LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Lila Downs
built 629 days ago
Lila Downs is an artist who reflects through her music the most personal and deep side of the Mexican and Mixtec traditions. Her intense performances and provocative lyrics have captivated audiences around the world and made her a legend in her native Mexico. Transformed by the lyrics she sings, Downs penetrates the soul and the mind as she retells the often bittersweet stories of her ancestors and homeland. She is an artistic phenomenon to be experienced, a world music diva in the making.
Source:
Lila Downs' musical creations and performances are motivated by a series of aesthetic and political considerations. Her music expresses a defiant, contestatory, at times critical stance towards both the United States and Mexico. Through this music, she attempts to voice issues of gender and ethnicity as they relate to national identity, transnational economies, and power. Specifically, her music critiques relations of power, homogenizing notions of mestizaje, and gendered ethnic niches in which women become exploitable pools of labor. Her album Trazos, a non-commercial 1999 release, presents two excellent examples of Lila Downs' performance and transnational politics. Both "La Niña" and "Sale Sobrando" are Downs' original works that have recently been re-released in her latest album "Border."
Source:
Lila Downs, born in 1968 in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca/Mexico, to a US American and an Mixteco Indian, straddles the boundaries between worlds, musical traditions and languages. Her repertoire is an artful blend of jazz, Afro-percussion and Indian rhythms, fusing her own compositions with Mexican folksongs. She sings in English, Spanish and in the Mixteco, Zapoteco, Maya and Náhatl languages. Her extremely versatile voice, with a three-octave range, and her provocative, political texts have made her a superstar in Mexico.
Source:
Lila Downs was born in Mexico to a Mixteca Indian mother and a Scottish-American father. Growing up, she spent time in both the U.S. and Mexico and her music reflects both those cultures. She now spends part of the year in New York City and part in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her songs are about everything from small town ostracism to making mole sauce. In her interview with host Peggy Wehmeyer, Downs says her music is all about educating people on both sides of the border.
Source:
Lila Downs was born in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, and grew up there and in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She began singing "ranchera" music at an early age, and later sang at the "fiestas" of the towns in her mountain region, la Mixteca. She sang with the band "Los Cadetes de Yodoyuxi" and later with "La Trova Serrana", a group of folk musicians from the Zapotec town of Guelatao, Oaxaca. At that time she met her musical collaborator Paul Cohen and began to create her own musical compositions.
Source:
Anna Lila Downs Sánchez was born on September 19, 1968 in Tlaxiaco, in the South Mexican state of Oaxaca, to Allen Downs and Anita Sánchez. Her Mexican-Indian mother, Anita Sánchez, comes from San Miguel El Grande (Oaxaca), in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains. The Mixteco woman met Lila’s father, Allen Downs, a US Scottish-American, when he was working on a documentary film in Mexico City. Downs was more than a filmmaker, he was a painter and professor of art at the University of Minneapolis and – as his daughter affectionately puts it – a “wonderful, crazy, radical communist”. He arranged for Lila to spend several years in Southern California, where she graduated from high school and learned how to speak perfect English.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Lila Downs