Lila Downs
Duality
by Philip Van Vleck

One of the most fascinating artists to arrive on the world music scene in recent years is vocalist Lila Downs. Her debut album for Narada Records, Tree of Life (Yutu Tata), was an exciting and very distinctive project that drew its inspiration from Downs' ethnic roots in Oaxaca, Mexico, and her Mixtec Indian heritage. In Billboard (9/23/00), it was noted that: "She has an exceptional ear, enabling her to sing in Mayan, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Spanish. Downs' passion for her material is conveyed by a voice as exotic as her lyrics. Her vocal range is impressive (three octaves, minimum), and the sensual quality of her singing will leave you breathless."

Less than a year after the critically acclaimed release of Tree of Life, Downs released a second album for Narada — Border (La Linea). Released July, Border is an ambitious collection that introduces Downs' fans to a much greater breadth, stylistically, than they witnessed on her debut CD. Downs takes on the popular Latin cumbia style, assays a number very much in the rumba mode, sings in English, and invokes both American and Mexican folk music for the purpose of bringing attention to the conditions of migrant workers. Downs is very purposeful in her departure from the material that characterized Tree of Life. Border is, among other things, an explicit acknowledgment that her cultural heritage is, in fact, bicultural; that she is the synthesis of her Mixtec mother and her Anglo father, not just biologically, but culturally as well.

"Tree of Life really helped me express that spiritual part in me that I didn't even know about when I was younger," Downs observed. "It was spontaneous. My father was an atheist, and when I studied anthropology at the University of Minnesota, I strayed very far from the Catholic Church and the religious realities of Latin America, but in this record, curiously, I came back to something that I find very centering in my life."

The songs in Tree of Life were inspired by pre-Columbian manuscripts (codices) drawn by Mixtec authors. "These manuscripts were written around 900 A.D. by my mother's ancestors," she said. "They're some of the few manuscripts we have that narrate the history of the Mixtec people. There are many mythological accounts also related there, dealing with the origins of people in Meso-America. In Oaxaca alone there are 16 different Indian ethnic groups that are still alive today. They are not Mayan; they speak totally different languages from the Maya."

Working with these codices was a challenge. Downs, who earned her degree in anthropology at the University of Minnesota, had help from Mexican and American anthropologists and linguists in producing many of the songs we hear on Tree of Life.

"We came up with these stories by interpreting the language and the beautiful metaphors that are in the language and in the accounts of certain characters in the books," she noted. "One of the things I found was that a character like Nine Winds is the same as the mythical Plumed Serpent, only in our culture he was called Nine Winds. He was a mythological personality, but he was also an actual person. There are many accounts in these books of characters who have that name and were important kings or rulers of different regions in Oaxaca. That's one of the things that's so different about these books. Many of these characters are human but they're also gods.

"Anthropologists speculate that this duality was used to legitimate their power. Some of them were real tyrants, and some of them sound like strong characters, including some women."

One of the songs on Tree of Life, "Arbol de la Vida," was inspired by the legendary account of the creation of the Mixtec people. "The Mixtec creation myth concerns this tree located in this little town called Apoala," Downs explained. "It's a desert area, but where the tree was, it's like an oasis. There's a beautiful, big river, kind of coming out of no place and going into the ground. It's a fascinating locale. I really believe in the beauty of our origin being in a tree. There are various interpretations as to what this symbolizes. There's a literal interpretation in which a female face is seen in the trunk of the tree and the branches are her legs, and there's a man coming out from between her legs. Another interpretation sees the tree as a pictographic idea of the family tree of the Mixtec people. The myth begins with two old people; they're the first people to emerge from the tree."
Is this the tree of life?
"Yes," she replied. "This image is also present in Mayan culture and in the Aztec culture. I expect that it's an image that probably persisted all over the Americas.
"You know," she continued, "my thesis in college was about a textile that's made by the Triqui women — one of those 16 Indian peoples in the state of Oaxaca. I'm so fascinated by the many ways one can tell stories in a manner that isn't Western. These Triqui women have these symbols in their textile weaving from pre-Hispanic times that represent things like the star and the tortilla of new corn. These symbols continue to develop with time. For instance, they have a symbol that represents the soldiers who fought in the Revolution, and they continue to create symbols that represent the changes in their lives and in their community.
"Hopefully I can do something with my music that has a similar staying power," she added.
This is an excerpt from issue #96.