Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Futuro Conjunto: A Transmedia Ballad

2021; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/asa.2021.0025

2381-4721

Jonathan Leal,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Futuro ConjuntoA Transmedia Ballad Jonathan Leal (bio) History is enacted myth. Myth is remembered story. —Cherríe Moraga, "The Indígena as Scribe" (2011) "What has yesterday done to tomorrow?" —Miguel O'Hara (Spider-Man 2099), in The Amazing Spider-Man #33 (2019) In the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, enavcted myths and remembered stories have a long history with the ballad form. The corrido—a rich cultural tradition that saw its first golden years in the early twentieth century—has for generations offered a frame for communal aspirations, a route into recollection, a thought-form for "love and death."1 Its corridistas, its inspired balladeers, have long relayed and mediated, commemorated and reimagined, enshrined and obliterated—transformed the rough textures of struggle into the world impressions of narrative song. The living archive of those efforts—stories recounted, erasures resisted, melodies dreamed—has long inspired new actions and subversions, new affirmations of memory's thread.2 But what if the corrido, as an index of myth and history and as an act of rendering ephemeral events lasting and intelligible, could function not only as memory but also as prophecy? "What would tomorrow do to yesterday," to invert a desperate observation by character Miguel O'Hara (Spider-Man 2099), if border ballads opened not only doors into [End Page 311] ever-present pasts but also portals into speculated futures?3 What kinds of geographies would be imagined, what acts of heroism portended, what extant histories re-envisioned? From where would such ballads after apocalypse emerge—from beneath what rubble, what undergrounds? Who would sing them? What would they sound like? These questions sparked Futuro Conjunto, a transmedia project of Chicanx speculative regionalism that Rio Grande Valley (RGV) music producer Charlie Vela and I created in collaboration with over thirty borderlands musicians, voice actors, visual artists, and activists. Released on July 1, 2020, the project blends original music, voice acting performances, visual designs, full animations, in-universe artifacts, an immersive website, and behind-the-scenes footage to realize a decolonial, speculative regionalist vision of the much-maligned borderland we all consider home. By speculative regionalism, I mean a fertile conceptual space in part named by the twin faces of the word "speculate": at once to behold, to see before oneself (e.g., Latin specere) and to imagine, to theorize.4 Speculative regionalism might name, then, a set of future-oriented, locally specific imaginative, theoretical, and political practices focused on the entwinement of protention and retention. That is, on how the pasts, presents, and potential futures of a region are not only co-constitutive of one another, contained in one another's multiformal and multiscalar articulations, but also dynamic, unfixed, and ever evolving in relation to continual planetary reconfigurations. Conceptually and artistically, this notion of speculative regionalism builds on existing critical considerations of its two constitutive terms, speculative and regionalism. Concerning the speculative, our concept is inspired by the work of theorists including Paula Moya and Lesley Larkin, whose concept of the [End Page 312] "ethnospeculative" foregrounds comparative racial and ethnic approaches to historically informed futurities, as well as by Catherine S. Ramírez, who developed the foundational concept of "Chicanafuturism": a category proximate to Afrofuturism and defined as "cultural production that attends to cultural transformations resulting from new and everyday technologies (including their detritus); that excavates, creates, and alters narratives of identity, technology, and the future; that interrogates the promises of science and technology; and that redefines humanism and the human."5 What we call speculative regionalism also resonates with Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and Ben Olguín's notion of "Latin@futurism," developed in their celebrated collection of Latinx speculative arts, Altermundos, as well as with Elda María Román's key theorization of the "realist-speculative convergence": "the point at which real life catches up to or surpasses the speculative."6 Concerning the keyword regionalism: our thinking here is also in part guided by the "critical regionalism" introduced first by Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in "The Grid and the Pathway" (1981), then developed by Kenneth Frampton in "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance" (1983), and then still further developed by Fredric Jameson, Cheryl...