Singing Our Way to Freedom (Paul Espinosa, 2018)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Singing Our Way to Freedom by Paul Espinosa Karen Mary Davalos (bio) Singing Our Way to Freedom. Paul Espinosa, 2018. Espinosa Productions. 87 mins. Writer, producer, and director of Singing Our Way to Freedom, Paul Espinosa offers an important history of Chicano musician Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez. This documentary is an intimate life story of Sanchez, from his childhood in Blythe, California, to the pivotal moments that crystalize his consciousness and musical trajectory. Truly a life history visual narrative, the film ends with the National Endowment for the Arts ceremony to recognize Sanchez as a National Heritage Fellow in 2013, three years before his death. Narrated by Alma Martinez, the documentary appeals to audiences of American history, ethnic studies, social justice movements, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and labor studies. It is also a complement to the scholarship about the role of the visual arts in the Chicano Movement, particularly since those narratives favor the binary that artists must choose between the market (read success) and politics. Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez’s music proves otherwise: he consistently made music in support of social justice while fostering broad appeal among diverse audiences and transforming people’s lives. Singing Our Way to Freedom is an excellent story about the cyclical formation of a politicized identity. Espinosa is able to use the format of the life history narrative while punctuating the moments that reinforce Sanchez’s political consciousness. By emphasizing the cyclical reiterations of Sanchez’s critical awareness of himself and his Mexican American community, the documentary threads and builds on the several moments during which Sanchez learns to identify as a Chicano or as a pocho. Espinosa points to this subjectivity as a “third space” that is neither aquí o allá, illuminating the complex, transnational, and durational experiences of self-determination. In this way, the intimate family home movies of Sanchez and his siblings playing in their yard and also posing for the camera indicate that self-determination begins at home, not just at the protest or rally. Similarly, long before the Chicano Movement, Sanchez was witnessing and celebrating microvic-tories of self-determination in the schoolyard. His retelling of the widely viewed StoryCorps recording that animated his elementary school memory of “Facundo the Great”—the one Mexican child whose name was not Anglicized by the teachers and school administrators—reveals the children’s revelry over Facundo’s ability to [End Page 253] retain his name. Other moments, such as when Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta visit Blythe during their tour of the California Central Valley, allow viewers to witness Sanchez’s growing attention to music as a pedagogical and political tool. As further reinforcement of Sanchez’s desire to create music that inspires, viewers learn that it was immediately after the 1973 musical festival for Latin American protest music that Sanchez decided to create a new band, Los Alacranes Mojados, although Espinosa does not specify why the previous musicians do not follow Sanchez. Was it an artistic or ideological split? At this and other moments, Espinosa gives clues that there is more to this man’s story. For example, viewers learn that Sanchez’s mother taught him to harmonize as a child and that she would sing with her brothers who played guitar. Yet, Sanchez’s sister describes their father as a traditional patriarch who relegated women and girls to the domestic sphere. Since Sanchez’s wife never speaks in the documentary, Espinosa leaves viewers to conclude that Sanchez may have been the same. A life of protest music did little to transform household and gender politics. But we cannot be too sure of this interpretation. A similar gap appears in the documentary when Sanchez’s family and colleagues enlist the familiar narrative of artistic sacrifice, but Sanchez only half-heartedly supports this rhetoric, focusing instead on his contentment and only briefly providing a tale about self-doubt. Espinosa is careful to record Sanchez’s awareness of his role as a pedagogue and performer. For instance, Sanchez tells the story of the battle for Chicano Park in San Diego’s Barrio Logan. He states that picket lines can be “boring,” so he and his friends brought their guitars, turning the mobilization into a...