String Quartet Makes “Untold Stories” Sing

Top: Yaira Matyakubova and Fatima Rojas. Bottom, from left: Yaira Matyakubova, Patrick Doane, Philip Boulanger and Linda Numagami. Lucy Gellman Photo.

At first, the instruments could have been mistaken for a fall wind, moaning gently as it blew through Fair Haven Library. Cello hummed, whisper-soft and low to the ground. Violin wailed a response. Beside it, viola trembled and dipped, in a slow, cautious dance with each other that was just beginning.

In between each note was a story—of migration, of hardship in two countries, of holding on to one’s culture and of finding family hundreds of miles from home.

Music Haven brought that sound—and the hundreds of narratives that it contained—to the Fair Haven Branch Library Saturday, in a Hispanic Heritage Month concert that doubled as the first installment of “Voices: Untold Stories.” The series amplifies New Haven’s immigrant and refugee voices alongside work by the Haven String Quartet. As it began Saturday, it was a stunning reminder that people must embrace their shared humanity, because they are nothing without it.

The Haven String Quartet includes violinists Yaira Matyakubova and Patrick Doane, cellist Philip Boulanger, and violist Linda Numagami. Doane, a longtime teaching artist at Music Haven, and Numagami, who has most recently played with the Fort Worth and Saint Louis Symphony Orchestras, are its newest members.

“Voices: Untold Stories” is the brainchild of violinist Matyakubova, a longtime teaching artist at Music Haven and artistic director of the Haven String Quartet (HSQ). Since 2017, her work has centered immigrant and refugee voices through the organization’s “Music Bridge” program, which teaches string music to newcomers to the U.S. For her, it’s personal: she came to the U.S. as an immigrant from Uzbekistan in the 1980s, and has tried to make the path a little easier for all those who follow. 

“When something starts as an idea, it’s sort of vulnerable and strange and it doesn’t always survive,” she said, shouting out Executive Director Milda Torres McClain and the International Association of New Haven for supporting her vision. “These are stories of immigration, stories of starting over.”

  They are also stories, in the midst of rising racism and xenophobia in the country, of recognizing the deep humanity that lives in all people, no matter where they come from or what their journey to New Haven has looked like. While she can already envision stories from Sudan, Congo, Iraq and Afghanistan—countries from which many of her students hail—she’s interested in narratives from across the globe.

Saturday, that sense of welcome permeated the concert, from its first breath to a final round of applause. As string quartet members started with selections from Puerto Rican composer Luis Gustavo Prado, strings filled the children’s section of the library, winding their way around snugly packed shelves and down aisles of books. Towards the back of the room, they found their way around a Hispanic Heritage Month display, complete with titles like Alma Semilla from New Haven author Nohra Bernal.

A faithful collaborator with the organization, Prado wrote his “Suite de Canto y Danza en Forma de Variaciones” with Music Haven teachers and students in mind. Four years later, the work has become a sort of Music Haven staple, with sections that are sometimes played as stand-alone pieces, and sometimes played as one long, flowing journey through music history.

Saturday, his “Danza Puertorriqueña” kicked off the set, transforming the library back into a nineteenth-century San Juan for just a moment. A beat, and the crisp, sizzling notes to his “Salsita Pizzicata” swirled the street-facing windows, pressing up against the panes. By the time musicians reached his “Juracan,” they were bridging oceans through the notes, bows flying as they played.

“Oh, yeah!” exclaimed an attendee who had wandered in the library earlier that day, and gravitated toward the music. His eyes sparkled when musicians said they were saving the remainder of his work for the end of the show. 

That excitement remained as student Eliana Ortiz rose from her seat to play Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah,” a song that is as omnipresent as it is so elementally human. As she raised her violin to her chin, Ortiz let herself lean into the sound, buoyed by a backing track that bloomed beneath her. She worked her bow back and forth, and conjured something soft and gentle as she played.

Around the room, attendees seemed to take note. One pulled her daughter in close, burying her face in her hair. Another found a pint-sized chair in the third row, and slipped into it as if they were coming late to Carnegie Hall. Even the smallest of attendees looked spellbound. All of them, it seemed, had tapped into a sense of solidarity, as if being in the library had opened a portal, and a few dozen listeners had eagerly stepped through.

Eliana Ortiz. During applause after her piece, Matyakubova pointed out that classes were just resuming at Music Haven after the summer break, meaning that she had taught herself Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" during the summer months. 

It was fitting, then, that labor organizer, budding musician and Music Haven mom Fatima Rojas, who hails from Mexico, kicked the storytelling part of the series. Pulling up a chair after Prado’s rousing “Juracan,” she turned the clock back to the 1970s, when she was just “una rata de ciudad” growing up in Puebla, a city in Central Mexico known for its bright pottery and soaring cathedrals. 

The oldest of three daughters, Rojas grew up with two parents who struggled to make ends meet, she remembered—but she didn’t realize it as a child. Instead, she and her friends made the city their playground, curious about its parks and greenspaces. Her mom, who had grown up in Puebla, brought the girls with her to find food, entered raffles for gifts like bicycles, and sold quilts to make money, close with a woman who made memelas and gorditas in the same building and would feed the girls while their mom worked. 

That life, she realized as she got older, wasn’t sustainable. When Rojas met her now-husband, Luis Santiago, the two opened a small cell phone shop in Puebla hoping that business would sustain them. Instead, the shop was broken into multiple times, with thefts that included phones that the two were fixing. “We got into a huge debt,” she remembered. “We had to shut down and go into the streets to be able to sell the phones. And it was rough!”

Without a shop, the two were barely able to support themselves. They sold at a flea market Rojas likened to the one on Ella Grasso Boulevard, where vendors pack in beside each other and compete to sell their wares. They struggled to make money. In 2002, her husband immigrated to the U.S. Two years later, she followed. 

“Being an immigrant myself, I realize that to move to another country, you’re not thinking that, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be an immigrant!’ Matyakubova said. “You’re thinking ‘Oh, those dreams! I want to capture those dreams!’ And then when you come to this country, there is this whole period of complete isolation and starting over. What was that like for you?”

Rojas nodded slowly, knowingly. When she made the choice to immigrate in 2004, it was immediately harder than she thought it would be. First, her visa was denied. Then, she thought that crossing would only take one day. It ultimately took four, on a grueling journey with other families through the desert.

After a life surrounded by friends and family, it was a shock to her system. 

“You are not a human being anymore, you are a number that has a dollar sign,” she said. She remembered walking through the desert all night, covered in a black plastic garbage bag that trapped the stifling heat. During the day, she and fellow migrants would find a place to hide, making temporary shelter from whatever they could.

At one point, she remembered looking down at her hands, and realizing they were bleeding. By then, her fingers had gone numb, and  “I was not even thinking or feeling it.”

“That was the first shock,” she added. “And then when I came here,” the city continued to surprise her—not in a way that always lived up to its promise of welcome and sanctuary. 

When Rojas arrived in New Haven, it was March, after a snowstorm that had left the city bone-chillingly cold. She remembered walking through the city’s Hill neighborhood in a denim jacket that wasn’t nearly warm enough. Her ears stung in pain from the cold. The public bus didn’t show up. Everything seemed spread out and somehow more precarious than it had before, when she had known Puebla like the back of her hand.   

When she finally made it to a grocery store, she was also struck by the juxtaposition of excess and scarcity. There were 17 kinds of breakfast cereal, and yet no one who would speak Spanish to help her out. “It was so far away from my culture, it was so far away from my food, it was so far away from my language, from my color of skin—it was so far away from everything.”

Around her, that contrast was omnipresent. Rojas worked long hours and made under the federal minimum wage, told there was no recourse for immigrants like her. After injuring herself on the job, she became active in organizing around immigrant and worker rights. She remembered the first time she heard the word “exploitation,” and realized it was what had been happening to her.

“I came to love this community” through that fight, she said. “The dehumanization, it was evident to me. It was [the idea] that we come here as labor, as cheap labor, and are not appreciated. Like, ‘you need to be in the shadows, be in the shade.’ Come, work, cállate and go on with your life. And I said, ‘Hell no! We have a lot of creativity. We have a lot of love. We have a lot to offer to this community.”   

During those years, she also became a mother to her two daughters, Ambar and Jade Santiago Rojas. With fellow immigrants, she joined the fight for the Elm City ID Card, which passed under Mayor John DeStefano in 2007. She continued fighting for rights, from fair worker compensation to unionization.

Two decades later, she understands the notion of chosen family, from members of the Semilla Collective like Javier Villatoro and Elizabeth Gonzalez to fellow organizers (and housemates) Joe Foran and Enedelia Cruz to McClain and the teaching artists at Music Haven. When she talks to members of her family who are still in Puebla, they ask her when she is coming back.

Her answer is that there is still so much to do in the fight for immigration reform—and that she has another family in New Haven now, too.

“She’s my family here—” she said, pointing to where Cruz sat with her kids. She looked around the room, gesturing to other members of her New Haven family. She gestured to Matyakubova, to McClain, to kids and parents around the room. “So I have now another family, and I try to explain that.”

That family keeps her going, she added. Currently, Rojas is part of the statewide coalition pushing for expansion of Connecticut Medicaid (also known as HUSKY) to all children and families, regardless of immigration status or age. Starting in July of this year (after initial legislation was passed in 2021), the state expanded HUSKY coverage to kids and young adults under 15, as well as pregnant people. But the fight for universal healthcare access continues.    

“My philosophy is to literally be on the streets with our people,” Rojas said. “To get the hearts of our community together, but then to be able to have the guts to stand up to go to places to fight for human rights. Because it’s not just about immigrant rights. It’s about human rights.”

Instruments in hand, musicians summoned that sentiment in song moments later, as Ortiz collected reflections from the audience and placed them on a whiteboard. Among clouds of words—Sueños, memory, home, cállate—musicians selected shadow, tractor, and love, taking a beat before beginning to play.

Slowly, they conjured that slice of Rojas’ world, putting to music that which often remains abstract and in the shadows. As the notes spilled forth, musicians spoke in a jubilant, curious, sometimes uncertain language of gesture, with fleeting glances that contained whole conversations.

Leaning forward, Numagami suggested a note, then another, her eyes wide. Across a half-circle, Matyakubova obliged, bringing something new and sharp into the piece. In another universe, they were slowly walking towards each other, hesitant but still moving. A cold wind was blowing. As cello and violin entered the fray, they touched, and began a strange waltz.

Slowly, pinpricks of light appeared between the instruments, and it was possible to hear a way forward. Viola broke through with a kind of jazz-flecked burble, and a listener could feel the whole song lift.

So too as musicians chose the words It’s rough, family, and strength, locking eyes for just a moment before they began. This time, the strings came in one on top of the other, as if they were one huge instrument, trying to tune itself. Violin and cello split, peeling themselves from each other as they chased each other in a frantic, breathy circle. Viola shuddered. A second violin shrieked. And then they evened themselves out, and found a way forward.

“We need to regain our humanity,” Rojas had said minutes earlier, and the words echoed through the space. “We need to claim our humanity."