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Speaker 1: This is Latino USA, the radio journal of News and

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Speaker 1: Courture Latino US. Latin Latino USA. I'm Maria Inojosa. We

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Speaker 1: bring you stories that are underreported but that mattered to you,

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Speaker 1: overlooked by the rest of the media, and while the

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Speaker 1: country is struggling to deal with these, we listen to

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Speaker 1: the stories of Black and Latino Studio United Latino Front,

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Speaker 1: a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of the movement.

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Speaker 1: I'm Maria ino Jossayan or La Latino USA. Listener, Here's

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Speaker 1: an episode the Los Archivos.

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Speaker 2: The corrido tomorrow will probably sound very little like the

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Speaker 2: one of today or of the past, and so we

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Speaker 2: wanted to have fun imagining what that could possibly be

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Speaker 2: and sound like, and what are the things that they

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Speaker 2: could be talking about in the future.

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Speaker 1: From Futuro Media and VRX, It's Latino USA. I'm Maria Nohosa.

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Speaker 1: Today our How I Made It series looks at Futuro Conjunto,

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Speaker 1: a musical project that takes us into the Rio Grand

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Speaker 1: Valley in Texas centuries into the future. The year is

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Speaker 1: twenty two hundred. The place is the Rio Grand Valley

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Speaker 1: in Texas. Though in this future imagined by artists Charlie

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Speaker 1: Vela and Jonathan Leale. It's now known as Rio Grista.

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Speaker 1: That's the fictional world of Futuro Conjunto, a multimedia science

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Speaker 1: fiction narrative made in collaboration with local artists and activists. Together,

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Speaker 1: they imagine what the Texas Valley would sound and look

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Speaker 1: like in one hundred years. Futuro Conjunto opens with a

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Speaker 1: man who stumbles across this damaged bootleg recording of an

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Speaker 1: underground concert from the year twenty one to twenty. That's

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Speaker 1: about eighty years in the past for him. This recording

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Speaker 1: tells the story of the Flickering Century, the period between

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Speaker 1: what is for us today and the year twenty one twenty.

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Speaker 3: Records indicate that notable local developments within the Flickering Century

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Speaker 3: include the uprisings of twenty twenty three Lavas of twenty

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Speaker 3: twenty eight to the Mars Mission of twenty thirty three.

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Speaker 1: It's a tragically eventful time. The Rio Grande Valley is

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Speaker 1: ravaged by a hurricane and is host to the Second

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Speaker 1: Mexican American War. Colonies are established on Mars. New religions

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Speaker 1: take hold.

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Speaker 4: The Second Mexican American War and twenty.

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Speaker 1: Futro Conjundo is a massive work of speculative fiction. It

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Speaker 1: crafts narratives about a distant future full of fantasy, but

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Speaker 1: at the same time, it revolves around urgent issues of

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Speaker 1: our present, like climate change, war, and socioeconomic inequalities. The

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Speaker 1: innovative project features more than thirty local artists and activists.

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Speaker 1: Along with the album, Futuro Conjunto has an interactive website, graphics,

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Speaker 1: and animations designed to further develop this imagined world. Now,

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Speaker 1: this isn't the first time that Charlie and Jonathan have

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Speaker 1: documented the music and the history of the Rio Grande Valley,

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Speaker 1: where they're both from. They previously collaborated on Wild Tongue

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Speaker 1: That's a compilation featuring local artists. Charlie, a musician and producer,

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Speaker 1: co directed a documentary about the region's musical history called

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Speaker 1: As I Walked Through the Valley. While creating Futuro Conjunto

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Speaker 1: with Charlie, Jonathan was also earning his PhD in Modern

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Speaker 1: Thought and Literature from Stanford University. During the program, he

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Speaker 1: researched musical narratives from the valley and secure funding that

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Speaker 1: made Futuro Conjunto possible. As the architects behind Futuro Conjunto.

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Speaker 1: Charlie and Jonathan wrote the story and the songs that

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Speaker 1: this complex and expansive project is built on. On this

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Speaker 1: episode of our How I Made It series, they take

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Speaker 1: us through the exciting process of imagining the future of

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Speaker 1: the Rio Grand Valley, while also walking us through some

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Speaker 1: of the vibrant musical history of the territory that inspired

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Speaker 1: this project.

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Speaker 2: I'm Charlie Vella, I'm co creator of Futuro Conjunto.

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Speaker 3: And I'm Jonathan Leel, the other co creator of Futuro Conjunto.

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Speaker 3: Futuro Conjunto at its core is a fictional multimedia story

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Speaker 3: multimedia narrative. It combines music and visual art and animation

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Speaker 3: and theater and universe artifacts and this interactive website that

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Speaker 3: we created to tell a story about the potential future

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Speaker 3: of the Rio Grand Valley, where both Charlie and I

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Speaker 3: are from. So in twenty eight Charlie and Ronnie Garza

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Speaker 3: came out to Stanford to do a screening of their film.

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Speaker 4: As I walked through the valley.

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Speaker 5: Once you leave San Antonio, there's a long stretch of

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Speaker 5: desert and there really is nothing, and then all of

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Speaker 5: a sudden, this whole borderline comes to life.

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Speaker 3: I had just gotten through co teaching a course called

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Speaker 3: After the Apocalypse. That class was essentially designed for people

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Speaker 3: from across the humanities and sciences to come together and

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Speaker 3: kind of engage with speculative fiction. And then a few

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Speaker 3: months go by and Charlie sent me an email after

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Speaker 3: he had been doing some additional research and music production,

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Speaker 3: and in the email was the title Futuro bunjunto. My

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Speaker 3: brain started going in a zillion different directions when I

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Speaker 3: saw that, and my sort of literal interpretation of it,

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Speaker 3: even beyond thinking of the really important musical tradition from

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Speaker 3: the valley, was thinking of the literal translation.

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Speaker 4: Of a future community or a future together.

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Speaker 3: I was starting to think, you know, what would a

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Speaker 3: future underground community look like, and specifically an underground community

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Speaker 3: from South Texas that has such rich connections to this

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Speaker 3: and Corilla tradition.

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Speaker 2: Conjunto music is a style of regional folk music that

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Speaker 2: originated here in the Rio Grand Valley. It's a Spanish

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Speaker 2: language form of music, but it's an American art form

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Speaker 2: and the musical form, like a big part of it

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Speaker 2: is the Corrida tradition, where you tell stories about local history, heroes, tragedies,

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Speaker 2: things that have occurred as a way of commemorating events.

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Speaker 2: One corilla that does come to mind. It was written

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Speaker 2: by Esteban Hoddan, the themed accordion player from the Rogrand

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Speaker 2: Valleys from Elsa, Texas. He wrote a song commemorating the

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Speaker 2: farm workers march from San Juan, Texas all the way

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Speaker 2: to the National Capitol.

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Speaker 1: A Sega chaws that.

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Speaker 2: One of my previous projects was a documentary I co

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Speaker 2: directed about music in the Real Grand Valley. And in

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Speaker 2: the process of doing that movie, I bought so many

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Speaker 2: like local records. I just bought hundreds, and so I

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Speaker 2: would go through them and I would see songs commemorating

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Speaker 2: things like hurricanes, like there was a hurricane that hit

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Speaker 2: the Rogrand Valley in the nineteen sixties called Hurricane Beula,

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Speaker 2: and there were songs about it.

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Speaker 3: I'm now ess and I see it yess. Narratively speaking,

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Speaker 3: the core of the project is this musical album, right,

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Speaker 3: which is this damaged bootleg recording of an underground concert

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Speaker 3: that takes place in one hundred years in the year

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Speaker 3: twenty one to twenty in a by then abandoned South

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Speaker 3: Texas Rocket Facilities.

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Speaker 6: This is Alato and I'm streaming from the old Rocket

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Speaker 6: facility down in Boca Chica.

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Speaker 1: Big concert tonight, and.

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Speaker 3: Six different bands performed at that, and all of them

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Speaker 3: are playing these different genres that we haven't heard before,

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Speaker 3: and they're all singing songs inspired by the heroes and

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Speaker 3: the tragedies that their world had been built upon. We

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Speaker 3: each would try our hand at composing, imagining what these

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Speaker 3: different genres and bands would sound like, and then we

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Speaker 3: would swap them and then kind of tear them all apart,

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Speaker 3: rebuild them, try to find the golden brick of an

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Speaker 3: idea that we could build a house out of.

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Speaker 2: It was a way of layering history into the sounds.

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Speaker 2: What are the things that artists of one hundred years

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Speaker 2: from now are going to be taking from the past,

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Speaker 2: What are the things that they're going to be mashing

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Speaker 2: up from the past or from their past. And so

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Speaker 2: by like building the song up, taking one little piece

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Speaker 2: of it, throwing the rest of it away, building it

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Speaker 2: all up again around that one little piece, it was

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Speaker 2: a way of kind of embedding it with a musical

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Speaker 2: history that.

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Speaker 4: Hasn't occurred yet.

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Speaker 2: A number of the events that we put into this

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Speaker 2: future timeline echo with things that have happened in reality.

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Speaker 3: At this our Hurricane Harvey continues and make its way

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Speaker 3: closer to shore. We have team coverts across the valley.

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Speaker 6: PBS forced even see they stop Buy Valley International Airport today,

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Speaker 6: and airport that he says is pretty much deserted.

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Speaker 2: The hurricane ASISO is an echo of Hurricane Bila and

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Speaker 2: Hurricane Harvey, which we watched happen in real time here

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Speaker 2: in the state of Texas. These are all things that

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Speaker 2: have some sort of current or historical significance, and we're

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Speaker 2: just kind of taking them and pushing them somewhat.

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Speaker 3: I wrote a short story which had these fictional bands

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Speaker 3: with these different genres that didn't exist yet, so chip

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Speaker 3: Hop and palm Wave, Futura, squatcha, things like that, and

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Speaker 3: I sent that to Charlie, and you know, Charlie's brain

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Speaker 3: started going in a bunch of different directions because then

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Speaker 3: our task was to figure out, Okay, what do these

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Speaker 3: bands actually sound like?

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Speaker 4: How can we make this world something that feels real?

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Speaker 2: So I would read, you know, the word palm wave

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Speaker 2: as a genre title and think, you know what as

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Speaker 2: a palm wave.

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Speaker 3: Band, palm Wave is the fictional genre that response to

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Speaker 3: the band Simon Nada. The thing that I liked about

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Speaker 3: Palm Wave was is that it just basically started as

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Speaker 3: a portmanteau, as a word, a suggestive word on a

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Speaker 3: piece of paper. Ethereal really beautiful accordion sounds, these very

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Speaker 3: dreamy guitars and these very like beautiful lush vocal harmonies.

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Speaker 3: So with one of the songs, which was the zas

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Speaker 3: tune Amerno, that originally just started off as a complete

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Speaker 3: like vocal a cappella track, and we slowly built it up,

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Speaker 3: and I have a very sort of minimalist tendency, and

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Speaker 3: Charlie eventually and rightly said, we really need drums in this.

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Speaker 3: We need this and this, we need this and this,

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Speaker 3: and so we started to add that in and the

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Speaker 3: song started coming to life. Everything started to really take

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Speaker 3: on a character. And then when we started working with

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Speaker 3: Diano Tavarda and Rudi Serda, who are the vocalists on

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Speaker 3: that track, then everything like, oh okay.

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Speaker 4: I can hear what's happening here.

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Speaker 3: The song is a love story between these two characters

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Speaker 3: who are distanced by space and presumably also distance by time.

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Speaker 3: One of them is leading an expedition to Mars, and

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Speaker 3: the others left on the planet Earth looking up at

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Speaker 3: the stars.

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Speaker 4: I mean, how much more romantic could you be?

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Speaker 3: They had the idea to frame the whole thing, the

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Speaker 3: whole story, as a duet, and so you have this

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Speaker 3: proximity happening in the music that isn't happening in the story.

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Speaker 4: There's nothing but distance in the story.

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Speaker 3: And so when we heard that in one of those

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Speaker 3: late night mixing sessions, we finally kind of agreed that

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Speaker 3: the missing rhythmic element was this batshata that turned the

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Speaker 3: whole song into an astrobot shata. It's one of my

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Speaker 3: favorite songs in the whole album because of how many

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Speaker 3: AHA moments were part of the process of composing it.

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Speaker 2: The headliner of the fictional concert as a band called Socio.

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Speaker 2: There was a group in the seventies and eighties called

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Speaker 2: Las Potra. They have this fantastic video where it's an

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Speaker 2: all woman gorjunto and they're wearing these like sparkly leotards

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Speaker 2: and the guitarist is playing Gibson Least Paul through a

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Speaker 2: Marshall stack and it's like distorted and loud, and it

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Speaker 2: sounds very punk and so we took inspiration from that originally,

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Speaker 2: and so it was the sort of guitar led punk

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Speaker 2: corrido Ranchera type thing. We got to the end of

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Speaker 2: the writing process and we thought, okay, so this is

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Speaker 2: the headliner band. Something about this arrangement doesn't feel big enough,

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Speaker 2: and we were kind of like putting off dealing with

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Speaker 2: it because it was like a big question. And what

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Speaker 2: we eventually did is we took the underlying chord structure.

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Speaker 2: We completely turned it into this sort of like anthemic synth,

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Speaker 2: big sound, but we kept the structure in the vocal

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Speaker 2: harmony intact, and the song just opened up. Suddenly. I

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Speaker 2: could see how this band in the future could be

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Speaker 2: the band that everybody was there to see. You know,

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Speaker 2: you're writing it, but at the same time, there's this

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Speaker 2: psychological distance from it being for these imagined characters, and

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Speaker 2: so it becomes a lot easier to criticize them from

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Speaker 2: this kind of outside perspective, like you don't feel so

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Speaker 2: emotion only attached to anything that's happening in the music

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Speaker 2: on that song. We were honored to have a step

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Speaker 2: on Hold on the third the son of Steve Jordan

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Speaker 2: performing the accordion, he's basically portraying the holographic version of

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Speaker 2: his father.

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Speaker 3: We wanted to make sure that it was a project

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Speaker 3: that would be for and also from the Rio Grand Valley,

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Speaker 3: and so everybody who contributed to it in any way

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Speaker 3: really has some strong biographical historical connection to the region.

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Speaker 2: We worked with a good number of local artists and

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Speaker 2: a few people who are sort of in the overlap

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Speaker 2: between art and activism. Queen Beatrix is a local dragtivist

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Speaker 2: who does work around HIV AIDS prevention, immigrant rights and

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Speaker 2: things like this, but does it through drag. So we

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Speaker 2: had them come in and lend a voice to Mima,

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Speaker 2: which is this sort of cybernetic version of Beatrix from

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Speaker 2: the future. Alaya Collector has been a great show for

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Speaker 2: you tonight.

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Speaker 1: It's our way to commemorate those people in places the

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Speaker 1: loss in this ridiculous war.

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Speaker 2: In the music, explicitly, there are lots of references to

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Speaker 2: historical artists. For example, the song called Alerticlaya, which is

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Speaker 2: the nickname of Naziso Martinez, who is one of the

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Speaker 2: founders of music and so we titled the song after

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Speaker 2: him and made the song about a literal hurricane. This

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Speaker 2: is a place we know very intimately, and it is

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Speaker 2: a place that never sees itself represented in the national

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Speaker 2: conversation except for the horrible. It's something that's very very

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Speaker 2: president in our minds. Currently. In the album, the hurricane

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Speaker 2: track Elertica is about this natural disaster cutting through here

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Speaker 2: and the fact that we will be left on our own,

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Speaker 2: like there's no help coming. And it feels so strange

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Speaker 2: to have written that last year about weather disaster and

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Speaker 2: then to like see it happen in the context of

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Speaker 2: a health disaster.

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Speaker 6: You want to girls swimming, swimming the lots and says.

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Speaker 3: When we started this there was no pandemic yet, but

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Speaker 3: because of histories of neglect of the region, we were

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Speaker 3: really interested in kind of focusing on our shared anxieties

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Speaker 3: and fears about what might happen in the future and

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Speaker 3: then to kind of alchemize them into art. To imagine

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Speaker 3: yourself in the future, and for the people of the

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Speaker 3: Rio Grand Valley and people who have connections to it,

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Speaker 3: you know, for all of us to imagine ourselves in

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Speaker 3: the future is itself a very radical act. That's one

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Speaker 3: of the major takeaways of the whole project is the

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Speaker 3: sense that you have a Say in your Own Destinies.

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Speaker 1: H the voices of Charlie Vela and Jonathan Mayan, the

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Speaker 1: co creators of the project. Is available for streaming on

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Speaker 1: band Camp and proceeds from the album are donated to

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Speaker 1: local nonprofits Raises Texas, Black Lives Matter, Index and switch

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Speaker 1: r GV. This episode was produced by Alejandra Salasad and

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Speaker 1: edited by Marta Martinez. It was mixed by Julia Caruso.

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Speaker 1: The Latino USA team includes Vittoria Strada, Rinaldo, Leanos Junior,

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Speaker 1: Andrea Lopez, Cruzado, f Lori mar Marquez, Beni, Lei Ramirez,

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Speaker 1: Mike Sargent, Nursaudi and Nancy Trujillo. Our director of Engineering

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Speaker 1: is Stephanie Lebou. Additional engineering support by Gabriel Lebiez and

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Speaker 1: JJ Krubin. Our marketing manager is Lis Luna. Our theme

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Speaker 1: music was composed by Zenia Rubinos. I'm your host and

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Speaker 1: executive producer Maria Jojosa. Join us again on our next episode.

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Speaker 1: In the meantime, look for us on social media and

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Speaker 1: as all waits not tel vides in note ba Yes Jao.

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Speaker 6: Latino USA is made possible in part by California Endowment

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Speaker 6: building a strong state by improving the health of all Californians.

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Speaker 6: The Heusing Simons Foundation Unlocking Knowledge, opportunity and possibilities more

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Speaker 6: at hsfoundation dot org and the John D. And Catherine T.

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Speaker 6: MacArthur Foundation.

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Speaker 2: So, Chill, I don't even know if we define their genre?

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Speaker 2: Did we get her lover?

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Speaker 4: No?

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Speaker 1: No?

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Speaker 3: I mean IFO was a genre. It isn't really, but

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Speaker 3: if it was, it would be that bad for sure.