The Warrior Voice of Mexican-American Lila Downs Mark MacNamara - San Francisco Classical Voice
go to original November 19, 2015

La Llorona Lila Downs SF Symphony Dia de los muertos (jewelspalace)

Lila Downs is the woman of “multiple voices.” As a New York Times reviewer once put it: Her voice stretches “from an airborne near-falsetto down to a forthright alto and a sultry, emotive contralto.” Downs, a Mexican-American, is also a fiery voice of political activism in Latin America and her songs are filled with the images and ironies of daily struggle.

These voices all came together recently with Downs’ debut with the San Francisco Symphony. The Dia de los Muertos program included songs from her new album, Balas y Chocolate. The album cover includes a mesmerizing photo of Downs, who is often shown to be sultry, distant, or bemused. But in this photograph, she brings another projection, that of a warrior goddess.

...Downs noted recently, in an article in El Tecolote, a San Francisco neighborhood newspaper, that during this year’s Dia de los Muertos she was honoring her grandmother and father, as the Mazatec curandera and shaman, Maria Sabrina, who died in 1985; and three of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School who disappeared on September 26, 2014. Three have been confirmed dead; the fate of the others is unknown, but Downs did not include them in her ceremony, in hope they are still alive.

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