The stage is set. From different corners of the room, clarinet and saxophone rise in step with each other, drums rumbling in beneath them. Half on the wetted reed, half on the mic, Ariel Goodman jumps up and down, her body a live wire. Across the stage, Cara Tratner is in the zone. It seems, for a moment, that there are springs beneath their shoes, coiling and releasing with the sound. María Paz Ordoñez raises her arms into the air, and it's officially a party.
That sound will be coming to Cafe Nine next Wednesday, as the Philadelphia-based eight-piece band Mariposas Galácticas brings its fusion of cumbia, klezmer and punk to the stage in a fundraiser concert for Red Sin Fronteras para Sobrevivientes de Violencia (Network Without Borders for Survivors of Violence). In a polyphonic set dedicated to the music of resistance, both musicians and organizers have tapped into a long history of popular activism, organized movements, and what it means to find joy in the midst of survival.
Tickets and more information are available here.
"The band started with us sort of experimenting with these different musical styles of our ancestors, and putting them in conversation with each other and seeing the ways that they connect," said Goodman on an episode of WNHH-LP's "Arts Respond" on Friday afternoon (to listen to the full episode, click on the file at the end of this article). "And one of the ways that they connect is the electricity of the music. It's music that you just can't stop dancing to."
Part of that mission is baked into the music itself, a mix of diasporic and migratory traditions that has opened itself to rediscovery and reinterpretation. Cumbia, which has its roots in both Colombia and Africa, grew out of resistance to colonization and forced migration in the 16th century, as enslaved Africans arrived in the north of Colombia. A mix of African and Indigenous styles, the genre centers music as a way to communicate, using both the drums and the gaita, or a type of Indigenous flute, alongside vocals.
"Cumbia really is resistance, because it's a mixture of the Indigenous gaita and the beats and the drums, but it is also a resistance to slavery," Ordoñez said, adding that the style is omnipresent and beloved across Latin America, from corner stores to the Chicha genre that is regarded as Andean cumbia in Peru. "It is really the people's music, because in the step of cumbia, it comes from the fact that people couldn't move that much because they were enslaved. Even the dancing steps of cumbia come from trying to fight slavery ... someone had them physically tied, and they were not free."
In the band, that style dovetails with klezmer, a centuries-old (and in New Haven, very much alive and well) style born in Central and Eastern Europe among Ashkenazi Jews, and brought to the U.S., Canada and other sites across the Jewish diaspora through waves of migration, including those in which which people were fleeing religious persecution and genocide. For both Goodman and Ordoñez, the styles may be initially surprising alongside each other—but their melodies also weave together shared histories of oppression and of resistance.
"Everyone is welcome," Goodman said. "No matter who you are or where you come from, we hope that you'll find yourself a little bit in this music and in the community that's always created around our shows."
When Mariposas Galácticas first came together in 2023—that's after Ordoñez and Goodman met each other in Ecuador, whence Ordoñez hails and is a member of the Indigenous Cañari peoples—part of its mission was resuscitating old Cumbias from the 1950s and 60s. They were, and are, works that might otherwise have been lost to history. In the years since, the band has grown its mission to also reinventing cumbia, klezmer and punk tunes as people know them, and adding new melodies. Their shows are not just high energy—they're educational, with histories that unspool in Yiddish, Spanish, English and Italian and centuries of sound baked into the music.
"People forget, even back to the more anarchist side of it ... the radical organization side of it," added guitarist Gary Galapagos, who was the first to bring a more punk aesthetic to the group. "Nobody's gonna do it for us. We have to do it for ourselves, and we have to be organized amongst ourselves so we can take care of ourselves."
Cruz at a celebration of immigrants and refugees in July. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
The other part of the concert, meanwhile, is Red Sin Fronteras, helmed by New Havener Denisse Cruz. Cruz, who hails originally from Oaxaca and identifies as Indigenous (she is Binnizá) founded the group to aid survivors of domestic violence a little over two years ago, although her work as an artist, organizer and activist goes back decades, across multiple countries and languages. For her, the organization grew out of an urgent and vital need: to better protect those who have lived, and are living, through horrific violence—whether in New Haven or across man-made borders in Latin America and beyond.
"When we work with women, it's impossible to avoid this topic," Cruz said. "Here, I discovered, it's really different and complicated to get services in your own language if you are from Latin America, even from all of different countries. Navigating the system is really complicated."
She gave the example of migrants from Mexico or Guatemala who may speak any mixture of Indigenous languages like Mam, Totonaco, Kaq'chikel, Q'anjob'al, and Na’huatl. When they come to New Haven, many of them may need specific translation services, and instead only receive Spanish-language assistance. It adds a layer of confusion, and sometimes isolation, to a process that is already thickly layered with bureaucracy.
That's also true of some Western therapeutic approaches, she added. In the U.S., new migrants may long for Indigenous healing practices that help them feel close to home, and end up with an hour of talk therapy instead. Solving that mismatch, which is as much culture as it is policy, is part of her mission.
"I'm focused on our wellness and healing," she said. "That's why we start doing healing in traditional ways. That's why we started growing and growing and growing—because of the need."
Cruz connected with Mariposas Galácticas by sheer luck, she said with a smile. Recently, her work in organizing took her to a porchfest in West Philadelphia, where the band happened to be performing. Among members of the crowd she found herself dancing with abandon—and falling in love with the group's mission to bridge diverse, layered, sometimes heavy diasporic traditions from very different parts of the world. She hadn't ever heard something quite like it.
The concert is helping raise funds for land that Cruz hopes to buy in Oaxaca, to build and open a women's shelter that can serve those fleeing domestic violence. Of the $90,000 she is aiming for, she has only raised $825, or around one percent of the cost. She hopes that the concert will help bring awareness not only to the need for funding, but to the work she and colleagues do more widely to help survivors of domestic violence move forward with their lives.
"Liberation is in our bodies," Cruz said. "I have forced myself to say, 'Okay, the liberation should cross my body and my mind.' And that has allowed me to dream outside of borders. And I think ... if the violence doesn't have borders, the solidarity should not have borders also."
When she dreams of it, she added, the shelter is already a place in her mind's eye, with traditional architecture that feels loved and cared for, rather than industrial or an afterthought. She can see supporting traditional Oaxacan embroidery and medicine, including goods that she would sell back in New Haven to raise money.
"All the support we are looking for is from the people," she said. "It's the only way we can create and make this a reality."
"It's really connected to what Gary was saying," said Goodman. "Like, 'el pueblo salva al pueblo.' That's the same spirit this show is being organized in."
Mariposas Galácticas performs at Cafe Nine on Wednesday August 12 at 8 p.m. (doors at 7 p.m.). Tickets and more information are available here. To donate directly to the Oaxaca shelter fund, click here. Listen to the full interview with Denisse Cruz and band members above.