HANNAH MÉNDEZ

Having grown up in the Bay Area, how did your upbringing, and specifically your Chicana Mexican heritage, influence your views on the environment and climate change? 

LA DOÑA

I have the great privilege of working with youth-led activist groups out of Oakland, California. What I see most of all is that so many of the people being affected and who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate catastrophe are people of color. I see most of my students fleeing environmental racism and terrible climate crises in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. 

Growing up in San Francisco, there was a very strong Mexican and Chicano presence. Today, with Salvadorians and Chilenos fleeing the civil wars and unrest, we’re seeing a lot more climate migration. At the same time, for Latinos, it is in our essence and customs to organize within the family and community. I am very inspired by my youth; my students who are coming together to call for more action around climate change and climate justice. So I think that, while we’re the ones being affected the most, we’re also the ones most capable to be leaders in this movement.

HANNAH

What first brought you to music?

LA DOÑA

I started playing music with my family band when I was seven years old. My parents have played music together since they met, and my sister since she was about 12 years old. I was the last one to join the family band with the virtue of being the youngest. It wasn’t necessarily something that I identified as a passion. When you’re seven, it’s really hard to see yourself with that kind of clarity or see a connection to self-expression in that way.

If I hadn’t played music with my family then I wouldn’t really have spent that much time with them because they were always playing. That’s how I came into the practice and into the community. I still play with them to this day. I also play with my sister’s group, and have my dad in the band to continue that legacy, while bringing in youth and teaching and playing with my friends and family and people I have a long connection with. So, that’s how I came into music and how I, hopefully, will always exist.

HANNAH

When did you start thinking about music as a way of spotlighting social and environmental issues?

LA DOÑA

I’d always played traditional music, and I’d always played on a lot of other people’s projects. But one thing that became more and more striking to me as I became a more radical individual is that a lot of the messages in regional Mexican music—and traditional music more generally—are very anti-women, anti-gay, they’re very xenophobic and nationalistic. They are all of these things that I don’t identify with. That was honestly one of the things that pushed me to start writing music. I was like, I’m just not really hearing the stories that I’m surrounded by. I’m not really hearing representation of the people who I am, who I love and care about—there has to be something else. It can’t be that we’re just talking about sex in the club and doing drugs. At least talk about the gays and the girls in the space, doing bad shit in the clubs. 

There needs to be more diversity, more representation. So that frustration with the limited narratives presented in pop music was one of the main propellers to me finding La Doña.

HANNAH

Your song ‘Cuando Se Van’ is a revolutionary anthem against gentrification—what impacts have you seen gentrification have on the community you grew up in, and the Latine people and culture of San Francisco? 

LA DOÑA

I would agree, and I would also say that it’s both about gentrification and climate change. A lot of the material in there comes out of this very deep-seated, long-existing fear that pretty much all San Franciscans of my generation have about storms, rising sea levels, earthquakes, and all these things we call natural disasters that we know are really exacerbated and prompted by climate change. We live with this feeling of fear and trepidation around that.

“Cuando Se Van” is about both those things. It’s about gentrification—how people are being affected by it and what the landscape of the city looks like—but also about the things that we fear and that we have in the back of our minds. I grew up in the ‘90s, and in my community, I really saw all of the phases of gentrification. I saw the dot-com era: I saw techies first come in, and I subsequently saw rising housing prices and rising costs of living. I saw a lot of my classmates, teachers, and artists from the community not be able to afford to live there, or even commute in to create there anymore. 

It’s the displacement of people, and the whitewashing and usurpation of public space at the cost of working class people of color that I would say are probably the most drastic effects of gentrification I’ve seen.

HANNAH

In your song “Show Me How You Livin’” from your latest EP Can’t Eat Clout, you say, “Esta existencia no tarda en volar / Tierra sagrada no deja de quemar.” (“This existence does not take long to flee / Sacred land does not stop burning.”) What was the inspiration behind these lines?

LA DOÑA

I wrote this song during one of the extremely crazy days when the whole sky turned red in California. The sun didn’t come out and we all thought it was the end of the world. I wrote this during the fire season when you really don’t know what is happening. People are like, Why aren’t you guys having kids? And it’s like, Well, because the world is literally on fire. How do you expect me, as a teacher, to have children when I see that my kindergartners can’t even have lunch outside? They can’t even have recess. They’re being told, Stay inside, or else you’re going to have an asthma attack. Once you see that kind of stuff, it makes you think twice about having kids.

This song really is about reconciling with, but not giving into the fear of the existential crisis. You have to be conducting this ongoing practice of community-building and safety-networking in order to survive these times. Those lines are about the fleeting nature of life on this Earth and the fires.

HANNAH

Do you feel a responsibility as an artist to platform and educate people on the issues that you care about? How does that materialize in your music and your shows?

LA DOÑA

Just by virtue of being an educator and by being a child of educators and coming from a heritage of community activism, I think that that’s always going to be part of my shows and part of how I show up in the world. But definitely, it is a conscious decision that I make as well. Not only is it part of myself to be bossy and concerned, it’s also something that I want people to be aware of; something that we can talk about as a community. 

So often, people have this feeling that if we’re talking about these bummer, downer things, we can’t have fun. But I want to remind us that the revolution has always needed music, and we need each other. You can’t be creating culture and supporting culture without being conscious of the world around you. 

HANNAH

Music is a great way to allow people to enter into a space almost without even realizing it sometimes.

LA DOÑA

Exactly. You’re like, I didn’t know I was going to a climate change class tonight, but I’m like, I got you.

HANNAH

You mentioned that you did some activism and organizing in your life. I would love to know when that started. What kind of organizing were you doing, and at what age did you start getting involved in community issues?

LA DOÑA

I come from a family of activists. On the Govea side, we’re involved in the Farm Workers Movement. My tia (aunt) Jessica Govea was one of the main organizers for the United Farm Workers. She sat on the executive board and was the sole organizer of the Grape Boycott in Canada and across many cities in the U.S. So activism has always been part of my heritage and familial practice. 

I grew up going to a lot of different actions, like anti-war protests during the occupations in the Middle East, and the immigration reform demonstrations and anti-border movements of the 2000s and 2010s. Now, climate justice.

It’s something intergenerational. I started going with my family and bringing our instruments and playing with the Brass Liberation Orchestra and other radical artists. I felt strongly about the need for music and joy in these spaces. Now, I go with my parents and my sister and her children, sometimes our students. It’s a practice that’s always been a part of my life, and that I feel happy and excited to share with other people.

HANNAH

In an interview with Rolling Stone, you mention that your stage name “La Doña” references a “playful nickname to describe your bossy and maternal attitude among your housemates.” Now, having established yourself as La Doña in your music and activism, what role do you think identifying as both bossy and maternal plays in standing up for your community and the environment? 

LA DOÑA

I love that framing. Honestly, I think that it comes from a deep observance of female and femme labor. The domestic labor that we have historically performed in terms of organizing the family, the social calendar, bringing people together around different issues and events, and culturally specific moments. I think that those things are something that have always been performed by women and by matriarchs. I see that continuity throughout movements and revolutions and throughout times and decades.

HANNAH

How can others claim that same bossy and maternal energy to stand up for their communities in the face of the climate crisis?

LA DOÑA

I think it’s just about reclaiming that energy. It’s about really letting yourself value that space instead of being like, Oh, I’m too loud, too bossy, too mandona. All these things we hold deep shame around that make us who we are, especially Latinas. We are shamed under machismo for all of these things that are needed in our families. Honoring that role is going to continue to support the movement, and it’s also going to be super integral to coalition-building and forming cross-cultural, transborder, intergenerational, connections and movements between organizations and cultures. Because who else does that? It’s always the matriarch, it’s always the women and femmes.

It’s about time we recognize that, and not find it as a place of shame or something that we need to hide, but rather a legacy that’s very important and powerful.

HANNAH

What impact do you think music can have on mobilizing and activating communities for change?

LA DOÑA

I think that it can happen on many different levels. Public performance is a way to come together around the same issues and celebrate our activity and action around them, as well as garner more energy and visibility for these issues. All of us that care about climate catastrophe should be talking about it. Not just in interviews, but also in our music. The more that happens, the more it’ll be normalized and become commonplace. That’s going to be really important.

Look at the tradition of blues. Some of the oldest blues songs are about gigantic floods that displaced people or about different climate-related things. Passing along those traditions and telling our students, our audience members, our children, that this is something they should care about, think about, talk about, and sing about, that will definitely shift an attitude of visibility and engagement around these issues.

HANNAH

What gives you hope in the fight against climate change?

LA DOÑA

Definitely my students; the youth I’ve been privileged enough to work with. They are going to change the world. It sucks that it has to be up to them, but I feel so honored and blessed to have them as leaders in the movement. 

This past Friday, I was supporting a group called Warriors for Justice out of Fruitvale, Oakland. They organized the Fridays for the Future rally, and I was there to support them with music. They were making speeches, organizing chants, making posters, and doing a climate change bingo, lotería (lottery), and it was all run by my Spanish-speaking students from all over Latin America. To see them have so much direction and focus around these issues gave me so much hope and pride, and I feel so honored and blessed to be witnessing their mobilization in real time.

I have a lot more to say and a lot more work to do as an artist, but I see that as I get older, one of my biggest roles is going to be to support the youth in their quest for justice. Not only in learning music and self-expression, but in organizing and taking on these huge tasks that we have unfortunately left to them. Most of them are Latinos, a lot of them recently arrived in the country. Lots of immigrant families and students, all of them brilliant and full of hope. 

Even através (through) these crazy things we’ve been dealing with, COVID-19, climate change, and the back-to-back trauma that these kids are going through, they still are able to show up with direction, hope, and integrity around these issues. It’s very impressive.