Beyond the Screams

Latina/O Punkeros

The punk performance aesthetic celebrates “hard-core,” a rock music style that Sorrondeguy described as “really fast, more aggressive and abrasive than rhythmic.” ² In the punk scene, participants value freedom of expression unfettered by convention. Some punks mark their bodies with colored, stylized hair (such as mohawks) or shaved heads, tattoos, piercings, heavy boots, chains, and casual clothing. Others, especially vegans, pursue a minimalist aesthetic and refuse to wear any leather. ³ The punk ethos of self-presentation can be so strong that participants may be criticized for inappropriate appearance or actions. By the 1990s more women began organizing their own bands, national conventions, and zines, protesting the way they were being “squeezed out” of the punk scene, which was sometimes seen as violent, racist, homophobic, nihilistic, or male-centered. ⁴ Participants in this scene, then, had to negotiate their acceptance, and not fitting in had serious consequences.

Punks embrace the ethic of do-it-yourself (DIY), which disavows materialism and consumerism and the individualist fame of rock stars. They often produce their own music, sometimes on vinyl records rather than compact discs, and they produce their own T-shirts and memorabilia for limited distribution. ⁵ Rather than lose artistic and financial control by marketing their products through intermediaries, they distribute them through the Internet, by bartering, or by selling at greatly reduced cost directly to the audience at performances. This DIY approach reflects the fact that Latino punks are marginalized economically and have limited access to production and distribution facilities. Indeed, Pacini Hernandez, Fernández-L’Hoeste, and Zolov (2004) argue that the musical practices of most Latinos residing within the United States—as well as those in small Latin American countries—are virtually excluded from the U.S. and Latin American culture industry controlled by conglomerates.

Michelle Habell-Pallán (2004: 163) argues that the appeal of punk is twofold: “The DIY (do-it-yourself) sensibility at the core of punk musical subcultures found resonance with the practices of rasquache, a Chicana/o cultural practice of ‘making do’ with limited resources.” Rasquachismo is an aesthetic sensibility that delineates the vernacular of the downtrodden, is irreverent and spontaneous and draws from barrio stance and style and an outdoor theater tradition that relies on improvisation (Mesa-Bains, 1988). Habell-Pallán (2004: 163) suggests that “punk’s critique of the status quo—of poverty, sexuality, class inequality, and war—spoke directly to working-class East Los Angeles youth.” I will show that punk’s multifaceted critiques extend far beyond East Los Angeles and produce transnational imaginaries within the punk scene.

The Latina/o punk scene began forming in the 1970s through contestation over performers’ exclusion from mainstream punk, in which the performers and audience members were predominantly white and often insensitive to racial issues. Latina/o punks, as represented in Beyond the Screams/Más allá de los gritos (Sorrondeguy, 1998), present didactic political messages that denounce racism toward Mexican migrants and call for pan-Latino, multiracial political solidarity among people of different generations so as to contest nativism and the exploitation of Latinos in U.S. society.

The film’s writer, director, and producer, Martín Sorrondeguy, is a migrant from Uruguay whose parents brought him to the United States when he was two years old. His mother, an avowed socialist, left Uruguay before the coup in 1973. ⁶ As did many other Latin American migrants, his parents stressed the maintenance of Uruguayan culture. Sorrondeguy grew up in a predominantly Mexican barrio (Pilsen) in Chicago, where he did not feel excluded for being ethnically different (Uruguayan): “Actually, with the young kids in the neighborhood, we really bonded. I felt I was a part of as opposed to ‘Where you from?’” He recalls a life with other Uruguayans and Latin Americans performing the nueva canción (new song) ⁷ popularized by the1960s protest movements in people’s homes and at one point hearing the renowned Los Olimareños perform in a fellow Uruguayan’s basement. ⁸ His mother had a huge influence on his nascent politics: “Early on, we would just talk shit about politicians all the time. She hated Reagan. My mom was ripping on [George H. W.] Bush early on, she was, like, ‘This son of a bitch was involved in the CIA when they came into Uruguay, and they practiced torture on Uruguayos.’ So it was really a lot. And for me, going punk made too much sense.” Sorrondeguy was attracted to punk because it represented oppositional politics, particularly in the display on the body. Yet, like other Latinos, he was in the minority among punks. He admitted that when he first began frequenting punk performances as a teenager he would think, “I hope I don’t get beat up tonight.” He left the punk scene over a political difference—they started charging so much for their performances that disenfranchised youth could no longer afford to attend. In addition, the increased visibility of skinhead violence at punk shows was distasteful to him.

Not your Average Punk Band

In 1991, Sorrondeguy and his friends formed the band Los Crudos. Its name literally means “those who are crude, coarse, raw, or hungover,” but it was chosen for more metaphorical reasons: “Being hungover means we were so inundated with everything that was happening in the neighborhood, we were overwhelmed with it. So we felt we would compare it to a hangover, to being hungover. We were just trying to see clearly.” Sorrondeguy describes the band’s purpose: “We were on this quest to find people who had similarities and thought like us and were really into radical politics and coming together and doing the bands together. And that’s what sets us apart from the average punk scene. It was important to stress that.” Los Crudos included José Casas on guitar, Juan Jiménez on bass, Ebro Virumbrales on drums, and Martín Sorrondeguy, who performed vocals. The band collectively composed songs, wrote lyrics, and performed until 1998.

Los Crudos’s lyrics were bilingual, incorporating Spanish, English, and code switching between the two. Grammatical errors in their lyrics clearly mark them as speakers of Spanish as a second language. “Tiempos de la miseria” (Times of Misery) expresses the band’s political poetics in relation to Latinos: ⁹

We all suffer from the same illness / It’s called: the government / Enough of people living in misery! There is not enough money to maintain a family / We can’t live like people, which people? The rich who are with the government and the press / They tell us to buy! Buy! Buy! / They hide problems and don’t show the truth / They think if we don’t see the problems/then the problems don’t exist / They can go to hell because they are liars / They can’t hide the pain and suffering / of everyone who works so they can survive.

By using Spanish, Los Crudos affirmed its value as a public language, disrupting the hegemony of English-language use.

Sorrondeguy recalls their first performance, a benefit in a basement:

We did a song called “Las madres lloran” (The Mothers Cry). It starts with this scream in the beginning, and I just went into it and the whole place was just, like, Huh! [makes face of astonishment]. And it was over after about a minute, and there was this moment of silence, and everyone was going, “Augh!” Then I started talking about what the songs are about. And an older guy was, like, “Oh, yeah? What are you going to do to change it?” I said, “What are you going to do to change it?” It became this back-and-forth: “What are we going to do to change it?” And this dialogue just started from the get-go. It started taking more form and shape as we went along. As we went on it became a really big part of what we did with the band; there was probably more talking than there was playing.

Indeed, in a video provided by Cecilia Brennan of Los Crudos’s tour in 1995, Sorrondeguy talked about political issues such as Proposition 187, domestic violence, and homophobia. Once he read a racist commentary about Mexicans, dated 1930, as a springboard for discussing the continuation of racism and nativism in the 1990s. Members of the audience shouted out, “Fuck Wilson!” (a reference to the then-governor of California, who was critical of undocumented migrants who “just keep coming”). One of Los Crudos’s songs, “Poco a Poco” (Little by Little), speaks directly to the undocumented and makes clear that they are part of Latina/o imagined community:

Little by little / They won’t let you forget / That they lost, the border is the memento / Five generations and little by little / They are losing something more / Little by little they strip you, little by little / Leaving you bare, almost nothing, little by little / Your existence is a threat / The border scares them / because you live in the face / of the assault that this government represents / Your blood is our blood / Your enemy is our enemy / Your struggle is our struggle/ We are all in the same war.

Reaching out to the undocumented was not a stretch, as Sorrondeguy recalls it: “At one point almost all of us were housing people who were coming over [from Latin America].” A record producer decided to put together a compilation of punkeros in the early 1990s; however, he ran into a glitch when he approached Los Crudos about participating, as Sorrondeguy explains: “I talked to him on the phone and I said, ‘None of the bands in Chicago—Los Crudos, Arma Contra Arma, Youth Against Fascism—none of us can be part of your compilation because you want social security numbers and there’s at least one person in every band who doesn’t have one, who is illegal.’” None of the Chicago punk bands participated in the compilation in solidarity with undocumented punkeros. In the liner notes for a CD that includes a Los Crudos discography (2002), one of the band members wears a T-shirt with the title of one of its songs: “¿Ilegal y que?” (I’m Undocumented and So What?), which apparently was very popular. Thus, in defending the rights of undocumented migrants, Los Crudos was defending fellow punkeros.

Sorrondeguy organized the first punk show in Pilsen, a benefit at Casa Aztlán, and the reception was positive: “It wasn’t just a punk audience, it was a lot of neighborhood people.” They did fundraisers for the Zapatistas with other performers such as folkloric dance groups:

I started hearing all these stories from kids coming up to me saying things like “My mom wears your shirt all the time; she loves your shirt.” Or one kid came up to me and said, “My grandfather hates your music, but he loves your lyrics; he’s into what you guys are doing.” It felt good to hear that people in the community were responding to us.

He recalls the early 1990s as a time when identification had become nuanced in response to increased migration from Latin America: “In Chicago, a lot of people would identify specifically by country first; they’ll say, ‘I’m Mexicano’ or ‘I’m from Uruguay,’ beforehand, the specific before they go umbrella with ‘Latino.’” However, nativist politics pushed them toward pan-Latino, cross-generational collaboration, as Sorrondeguy narrates in his film: “What started happening politically in the U.S. pissed us off so much—and we were feeling targeted, and we were feeling cornered as a community—that we began to write songs about it.” He considered the solidarity between the undocumented and U.S.-born Latinos unprecedented: “This was the first that I had ever seen what I was calling ‘generational Latinos,’ ones who have been living in the U.S. for several generations, actually coming together with recent immigrated Latinos and Mexicanos and forming bands and really forming a scene in the community.”

There is debate about whether the Latino punk scene is a site of dialogue or contestation among practitioners. Mike Amezcua (2004), for example, characterizes the punk scene as a progressive space for constant dialogue about the politics of race and gender. Michelle Habell-Pallán (2004: 168), however, argues that “sexism did exist in the punk scene” and some women were told outright that they did not belong because their clothing was too feminine. However, Latinas found ways to contest sexism and created discursive spaces where punkeras reimagined their worlds and constructed themselves as empowered: “The visual and sonic language of punk subculture allowed them to express their private rage about restrictions placed on them and the violence done to their bodies and their mothers’ bodies” (Habell-Pallán, 2004: 163–165). Similarly, the Latina/o punk scene was not always safe for queers. Sorrondeguy, an out gay Latino, recalled his negotiation of homophobia: “Certain things could be too overwhelming coming back at me. And there’s days you’re willing to deal with it and days you’re not.” So he gauged when he would talk about queer issues and sometimes received a favorable response. Cecilia Brennan said that even though the Latino punk scene was predominantly male, she appreciated it for its cultural politics, in which women were included.

Not all the participants at Latino punk performances appreciated the political messages. Indeed, while Sorrondeguy was explaining the meaning of a song, kids would sometimes scream, “Cut the shit and start the pit.” The “pit” was a circular dance in which occasionally someone dived from the stage into the audience or “floated,” lifted above the heads of the audience and passed around, signaling trust. According to Cecilia Brennan, “The pit allows you to express yourself in the scene.” However, pits could be violent. Women often chose not to float because their bodies would be groped, and floaters sometimes fell to the floor. The music inspired aggressive dancing, punching, or bumping into the audience, who then pushed back. Sorrondeguy sometimes had to stop the music because the pit became too violent or disparaging to women. There was, however, a core of performers and audience members who took the politics seriously and were engaged in intellectual exchange. For example, liner notes on albums provided a variety of resources such as song lyrics, translations from Spanish to English, reading lists, information about other bands, web sites, and notes about influential political figures, all of which, according to Brennan, were importance sources of information for youth. Los Crudos found performance to be a cultural expression of politics expressed in tandem with activism elsewhere. Brennan commented on the advocacy that Los Crudos inspired: “Music shaped our identity. As an art form music allowed us to express our politics and gave us this powerful cause.” The cause included a new Latino identity in which the undocumented and marginalized youth were welcome, according to Sorrondeguy: “We took it upon ourselves to redefine what ‘Latino’ meant to us, what ‘community’ meant to us. . . . We became our own voice and never waited for acceptance. . . . We didn’t need it” (Green, n.d.).

Sorrondeguy founded a production company called Lengua Armada (Armed Tongue) and wrote a song that explained its politics (Los Crudos, 2002):

Our tongues are armed / With words that put out fires / From racism and fascism and from hate / Tongues that spit out the truth / Armed tongues are enemies of this system / They give voice to the mute and sight to the blind / These tongues are loaded with sharp / words that slice through the lies of the past / and stupidities of the present / Armed tongues are enemies of this system.

Lengua Armada was the venue through which Los Crudos released its products and produced tours, charging fees just sufficient to recoup expenses rather than make a profit.

Los Crudos did several tours around the world, including all three countries in North America as well as South America (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), Europe, and Japan. During the South American tour, thousands of fans had heard of Los Crudos. According to Sorrondeguy, “Bootlegging rules in México! There were kids who had twentieth-generation copies of our songs; they knew the words; they knew all our songs already.” He was gratified by audiences’ appreciation: “Well, the response is a little different in that, in some of the songs, things that we’re talking about are directly related to people there in certain places, so they take a lot of it more to heart and people really get into it. For the most part we got a lot of support from people” (quoted in Green, n.d.). In countries outside the United States, the appeal of Los Crudos was often its exile politics: “I’d meet Latino kids who were taken to Europe the same time we left for the [United] States. There were Argentinos—one parent was murdered during the dictatorship—just really heavy stuff. They were relating to these songs.” Los Crudos discovered the underground world of Latin American migrants as well, which solidified its sense of purpose. For example,

We played in London, in some bar, and there was one woman, a Mexicana with braids, in the middle of the place. And she was shouting, “¡Órale, cabrones! (Hey, dudes!).” She’s, like, fuck’n screaming and going nuts. We were all, “What’s up? Hang out and we’ll talk after the show!” And she was there, illegally, working, and we connected with her. And for me it was, like, “This is awesome; this is it; this is what it’s about!”

Documenting the Latina/O Punk Scene

Documentary films are artistic forms that show social worlds with their own cultural logic or social norms. “The essential documentary impulse is . . . to catch life off camera, to film what was not planned to happen or what would have happened whether some one was there to film it or not” (Menand, 2004: 90). Documentary filmmakers are often advocates for the subjects they represent on film and aim to arouse passion and support in the audiences for their version of often-ignored human rights abuses or marginalized social worlds.

Beyond the Screams/Más allá de los gritos narrates the history of the Latina/o punk scene, which flourished in the early 1990s. ¹⁰ Sorrondeguy is an accomplished photographer. While completing a Master’s in Fine Arts at the University of Illinois, Chicago, he decided to switch to video so that he could document Los Crudos’s 1998 tour of Mexico and the United States for his thesis and the project became much bigger: “I’m into documenting things; I just wanted this to exist, for it to have its mark in history. This is really important, and I think too many things just get lost. And I didn’t want anyone else to come and tell our story out of fear that they are not going to tell an accurate story.” Sorrondeguy places himself inside the film by having members of the audience hold the camera while he performs (see Figure 1), and he provides voice-over narration throughout. In the film, he explains that Los Crudos was inspired by punk bands in Latin America: “Around 1986 I heard for the first time of bands coming out of Latin America, from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, México. And hearing these songs—they were singing against poverty, against this military dictatorship, and all of these issues—and for the first time I started thinking about punk in this totally new way.” ¹¹ This history disrupts conventional wisdom that the spread of rock music was from north to south in the Americas. The film suggests that in working-class urban barrios there were few economic outlets other than exploitation in low-wage jobs or the underground economy through gangs. In this milieu, punk became a way to scream in rage, anguish, and desire in a poetics of social justice.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Martín Sorrondeguy in performance.

Sorrondeguy self-consciously saw himself situated in what George Lipsitz (1994: 12) calls the “dangerous crossroads” between artistic expression and marketing: “For many musicians around the world, the ‘popular’ has become . . . an intersection between the undeniable saturation of commercial culture in every area of human endeavor and the emergence of a new public sphere that uses the circuits of commodity production and circulation to envision and activate new social relations.” Sorrondeguy (2004) recalls his thinking when he started the film as follows:

I needed to keep close to that community that I come from and not steer away from it, from what is important. But I wanted to invite other people to come into it and walk away and say, “Wow, this is really interesting” or “This is something that we should look at.” It was a very strange space to be in; to make it for a wider audience that would be true to the roots of that scene.

In the film, Latino punks are represented as thoughtful, if irreverent, and energetic. In a series of titled sections, the film narrates different facets of the Latino punk scene and often responds to major political developments. The film takes care to present images and names of all the major Latino punk bands. This democratic sensibility is seen in the credits, where the bands are listed in alphabetical order. While many of the performers and audiences are male, the film includes well-known women performers who have created their own following. The film gives special thanks to Alice Amendariz (known as Alice Bag) and other women performers in Los Angeles and presents images of women’s performances and personas. In one scene, a woman opens a performance by blowing through a conch shell typically used by indigenous/Chicanas and Chicanos to begin danza azteca performances, signaling that she is performing spirituality and indigeneity within the punk scene.

One scene in the film illustrates the punk ethos of blurring the boundary between the audience and the performers. During performances, members of the audience stand right next to the band and often touch Sorrondeguy while he sings. He hands the mike to members of the audience, who perform extended riffs during songs. The film also presents the DIY ethic, as Sorrondeguy explains:

We have an enormous world; it’s a universal network that exists. And it’s this DIY network, which is the most powerful thing that has come out of punk, I think, ever. And I don’t know of any other music scene or genre that runs the way we do. It means having total control of what it is you are doing, what it is you like, how you want to write it, how you want to put it out there and distribute it. Releasing our own records, making our own shirts, I mean, everything is DIY, even down to the way that we book our shows. . . . It is all done on our terms and on our own.

The film suggests that punk art—lithographs on T-shirts or murals and banners on public walls—is part of a Latino artistic renaissance.

Another scene illustrates how Sorrondeguy negotiates race with a multiracial audience and creates a collective identity. He tells the story of the birth of Los Crudos, which, like other Latino punk bands, was excluded from the white punk scene and wrote a song about it entitled “That’s Right, Motherfuckers, We’re That Spic Band.” The audience we see on screen is clearly diverse and young: there seem to be a lot of white men and some Asians as well as Latinas and Latinos with women at the front. In his introduction of the song, Sorrondeguy articulates the band’s point of view: “The kids that have been coming to see us from this neighborhood since we started this band, know us. And none of us feel less than anybody else—for the way you were born, the language we speak, the foods we eat, what we are about, our history, our families—there’s no shame.” He then explains why he is speaking in English: “It’s really important that these gringos understand what we’re about.” The audience laughs. Then he says, “Ésta canción les dedico a toda la gente de este barrio” (I dedicate this song to everyone from this neighborhood), signaling that this is a Latino space. The audience joins in while he performs, screaming the refrain “Bullshit!” One young man who looks white climbs up over the shoulders of others so that he can reach the mike and sings, “We’re that spic band!” This raises questions for the viewer: Why is that white guy identifying himself as Latino? And how do those who are not Latino feel in this Latino space? Clearly, this Latino punk performance is attractive because of Los Crudos’s efforts to be inclusive. ¹² This was an emotional moment for Los Crudos and the audience, according to José Palafox, since it was their goodbye show: “Martín was really saying, ‘Look, this isn’t the end.’ I mean, it’s sad just to think about it. This was an end of an era and what Los Crudos meant to so many people and he’s talking about it right on stage. He’s bringing closure in a way, and it’s in the film.”

The importance of Spanish is a key point in the film, as Joe Carreño narrates:

When you do it in Spanish you’re pricking up some ears that wouldn’t have been tuning in before. . . . Latinos and Spanish-speaking people are used to being targeted in other ways—whether it be violence, exploitation, or as demographic or marketing groups. But when you target them . . . to have a conversation with them, it lets them know “You are not alone.”

José Palafox elaborates on camera: “Here there were these kids singing in Spanish in . . . places where people are fearing the ‘brown invasion,’ of, like, these migrants coming in, and here are these kids not only singing radical politics and saying things that were affecting their communities but they were doing it in Spanish.”

A key scene in the film is entitled “I’m Making My Future with the Border Patrol,” the title of a song by the band Revolución X. With its mix of playfulness and bitter irony—the song includes the refrain “Beating Mexicans is too much fun”—this song has become something of an anthem for Latina/o punks. The scene includes footage of Mexican migrant men being rounded up and deported by the Border Patrol. There is footage of the infamous beating of migrants by the Riverside police in 1996, which, “in a very punk fashion,” Sorrondeguy lifted from a news clip, and a scene with a violent battle over affirmative action in which the police pepper-sprayed the demonstrators. Referring to the treatment of migrants, Sorrondeguy narrates: “The general xenophobia that was in the U.S. . . . It wasn’t just a West Coast thing—wherever you were going you were being faced with these issues. And all of a sudden there was a lot to sing about, a lot to write about, a lot to talk about.” Thus he includes all Latinos in the imagined community targeted as undocumented. José Palafox further drives home this point in the film: “It’s not just art for art’s sake. It’s stuff that is really important to us and we need to build a whole culture of resistance and punk rock, to me, hardcore is part of that.”

Much like the beating of Rodney King, the Riverside beating was a flashpoint in U.S. immigration politics. It occurred only two years after the passage of Proposition 187. In contrast to the prosecutors who framed the beating of Rodney King as his being out of control and a danger to the police, Sorrondeguy frames the mistreatment of Mexican migrants as part of events such as Proposition 187, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Zapatista uprising, suggesting that discrimination is based in structural inequalities and is linked to organizing in Latin America.

Marita Sturken (1997: 17) suggests that screening traumatic events in a public context provides a narrative that reframes them: “Memory often takes the form not of recollection but of cultural reenactment that serves important needs for catharsis and healing.” By situating the beatings of migrants in the context of other protests, Sorrondeguy suggests that Latinas and Latinos reject hegemonic discourses. Sturken continues: “It is precisely the instability of memory that allows for renewals and redemption without letting the tension of the past in the present fade away.” Thus, by framing the beating as part of the consequences of colonialism, globalization, and nativism, Sorrondeguy memorializes the victims. The film provides some healing of the trauma and constructs solidarity, placing individual experience in cultural memory for public comment and reflection.

The film ends with scenes of young Latino punks performing in garages, the classical start for rock bands, leaving the viewers with the understanding that new performers will join the scene, which is ongoing. Sorrondeguy narrates: “For us, being punk didn’t mean letting go. It meant listening to their history and getting somewhere, to get to a new level.”

Beyond the Screams/Más allá de los gritos has been well received. At the first screening, at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles in 1999, according to Sorrondeguy, one cholo youth said, “ ‘You know, man, I’m not into your punk stuff and all that screaming, but your video is cool, man; you guys are down.’ Seeing it cross over, and people having a better understanding of it, is really interesting and cool.” José Palafox says, “I cannot overestimate the importance of Los Crudos. I think they really helped out a lot of bands, a lot of kids that would go to their shows, and they did it.” Cecilia Brennan appreciated Los Crudos’s political contribution: “They provided historical context in relation to U.S. foreign policy and transnationalism to kids who did not have access anywhere else.” The DIY ethic has made the circulation of the film fairly widespread despite its limited institutional distribution. Sorrondeguy (2004) explains: “I’ve met people who say, ‘I saw your film in the Czech Republic,’ and I’m, like, ‘Wow, how’d it get there?’ And I don’t know; it’s gone. I’ve lost track. The punks are great for bootlegging, so it just goes; it has a life of its own, and I’m thankful for that.” The film received a First-Time Filmmaker Award at the 2001 San Antonio Film Festival. It is still screened at film conferences and in college classes and the Latina/o punks continue to perform. At the film’s debut at the university where I teach there was a full house and it was received with rousing cheers.

One tension in the film is about whether to be open about gay sexuality during performances. In one scene, the predominantly male fans are pushing one another, confirming the view that punk can be masculinist and aggressive. Sorrondeguy explains:

I didn’t really touch on sexuality much in that film. But I almost view it like a song. Do you sing everything in one song, or do you break it up? You write specific songs dealing with specific issues. And Los Crudos was really talking about Latino/Chicano issues, politics, and there was a little queer stuff going on but I think I saved a lot of the queer stuff for Xlimp wristX [his current band].

After Los Crudos broke up, Sorrondeguy formed another band, Harto (Fed Up), that “attempts to deliver a message” in a new way about the 2004 roundups of undocumented migrants, the women’s murders in Juárez, and other issues through performance art and music. He says, “My dream band would be an all Chicano/Latino queer punk band—what would that be like? It would be the best thing: a drag, Chicano/Latino, political, hysterical, everything else all rolled up in one. It would make people walk away and say, ‘What the hell was that?’” After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, Sorrondeguy focused on the politics of gender and sexuality directly through music in an all-gay, straight-edge band called Xlimp wristX, which, according to multiple web sites, continues to perform.

Deborah Pacini Hernandez and her colleagues (2004: 20) argue that “rock has served as a vehicle for participatory action and a site for expressing a political discourse or agency that is either too dangerous or impossible to express through other means. . . . Rockers have assumed their right to belong to the nation and thus to have their voices heard as citizens.” While the rock scene overall has much work to do in deconstructing racism, sexism, and homophobia, Beyond the Screams/Más allá de los gritos represents the Latina/o punk scene as a site of dialogue and negotiation of difference although it is silent about queers. Sorrondeguy (2004) deploys a pan-Latino political perspective, mindful that this film represents his vision of the Latino punk scene:

Kids are talking about really important things; it’s not just “I’m young and pissed and hate Mom and Dad.” They’re talking about a lot of stuff that’s related to those communities right now and it’s contemporary and very fresh. A lot of the bands are addressing issues related to Juárez or to immigration. This is the voice of the Chicano movement of the future.

By situating the Latina/o punk scene and his documentary film within the Chicano movement, Sorrondeguy resignifies the representation of the Chicano movement as ongoing, with punkeras and punkeros as key contributors to political vitality. Further, he theorizes an expanded Mexicanidad that flourished in the historical specificities of the 1990s and counters the tensions between Mexicans and other Latinos (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas, 2003). Latina/o punks are well aware that, from a nativist point of view, Latinos are often racialized as undocumented Mexicans. Thus performance of Latina/o punk music becomes a site of struggle over representation in which activists contest the treatment of Mexicans and, by extension, all Latinos, including the denigration of their language and culture. The film presents narratives about painful events and racism that the dominant culture would rather forget, turning individual trauma into cultural memory. Los Crudos’s technologies of memory are based in pedagogy, the performance of songs, critique of social issues, framing of political perspectives, and solicitation of audience responses that are deeply meaningful to punkeras and punkeros. I argue that the texts, representations, and performances discussed here create powerful archives of feelings that are transnational, forging deliberate counterpublics in the United States that denounce the deaths, mistreatment, and exploitation of migrants. Thus, in the production of the film, in its circulation around the globe, and in its the text, Beyond the Screams/Más allá de los gritos provides an archive for the expression of rage against nativist politics and a desire for social justice. The film documents a counterpublic that extends beyond the nation, reflecting the struggles of Latino communities aquí that foster cultural citizenship with those from allá.