradition of struggle and solidarity, of lifting spirits and giving comfort, and dancing in the face of injustice.
All of a sudden, dancing breaks out in the middle of a march in Minneapolis to a classic song like Stand by Me, played by Brass Solidarity, a band that formed there in 2021 as part of the massive popular response to the police killing of African American George Floyd which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. They invite other musicians to join in, to a repertoire that includes traditional gospel songs, music from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, a bit of New Orleans, and some Motown, all accompanying the movement in resistance.
Singing Resistance is a new group in Minneapolis that invites hundreds to join in new a cappella songs that are becoming anthems of the movement. “This is for our neighbors who are locked inside / Together we will abolish ICE” is one; “I am not afraid, I am not afraid / I will live for liberation/ cause I know why I was made,” is another, sung in English and Spanish. And on social media, corridos in Spanish appear, recounting what’s happened in Minneapolis, in solidarity with the movement.
This national resistance movement was born in Spanish, in Los Angeles, with the first mobilizations against the federal anti-immigrant crackdown led by Latino immigrants and their allies. Suddenly, in front of an immigrant detention center, a truck would appear with a famous local band singing “La cumbia de la migra.” Mariachi, rock, and Spanish-language rap all joined the mix, and with the arrival of African American, Filipino, and other allies, the rhythms expanded to include a mosaic of universal sounds.
All this is repeated across the country. It includes expressions from almost anonymous street artists, alongside some of the most famous musicians in the world, including Bad Bunny, Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, Tom Morello, and others. Morello, former member of Rage Against the Machine, not only held a solidarity concert in Minneapolis last week, with Springsteen as special guest, but also joined the marches in the streets. “I am an outside agitator,” he stated, standing in solidarity with the resistance in Minneapolis, “to oppose state terror… and defend democracy.”
The list of stars keeps growing: Jane Fonda, Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish, Olivia Dean, Natalie Portman, Olivia Rodrigo, Pedro Pascal, Matt Damon, Olivia Wilde, among others, have continued to speak out in support of the protests and to condemn federal authorities.
In New York, dozens of artists, both well-known and newcomers, alongside local politicians, writers, playwrights, and poets, spent eight hours reading excerpts from famous speeches, novels (including the inevitable 1984 by Orwell), poems, and even portions of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, in an act of denunciation, protest, and solidarity. Susan Sarandon, Peter Dinklage, Christine Baranski, John Leguizamo, Oscar Isaac, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Tony Kushner, among others, took part in this artistic response to the attempt to erase the delicate beauty of a nation built by the hands and cultures of the world.
It’s always been this way. All popular movements for at least a century have had their soundtracks: the struggles of the anarcho-syndicalists gave us the song Bread and Roses [sung more than a century later at the inauguration of New York’s new socialist and immigrant mayor, as part of the rebellion against the right], and those of their leader Joe Hill; soon after, the extraordinary Paul Robeson and singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie narrated antifascist resistance and social struggles. Guthrie wrote the first protest song about deported Mexican immigrants in English, Deportee, nourishing the folk movement of his friend Pete Seeger and the Caribbean-born Harry Belafonte, and the young Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Nina Simone, and so many others who made the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s sing and dance.
From the seventies through the nineties, new rock expressions by Patti Smith, Springsteen, Rage Against the Machine, Billy Bragg, and many others also became an integral part of movements, their songs sung in choruses by thousands, perhaps millions. And today, new musicians, writers, poets, and actors, among them Billie Eilish, Olivia Dean, Kendrick Lamar, rediscover old verses and prose that they renew or invent new ones that join the soundtrack, the theater, the dance, and the poetry of U.S. rebellions.
And roses, too.
🌹 Playlist: Soundtrack of the resistence
The Quote:
“If it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism and lies like fascism, boys & girls, it’s f—king fascism. It’s here, it’s now, it’s in my city, it’s in your city, and it must be resisted, protested…”
—Tom Morello in Minneapolis.
In Case You Missed It
◻️ Eighty kinds of tamales! Stone and wood-burning ovens were fired up, just as altars were once lit in honor of Xilonen, goddess of tender corn, and Huitzilopochtli, according to the accounts of the chronicler Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. Today, tamales offer a map of flavors stretching from the north to the southeast. At the Tamal Fair, an extraordinarily wide variety of flavors of this ancestral food, considered the oldest in Mesoamerica, was on offer.
◻️ Against ICE at the Winter Olympics and the World Cup. “They’re not your Games,” protesters say, opposing the presence of ICE in Italy ahead of the Winter Olympics. Hundreds of demonstrators march in Milan, rejecting the presence of U.S. immigration agents. The Mexican government warns of a high risk of raids in the U.S. during the 2026 World Cup.
◻️ Lack of protection for migrants in Mexico. In 2024, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation ordered Congress to reform the Migration Law, but this has not yet been carried out. The International Human Rights Center in Los Angeles has filed a complaint with the UN over the lack of reforms and the absence of a national registry of migrants detained in Mexico.
◻️ The government looks for ways to send crude oil to Cuba. In response to pressure and statements by U.S. President Donald Trump saying that Mexico should not send oil to Cuba, the government of Claudia Sheinbaum said that Mexico will seek dialogue on the issue, but in the meantime will send humanitarian aid to the Cuban people. “President Sheinbaum’s position is particularly delicate and difficult,” writes Julio Hernández. “Opposing Trump’s impositions means entering a cycle of unpredictable outcomes, starting with the economic ones, given Mexico’s extreme dependence on the United States, but for how long, and how far, should Mexico give in?”
◻️ Cuba: Trump and his colonialist nostalgia. “After the Haitian Revolution, the United States set its sights on the island of Cuba as a suitable territory to serve as a port of entry for enslaved people,” explains Juan Becerra Acosta. “In 1902 it became a republic under U.S. tutelage, which succeeded in protecting U.S. investments in sugar plantations. American capital controlled the island’s economy, and Cuba became a haven for the mafia and a destination for tourism, gambling, and money laundering.” The Cuban Revolution broke U.S. hegemony not just on the island, but in the hemisphere.
◻️ Trump glorifies the theft of half of Mexico. The White House released a “presidential message” celebrating the “victory” of the United States in the war against Mexico 178 years ago, which, according to them, marked the beginning of the country’s international dominance. “We are not Santa Anna,” responded Claudia Sheinbaum. In an editorial, La Jornada stated: “Boasting about the historic plunder committed against Mexico by military force in 1848 is an unmistakable sign of decline, rather than a projection of contemporary power”.
🎥 What We Are Watching
Davos and the breakdown of the world order. Luis Hernández Navarro in el Pulso de La Jornada.