Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies

9. Sounds of the Sweatshop: Pauline Oliveros and Maquilapolis

211 Sounds of the Sweatshop Pauline Oliveros and Maquilapolis Stephanie Jensen-Moulton In their 2006 film Maquilapolis: City of Factories, Vicki Funari and Sergio De La Torre chronicle the extraordinary results of activism by two female factory workers, or maquilas, in Tijuana. In this essay I examine the original music for Maquilapolis, composed by Pauline Oliveros and several collaborators , through the lens of transnational feminist praxis as articulated by Chandra Talpade Mohanty. A recent report by the Border Committee of Women Workers on factory conditions since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) also informs my analysis. The compositional techniques Oliveros applies to the original score of Maquilapolis render her music for the film as politically relevant as the documentary itself. While the soundtrack subversively contributes to the toppling of economic and social structures of power crucial to the subjugation of Mexican women workers, the sound editors have rendered Oliveros’s work secondary in the film, having secured previously recorded tracks by Bang on a Can, among others, for additional material. Much of Oliveros’s original work was left on the cutting room floor, in favor of more rhythmic sounds that bear greater resemblance to those of Tijuana’s popular music scene. In the end the directors used Oliveros as a feminist name to headline a soundtrack filled with Oliveros’s own collaborators—members of the Nortec collective and the Argentine band Reynols—as well as other musicians unaffiliated with her work. Oliveros, however, emerges as a protagonist in this narrative because of the nature of the film itself, and because of the chronology of the soundtrack’s evolution as a finished product: the search for music to underscore Maquilapolis all began with Oliveros and her philosophy. 212 • tomorrow is the question Oliveros has articulated her ways of listening as feminist ways of knowing , leading directly to her use of “Deep Listening” as the primary compositional practice for Maquilapolis, among other works. According to Oliveros , Deep Listening requires the practitioner to differentiate between the concept of global listening and that of individual listening, while acknowledging both. Similarly, global feminism calls for activist collectives comprising individuals who often speak from plural standpoints. For the soundtrack of Maquilapolis, Oliveros emphasizes interaction between human performers over a tape of sampled environmental noises heard by workers during the course of their daily shifts. Through her manipulation of these everyday sounds, Oliveros transforms oppressive factory noises into powerful, consciousness-raising music that complicates issues of gender , nationality, and global economics. Transnational feminism, though well established in the academy, has been completely absent from music scholarship pertaining to experimental music,and even from scholarship on noted feminist composers and performers of experimental music such as Laurie Anderson, Pamela Z, and Oliveros. Although feminist approaches to music criticism certainly exist, within the area of experimental music they are only beginning to emerge, with one notable example being Martha Mockus’s biographical work on Oliveros, Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality.1 Feminist histories are often linked to activist histories, but this area, too, has remained largely absent from music criticism in general and histories of experimental music in particular. This study engages the questions of nation, woman, worker, and activist within the framework of norteño musical experimentalism.Alejandro Madrid’s study Nor-tec Rifa! has addressed issues of nationality with regard to electronic musics, but without noting the particular impact on women of Tijuana’s proximity to the United States.2 I aim to link norteño musics and transnational feminism through an examination of Nortec’s collaboration with Oliveros, a long-distance collaboration that Oliveros eventually reworked into parts of her original score for Maquilapolis. Feminist Film Scoring Maquilapolis represents a continuation of feminist and activist film scoring by Oliveros. Vicky Funari, a producer and director of Maquilapolis, first contacted the composer about creating a musical soundscape for the 1998 documentary Paulina. Funari’s first film—which she wrote and directed— documents the tragic life of Paulina Suarez, whose parents traded her at age thirteen to a village man in exchange for land rights. The director’s Sounds of the Sweatshop • 213 feminist approach to Paulina incorporates experimental film techniques, including fragmentation of the narrative line and melodramatic reenactments of Paulina’s memories; these reflect Paulina’s thought process and differing accounts of events that have emerged from different individuals involved directly in the events depicted in the film...