Resonance of the Codex

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Jaime Roque: Watching a home video of my family’s first trip to Mexico brings back a flood of emotions. This trip was made possible by the Immigration Reform…

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Archive Audio: …and Control Act of 1986 that I’ll sign in a few minutes, is the most comprehensive reform of our immigration laws since 1952. It’s the product of one of the longest and most difficult legislative undertakings in the last three congresses. So now I’ll get on with the signing and make this into law. Hope nothing happens to me between here and the chair.

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Roque: This provided a pathway to legal status for undocumented migrants like my parents. This was their first visit back to their hometown since they left. Since this was a special occasion, my grandparents pulled out all the stops for a big celebration with food, family, and music.

Roque: The front yard of my grandparents’ house turned into a stage where the band set up and played long into the night. I vividly remember the feeling I had when they started playing the first songs of the night—a mixture of very upbeat and happy Latin American cumbia classics. Although I was too young and embarrassed to dance, that moment sparked my love for music.

Throughout the evening, the band, Grupo Lares, which I later found out was made up by all of my uncles, played various Mexican and Latin American classics. I was particularly fascinated with the drums and percussion. When the band took a break, I explored the mini makeshift stage and decided to hop on the drums. That moment changed my life, it instilled in me a love for music that has been a constant companion through both high and low moments.

Hello, my name is Jaime, and welcome to ReCurrent. This week, we’re exploring the rich and resonant history of music from our past and how it continues to resonate with us today. And just a quick heads up, we’ll be diving deep into the details at times, exploring specific instruments and their cultural contexts, but whether you’re a musician, a music enthusiast, or someone who loves learning about history and cultural origins, I think you’ll find this journey interesting. Even if some parts get a bit detailed, stick with us, it’s all part of the adventure we’ll be on throughout this episode.

Roque: I’ve always felt a deep connection to Latin and Mexican music, and because of that, It sparked a passion in me to explore and learn more about its origins and history. Growing up, I listened to Spanish music first, and not by choice, it was just something my parents had on the radio and so I knew about Agustin Lara, Vicente Fernandez, and Jose Alfredo Jimenez long before I ever heard of The Beatles or Led Zeppelin. My interest in music, especially Latin American music, has always been a significant part of my identity as a musician. My main instruments to play are drums and percussion, which is a huge component of creating Latin American music.

Recently, the Getty took on a major project to digitize a manuscript called the Florentine Codex. At first, I didn’t know much about it, but as I learned more, I realized how important it is. This project took years to complete, and the deeper I got into it, the more fascinated I became. It brought me back to a similar experience in high school with the book “Aztec” by Gary Jennings. I was assigned this massive 745-page book that I didn’t want to read, but once I started, I couldn’t put it down. Discovering that the Florentine Codex is like this but as a real historical document was amazing. The Florentine Codex is full of incredible details about the Aztec daily life, customs, religious practices, medicinal knowledge, and especially their music and instruments. This led me to Christopher Garcia.

Roque: Okay, I am excited today because I am on my way to visit Christopher in his studio, and as a musician, it’s always fun—uou never know what to expect, anything can happen. Building A, Building C, 24E… Hello, hello!

Christopher Garcia: How you doing?

Roque: Hey! How are you? It’s so nice to meet you. Yeah! I parked on the other side…

I’m with Christopher Garcia, a musical polyglot, a multi-instrumentalist who plays breath, percussion and string instruments of Mesoamerica.

Garcia: There’s 100, there’s 120 studios.

Roque: Oh wow! I mean, it’s all indiscreet. You can’t even tell.

Garcia: Right, right, right! So I’ve been here 25 years.

Roque: 25 years!

Garcia: And you see, you know, all the grunge people were here. Then all the punk people were here. Then all the hippie people were here and all of the… what do they call them, the goth people were here.

Roque: Yeah!

Garcia: But then they’re gone.

Roque: The wave, but you’re still here.

Garcia: I’m still here.

Roque: After our initial introductions, he said that he wanted to start our conversation by playing traditional Mesoamerican music for me.

Garcia: I would like to just play for you.

Roque: Yes, of course!

Garcia: And then you just uh…

Roque: Okay!

[small music interlude]

Garcia: My name is Christopher Garcia. I’m from el Este de Los Angeles, from East LA, born and raised my whole life. I got interested in drumming. I learned to play by watching people play because nobody had money for instruments and nobody had money for lessons. I got a scholarship to study Indian music, so I went from playing drum set to playing piano, to playing marimba, to playing Indian instruments from India and then learning about instruments of Mesoamerica and Mexico, and working with modern-day practitioners in the United States and Mexico.

Roque: As Christopher played, I felt emotions starting to stir inside of me.

Roque: Amazing! I really have goosebumps right now. I don’t know how to explain it, but the closest thing that comes to my mind is just—something inside of me was resonating. That, I don’t want to sound too corny but I feel has never been like awake, awakened.

Garcia: Activated!

Jaime: Activated, there you go!

Garcia: This happens all the time when we play. It doesn’t matter what culture the person is from. They, they will tell us, I’ve never seen this or heard of it, but something is causing me to resonate with what’s going on. I can’t articulate it how that is or what it is, and I said, I can’t either, but I recognize it. When I play things I’ve never played before, the elders say, “It’s in the blood.” When that comes to you just be open to it and go with it.

Life and music, I compare it to, riding a wave. You don’t go into the ocean thinking that you are going to tell the wave where to go. The wave is going to take you wherever it’s going to go. Hopefully the longer you’ve been able to ride the wave, you learn to go with the wave, so what you learn to do is relax enough to be able for it to let it take you. When we do presentations, the first thing we say is, “Every person, every place, every thought, and everything has a resonance.” And then we strike one instrument and then we say the resonance being created here today will only be created here today, because you are here today and were here today.

Roque: What, what you were playing wasn’t rehearsed, you were just letting the wave take you?

Garcia: Right, I didn’t play any specific rhythms, traditional or untraditional. I just went with the resonance of the instrument, right? And that’s like human beings right? You resonate differently than when you’re in a boardroom with a bunch of strangers. And it’s not like I’m gonna resonate differently now.

Roque: As we continue talking Christopher mentions the Florentine Codex and the references to music that can be found in it.

Garcia: It’s so wonderful that you can look this, look up any aspect of it. You can just type in drum and it’ll show you anytime the word drum is mentioned. You can type in, you know, flute. You can type in music. You can type in flower, and it’ll show you 80 times…

Roque: I wanted to learn more so I went to visit Kim Richter, a senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute and the lead of the Florentine Codex Initiative.

Kim Richter: The Florentine Codex. It’s a 16th-century manuscript. that was created by a Franciscan Spanish friar, Bernardino de Zagun, and he worked for 30 years with a large group of Nahuatl specialists where they went around and interviewed people, witnesses to the conquest of Mexico. Elders, respected people, specialists who knew about medicine and plants, et cetera. And then the Florentine Codex is one of the final copies of this information, and it was completed in 1577. It was meant to be sent to Spain, and then never made its way there and ended up in Florence in the hands of the Medici. So it has 12 books and it’s written in two columns of text, Nahuatl on the right and Spanish on the left.

Roque: Dr. Leon Garcia Garagarza, a native of Mexico City and a specialist in the history of indigenous religions of Mexico and Nahuatl history and religion, was also joining us remotely from Mexico City. He also worked on the Digital Florentine Codex project and he told me that there was a real danger of this information being lost.

Leon Garcia-Garagarza: However, in the 1580s, there was a royal policy of suppressing all information specifically about the religion of the peoples from the New World, not just in Mexico, but all over the empire. And that’s how the manuscripts were confiscated, not just the Florentine codex, but every type of manuscript that had been produced about the religion of the, the people in the New World was buried in archives or destroyed.

Richter: So one of the theories is that it was another Franciscan friar Sequeira, who took the manuscript, and delivered it to Italy because there was a fear that it would be destroyed. And he had good reasons to think about this because this is a moment when the information in the Florentine Codex could have been perceived as dangerous because it had information about idolatries and heretical information. When the Spaniards came to the Americas, and this is recorded in the sources, they would have book burning ceremonies. So there was reason to be concerned.

Roque: And so how does the Getty come into play here?

Richter: It’s a long, epic, epic story, the key to emphasize here is that the Florentine Codex is not at the Getty. It’s at the Medici Library in Florence, still as it was from the 16th century onwards. And so one could ask why did we take on a project that’s about an object that’s not in our collections should we focus on ours and that’s a valid point to make. I think there’s an interest and an effort to diversify the types of research and knowledge that we produce. And in this case we did a digital project that I think reflects the interests of many people who live in Los Angeles, right?

And it also so happened that we have a lot of expertise here in Los Angeles. So some of the leading scholars of the Florentine Codex are here. So Diana Magaloni at LACMA, Kevin Terraciano at UCLA in the History Department, Jeanette Peterson in Art History from UCSB, and the list goes on. And so, they are the co-conspirators as I like to think of them. Our mission is to democratize this sort of knowledge, right? It’s a piece of important cultural heritage that people all over the world should have access to.

Roque: I learned from Leon and Kim that the Florentine Codex is our most comprehensive source about Central Mexican culture at the time of the conquest, it’s this huge encyclopedia about Nahuatl culture. It contains information about foods, ceremonies, religion, and music!

Garcia-Garagarza: We can talk about the content of the music and musicians and symbolic aspect and the religious aspect of the social aspect of music in the Florentine Codex.

Roque: In Mesoamerican culture, music was an essential part of both ceremonies and everyday life, serving much more than just entertainment.

Garcia-Garagarza: You do it in community, and that is something that is a very strong lesson that you will find about the production of music in ancient Mexico, Where it’s so very important to get together, play music, make music, pray together, petition together, give our energy together, encourage each other together, and make beautiful, beautiful music and dance together.

Richter: So uh when we think of music today, it’s everywhere right in our car on our phone at home. It’s tied to leisure, music then was a really important part of rituals. But I think likewise, it’s important to recognize how music function differently and how, when you maybe don’t have access to music at every moment, how powerful it is when you go and participate in a ceremony and suddenly you’re enveloped by music.

Garcia-Garagarza: Let me, let me tell you about the, the heart, the instrumental heart of the instrumental heart of Nahuatl music at the time before guitars were introduced. There are two main percussion instruments that usually go together and they are really a symbolic dyad, you see, like a complementary pairs of opposites, and they have a conversation with each other, and they represent different aspects of the cosmos, and they have different sacred histories of how they came to be.

We are talking about the Huehuetl, which is the ground drum, this vertical drum, that is made of wood, and it’s covered with a membrane with the skin of an animal. It could have been a jaguar or it could have been a deer or any other animal that was suitable for that.

[drumming music interlude]

Now that drum is large and has a very deep sound. We see in the depictions of the Florentine Codex and elsewhere that it was played with the bare hands, rather like people play congas today, and even though you see the Aztec dancers today, they play with the mallets, which in Spanish we call baquetas.

Another very sacred instrument, it’s called a teponaztli. The teponaztli is not a vertical drum. It doesn’t have a membrane, but it is an idiophone. It’s a wooden drum, or it could be made even of gold sometimes, that is horizontal. And it has a, it’s like a trunk, a tree trunk, you know, that’s horizontal, you see, and it has two or more tongues that produce a contrasting sound. So, these two instruments are really at the basis of the, uh, that’s a rhythm section of, of, uh, of ancient Mexican music, these are like the king instruments.

Roque: This talk with Leon and my musical experience with Christopher, takes me back to that first family trip to Mexico. That trip among the many first for my family was my first real in person exposure to these new instruments such as the congas. Which resonates like the Huehuetl. Maracas. With similarities to chachayotes. And cowbells. With similarities to turtle shells.

And just like then, that moment with Christopher introduced me to a whole new set of sounds and instruments that opened up my musical universe to something I had never experienced or felt before. He says the elders say, “It’s in the blood” and it makes total sense now! My whole family, we’re all musicians, and that’s one of the things people would say about us, oh, it’s in the blood, está en la sangre. My grandpa was a musician, my uncles were musicians, my generation is full of musicians, now all the younger generations are becoming musicians, and so it makes sense that yes, it has to be in our blood. Even though this new generation may not directly point to it as a major influence, that resonance memory somehow transmits to the music they are creating now.

Roque: Here’s Leon again.

Garcia-Garagarza: There’s a, there’s a continuum of it. And, of course. After 300 years of colonization and 200 years of national modern identity, in Mexico and Central America, things have changed a lot as well,

Roque: Do you think there’s any, um, bands or musical groups that are still carrying this tradition found in Mesoamerican music now, in our modern times?

Garcia-Garagarza: Most definitely, yes, yes.

Roque: So, a lot of these things have survived, but just have evolved in a way, they are still evolving but they’re still present in our lives?

Garcia-Garagarza: There are several groups that are, inspired by the timbres, by the sounds, of the instruments, of that era. Now, I would have to say one thing that would be kind of like a revival in a sense that kind of like modernizing something that was back there and it’s absolutely legitimate. You see people mixing with synthesizers, you know, make it all cosmic and all that.

Veronica Castro: El Tri y Caifanes, qué más quieren, qué más quieren en la vida.

Roque: This is audio of a Mexican TV program that was very popular in the early 90’s titled, “*Y Vero America Va! *" hosted by Veronica Castro, a Mexican actress and TV personality. This show highlighted a lot of musical artists and bands in Mexico during that era. In this clip, she is interviewing El Tri, a classic Mexican rock band, even for that time, and who are considered pioneers of Spanish Rock in Mexico. Sitting opposite of them is Caifanes, then a young and up and coming Spanish rock band.

The interview feels a bit awkward and feels like we are witnessing the changing of the guard in Spanish rock. Similar to when a sports team drafts the aging superstars replacement and they are holding a joint press conference together. There is a sense of uncomfortableness between El Tri and Caifanes, and the host seems to feel it too and is doing her best to make the mood seem light and comfortable by trying to throw in a couple of jokes and laughs here and there. But It gets even more awkward when the host asks El Tri frontman, Alex Lora, if he enjoys the music of Caifanes.

He says, “Well they play good and they are good musicians but in all honesty, I don’t really vibe with their music and no, I don’t like it.” He tries to soften the blow by saying that while he’s a fan of all music, El Tri musical influences and sound is rooted in African American R&B and Rock. Then he says something that changed my musical perspective,

Alex Lora: Osea, es Rock en Roll, pero no tiene una raíz negra.

Roque: He says, They’re rock and roll, but their root sound doesn’t come from the traditional African American rock and roll sound. Caifanes, is a Mexican rock band that is linked to being the foremost proponent of integrating traditional Aztec or Mexican roots into their songs and band identity. You are listening to Afuera, one of their most famous songs, and if you listen closely you can hear mesoamerican influences.

[music interlude]

Garcia-Garagarza: But in most occasions, the Tlapotzona, the hitting, the music, it’s done with old world instruments that have been adapted to Mexican music. That is the guitarra, Huapanguera, in eastern Mexico. And the violin, the violin has been adapted throughout the Americas because it’s a very resonant instrument that kind of serves the same structural parallels as the Huehetl, the upright bass drum and the Teponatzli, horizontal drum did, that conversation is made now by string instruments. The violin takes place of the Teponatzl, that’s the high voice, the singing voice. And the guitar is a rhythm instrument, that’s the bass drum, you see. So you still see that, the same parallels in music production.So you see all this beautiful notions about what it is to make music, how it is made, but as you can see, there are very, very deep cosmological undertones to all these concepts. Music is our linkage to the world. And music is not just what’s been made by humans, it’s also happening through the wind, and it’s vibrating everywhere. The thing is just to capture it, to create it, to make it anew, to invent it.

Roque: Leon’s words make me reflect on how the elements found in the Florentine Codex are still alive today, even after all these years of potential loss. There is a cultural resilience that feels almost necessary to keep alive and to pass this knowledge to the next generation. We see this in Dia de Muertos celebrations, traditional Aztec ceremonies with dance and drum, in the music of bands like Caifanes, in rural parts of Mexico, and on the streets of Mexico City.

Garcia-Garagarza: You have to go to many communities in Mexico, in Guatemala, or even in the United States of indigenous people who are still playing the traditional instruments. But you will find it all over. You just have to look. And people don’t pay attention to them because they think it’s just a thing of poor Indians. They don’t have the fancy books, but they have been reproducing their music continuously for centuries. If you go to Mexico City, you will see the Tlapitzalli, Totonaka, you will see a man who’s playing a little drum and playing a little flute at the same time for a dancing music. And he’s not a fancy guy who knows all about Aztec history, but he’s been playing the music of 500 years ago, still sounding in the streets of the sea. So, yes, you can still find that music. It’s just that people don’t pay attention to it, but it’s so precious. And, uh, I hope that it will never disappear because it’s still part of the sonic landscape of this country.

[music introduction]

Roque: The resonance of this music it’s all around us, living on through each of us in unique ways. While it may not look exactly the same, its essence remains in small, meaningful pieces. Like your family, it endures through each generation, evolving yet always present. This enduring cultural resilience not only connects us to our past but also inspires us to carry these traditions forward, ensuring they thrive for future generations.

Here is Christopher and Pablo Leñero, playing music as the contemporary music duo, Mexico atemporal. It’s a fascinating look at this mixing of sounds from the past and the present to create a new musical world. You can hear the Huehuetl, chachayotes, and the Teponaztli being fused with the sounds of a piano. One side of the music indigenous to the Americas and the other brought to America in 1770, now coexisting and creating new sounds for us to enjoy.

Garcia: We do this whole thing at the end of our presentation, where uh, I’ll do it for you, we do this. We say no matter the color of our hair, the color of our eyes, or the color of our skin, no matter how we choose to identify ourselves, ancestrally, culturally, ethnically, physically, genetically, spiritually, the one thing we share as human beings is 270 days, 6,480 hours, nine months in our mother’s wombs. This pulse has been with us before we were born, no matter how you choose to identify yourselves. And this pulse exists in every human being that walks on this planet. But what happens is, the older we get, we lose track of the pulse. And we get caught up in the rhythm of our lives. Instead of recognizing the pulse in other people. And when that happens, when we got so caught up in the rhythm of work, of play, of family, of spirituality, when that happens, we gotta stop. And we have to find this pulse in ourselves and in everyone else that’s around us. The more we recognize that in ourselves and in others, and we realize that we are human beings, that we are indigenous to this planet. All of us are indigenous to this planet. And we always say, may we continue to live our lives with intention, with integrity, with intensity, with passion, and with the most difficult, balance. Because sooner or later, when you least expect it, no matter your age, you’re out of time. And then we quote Sixto Rodriguez, “The mystery of life is, we never know when it’s going to end.”

Roque: Wow! Amazing, thank you so much! Wow, man, that hits home, definitely hits home.

Thank you for joining me on this episode of ReCurrent. Join me in two weeks as we continue to explore the cultural heritage stories around us. Let’s see what we can gain by keeping the past present.

ReCurrent was written and produced by Jaime Roque. Audio production by Jaime Roque. Our executive producer is Christopher Sprinkle.

For transcripts, images, and additional resources, visit getty dot edu slash podcasts slash recurrent.

[music fades out]