Sarah Lawrence College DigitalCommons@SarahLawrence Women's History Theses Women’s History Graduate Program 11-2018 Game Changers & Scene Makers: Black & Brown Women of the Punk Underground Courtney Aucone Sarah Lawrence College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.slc.edu/womenshistory_etd Part of the Women's History Commons Recommended Citation Aucone, Courtney, "Game Changers & Scene Makers: Black & Brown Women of the Punk Underground" (2018). Women's History Theses. 37. https://digitalcommons.slc.edu/womenshistory_etd/37 This Thesis - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Women’s History Graduate Program at DigitalCommons@SarahLawrence. It has been accepted for inclusion in Women's History Theses by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@SarahLawrence. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Game Changers & Scene Makers: Black & Brown Women of the Punk Underground Courtney Aucone Thesis Seminar Dr. Mary Dillard December 6, 2018 Submitted in partial completion of the Master of Arts Degree at Sarah Lawrence College, December 2018 Table of Contents: Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………….…......1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………….…..2 v A Note on Methodology…………………………………………………………………………………21 Chapter I: “A Wave of History”…………………………………………………………………………... 26 Chapter II: The Underground…………………………………………………………………………….. 51 Chapter III: “Somos Chulas, No Somos Pendejas”: Negotiating Femininity & Power in the Underground……………………………..…………………………………………………………………70 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………91 AppendiX i: Song Lyrics………………………………………………………………………………………96 AppendiX ii: Zine Covers & Artists……………………………………………………………………..117 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………….126 Acknowledgements I have so many people to thank for getting me to this finish line. First I want to shout out my mom, Alicia Anabel Santos, for going above and beyond in her support for this thesis and my education in general. I honestly would not have made it to the end without her loving urgency so thank you mom this one is for you!!! Dad, thank you for all your advice. I would like to thank my brilliant advisor, Dr. Mary Dillard for her patience, time, support, and keen eye. This thesis would not be half of what it is if not for you graciously pushing me in all the right directions. I see everything that you give and I will be forever grateful. Thanks to Tara James for her support of this program, and all of its affiliations, especially us, the students. To my cohort, it has been a privilege to share the round table with you all and to bear witness to your academic growth. I would like to give a very special shout out to Gwendolyn Fowler for being a constant source of knowledge and insight outside and inside of the classroom. Velvet Ross, you inspire me. I hope to one day be as generous, thoughtful, talented, and genuine as you are. Sarah Ahmad, I’m glad we met. Thank you for the passion and understanding that you brought to class. Sarah Lawrence is lucky to have you. Thank you Maggie Craig, my former manager and queer sci-fi writer extraordinaire for taking the time to read some of my stuff and providing feedback. Much gratitude to SATE for her time and insightfulness, which she offered so generously. I only wish I had more time to mine through our oral history. Thank you for reminding me of the importance of feeling and emotion in making and consuming music. Women like you are the reason why I do this. Victoria Ruiz, thank you for agreeing to speak with me not once but twice. Thank you for the enthusiasm and passion that you brought to this work and that you bring to Downtown Boys’ music. Thanks for making me a better scholar and punk fan by sharing your ample knowledge and rich personal eXperiences, which, as you’ll see, has truly become the heart and soul of this thesis. You eXemplify a rapidly evolving generation of young people that is revamping the way we execute the nuances of our politics and I am so here for the anger, aggression, and dismantling of toxic structures of it all. Thank you to LaShonda Katrice Barnett for inspiring me to apply to this program, which benefitted me in more ways than I can thank her for. Thanks to the Graveley’s for being my second family. Thank you Lyde Sizer and Priscilla Murolo for teaching me so much. Big shout out to the librarians and archivists at Fales Library Special Collections and to every librarian who went out of their way to help me find what I needed in the archives. A special thank you to BEN ORTIZ, assistant curator of Cornell University’s gem of a Hip Hop Collection for his enthusiastic support of this project. Its people like you who make the research process fun. Finally, I’d like to thank the Black and Brown women of punk, obviously, without whom this thesis could not eXist. My hope is that folks will read this and feel moved to add to the scholarship of Black and Brown women who have been omitted from the record for the neXt generations. 2 INTRODUCTION: I have had a life-long love affair with music. I feel loyalty to it. My commitment to the sounds that sustained me increases with time. My mother raised me on the mostly passive and tame voices of the women musicians she and her mother have enjoyed from Milly Quezada1 to Sarah McLachlan2. Discovering the aggression and boldness of punk was a total revelation to me, teaching me things about self-confidence and femininity that influenced the woman I became. As a young Brown/Dominican/Italian woman navigating rigid gender roles that left little room for individuality and variation, punk provided the free pass my pre-teen self had been waiting for, allowing me to transcend the restrictions that silenced my voice and suppressed the very qualities that made me human: my anger and need to be heard. My personal relationship to the music is the motivation behind choosing to pen a history of Black and Brown women in punk. Through my research and the oral histories that I have collected I am hoping to argue the forces, both emotional and societal, that inspire Black and Brown women today to become involved in the underground music scenes of Providence, RI, New York City, and to a lesser extent, 1Milly Quezada, my Abuela’s favorite merengue artist, sings of love and heartbreak. Released on her album Vive in 1998, “Para Darte Mi Vida” was a commercial success, peaking at number 5 on Billboard’s Latin Pop Airplay chart and number 4 on the Hot Latin Tracks chart, http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/latin/7540986/elvis-crespo-top-10-hot-latin-songs- poll. While “Para Darte Mi Vida” is technically Quezada’s track featuring Elvis Crespo, I had to visit Crespo’s profile page on Billboard’s website to find detailed information and statistics on the song itself. Considering that the song was a commercial success, it is curious that Billboard’s artist profile of Quezada would omit a major marker of her success such as this. See appendix i for song lyrics. 2 My mother played Sarah McLachlan around the house when I was growing up. Like Quezada, much of McLachlan’s music is about love and heartbreak. “Ice Cream” happens to be mom’s karaoke song. See appendix i of this thesis for song lyrics. 3 Toronto Ontario.3 I consider the ways these two things interact and manifest within the scene while also discussing the ways that Black and Brown women have impacted their local punk scenes from 2000-present day. I will do this in relation to their influence on how the scene developed and changed turning it into what it is today. In this thesis I eXplore the ways Black and Brown women navigate the underground on an individual level as they encounter seXism, economic oppression, and racism in the real world and in the smaller worlds of the music scenes that function as a second home to the youths who created them.4 My oral histories serve to highlight the ways Black and Brown women have been ignored in the music scholarship. Ignoring these women contributes to our erasure from the written history of Black and Brown women in punk.5 The scholarship of punk is scarce. Much of the scholarship to date fails to note the ways that women of color eXperience the same social isolation as white women punks or others but in ways unique to their experiences as people who encounter both seXism and racism at the same time. Scholars and writers of women’s music history effectively address gender discrimination but fail to offer an analysis of race as it applies to the Black/Brown musicians they write about in their work. This serves as an injustice to these women because it lowers the bar for the way in which we write their stories and in turn lessens the quality of what we as 3 Time limitations kept me from using this oral history in the thesis as much as I would have liked to. 4 Stephen Duncombe describes the scene as “the loose consideration of self-consciously ‘alternative’ publications, bands, shows, radio stations, cafes, bookstores, and people that make up modern bohemia.” Stephen Duncombe, "Let's All Be Alienated Together: Zines and the Making of Underground Community," In Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America, edited by Joe Alan Austin and Michael Willard, 427-51, NY: NYU Press, 1998. Underground music scenes serve as a safe haven for folks who may not have anywhere else to go. They are thus attractive to inner city youth who may be eXperiencing homelessnes5 Much like the details of Milly Quezada’s album and chart-topping track.