Art Corner: Getting sentimental with Jazmin Garcia
This month I spoke to director and music curator Jazmin Garcia about love, loss, and finding beauty in melancholy
Before you start reading, press play on this (Trust me):
https://www.nts.live/shows/jazmin-garcia/episodes/como-la-flor-w-jazmin-garcia-18th-january-2021
There is a legend in Alice Walker’s book In the Light of my Father’s Smile that has always stayed with me. In it, she explains how the white bell-shaped flowers, Calla lilies, came to be on Earth. When the Egyptian Goddess of love, music, fertility and dancing, Hethor, was breastfeeding her children, the drops of milk that fell onto the earth became Callas, symbolizing motherhood and survival.
I buy a lot of flowers, not only because they bring beauty to every corner, also because they are misunderstood. “A woman is soft like a flower” is a typical phrase I heard growing up but never understood: flowers withstand hurricanes, grow through concrete, and are key for our survival. Their softness carries power.
The same duality exists in this month’s guest: beauty, power, and melancholy. I discovered Jazmin Garcia on a day I needed joy and some wistfulness. She is a director and music researcher, and curates the most incredible playlists on NTS radio from her home in Los Angeles. Como la flor, the name of her channel, features a great selection of Latin American music such as rancheras, bolero and cumbia.
This was my way into her world. Music that is incredibly beautiful to listen to lulls you, and at the same time, has some of the most heartbreaking lyrics. Take the song “Odio en la Sangre” — Hatred in my blood- by Julio Jaramillo. It is wildly soothing, yet it features a heartbroken man degrading a woman for leaving him. Both Jazmin and I understand the double standards of some of this music, and how certain songs may create narratives that can be toxic. She tells me she understands the contradictions and problematic nature of capitalist romantic love, but that her romanticism comes from another place, one of vulnerability that is beautiful, “when I’m curating these shows, and putting them out there, they’re never about romantic love.”
What Como la flor transmits is also a sense of memory and loss. Her special on Chavela Vargas, the late Costa-Rican singer and songwriter that revolutionized classic Mexican ranchera music, and became an icon of LGBTQ rights in Spain and Latin America, is one of those.
“There’s also the intention of collecting music that reminds me of my family,” and I notice that her family is present in a lot of her work. “The show really started as I was dealing with the grief around losing my dad. I was tired of being in a dark place. So I made a playlist thinking about the way my dad used to listen to sad music,” she says. Jazmin tells me that her father would listen to this music in a more “toxic” way, maybe crying in the living room during a drunken night. “ I think he was hurting a lot. He seemed stuck in a sort of cage. As I child I didn’t understand it but I felt his hurt. As an adult I can now recognize that it was built by the mechanisms of toxic masculinity, and, from living in a white patriarchal world that rejected him in such layered ways.”
It feels that Jazmin is trying to rewrite the way this type of music is felt, as a channel for healing rather than desperation.
Jazmin speaks in a monotone that feels soothing and tender. She is Mexican-Guatemalan and is a first-generation American, and a lot of her directorial work depicts the life of first-generation Americans. LA represents the city her parents had to migrate to, she tells me, “There’s a lot of immigrant communities here. But also Hollywood and the film industry,” representing ostentatious richness, and privilege. “Many of these communities are completely left out of that.” She tells me about her documentary where she follows two Latina women on their way to work. “When I started working here, I wanted to showcase the everyday people who make the city run, and who the city couldn’t get by without.”
She tells me that LA is the only place she would live in the US right now because she feels safest there, especially with the extremely polarized political atmosphere. She recognises the contradiction of a city that is liberal and also hypocritical, she says “A place with a huge police force that spends ridiculous amounts of money incarcerating people while claiming to be a sanctuary city.” Her videos have incredibly saturated images and evoke the lively colors often seen in Mexican embroideries. Her work is obviously political, often tackling issues like decolonisation of beauty or the reality of being undocumented in Los Angeles.
The conversation weaves into speaking of America with an outsider’s view. When I visited my brother in LA, where he lives, I was shocked by the number of advertisements for junk food and medicine on TV. The consumerist money-obsessed culture was really in my face. When she started her career after college, the only way of surviving in an expensive city like New York, where she had moved, was to work three jobs. There was an expectation to succeed, in a place where she often felt abused and racialised. “Berlin was the first time that I felt liberated from all of these expectations. To be poor, in Berlin, but not feel stressed about it,” she says about her European experience. This feeling is portrayed in many of her videos, which have now evolved to showcase Latinx artists with a dreamy, passionate, and flamboyant energy.
We stop for a few minutes to listen one of my favourite Como la flor. . I ask her what her intention is when she curates a playlist now. “It is about making people feel something deeply, a lot of it reflects how I may feel on that day. Sometimes it’s really selfish. Sometimes I’m really sad. And it’s just about the music, the beauty of the music. I don’t know any better medicine than music.”
There is always a poetic and beautiful twist to the visuals and the content of her work. We get to talking about beauty, something I have been exploring in my research lately. I tell her I sometimes find it challenging to find beauty in tragedy, but this is exactly why I do it because in a way it is revolutionary. “Beauty for me has always been really important. I don’t have any academic theories around it. I just know that viscerally. It’s something that’s always moved me.” She says, “We live in a society that is so aesthetic and visual, one that decides what is beautiful and what isn’t. The way that I’ve approached it in my work is always a way of trying to almost assert that things that don’t normally get that label can be beautiful,” and the reason that they don’t is usually political or exclusionary.
“Beauty for me has always been really important. I don’t have any academic theories around it. I just know that viscerally. It’s something that’s always moved me.”
The thematics she explores with such grace and power are a testimony to her person. I admire her clarity of vision when she speaks about her intention. It feels almost like she doesn’t realize that what she intends is exactly what is transmitted to the heart of whoever is watching, or listening.
While speaking to a song, she reveals her vulnerability and confidence: “I feel like I’ve actually somehow harnessed the ability to create beauty out of deep sadness. I’m not sure how. “
Thank you for reading this month’s Art Corner! This is a monthly column, follow Virginia here on Medium to get this in your email when it comes out, or follow us here. This is a passion project made a reality by New Media Advocacy Project.
You can follow Jazmin Garcia’s work on her NTS show and on her website.
