The Philadelphia-based activist, educator and artist takes on the history of the Latinx experience with her new album, “No Otro Lado.”
Photo: Rashid Zakat
By Sameer Rao
November 14, 2018
Name: Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela
Hometown: Wichita, Kansas
Latest Project: “No Otro Lado,” the artist’s musical tribute to Mexican and other Latinx Americans’ resilience through generations of xenophobic violence and border politics. The album comes out tomorrow (November 17).
Why You Should Care: “No Otro Lado” (translation: “No Other Side”) marks the latest and most complete step in Johnson-Valenzuela’s evolution as an artist, activist, performer and witness to social justice movements. The record, which the Philadelphia-based creator describes as “conceptual reggaeton,” mixes many of the musical and political concerns of her previous work.
Johnson-Valenzuela’s story begins in Wichita, Kansas, where she was the child of a Mexican-American mother and White father. “I grew up being asked, ‘what are you?’ my whole life,” she says. She didn’t find answers to identity questions in her home life, so she sought solace in books and music.
“Books really started my activism, and from a very young age, I was concerned about human and civil rights,” she explains about the early influence of author Leo Tolstoy, classic comparative urban politics text “Detroit: I Do Mind Dying” and other works she read as a teen. “I was also drawn to punk rock, alternative culture and activism. I did a [punk] zine in high school.”
At the same time, her brother got Johnson-Valenzuela into hip hop by introducing her to the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).” “I started buying hip hop albums on vinyl, before the vinyl resurgence,” she says.
These early adventures in beats would lead to her first major musical endeavor: DJing. In 2000, she moved to Philadelphia and dove deep into the city’s activist communities. Johnson-Valenzuela acquired a mixer, which allowed her to spin in local movement spaces. “People asked me to DJ benefits and house parties, so I was DJing a lot by the early ‘00s,” she says.
Read more of Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela on her new album, “No Otro Lado”: http://bit.ly/2E0qYEk.
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