Brick by bricolage: Adobe Punk 's decolonial remapping of Los Angeles

These lyrics, excerpted from the Bell System song “Not to Scale,” in the theaterwork,¹ Adobe Punk, speak to the hopeful freedom imagined in punk's break with the past—a rejection of the boundaries and borders set by authority figures, from governmental officials to parents, who create the maps with already paved roads leading to predictable destinations and other metaphorical and literal boxes that direct the course of our lives. And yet, as I will show, the meaning and inspiration behind this song is more complicated since it is steeped in layered, (de)colonial processes that our punk protagonists become immersed in as they discover the history of the building in which they are squatting and their connections—and possibly responsibilities—to it. In this way, the theaterwork locates the tension in punk between individualistic freedom and (familial, intergenerational) connections and/as responsibility. Given the broad spatiotemporal entanglements into which the main characters become committed, this tension goes beyond what might be conceived as a contradiction between individual autonomy and accountability for, and as part of, a collective. Might a reflection on the layers of this tension help us consider punk and sustainability or punk as a sustainable practice, given the subculture's multigenerational existence and continued momentum?

Punk subculture is often portrayed as breaking with previous generations and traditions through desecration and defamation of values, symbolized by aesthetic, lyrical, and musical choices. Most iconic, perhaps, is the Sex Pistols’ defacement of Queen Elizabeth II and their appropriation of the British anthem, “God Save the Queen,” in which they liken the queen to a “potential H-bomb” and deem her to have been made a “moron.” The lyrics are telling, and, along with other punk productions (e.g., the Dead Boys “Sonic Reducer”), send a message that might be worded along the lines of the following: “Previous generations and their leaders got us into the messes that we are currently in, and therefore, if we want a future, we need to cut ties and rebuild by sifting through the refuse. We need to collect the scraps, patch, and stitch them together to forge a pathway that's our own while we make sense of the lies we’ve been told so we can avoid their traps, including the trap to become complacent in oppressive structures by being oppressed or becoming the oppressors ourselves.” What do we make of punk today, then, as a multigenerational phenomenon that, itself, has a canonic history and historicity? What do we make of punk's enduring commitments across generations to, for example, DIY, do it yourself practices, and certain ways of life, such as squatting, and particular aesthetic musical stylings? How can we creatively and critically reflect on punk histories, futurities, and solidarities while keeping generational exchange in mind within and beyond the punk community while also challenging traditional hierarchies and power structures?

This essay discusses the theaterwork, Adobe Punk (About…Productions), which premiered in March 2022 at Plaza de La Raza, known for providing accessible and affordable arts education in East Los Angeles, which is now a primarily Latinx community (Figure 1). I read Adobe Punk to interrogate how punk-reflective productions, or productions that are reflections on punk and punk productions insofar as they are instigated by punks, can animate conversations around sustainability—as a concept that stresses “intergenerational equity” in terms of economic, societal, and environmental means of community endurance. As I will show, Los Angeles is a city contoured by settler colonial processes that have left traces in name and façade. I understand Adobe Punk to be part of a punk-reflective trend that demands that (1) we reflect on ongoing historical injustices in order to remedy exploitation of, for example, settler colonialism, and environmental abuses and (2) we align punk DIY with other communities’ DIY practices rooted in radical anticapitalist, anticolonial sustenance models. Punk scholarship, such as George Grinell's “Decolonizing Punk Studies” (forthcoming), recognizes the importance of stating, as he writes, “punk rock is settler music” (Grinell, forthcoming: 8). And, to complicate matters, we need to contend with punk's differential colonial liminality—that is both resistance to and participation in settler-colonial structural benefits. Contemporary Los Angeles bands such as Fuck U Pay Us and mirrored fatality, for example, decry slavery, an extension of colonial domination, and emphasize decolonial regeneration amid ecocide. These QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) punk groups exemplify recent challenges to the historical representations of settler colonialism and punk that have suffered from Anglocentric narratives, binaries, and biases. Moreover, while mainstream punk has prioritized denouncing the capitalist system and environmental injustices, there are fewer pointed attacks on the settler colonial basis of capitalism and its enduring structures of Indigenous deracination through interrelated processes of conquest, displacement, and environmental racism. ² However, we punks need to continue the aforementioned trend and understand that settler colonialism, as “a structure and not an event” (Kauanui, 2016), is fundamental to the power structures and privileges that many punks rally against and feel entitled to assume, such as squatting on “unoccupied” or “unclaimed” land or buildings. I situate this reflection on Adobe Punk as a contribution to punk anticolonial studies by providing analyses on how the theaterwork locates itself in a transitional time and compels us to reconsider these narratives and practices through our own situatedness, modes of belonging, and roots/routes.

Coined a “theatrical zine,” Adobe Punk was born from an intergenerational collaboration between a mother, Theresa Chavez, and her son, Gabriel Garza. Chavez also directed the play and, along with Nina Diaz (of the band, Girl in a Coma), composed the songs. Chavez was part of the formative Los Angeles punk scene in the 1970s. As such, the play is pointedly inspired by her experiential knowledge and DIY punk culture, which Dunn (2016: 9) argues in Global Punk, “provides individuals and local communities with resources for self-empowerment and political resistance.” DIY punk culture is increasingly becoming reconsidered in terms of DIT or do it together, which underscores the communal efforts in DIY practices, such as starting a band, releasing an album, or putting on a show. DIY-as-DIT also exceeds these oft-discussed “punk productions,” to use Thompson's (2004) term. DIY punk culture has seen the growth of rock 'n' roll camps for girls (and non-cis-male gendered participants), on the one hand, and resources for the unhoused, persons suffering from mental health issues, and those with addiction or substance misuse and abuse disorders, on the other. Many punks with whom I have spoken have felt suspicious of or rejected by the system and the laws (and law enforcement) aimed to “protect and serve” them as well as society's status quo that continues to be dominated by elite members with particular (moralized) values and notions of respectability. “DIY punk provides the means by which alternative ways of being are imagined and realized at the individual and local levels, with profound implications for the lives of its participants (see Sofianos et al., 2014)” (Dunn, 2016: 19).

Punk did not create DIY, and many marginalized communities have engaged in DIY practices to survive. “The DIY ethos,” as Dunn (2016: 13) explains, “became the defining feature of punk rock scenes as they emerged in the late 1970s.” This ethos is often explained by the 1970s consolidation of media with the “Big Five” corporate record labels and performers who were increasingly disconnected from their fans. In the United States, the 1970s also brought a critical lens to the taken-for-granted, Anglo-American, male hegemony that dominated the economic, political, and cultural social sectors and norms. Political movements such as the Civil Rights Movement, Women's Liberation, LGBT Rights, the Chicano Moratorium, Environmental Rights, and Native American Rights made strides in increasing visibility and beginning to remedy historical injustices. While there were (and are) many reasons for getting into punk, some people didn’t fit neatly into one political or social group, and punk became a place to belong, to create new familial relations and support systems by DIY—doing it yourself, together. As Alice Bag and others from the early Los Angeles scene explain, punk was a place where labels were taboo; they were misfits creating a new identity: punk. With this new identity came the wholesale questioning and, at times, refutations of cultural traditions of their parents, such as challenging normative gender roles, ideas surrounding sexuality, relationships, and religious mores, for example. This is where the storyline of Adobe Punk, finds us—with three young people from different backgrounds who identify as punks living together and relating across any perceived differences (societally).

Background

The storyline of Adobe Punk is set in the working-class neighborhood of Bell Gardens, which is in Southeast Los Angeles in the early 1980s during a time of great sociodemographic change after white flight occurred and Latinx, Black, and immigrant communities, such as Lebanese refugees, made Bell Gardens their home. ³ Crucially, the theaterwork takes DIY as its central theme through which the history of Bell Gardens, and the Los Angeles basin more broadly, is shared, connecting California's Indigenous and colonial roots to the formative pivot in the early 1980s when punk shifted from its nascency to hardcore, which has shaped how punk has been viewed in Anglophonic terms. As Garza explains, the entire play takes place in an adobe building which is based on a real structure built by the Lugo family in 1844 that burned down in 1983, which prompted Garza to think of what was happening in punk at that time. Of his inspiration, he noted:

I have loved this music for a long time, and upon learning more information about this home and the timeframe of its last days, [it] correlated with the demise and at the same time height of the punk scene becoming the hardcore punk scene in LA. And just that immediate idea of a house burning down made total sense related to a punk attitude in a really rudimentary way (About…Productions, 2020).

The opening scene is set within the building itself and a haunting Californio soundscape, which seems to emanate from the “soul” of the house but is actually coming from amps on stage, which we find out are our punk protagonists’ amps. Californios were early Hispanic Californians and their contemporary descendants, typically descended from Spanish and Mexican settlers. Sage Lewis, the production's resident composer and sound designer, threaded Californio and Indigenous sound recordings culled from the Gene Autry Museum Archives throughout the theaterwork. As the lights come up, our three punk protagonists, between the ages of 19 and 22, enter in a joyful manner. Their bright entrance is due to them returning from an X show, singing the X song, “In This House That I Call Home.” The walls of the squat are covered in lists, flyers, photos, and other cut-and-pasted ephemera in the DIY bricolage aesthetic, which is representative of how they are making the house a home.

Manny, the drummer, is Mexican-American, and we later find out that he is pro-labor, a fan of the Minutemen, and, with his roots in Bell Gardens, the most knowledgeable about the town's history. Kat, the bass player, is a Lebanese immigrant whose family is Muslim. She and her family emigrated from Lebanon during the start of the Civil War in 1975 when she was a young teenager, so she was introduced to American culture and cultural values through media (radio and television). We learn that her favorite bands are Blondie and the Bags. Noreen, the lead singer and guitarist, is Anglo-American (white) and lived in a mobile home park with her mom and sister before joining Kat and Manny in the squat. She loves photography, drawing, and the band, X, especially the avant-garde stylings of Exene. Both Noreen and Manny are from Bell Gardens. All are learning to play their instruments throughout the theaterwork, demonstrating the DIY approach, which, as Cordova (2016) has outlined, is a valuable educational process that can bridge sustainable knowledges. From the outset, these punks are both connected to and disconnected from their given families. Each character, then, represents a means of sustainable knowledge that emerges through their unique sensitivities that they bring to bear on the history of the house through their intergenerational positionalities: Manny (labor, history, the grounding rhythms of life), Kat (diasporic movement, media/sound, religion/spirituality), and Noreen (visual sensibilities, narration, artistry).

Adobe Punk complicates what constitutes the “given” in punk, as many contemporary accounts often rely on the “given” as white, cishet male, or “dominant” (Anglo-American or British) cultural and systemic constructs. Punks with othered identities, to challenge the punk-as-system status quo, have reclaimed labels predicated on dominant forms of political categorization through which groups have been marginalized. However, the punk bricoleurs that inhabit the theaterwork's stage occupy liminal identities in a period of time where the category of “white,” for example, could apply to each character, although for two of the three protagonists, it seems obvious today that they would not be “white” like Noreen (Anglo-American), and the privilege of such nonconditional whiteness is revealed when Manny declares that they are officially squatting, which concerns Kat because she doesn’t want to get her immigrant parents in trouble, to which Manny explains that some of his relatives are undocumented.

Inspired by the X show, they start to practise their own songs. One aspect of this theaterwork that shows the DIY process is, as Chavez explained, how “the songwriting process is part of the show, and we see them developing these punk songs that they perform for us as well” (LATV Network, 2022). Throughout the theaterwork, music resounds the process through which the main characters’ affective intensities (resonant in song, for example) coupled with their sustainable knowledge become subcultural communication, which is exemplary of bricolage aesthetic in lived practice. As Hebdige (1979: 106) explained, famously drawing from Claude Lévi-Strauss, bricolage is central to meaning-making in the production of new subcultures. ⁴ The (punk) bricoleur takes what is available, in DIY fashion, to “disrupt and reorganize meaning” by juxtaposing seemingly disparate elements and amplifying dissonance. As these processes of resignification become stylized, distinct subcultures are produced that (can) challenge dominant communicative value systems that reinforce the status quo. For the main characters of Adobe Punk, DIY bricolage is the operative logic through which they fashion their futures in their communal space by incorporating and transgressing their given pasts, including the given pasts of their present habitation. We, the audience, are privy to an important example of the trio's resignification practice when they broach naming their band. Ultimately, they settled on “Bell System” after their municipal telecommunications company that has its company title imprinted on the city's manhole coverings. Manny produces the name, and he excitedly persuades Kat and Noreen, “Just think. The place where we’re from, Bell Gardens, that we disregard and cherish, is in the name too . . . We grew up in this system, we’re gonna get out of it, and why not pronounce that with our name? . . . And we’re stripping our community away from the company . . .” (Chavez and Garza, 2022b: 9). The enthusiasm grows as they discuss doing away with the manhole coverings that say “Bell System” and allowing holes to appear that “lead to [their] underground.” Their collective chants of “my underground” turn into the inspiration for another song, “Bell Underground Gardens.” After Noreen tacks a large piece of paper on the wall, contributing to the bricolage texture, they each contribute a line in slow earnestness, compose the music, and contemplate going “public.”

The band name can be read as a metaphor for engaging punk creativity, such as music-making, photography, cinema, and poetry to invigorate transhistorical communication. As Manny shared, it encompasses their formative spatial and temporal realities of place (Bell Gardens) and structural process (the system). Uncovering the layers of Bell Gardens (literally by removing manhole coverings and later discovering the history of the adobe house) becomes a way, it seems, to disregard the immediate present while still cherishing it. The line, “My underground/ where thoughts begin, but never start,” in “Bell Underground Gardens,” suggests the continuity of collective consciousness where they take shape in being (beginning), but not as a radical start borne in the mind of an individual. The former continuity disrupts the latter's problematic modern trappings that perpetuate uncontested privilege by denying how generational wealth accrues. What follows from the scene suggests the important work of revealing the layers of our material surroundings and our emotional connections to them that manifest as we uncover and animate these histories. Kat discovers an old piano hidden beneath a sheet. Manny doesn’t want her to disturb the covering, and Noreen exclaims, “It feels like you’re uncovering a dead person . . .” As the lights lower and Manny and Noreen fall asleep, Kat begins to play the instrument. “I love the sound of an old piano. I haven’t had one since we left Lebanon. Sometimes I wonder if that piano is still alive.” We don’t often think of punk musicians playing or “loving the sound” of pianos (new or old). In fact, DIY punk musicianship might baulk at the arrangement of piano keys and their immediate inflexibility, the instrument's connection to classical Western music and music theory, and the instrument's overall immobility. Yet, here we are, with what can be considered a haunting among many—the sounds of the old piano (“a dead piano” as Noreen qualified it) that bring feelings to life and change the soundscape of the squat. These affective shifts are part of the layered bricolage that, we later realize, is the more-than-human assemblage of the squatters in relational response to the call of the historical, material structures, and instruments that they occupy them. Like the cut-and-paste aesthetic of layering posters, lyrics, and lists on the walls of the squat, each musical performance becomes a part of developing communicative texture—call and response patterns—as the trio search their histories for sustenance.

Portraits & drawings

Then, the lights go dark. As Kat sits down and “plays Middle Eastern tonalities” on stage left, on stage right, a film screen emerges with Noreen sitting in front of it, her back to the audience (Chavez and Garza, 2022b: 11). Manny's black and white images appear on the screen, and he begins talking in interview format, reminiscent of the interviews in Penelope Spheeris's Decline of Western Civilization from 1981, coterminous with the era. Yet, while Spheeris documents the violent punk scene, Noreen's “portraits,” as she calls them, document aspects of their lives, and she reveals what she feels is a “secret corner of her neighbourhood” (Figure 2). The interviews are woven throughout the play. Manny is the first subject. He talks about the lists he makes, which he gives to city hall so they can fix all the municipal breaks. “It's their job after all, not mine . . .” Here, he explains that his cousins and neighbors perform manual labor to fix the crumbling city. He wonders if the disrepair is good since it keeps them employed but has concerns for the residents’ safety. He enumerates why he doesn’t want to settle into his father's footsteps. The video recording is doubled by Manny's live voice. This performance technique is one of the compositional methods that foreground voice and vocal plays throughout the theaterwork. Voice and subjectivity have, conventionally, been linked in humanistic scholarship and narrative tropes where the voice yields insight into a character's innermost thoughts, feelings, and, at times, psychological turmoil. The doubling of Manny's voice, resounded in the subsequent portraits, emphasizes the split subjectivity or internal dissonance that compels our punk protagonists to become subcultural producers. The vocal effect creates the sensation that Manny's voice cannot be contained by him (or in his portrait) and has a life and energy of its own, reaching above and beyond the here and now. Explaining why he doesn’t want to follow in his father's footsteps, he punches a hole in the wall and reveals the adobe. In doing so, he uncovers that they are actually squatting in what was an adobe building, made in the mid-1800s by early Californios.

A Californio soundscape plays, emanating the vibrational history of the house. “It feels like something is touching me back, like a pressure around my whole arm, like it's surrounded by something,” Manny exclaims with passion (Chavez and Garza, 2022b: 13). “Old bricks, the kind my grandfather used to make in our backyard . . . Mud, straw, [and] sunlight forced together to create a brick . . . Am I feeling him?” Manny has a transformative experience. He faints and is caught in a hand truck by Kat and Noreen. “Adobe,” he says. He begins to feel as though he is floating above the house. “I can see its bones. And feel its organs. Its blood pulses through me like a transfusion from the past.” Kat and Noreen lower Manny back to the ground, and he shares that he is returning with new information about the house and its “birth.” Kat and Noreen ask, in unison, “How did this house come to be an adobe?” sonically manifesting the records that Manny has retrieved. The script shares his actions (Figure 3), which connect the adobe brick structure to the punk bricolage that adorns the walls of the squat, comprising their interconnected “by-hand” texture. He explains that it was built in the mid-nineteenth century by Vicente Lugo before the area was incorporated into the United States following the Mexican-American War in 1848, per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which also mandated that the US government honor the Mexican land grants in the region based on “the hand-drawn sketch maps” or diseños (Portrero de Felipe Lugo Rancho, 1845; Figure 4).

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Figure 1.

Adobe Punk: “A theatrical zine with music.”

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Figure 2.

Theaterwork still. Kat sits at the piano (stage left), Manny stands (center stage), and Noreen sits in front of a “portrait” (film) of Manny (stage right).

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Figure 3.

Adobe Punk script directions, p 15.

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Figure 4.

Portrero de Felipe Lugo Rancho.

They examine the land deed, part of the early colonial system, and Manny continues, “It was part of a larger rancho that his father had . . . This is where they placed themselves in this landscape. And they drew this picture so they could say . . .” Kat interrupts, “They exist” (Chavez and Garza, 2022b: 15). Noreen follows, “Here. In this house.” The conversation surrounding the diseño of the Lugo rancho continues, as the protagonists go back and forth: “It's like a map . . . sort of . . . but it's not straight. No squares. No lines.” Noreen muses that it is between the “rock-hard” reality of a map and a drawing. “That's how a lot of rancheros lost their land to the Americanos,” Manny expounds upon the layers of colonial entitlement related to how the first Californios were the descendants of the Spanish military expeditions that established the California presidios and mission system, converting the Native populations to Catholicism. Militarization and missionization are both elements of broader colonial ventures, and the Californios’ culture became centered on the Vaquero tradition (cowboy) practised by those who received large land grants on which they established ranches (part of the Rancho system). The Lugo house was part of the early, European colonial system, but they became displaced, in part, when the Anglo-Americans colonized the land. The diseños were in Spanish, Manny notes, while the court proceedings were in English, which meant that land titles were often not recognized or boundaries considered. He explains that the land was continuously subdivided in the creation of contemporary neighborhoods and states that “even squatters were involved.” However, he references the US American squatters (Americanos). Land grants were honored through an arduous and expensive process, with translators, lawyers, and travel fees often bankrupting individuals. Petitioners who went through a nearly two-decades-long process were not guaranteed grant claims’ approval. The coterminous decline in cattle prices and drought across California resulted in US settlers’ acquisition of rancho lands at reduced prices. When the ranchos were vulnerable, the Americano squatters would take their land.

Manny's statement about the Americano squatters creates yet another complex connection between the punk trio and their colonial predecessors; it tacitly affirms how their liminal position as squatters is entrenched in structures of power. As squatters, they are vulnerable to established municipal codes and current law enforcement (and other authority figures, like their parents), but they are also participating in social processes of settlement that have promulgated exploitation, erasure, and deracination. DIY punk collectives, houses, show spaces, activist networks, and even entire scenes have been represented as alternatives to dominant, oppressive institutions. And yet, they too often exist within the settler common sense that effaces the conflictual space of settler occupation that, as artistic communities, have participated in processes of gentrification through claims on urban space. ^{5 6}

Adobe Punk's accompanying “info zine” (Figure 5) focuses on a different facet of Californios life, stating, “Californios were a DIY culture much like the punks. Separated by hundreds of miles from what is now Northern Mexico, they developed their own distinct food, music, dress, and created their culture from the ground up.” And, the program also notes that Theresa Chavez and Gabriel Garza are seventh and eighth-generation Californios. The Californios, then, were intermediaries of sorts in settler colonial history, and exploring their roots might offer a way to reconnect with a more complicated history than the theaterwork is able to delve into. Thus, while Manny stated that the Americanos “carved away at the edges,” Kat's response, “Why can’t we carve away at the edges too? Really, stake a claim on this empty house. Create a map of our own to say—we exist here. Our music exists here,” belies that difficulty in divesting from staked claims, even when challenging “the system,” as it were (Chavez and Garza, 2022b: 16). For, when people are pushed from their home, as was Kat, or born into a place that is the only home they have known, how do they work to decolonize and provide intergenerational equity when they also must survive? As Noreen conveys, she was forced to work for her mom and sister—who seem to care more about money than her—after her dad died and they had to live in a trailer park. That the creators locate themselves and the characters in the midst of colonial theft and generational trauma—as persons with generational inheritance of being both oppressed and the oppressor—provides a crucial corollary for punks to think through their/our responsibilities as societal “outsiders” while many of us, to varying degrees, also benefit from legacies of generational privilege. How can we “carve away at the edges” of the injustices that come from land theft and toxification? Do the Californio soundscapes offer vibratory clues?

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Figure 5.

“Info zine” (adobe punk).

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Figure 6.

Theaterwork still. Kat (pictured with a bag over her head) in her “portrait.”

After the trio discusses who knows they are squatting (only Manny's mom knows), they launch into the process of another song, “Not to Scale” (the lyrics are excerpted at the beginning of this article), which references the diseño and also the punk protagonists’ desire to affirm their presence and music have made an impact in the house. After the song finishes, they ask in unison, “[I]s this the center of my universe?” Noreen's portrait of Kat follows. She talks about leaving Lebanon: “Sometimes I can hear those pieces of myself wandering between Lebanon and here, especially when I am playing. The vibration of my bass sends out a signal and my soul hears it.” Her parents tried to move away from their life before but now her mom covers her head with a hijab even though she didn’t in Lebanon because someone from the mosque here told her to—she is becoming more conservative—and Kat is moving in the other direction. “And what about you?” Noreen asks. “I could cover my head with a brown paper bag like the Bags did when they first started their band,” Kat responds, making a reference to the seminal Los Angeles band fronted by Alice Bag who appeared in Decline of Western Civilization (Figure 6). She continues, “And to me, they were saying, we’re not anonymous and we won’t be silenced. And we are going to punch our way out of this paper bag.” Like Manny before, her voice is doubled live and they launch into another song with Kat singing, “[N]o waiting for permission, I’ll stop playing the submissive.”

Becoming history through sound

Noreen, the photographer, finds a portrait of Maria Antonio Lugo (1877) and feels like she is connected to the house. They then hang up Lugo's portrait on the wall and the amps start playing eerie music, to which Kat responds, “Sufi mystics believe that sound comes from the soul, and why wouldn’t this house have one?” (Chavez and Garza, 2022b: 22) The hole that Manny punched now becomes a journey back to and through the sounds of the Gabrieliño/Tongva Nation (one of the Indigenous communities of the “Los Angeles” basin) and beyond to Earth. Kat proclaims, “[It's] saying go back further.” As she listens, she responds to the sounds with her bass, playing along, or, per the script, “communicating” with the sonorous signal. Kat elaborates, “Further than this diseño, and these roads, and this adobe,” and with it, the trio all begin to play their instruments in a quiet, contemplative spiritual communication. “. . . [B]efore this house, there were hundreds of tribes here for thousands of years and they’re still here and we should listen.” Bell System starts jamming with these sounds, becoming a different type of transgenerational communication system. We hear what sounds like old ranchero (Californio) songs and native chanting. Suddenly, they fall asleep and when they wake up, they have had a dream, although different, they are interconnected, tying them to each other and the soul of the house, compelling them to share their messages with the world and leave their mark. They all dream about red lights, perhaps suggesting the fire that caused the ultimate destruction of the building in 1983.

Finally, Noreen shares her self-portrait (Figure 7). “This camera belonged to my father,” she announces, “I felt like it had a hold over me. I felt like it was an extension of not just my arm but my entire body” (Chavez and Garza, 2022b: 24). The theaterwork highlights how deeply connected the punk youths are to their families on an embodied, spiritual level, and how these connections manifest both in their punk productions (the breaks with their immediate families that see them living in the squat) and in their connection to the adobe house and thus each other. When it comes to sustainable knowledge, then, the generational artistry that moves through and with each of the characters and contributes to the bricolage becomes not only their underground but also part of the larger story of Los Angeles and its punk scene as it is connected to the adobe bricks and beyond to the sun and Earth of which they are a part. Noreen's self-portrait offers reflective inquiries into the creative process, which occurs at the moment of her voice doubling, live and on film, to emphasize the statement's generative import:

Is that act, is this act, going to exist outside of this house and move anyone? Isn’t that the question for every song ever written, every film or drawing or painting ever made? And if this world ends tomorrow, is it worth taking one more photo and writing one last song? (Chavez and Garza, 2022b: 24).

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Figure 7.

Theaterwork still. Noreen's self-portrait, with a camera.

A transitional silence accompanies Noreen as the film shuts off, she puts on her coat, picks up her guitar, and begins to sing “One Last Song,” a cappella and solo, with the opening lyrics, “Want to write one last song . . .” As she sings, Manny hoists Kat on his shoulders, and she drapes a Bell System banner across the bricolage textured walls, which we now know are layered over the adobe bricks. “. . . [B]efore the world goes dark/ Wind it up, let it spin/ Maybe move a heart.” Manny picks up the melody, sitting at the drum; he begins to sing a cappella and solo: “Want to sing one last song before we leave this place/ Leave our mark/ Our human trace.” Kat, with her bass strapped on, sings a cappella and solo: “Want to play one last note before it's ripped away/ Make it worth my while and have one last say.” The entire band begins to play, and Noreen moves from a ballad delivery to the punk-inflected chorus, “With red lights flashing this dream is clear/ This adobe spirit has taken away our fear.” Preempted by a composed musical chaos, Noreen's energetic count-off marks Bell System's transition to a medley of the songs they wrote over the course of the theaterwork: “No Waiting,” “Not to Scale,” which Manny begins in the Spanish language, and “Diddly Squat,” which is a play on the phrase meaning “nothing” and their positions inhabiting a squat, which they claim as rightfully theirs. The chorus of the song, which they have been working on since the beginning of the theaterwork, offers: “We don’t have diddly squat, but we got the right to keep what we got.”

The song is an upbeat, playful-sounding punk anthem. And yet, it speaks to the issues of entitlement where privileges are taken as “rights” when individuals assign them as such in broad-sweeping claims that leave the inequitable applicability of such “rights” based assertions unexamined (often unspoken). When privileges are claimed as rights and these ”rights” are unevenly distributed (i.e., they are denied while being granted to others), then the constitutive terming of “right” needs to be reexamined precisely by looking at the structural means of entitlements (titles, land grants, and resources) as well as histories of inclusion and exclusion that enable and even promote uneven access to “rights” (and consequences for not existing within the bounds of a citizenry granted such rights). That “Diddly Squat” occupies the penultimate spot in the finale's set list, it amplifies the trio's differential positions of privilege and precarity. Their togetherness in this underground space has not emerged ex nihilo; rather, it has been conditioned by the builders before them, the alliances and violence that have made and remade the overarching system they seek to subvert. Their creation of their own subcultural style, as Bell System, and their “mark” on the adobe house (internal to theaterwork) recall the power of cooperative relationality where identity does not cease to matter but the sum of the parts can offer new opportunities for members within the collective when they take on the identity of that relationship. For, in this critical representation of Los Angeles punk (written and directed by Chavez, an early punk participant and woman of color) we are reminded that, in Los Angeles, punk began with and through difference, even though it retains a historical shift where it became whitewashed, masculinized, and instrumentalized (as such) as a form of violent effacement and exclusion. We, the audience, along with Chavez and her collaborators, know that this moment in Los Angeles punk is fleeting, but its resonance has retained momentum which can be seen and heard across East and Southeast Los Angeles punk shows.

So, it is fitting when, after the audience erupts into applause, the trio segues into a spirited reprise of “One Last Song.” Following the chorus (“With red lights flashing this dream is clear/ This adobe spirit has taken away our fear”), the instrumentation drops out, and Manny returns to a cappella, solo singing, “With red lights flashing, our time is up/ Sidewalks still cracking/ We’ll march, abrupt” (Chavez and Garza, 2022b: 26). Kat chimes in, “[T]o my underground,” as does Noreen, “[O]ur underground,” and then Manny joins them as they lace arms and dance off singing, together, in unison, “[L]eading to our underground, leading to our underground, leading to our underground . . .” The moment the trio joins as one through physical proximity and vocal delivery, the Californio soundscape returns. It acoustically envelops and supports their chant, remaining even after the characters have exited the stage.

Conclusion (sonic returns)

Adobe Punk directly contends with and more obliquely touches on issues surrounding intergenerational equity and the power of leaving a “mark”—be it a song, a picture, or a brick—through which histories become realized and reflected upon through embodied realities. Crucially, DIY punk producers, via bricolage, contribute to and glean new meanings from these creative cut-and-paste reflections. Members of the audience, punk tells us, are always already implicated in the show, the system that positions us as spectators. We are, in fact, producers too, and it is up to us to make meaning and meaningful contributions from what we are given in any “show” (or theaterwork). That said, I want to conclude this essay with ruminations on sound (sonic vibrations) and DIY music as a material–spiritual connection that, in the context of Adobe Punk, has the potential to invigorate conversations about how punks are connected through their roots to different processes of privilege and oppression. Such contemplations, I hope, can compel more reflections on the responsibility of punk productions to pave decolonizing routes. Nina Diaz, for example, claimed that the play was like rediscovering her roots.

Being Latinx, as we evolve and we change things that generations before didn’t have the opportunity to change, we could still remember our roots, we could still remember that past all these layers we have that connection to our ancestors…I feel that this play also reminds you that whether or not you’re Latino…don’t forget your roots because it's like the music today—don’t forget where it came from, it came from somewhere (LATV Network, 2022).

She said, “As you create, you touch into something spiritual, and if your ancestors are there or spirit guides—I feel like, it's amazing—and that's definitely a part of the play too, connecting with ancestors and your inner core” (LATV Network, 2022). When we think about “the ancestors” or the presence of the ancestors, often we think about human ancestors. The play, however, shows how all things creative—music, sound vibrations, buildings, maps, cameras, lists, decaying infrastructure, and, importantly, adobe (the mud and straw that human hands moulded such that the work of the sun would fuse them together to bake them into a brick, as a building block)—are extensions of ancestors, intergenerational energies that carry vitality and support in their own ways, relational knowledge and guidance that disrupt the mediated modern categories or disciplines that punk, in its nascency, was experimenting with. What does decolonizing work consist of? With the theft of land through settlement and restructuring of society, there is the violent erasure of entire systems and lifeways. Reconnecting with ancestral spirits and with others’ ancestral worlds can awaken us to the shared need for sustainability and equity—not in development terms co-opted by the system as such—but in terms of DIY. What we need to thrive and divest from is continued violent modes of theft, policing, and surveillance—those that are part of mainstream politics and those that have overtaken punk's boundaries and borders, as we realize with the challenge to Decline and the violent history it presents. The challenge to Decline is poignant because, in some respects, the hardcore scene that moved in—as Garza discussed of his inspiration—colonized the spaces and places of formative Los Angeles punk, which was more diverse. And yet, there remained an irreverent attitude, again as Garza suggested, of these punks in this scene such that it seemed to fit the story that they would burn down the house, which coincidentally was part of the storyline in Penelope Spheeris's Decline of Western Civilization III that focused on the crust punk/squatter scene.

In sum, Adobe Punk brings up more questions and complications than answers and neat resolutions. We are left with impressions of aesthetics and theatrical artistry, share the lessons we learn from land theft as part of the increasingly toxic industrializing of Los Angeles (a city infamous for its smog, for example), as well as the importance of intercultural, transgenerational knowledge of perseverance through which sustainability can be effectuated. But, we aren’t directed in any way from these impressions. Perhaps that is the lesson: to create and be open to spiritual, intergenerational connections, to DIY decolonial divestments, and to reimagine the hard reality of a map through drawings that direct us to alternative places comprised of people with different backgrounds, like the one in Adobe Punk's “info zine” (Figure 8). Here, the Atomic Café and Hong Kong Café, for example, remind us of the Asian (East and Southeast) communities that are part of Los Angeles punk's formative story. As Ngô (2012) writes in “Punk and the Shadow of War,” punk needs to be situated amid US imperial logic through discussion of where punks choose to live (often with and among immigrants, poor people, and people of color, as detailed with the Canterbury residence). Ngô (2012: 205) offers:

[P]unk reformulated topics and modes of resistance, the impact of the wars in Southeast Asia, as well as continuing histories of imperialist aggression elsewhere, served as a way for this racially and sexually diverse punk scene to imagine itself as resistant through (sometimes simultaneous) affiliation with and disassociation from the state, military, and acts of capitalist violence.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 8.

Punk map and info about punk and Lugo house.

This disassociation is problematic, and it needs to be confronted, as the above article details through situating punk amid the living and business spaces of Southeast Asian immigrants displaced by the war, which officially ended in 1975 (the year the Lebanese Civil War began, as we recall from Kat's narrative). The sustainability of punk has thus depended on these communities displaced by war and punk's sustainability requires we locate the colonial/imperial processes as constitutive in punk's formation. We are always contending with our personal, political, and entwined legacies of being displaced, disenfranchised, and searching for a home, a place where we can belong and feel secure in a community. Capitalism has promoted the idea of scarcity and the zero-sum game. Rules are written such that our belonging or success seems to necessitate the displacement or failure of another. Just as punks resist capitalism, we need to remember how to think more capaciously, which might start with hearing more capaciously, and, through frank conversations with each other about our lineages, repositioning ourselves in punk futurities that take into consideration intergenerational equity and striving towards who and where we want to be beyond ourselves.