The Brooklyn Rail

The culture wars are back. The term was regularly applied in the late-eighties and early-nineties to reference clashes between liberal and conservative groups over government support for controversial artworks. It calls to mind the intensely provocative photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, as well as the loaded performance art of the NEA Four: Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, who in 1990 had grants to produce their work rescinded by the government agency that awarded them. There were outraged protests about freedom of speech, as well as a simmering joy for some at the various assaults on propriety, as with Finley’s legendary performances, which led one cultural commentator to note, “Yams. They’re not just for Thanksgiving anymore.” It also prompted the quaint, pearl-clutching response of the late Senator Jesse Helms’s wife Dot to Mapplethorpe’s work: “Lord have mercy, Jesse, I’m not believing this.”

In 1992, arch-conservative presidential candidate Pat Buchanan laid out the terms starkly, saying “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.” Yet for all the high-toned, would-be gravity of this pronouncement, the stakes now are considerably higher. Whereas the earlier battles had much to do with state support of the arts, the current battles reach into nearly every fundamental aspect of American life. Culture is just one front among many on which this war is fought, and the others—starting with a basic respect for the rule of law—can appear in such dire shape as to minimize an attack on the arts. But they are all crucial steps on the path to full-blown autocracy.

When Trump dismissed the board and president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and installed himself as chairman, it smacked of Cultural Revolution tactics in China, though with a distinctly American gloss; speaking of its new programming, he declared, “We’re going to make it hot. And we made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.” First up, according to the center’s newly appointed interim Executive Director, Richard Grenell, will be “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”

But this is about much more than whether or not such a program can rightfully be said to “make it hot,” or simple revulsion at the whole enterprise, or even the triumphal, Christian nationalist trampling of the separation of church and state. Dictating what constitutes culture, and defining it as that which supports the ruling ideology, the administration is directly attacking freedom of expression. This is clearly in line with the assaults on judicial independence, affordable (and sane) health care, environmental policy, national borders, political alliances, and the rest. These overt shock-and-awe tactics have many citizens shaking their heads in astonished outrage. Everyone seems to be wondering how much more of it we can take. Like Dot Helms, we’re just not believing this.

Of course, you can’t fight a culture war, or any other kind, without an enemy. Although anyone who doesn’t accede to the President’s dictates could be said to fall into that category, he seems to hold a special contempt for Mexicans. He has ranted about their being rapists and murderers, tried to steal naming rights for the Gulf of Mexico, threatened and occasionally imposed tariffs, and blamed the country for allowing the drug trade to flourish (never mind the never-ending American demand for the product).

It was into this often hostile national environment that the Mexico City-born vocalist Magos Herrera recently presented her art. In a concert held at National Sawdust to celebrate twenty-five years of living and making recordings in New York, she ranged free over cultures and languages, incorporating English, Spanish, and Portuguese into a dynamic program. Herrera had as her collaborators members of The Knights, the extraordinary chamber orchestra put together by Colin and Eric Jacobson, whose luscious string sound created a counterpoint and firm undergirding for her music. She brings a jazz musician’s sense of interplay to her style, and led the whole strong ensemble, including guitarist Vinicius Gomes, with grace and precision. She featured three fellow vocalists in the show—Theo Bleckmann of Germany, Chiara Civello from Italy, and Melissa Stylianou from Canada—that only extended her reach, and brought different colorations to the sound of the human voice.

It was not so long ago, after all, that celebrating the art of different cultures was the natural outgrowth of music in our country. After all, music is known as the universal language, and recognizing its different paths and ways of growing and recombining fit our national narrative. One of the abrupt shocks of a nativist, isolationist vision of politics is its corrosion of this narrative. Yet Herrera and her fellow transnational musicians continue to resist this approach. She follows her passions, and conveys them admirably.

Recently Herrera collaborated with National Sawdust co-founder and artistic director Paola Prestini on Primero Sueño, which was presented in four performances at the Met Cloisters. Directed as a processional opera, one that moved audiences through the spaces there, it took as its text a poem from 1692 by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Sor Juana was born in Mexico and mostly educated at home. She only enlarged her studies by entering a convent. There she began to write poetry that explored advanced beliefs informed by freedom of choice. Primero Sueño advances a complex argument about the relationship between the soul and the body, and provides a literary examination of a woman’s struggle to reconcile the two. For her example and her work, she is often cited as an early and important purveyor of feminist thought.

Herrera herself has broken through traditional boundaries, and expanded her reach to include engagement with various political entities. She is a spokesperson for UN Women for UNiTE, a campaign to end violence against women, and HeForShe, a campaign for gender equality. Herrera pays a special, fierce attention to the subjective experience of female consciousness. In the surging “Niña,” she creates a setting for a work of that name by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, which begins, “Between the afternoon that won’t go away / And the night that wants to come soon / there’s the look of a girl.” Herrera seems to embody this self-possessed, anonymous figure, who is animated by her curiosity about the world: “The girl puts away her notebook and her writing, and / her whole being is condensed in her staring eyes.” She engages with the world, with infinite possibility, and leaves herself—and the world—richer for it.

The idea of the world as a treasure house of ideas and experiences is fundamentally at odds with one of the world as nothing more than an arena for competition. The latter view is fatally stunted by its lack of imagination, its zero-sum view of human experience. In that way, the fantasy of American exceptionalism is self-abnegating. If we can’t understand the value of other viewpoints, then our own beliefs have no range, no access to the greater good. And unless we are prepared to move from a warring state to some form of a peaceable co-existence, we will never truly enjoy our earthly inheritance. Our only hope of waking up is to start dreaming in full, vivid color.