[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]
On one importantly specific and one beautifully universal layer to my favorite song on the album.
In this May 2021 post I both highlighted a number of prior posts on Gloria Anzaldúa and her book Borderlands/La Frontera and added some additional thoughts. I’d ask you to check out that post if you would, and then come on back here for a couple of ways in which Springsteen’s “The Aztec Dance” can be put in conversation with that author and text.
Welcome back! I could spend all day listing things I love about Borderlands/La Frontera, but high on the list would have to be Anzaldúa’s use of language, mythology, perspective/narration, and many other stylistic elements to capture the presence of indigenous history, spirituality, sexuality, and more in her identity as a Mexican American woman. In “The Aztec Dance” Springsteen uses a conversation between two Mexican American female characters to do much the same: when teenage Teresa, wearing a traditional flower crown and performing the titular dance at her “high school gym,” righteously complains to her mother that “Ma they call us greaser, they call us wetback/Here in this land that once was ours,” her mother responds (for the rest of the song’s lyrics) with an extensive descriptive of Aztec culture, community, and history. She concludes by recognizing both what has been lost but what endures in her daughter: “Our city gone and left in ruins, they cry bitter tears in another world/But here in this world, my daughter, they have you.” I don’t think even the great Gloria Anzaldúa could have said it any better.
That’s a powerfully specific layer to this wonderful song, and I don’t want to minimize it in any way. But I also believe that this song, like Anzaldúa’s book as well, is an incredible rumination on universal themes of heritage and memory, loss and persistence, that are present for each and every person, family, and community. That’s probably true everywhere, but it’s unquestionably true here in the United States, a nation defined by both the inspiring cross-cultural transformations I traced in my second book and the tragic discriminations I’ve written about throughout my work. In the best and the worst ways, the story of America can make it difficult for us to hold onto the heritages that pre-date our contemporary American experiences and identities, something I’ve thought about a lot when it comes to my own Eastern European Jewish ancestry on my mother’s side for example. But as Springsteen’s beautiful song, and especially its very moving conclusion, reminds us, those heritages are still with us whether we overtly remember them or not—they are literally and figuratively embodied in the young Americans who carry them forward into our vitally diverse future.
Next InyoStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?
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