Love begins in resistance: Vivir Quintana
Image Tania Victoria/ Secretaría de Cultura de la Ciudad de México. Edition by Ojalá.
Interview • María José López • April 13, 2023 • Leer en castellano
Vivir Quintana is a singer-songwriter, activist and Spanish teacher who transforms Mexico's open wounds into songs that counter narratives of violence and oppression.
In early March, I sat down with Quintana in a recording studio at La Bestia Music Inc. in Mexico City. We talked about her musical heritage, collective work among women, the motivation behind her songs and more.
Throughout the interview, I asked Vivir to share songs and artists that marked her artistically, which I used to create a YouTube playlist.
Our interview has been translated and lightly edited for clarity and length.
María José López: Tell me about your name. Your name is Viviana, but we call you Vivir [“Vivir” in Spanish means “to live”]. What has it meant for you to be called Vivir?
Vivir Quintana: My given name is Viviana Monserrat Quintana Rodríguez. In my family tree, there are two or three other Vivianas on my mother's side.
Some of them wanted to sing and dedicate themselves to music and their parents—my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather—forbade it, saying "women should not dedicate themselves to music." My maternal grandmother, the Viviana closest to me, used to tell me "good thing your mom and dad let you sing, good thing they let you play the guitar." I didn't understand it back then.
I started living in Mexico City almost 10 years ago. The first years were painful and very difficult, because projects appeared, but they never materialized. I felt nervous about singing in public, on stage. Things just didn't flow.
A therapist told me, "you have generational loyalty with the women in your family who couldn't dedicate themselves to this, you are unconsciously telling them 'if you couldn't do this, then neither can I.'"
So she said, "change your name, look for a stage name and you will see that everything will start to flow."
My parents and oldest friends call me Vivi, so I took the R of Rodríguez, my mother's last name, and with that I came up with "Vivir."
It was my way of saying "I'm going to live my own story."
I swear, about a month after I changed my name, everything started to flow and fall into place. I've been fortunate to make a living from music since 2017 and everything has happened because of my name change. Now I am living my own story, in the present.
MJL: Who taught you to play guitar?
VQ: A man named Don Chuy taught me to play the guitar. His name is Jesús and he's a carpenter. It sounds really religious, but that's actually how it happened (laughs).
When I was 12 years old I discovered I loved to sing, my parents had a little dirt hill in the house and I would climb up there. It was my stage.
In elementary school, I entered a singing contest, even though I didn't even know what being in tune meant. I won those contests and I was invited to sing in the cultural Sundays in my town, which is Francisco I. Madero, outside of Torreón, Coahuila.
I used to sing over cassette tapes that my father bought for me, which we played so many times that distorted. A man came up to me on a bike and said, "Hey, wouldn't you like to learn to play the guitar?" and it seemed so distant.
Playing an instrument seemed to me like something I just saw in the movies, on TV, in stories about people who manage to follow their dreams.
I said "hmmm, I don't know." He said "look, maybe when you're older, if you learn to play guitar, you won't have to use a backing track. You could accompany yourself with your guitar and maybe even write your own songs and sing them."
I said yes and started studying with him. Every day I would go to a public plaza and Don Chuy would be there from four in the afternoon to nine at night, and he would charge the same for one hour or for five.
MJL: What songs did you first learn to play?
VQ: I started with old Spanish rock songs, rondalla songs [a Spanish folk music genre] and songs by Leo Dan and Rocío Dúrcal, all the classic Spanish ballads.
The first song I learned with Don Chuy was called “Mi ranchito” by Estela Núñez. And I remember the first chord he taught me was D.
We played songs by the Teen Tops, La Rondalla de Saltillo, Rocío Durcal, Mercedes Sosa, and Violeta Parra. Little by little, I learned about the heritage of Latin American folk music.
That's when I began to realize that I really liked stories in songs. One song I heard that had a great impact on me is called “El pájaro chogüí.” It's a story about a boy who becomes a bird after he dies and then he sings. I discovered that I liked to analyze songs, which is part of how I write songs now.
MJL: And when you began to be introduced to all this folk music, did you notice a difference between the stories of female and male performers and singer-songwriters?
VQ: Yes, I noticed that they had a different way of speaking. I was most interested in understanding what they were talking about when I worked for six years in a mariachi band, where I played the vihuela, the violin and sang.
One day we went to serenade a man's wife and he told us: "We are celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary and I want you to sing her 'Si Dios me quita la vida' by Javier Solís." I started singing it and I remember thinking, "What am I singing, what is this?"
Because the song says "if God takes my life before he takes yours, I'm going to ask him to put my soul on yours," to keep watching you, to keep track of who you're with.
The poetic image is beautiful, but in reality it's horrible. It's like all these women whose husbands die and they go into mourning for the rest of their lives, because they believe they "don't deserve love after this."
I was left wondering how we talk about such different realities. I'm not blaming violence on men, but I do think they have more leeway to speak openly about a lot of issues.
When I was a child, every Mexican Revolution Day, we used to have to sing corridos. In Coahuila there are lots of corridos [popular folk songs that narrate socially relevant topics], you hear norteño music everywhere in the streets, it’s one of the most common soundscapes.
One of the corridos they had us sing was "El corrido de Rosita Alvírez," a very famous corrido in Coahuila, originally from Saltillo. I found out that it was about a femicide, and it is sung in a mocking way, poking fun at femicide.
Rosita Alvírez got murdered because she refused to dance with Hipólito at the ball. And he replied: " No? Then I'll kill you." There is a part that goes "the day she was killed, Rosita was in luck, of the three shots that hit her, only one was fatal."
Personally, I want my body of work to be remembered because it is more loving. But not with commercial romantic love that taught us that "if you leave, I'll kill you," "if it's not with me, it's not with anyone" or "without you I'm nothing."
As women, we ought not reproduce violence in our music, or justify violence. However, we are also trying to fight for the eradication of violence within these new narratives.
MJL: Since you started to make a living from this and especially since "Canción sin miedo", which you released just before March 8 in 2020, how have you seen women's access to music transforming?
VQ: Historically, it’s been complicated. I read a book that talked about feminism in art. It explained that the possibilities and opportunities for women artists and men artists are different and it's more complicated for women.
That is why, when I see my compañeras gaining greater access to music, to media, to forums, to stages, it is up to me to help build collectivity, to support them and to understand that, if my music is being noticed, then yours, yours and yours may also be noticed. To create greater interconnection between us and greater access, which we can all give to each other.
My work team is almost all women, about 95 percent are women.
I have an amazing band and sound engineer that make me sound my best on stage and I have an incredible personal manager that helps me get into spaces like this interview, so that my schedule and my life don't get jammed up.
I have a musical director who makes the band sound amazing, and women on the staff who make sure everything is running smoothly. The press team are all women, the marketing team are all women, and they all understand that "yes, you are the one who goes up there, but we are a team that is working for the collective." That's how we're all going to do well, you know? It's having greater access to music by working for the collective.
MJ: Your song "Te mereces un amor" is related to this…
VQ: Yes, it comes from the urge to tell my friends that love begins within us, in our resistance. That I deserve a love so beautiful and so great, that first I will have the one I see in the mirror, and then I can share it with others.
I wrote the song to say to my mom, and to my grandmothers: “I would have loved to tell you that you deserve such great love.” To tell men that whoever has a love this big must not commit violence against another. To tell my friends that, when we have found love, we won’t let anyone transgress it. Love is not synonymous with violence.
Children are told, “if so-and-so teases you or hits you, it’s because they like you,” and they believe it. And we reach adulthood and think “of course, my partner is violent with me because he loves me” or “he loves me so much that he doesn’t want anyone else to see me” or “he loves me so much that my freedom depends on him.”
MJL: Which artists do you recognize yourself in?
VQ: Oh, what a beautiful question. I recognize myself deeply in Mercedes Sosa, her strength to sing to Latin America and to the world. I think the word "cantora" [another word for a woman singer], as she used to call herself, is a very broad and beautiful word and also very healing. I recognize myself in that word.
I see myself in Lola Beltrán, in the strength of her voice, in how she made you really feel the song of a bird. I see myself in Juan Gabriel, who had such a poetic way of speaking to people. So poetic but at the same time so familiar that you could understand him, and you suffered, and you felt, and were moved by his songs. I like his language a lot.
On a more contemporary note, I also recognize myself in much of what Karol G does, which is crazy and contrasting. I love the bichotismo [reference to the song "Bichota", a word for powerful women that comes from the English term "big shot"] and everything she does. I also resonate with very honest ways of making music, like Julieta Venegas or Natalia Lafourcade. They have been in the industry for a long time and yet continue to experiment and create new work according to their interests.
MJL: You deal so much with the perspective of women and you are part of the feminist movement. And the feminist movement is created, nourished and woven with other movements, for example, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism... How do you think about these resistances linked to feminism?
VQ: They make me feel a lot of respect and sorority, because I know that each of us has our own struggles and that all of them are valid, because they are part of our own realities.
For example, there are women who are separatists and they are to be respected, because there are women who have been survivors of attempted femicide and, quite frankly, you cannot force them to work with men. They still have internal work to do and they are not going to be forced to do it on someone else’s timeline.
What really interests me is to get to know each one of these currents and learn about them. I still feel very ignorant on many issues. What I do know is that we cannot be ignorant when it comes to respecting the decisions of others.
One of the artistic expressions that I would like to do within feminism is embroidery and graffiti (laughs).
I love to draw. I would like to have more time to make posters, collage and create resistance embroidery. Those are the things I would like to explore and experiment with. More than experimenting, I want to put my creative desires in the service of conveying a message.
