Collective Songwriting in Boyle Heights
Justice Never Dies Lyric Video by Quetzal
Toro Ayotzinapa by Quetzal at the 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival
Pillow People by Quetzal
Todo Lo Que Tengo (All That I Have) by Quetzal
Quetzal: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
Chican@ Artivistas: Music, Community and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles

About Me

As a Chicana artivista, music and the power it invokes is at the heart of my practice as a musician, scholar, and activist. Fandango and collective songwriting as empowering methodologies have helped me and members of my communities summit into new forms of analysis and thus action. Music as a tool of dialogue. Music and its respective dance as a participatory practice are generative and artivistas like myself see these and similar practices as part of the lexicon of social justice movement… (click arrow below to read full statement)

Chican@ Artivistas: Music, Community and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles

My new book; Chican@ Artivista: Music, Community and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles will be out soon. Check out the blurb on UT Austin press (July 27th, 2020). As the lead singer of the Grammy Award–winning rock band Quetzal and a scholar of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, Martha Gonzalez is uniquely positioned to articulate the ways in which creative expression can serve the dual roles of political commentary and community building. Drawing on postcolonial, Chicana, black feminist, and performance theories, Chican@ Artivistas explores the visual, musical, and performance art produced in East Los Angeles since the inception of NAFTA […]