With melodic, rhythmic, and lyrical brilliance, Memory and Return uses the poetics of place and the meaning of memory as points of entry into a magisterial work of collective witness, reflection, rumination, and regeneration. Recorded in a studio in the heart of East Los Angeles -- with lyrics and melodies composed by East L.A. native Martha Gonzalez -- and graced by a sonic landscape co-created with Eastside and Monterey Park denizens Juan Perez and Tylana Enomoto, Memory and Return draws on the artistic mastery and personal memory of people from different genders and generations whose histories on the Eastside span decades. Produced and curated by Quetzal Flores and reflecting his long, enduring, and deep commitments to the people and cultures of East Los Angeles, participants include Ofelia Esparza (b1932), David Hidalgo (b.1948), Martha Gonzalez (b. 1972), Juan Perez (b.1974), Tylana Enomoto (b. 1977 Monterey Park), and Sandino Gonzalez-Flores (b.2005).

The songs on this album blend beautifully and memorably the incomparable vocal power and sonic textures of Martha Gonzalez and David Hidalgo, the poignant melodies and accents provided on violin, Hammond organ and other keyboards by Tylana Enomoto, the driving propulsion of the rhythms that Juan Perez produces on the bass and Turbo Diddley box guitars, the virtuosity of David Hidalgo on electric guitar and drums, and the eloquence and wisdom of Ofelia Esparza. Yet, as is so often the case in instances of convivial co-creation, the collective accompaniment and improvisation on this album combine to produce a sum that is even greater than its individual parts. Its musical figures and devices and song lyrics reflect and represent lives replete with loss as well as love, with antagonism as well as affection and affiliation, and with never resolved ambivalence tempered by enduring resolve.

The East Los Angeles remembered and returned to in the songs on Memory and Return is both a personally remembered place and a perpetually recreated collective project. Songs composed, orchestrated, played, and sung by people whose experiences on the Eastside of Los Angeles span the decades from the 1930s to the present evoke through music a wide range of neighborhood spaces that have been sites of both cultural coalescence and conflict. East Los Angeles has been a crossroads of countries, colors, customs, and cuisines, a place where religions and races interact, where strangers who speak different languages find themselves laboring and learning together. Memory and Return shows that a community’s history contains solidarities of sameness as well as dynamics of difference.

There are many different iterations of East Los Angeles recalled and revisited by these artists. Ofelia Esparza remembers a world before the freeways ripped through it, a neighborhood made up of many different ethnicities, races, religions, and languages. David Hidalgo witnessed the rise and fall of the Chicano Movement and learned his craft from works of art and expressive culture testifying to its consciousness. Martha Gonzalez, Juan Perez, and Tylana Enomoto came of age at a time when hip hop, break dancing, and Mexican musics reflected the eastside’s transformations and the Reagan era’s reduced spending on education and social services, an era of increased migration from Mexico and Central America marked by economic restructuring, political repression, immigration restriction, and mass incarceration. The eastside that Sandino Gonzalez-Flores has experienced is one shaped by climate catastrophe and artificial austerity, but also by determined and resolute political and cultural mobilizations by young people refusing the unlivable destinies meted out to them by neoliberalism and racial capitalism. At the age of 91 Ofelia Esparza’s memories and dreams about interpersonal love as an infinitely renewing source of both hurt and hope are both similar and different from the observations and aspirations of 18 year old Sandino Gonzalez-Flores. As they accompany David Hidalgo singing about his older brother’s loss of memory and loss of life, Juan Perez grapples with his eighty-plus year old mother’s death from dementia while Tylana Enomoto gives thanks that her nonagenarian Aunt Mary retains her full faculties.

Yet the same history of East Los Angeles that is characterized by rupture, interruption, and loss, also manifests continuities. The lyrics of the songs on Memory and Return reflect the resourcefulness of people who turn ambivalence into agency, who find beauty in neon sunsets and oil rainbows of a polluted city, who both romanticize and lament the past as they narrate, improvise, and recreate their lives. The pasts to which these songs journey are not solid, static, fixed, or finite entities waiting to be found, but rather dynamically remembered and remade constructions that get forged anew every time they are recreated. As Gonzalez composed the songs for Memory and Return, she recognized that her feelings about East Los Angeles included both longings for the past and hauntings by it. “The more it changes the more I lament, but the more I love it as well,” she observes. That ambivalence, and acknowledgment of both its paralyzing and generative potentials, is not confined to her personally, but rather provides part of a socially shared and collectively experienced relationship to sometimes debilitating struggles with racism, sexism, and class oppression. Yet Memory and Return also resounds with the exhilaration of connections and collective struggles for dignity, freedom, and justice.

Remembering and forgetting are not just things that people do, they are things done to them. The ordinary practices of racial capitalism routinely dispossess and displace people. They impose forced forgetting on people for whom East Los Angeles has been a place of arrival. Migrants, refugees, and exiles are treated as people without history, as individuals who must uncritically accept and embrace the premises and practices of a society built on their subordination and exploitation. Yet people deprived of material resources often become stunningly resourceful. Deprived of secure places in which to live, they deploy music and other forms of expressive culture as homes from which they cannot be evicted. Policed and harassed in public places, they create discursive spaces through music, movement, dress, display, style, and speech. Ordered to forget the traditions of their ancestors and to disavow the cultures and communities that have nurtured and sustained them, they make music that maps their pasts and presents, that constitutes a museum of remembered injuries, experiences, aspirations, ideas, and accomplishments. Memory enacts the miracle of bringing the dead back to life, of reconnecting communities that have been torn apart, and that affirm the right and insist on the necessity of forging a fulfilled future. Memory and Return presents an acoustic inventory of tools for personal and collective liberation.

Martha Gonzalez’s eloquent and evocative lyrics call on us to hear voices calling from an earth and commons walking toward darkness, while recognizing as well the children fighting for a better future with spirits emerging and fading, yet abiding. The poignant remembrances of lost loved ones by Ofelia Esparza in “Al Soñar Que Estas Conmigo” and David Hidalgo in “El” document parts of the past that never ever go away for people now seen as elders, while the evocation of the climate crisis in “Spirits Emerging” that David Hidalgo sings about reveals the ruinous destruction of the earth that threatens to foreclose the future. In “Truth and Dreams” and “Hold Me Over” Martha Gonzalez explores the nettling pull of the past on the present with lyrics that describe that while “nothing stays the same and cells rearrange,” part of our present is the memory of waiting for the change that never came. The past emerges as both a solid anchor and an unreal illusion in the lyrics that Hidalgo sings on ‘The Past” and “L.A. River Flora and Fauna.” Yet powerful memories from the past inspire and empower the present in “Afro Azul/Chequerao” which honors the “mixed-race and dark-skinned voices” of the city and how they continue to inspire love “even if you never see them again.” The steady relentless percussion undergirding the song and the grito inflected vocals testify to the defiant determination of people who refuse to give up and to the importance of people who believe “lo que estaba no termina” (what was once there does not end.” This dogged determination in Afro Azul/Chequerao is the other side of the coin of exhaustion articulated in “Hold Me Over” where the “bloody fist being held up by a tired arm, weary from so much surviving, weary from so much fighting.”

The memories and returns in these songs are both intensely personal and individual but also profoundly public and collective. “El” relates the experiences of Hidalgo’s older brother Elmo, a veteran of war who lost his memory from a near fatal fall, but found things coming back to him when taken to a war museum where he recognized different planes and their special features. The lyrics make a Spanish language pun from the symmetry between the name Elmo and the article “el” in “el momento” – the moment, while building on a double meaning in saying “el voló y se acordó” – he flew and remembered – the flying being both the fall and his memories of the airplanes of warfare. The tragedy in Hidalgo’s family is intensely personal, but it has affinities with the many other stories that need to be told about those like Elmo who went from “the neighborhood to the war.”

Attention to memory and return as part of the survival strategies of oppressed people is not a new concern for these musicians of Quetzal. As Russell Rodriguez explains in his liner notes to the 2011 album Imaginaries the musicians on this recording have long conceived of public art and music as “platforms from which to voice marginalized people’s desires, opinions, and resistance to the conditions in which they find themselves.” Similarly, Alex E. Chavez’s liner notes for 2021 album Puentes Sonoros emphasize its temporal dimensions, its envisioning of a utopia that lies not in a treasured past or imagined future, but in “an eternal and imagined sonorous present full of intensity, full of memories of where you’ve been and desires of where you might go.” Martha Gonzalez declares that her memory is long, that traveling into the past is necessary for moving into the future. Quetzal Flores maintains that knowing where you are from builds respect for where other people come from, which enables healing processes and opens up possibilities for lives that are interconnected and based on humanity rather than on greed or marketing.

Memory and Return is another beautifully conceived and masterfully executed recording from the virtuosos featured on it. Yet its acoustic inventory is also impetus for each of us to get ourselves ready for the challenges that we face because of what racial capitalism has done to the planet and its people. As the lyrics of “Afro Azul/Chequerao” maintain “what was once there does not end.” People consigned to unlivable destinies have long found ways to thrive and survive not by imitating their oppressors, but instead by embracing what Mary Pat Brady calls “multiple proximities, shared vulnerabilities, and mutual indebtedness and obligation” -- qualities that Memory and Return envisions and enacts so brilliantly.

— George Lipsitz