Punk at the Baseline: Downtown Boys' Victoria Ruiz on the Infinite Futures in Being Punk, Latinx, Communist, and Enough

by Stefanie Fernández

When I initiate my Google Hangout last April with Victoria Ruiz, lead singer of Providence, RI-based punk band Downtown Boys, the second thing to catch my eye is a brightly-colored poster on her sparse white wall that reads in triumphant all caps: OUR COMPLEXITY IS THE WORLD. The first thing to catch my eye is Victoria’s half-bleached, wildly curly brown hair, and I think to myself before we even get to speaking, here’s a person who gets it. It’s the same feeling of being understood that I recognize from when I first listened to the song “Monstro” off Downtown Boys’ 2015 album Full Communism, an album that is in every sense the opposite of a sophomore slump. In “Monstro,” a track written in the band’s familiar bilingual Spanglish, Ruiz yells a rallying cry of “she’s brown,/she’s smart!” over a signature angry, alto-sax infused guitar riff. I feel it again now, sitting in front of my laptop on a Sunday evening in New Haven—the old nameless thing that sits on my tongue like Spanglish or the raw cut of sugarcane my father bought for me in Key West because we were closer to Cuba than to the United States. Our complexity is the world, and it deserves to be heard in screaming color from the mouths of those for whom the world is made far too complex.

I learned about Downtown Boys in the least punk way possible: in 2015, the band, together with Olympia, Washington trans punk activists G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit) was named “the most powerful punk [bands] of 2015” by Pitchfork in an article titled “The Year in Punk” by Jenn Pelly. The words “powerful” and “punk” seem disingenuous coming from Pitchfork, a publication that for years now has had the reputation of a laconic cliché to be dropped over 40s of Ballantine at Bushwick apartments before quietly ending its reign of hipsterdom with its purchase by Condé Nast in 2015. When asked about her thoughts on what (and if) being given this title means in this decade, Ruiz said: “There’s a lot of resistance to that, and a lot of people who really know punk like to push back against that label being put on us.”

It’s not surprising that the mainstream readers of Pitchfork and lovers of mainstream punk would bristle at this label. “With punk, you’re dealing with a much different power structure and dynamic because a lot of people tend to erase the women who were in punk or the people of color who are in punk in the United States,” Ruiz said. “But obviously Pitchfork saying that is very different than Maximumrocknroll saying it, or Rolling Stone saying it. There’s this website called Wondering Sound that said we were the best punk band in America like a year ago, and people were so mad because it’s mostly read by old-school dudes.”

Downtown Boys was formed in 2011 when Ruiz met guitarist Joey DeFrancesco at the Renaissance Providence Hotel where they both worked. After deciding to form the band, DeFrancesco famously approached the hotel’s manager with his resignation, accompanied by Ruiz and his former bandmates from the Providence 18-piece brass band What Cheer? Brigade. The footage of this resignation, titled simply “Joey Quits” on YouTube, went viral. In it, DeFrancesco approaches his manager, tells him “I quit,” hands him his resignation, and walks out to a triumphant brass jig as the band chants “Joey quit, Joey quit!” The video is as much a serious indictment of the poor working conditions to which DeFrancesco and service workers like him are sub-jected as an irreverent celebration of power reclaimed within the system. TIME Magazine called the video “a seriously bad career move,” but one gets the sense in this video from DeFrancesco’s smirk of satisfaction and Ruiz’s brash laughter that they aren’t ones to care much for brand reputation. Ruiz and DeFrancesco have been inseparable as bandmates and friends ever since.

In our conversation, Ruiz even cited DeFrancesco as one of her heroes: “[Joey] is definitely one of my heroes; he has always been my best friend and has always believed in this band; he could write music for anyone or any type of band. I think it’s cool that he chooses to do this.” There’s something to be said for that choice of being agents of change via a self-described “bi bilingual political dance sax punk party” band in 2016—there’s an irreverence on Full Communism that is at once fun and anarchic yet totally calculated. Intentionality might be bullshit, but it’s at the heart of this album, and Downtown Boys aren’t afraid to call themselves—and the country—out on theirs. In the music video for the album’s biggest hit, “Wave of History,” statistics regarding the enslavement of African bodies at the dawn of colonialism in the New World, the displacement and eradication of Native American land and peoples by white colonists, and police violence and brutality against black and brown bodies throughout history flash in stylized pink Coca-Cola font text over the screams of Ruiz and the alto sax. It is a propulsive anthem for the disenfranchised, and those for whom the anger of centuries is not pretty or poetic.

Not one step back on the wave of history,

You can’t look back on our wave of history!

Necessity! Necessity! Necessity!

In addition to Downtown Boys, DeFrancesco and Ruiz are the two sole members of side project Malportado Kids (“Misbehaved Kids”) that Ruiz describes as more “political dance band” than Downtown Boys. “Downtown Boys is this big rallying call; it’s very macro, and Malportado Kids is more micro,” she tells me. While the songs off Full Communism are the kind of soul-spearing truth bombs on the general fucked-up-ness of the American social body politic, the songs of Malportado Kids focus sharply on the personal dimension of the individual body. “A lot of our songs are commentary on the body and the colonization of the body by whiteness. One of the songs, ‘Mi concha no es bastante blanca’—my pussy isn’t white enough—is about imperial love and colonized love, and this long history of reproduction and white people feeling that their reproduction is sacred, while the reproduction of people of color is this thing that colonialism and whiteness play with.” She gives me a nod at this point that says you know exactly what I mean, and I do. “If a Latino person has too many kids, then she’s a welfare queen …where like with white families there’s a beautiful family tree and a crest by which to recognize them.” With the angry punk noise of Downtown Boys and the dancey, synth-and-modulator-heavy tracks of Malportado Kids, Ruiz and DeFrancesco are carving a space in modern punk for the Latinx women and folks who have been sexualized and pushed to the fringes of the scene by white punks since the genesis of the movement.

Who taught you to hate yourself?

Mi concha no es bastante blanca,

mi concha no es bastante blanca para ti!

Fuck you, guey!

Written into Ruiz’s blood is a long ancestry of feminist Chicana labor that informs her politics as a brown woman living in the United States. “I grew up in a Chicana family, and being Chicana has always been part of my identity,” she tells me when I ask about her family background. “I grew up in San Jose, California around a lot of people who believe California should still be part of Mexico [laughs].” Raised in a strictly matriarchal family by her mother, grandmother, and aunt, feminine labor among Chicanas was the only labor she knew as a kid, after her father “disappeared out of the picture” when she was very young. “My mom grew up very much as a pocha, or somebody who was born in the United States but has this very strong Mexican identity—never being Mexican enough, yet never being white enough for white people in the United States.” This part of the pocha identity struck a chord with me, having grown up in Miami where the 48% Hispanic/Latinx demographic gave me a false impression of homogeneity in this country. Closer to Cuba, closer to Mexico, yet still in these fifty states.

Ruiz continues: “My mom’s dad was murdered when she was fifteen, so she became a big provider in my family. My grandma because she was a farm worker never learned to read or write.She was hungry as a child. It’s pretty incredible that my grandma was able to raise a family once her husband died, and to be able to send four of her children to college is such a big deal.” Sitting behind a desk at Yale University, thousands of miles from the farm in Artemisa, Cuba where my father was born, I think of my own abuela, whose primary feature in my memory is the hard line of her mouth after a lifetime of solitary labor. These women—the ones disappearing with the years like so many seeds that never took, that we remember with the phrase she had a hard life—are the models of feminine labor, the teachers of what it means to be self-sufficient and distrustful of wide open promises for so many Latina women from as different worlds as Victoria Ruiz and I.

When my abuela was alive she would tell me stories about my absent grandfather and the fidelistas marching through the streets of el campo while I sat on her porch in Miami Lakes after the sun went down, the words all sticking to the fronds of palm trees fallen at our feet. She’d hold my hands in hers and tell me how beautiful they were, unscarred by work and years of resistance against the men and the systems who pushed her body to its limits in Cuba and out here to this porch in Miami Lakes all these years later. In my memory I feel my hands held gently by rough, tired fingers.

Though we’ve only been acquainted through a screen for thirty minutes, what Ruiz and I share now on this Google Hangout is the weight of a distinctly feminine labor borne down through three generations of migration, sowing, reaping, and loss. How do we preserve these women as more than just muling of work across borders, lost to the transition? When abuela was alive, the thing I found most difficult to understand—that filled an ocean between us—was how she and the family could trust me with the unbearable uncertainty that was the future: how after the work of making a life in Cuba, the painful exodus and separation from her children, and the picking up and restoring of the pieces left in Miami, the future had somehow escaped her before her life had even yet finished. She gave that to me, and as thankful for the promise of infinite paths as I was and am, I have yet to fully accept this gift.

Ruiz, who graduated from Columbia University in 2010, shares a similar sentiment with me regarding her own grandmother. “She taught me to think about futures; I was able to get through any struggles I had in the present [with that knowledge],” she tells me. The ability to move forward, amidst the pain of migration, hunger, poverty, and work is the purest form of belief. Alice Bag, Chicana queerpunk pioneer of first-wave Los Angeles punk with the Bags in the 1970s, screams in the chorus of the song “Violence Girl”: “she’s a violence girl/she thrives on pain.” In line with women like Bag, Ruiz’s grandmother, her mother, my abuela, and maybe even the two of us right now, a legacy of pain and resilience has forced us all to become violence girls. It’s no coincidence that Downtown Boys can encompass all that pain and still provide a rallying cry for a future of moving forward, and only forward—it’s the only way for our communities to survive. “I continue to do that as a method of pushing through—to think about infinite futures, and that’s something my mom and grandma always pushed inside of me.”

As much as Full Communism advocates for the dismantling of oppressive capitalist systems in the United States, Ruiz maintains that “the album definitely wasn’t written in a communist context—it’s an album written in response to real experiences of members of the band.” It’s an American album about American Latinidad, which Ruiz makes sure to emphasize when I ask how she feels about communism as an ideal in a Latinx context, especially given its violent implementation in Cuba as well as in China, North Korea, and the USSR. "I think it’s important for Latinos to recognize Latino culture and community in U.S. America as our own nationality. Because of that, I’m going to have a different connection to communism or socialism; because I see it as a solution—I see it as an answer." This is where Ruiz and my abuela would likely have disagreed. “I think that I have grown up in a failed capitalist system. I think that every piece of capitalism is wrong. The Drug War came out of capitalism, prisons are a consequence of capitalism—institutionalized racism needs to exist for U.S. capitalism to exist. Because I have this relationship with capitalism, communism for me is an ideological goal. I believe in it.” The way my grandmother saw the United States and its capitalist framework as an escape from oppression is staggeringly similar to how Ruiz conceptualizes communism as a utopia.

When asked about the oppression experienced by political prisoners and exiles in communist systems in the past, Ruiz acknowledges their pain as equally valid. “We need to listen to those histories and to those critiques. People who are in exile, people who are escaping, those are all real and true stories. But I think there’s a huge separation between ideology and reality, right?” Right. It’s impossible to feel morally comfortable defending the current system by contrast, one that thrives on the mass incarceration of black and brown bodies and whose judicial system distrusts the pain of black families who have lost sons, brothers, fathers, and loved ones to over-zealous “law enforcement.” “Because if you were to ask someone who’s sitting in prison for the rest of their lives for something that they did or didn’t do because of their economic and racial context, do you agree with the U.S.’ economic system?, their answer would probably be no! [Capitalism] means exile, it means violence to them.” Exile within an oppressive system is equal, and likely worse, to exile from one.

What does it mean, then, when a band of young, rowdy Latinx punks names an album of political sax-dance tracks after the full implementation of a problematic, often violent ideology? Ruiz tells me that it’s a project bigger than ideology. “When Downtown Boys named our album Full Communism, it wasn’t so much about an economic or government model being put into place. It was about this idea of utopia, this idea of equality—and right now, if someone who has a lot of privilege and a lot of power has that power taken away, in order for to two people to be more equal to each other, then that person is going to feel oppressed.” She feels no qualms about dismantling the floor of comfort that rest on the backs of the lower class upon which the privileged sit. “A lot of rich people and a lot of white people are going to feel oppressed because we’re going to need to redistribute power.”

The redistribution of power is a concept that has historically never been fully achieved, and no communist system that exists today is a “full communist” one in the way Ruiz and company envision (after almost six decades of hegemonic control by the Castro brothers in Cuba, the island seems with every passing year to be turning more fully into the starkest social segmentation of Marx’s worst capitalist nightmare). And power is a word that is often misunderstood—inherent in the mechanics of power are violence and chaos that skews against the restoration of equilibrium ad infinitum. Ruiz continues: “Power is a lot like energy; all of it has been created, none of it’s going to get destroyed, and no moral will be decided. Power will only be redistributed. When we say Full Communism, it means that redistribution of power where everybody feels free, and where there’s not a need for us to oppress each other in order for one person to feel free.” Ruiz knows this liberation won’t happen in her lifetime. I don’t believe it will happen in the next seven lifetimes. But for radical change to begin, there has to be radical belief. When it comes down to the pain of real Americans living in fear of their government today, an album called Full Communism, however escapist or utopian it may feel, inspires more hope than anything with the promise of Full Capitalism ever could.

What does this idealism mean on the ground? The problem that has plagued punk for decades as it endeavors to remain relevant to issues of social justice is the divide that exists between the performers on stage and the kids in the audience, and the even wider gap that exists between that show and the prisons that hold the innocent and the mothers who grieve for their lost sons. Who does punk serve in 2016?

Ruiz, DeFrancesco, and company are the misbehaved kids in the audience, and that’s crucial. They’re also the objects of discrimination and class warfare like any other people of color in this country. For this reason, Downtown Boys are the most necessary punk band in the scene right now, though they are by no means the first of their kind. Featured on Full Communism is a cover of the song “Poder Elegir” by Chilean ’80s punk band Los Prisioneros whose socially incisive lyrics and relentless bass-heavy anger led to their being recognized as the band with the largest socio-political influence on the Chilean population in the Pinochet years. Over a four-on-the-floor bassline that thrums with an intensity that makes it sound like something Black Flag would have released (had Black Flag written anything this specific and political), “Poder Elegir” is the angriest punk song to so earnestly and gently take the hands of the folks who work too long and hard to expend their efforts in being political. The opening lines break through a jagged riff that promises the hurling of insults or societal slander, offering instead a vision of a better future:

La vida no es broma

Hay algo más que comer y llorar

These lyrics—which translate to “life is not a joke/there’s something more than eating and crying”—are so sparsely set against the rhythm chords and heavy bass that, in contrast to the thresher of poverty, they seem like decoration for aesthetic-punk’s sake. Hunger and emotional purgation. The will to move forward. Beyond engendering greater sociopolitical consciousness, the project of Los Prisioneros in this song goes deeper to the primal survival of human bodies at risk of systemic death, incarceration, and loss of personal control. It feels wrong to say that this is what punk really is about—because if you’re not a man, and not white, and have been to a punk show at any point in its near-golden-jubilee of existence, you know that punk offers only artificial safety. What punk really is about is the recognition that punk isn’t a refuge; it’s about the conscious choice by the collective scene and fringe bands like Los Prisioneros and Downtown Boys to constantly reinvent punk to adapt to contexts of the social uplift of the inarticulate, the uncool, and the lonely; the hungry and the homeless; and the wrongfully incarcerated within the industrial prison complex in any given era.

Las vidas no son bromas

Hay un poco más que se puede hacer

Bastante más que enviar cupones a la tele

Más que planchar tus bluyines

Más que pelear por un sueldo decente

A cada fin de mes. 

Lives are not jokes

There is a little more that can be done

So much more than sending coupons to the TV

More than ironing your blue jeans

More than fighting for a decent wage

At the end of every month.

It’s only then, after reaching out first to the people who most need these lyrics, that the song goes on the offensive: “Hay gente que está comiendo/de tu no saber que decir.” There are people feeding off your not knowing what to say.

Acts like Los Prisioneros and Downtown Boys make history (and not just Pitchfork history) because they place the reclamation of power over profit, aesthetics, and the accumulation of cultural capital as their first priority. “We’re not promising any sort of utopian space,” says Ruiz when I ask her how her and her bandmates go about this reclamation of power in the shows they play. “Part of it is [knowing] that power can’t totally be reclaimed in those thirty minutes or even in that space because the reason that whatever power dynamic at a show exists is because of a power that existed long before that show started.” At every punk show, there will there always be skinheads, transphobes, misogynists, and rapists, and recognizing these people as cancers to the scene is vital to its productivity and survival. Ruiz often calls out these people when they’re present at shows. “I’ve had people come up to me in the middle of sets and tell me that people are being racist or homophobic or are touching people in violent ways. When they tell me that, we try and take care of it then and there… by taking action on the things people say or do. We also try to learn a little bit about where we are and something pertinent that we can speak about. We played in North Carolina this past weekend, and we mentioned HB2 [an act banning people from using bathrooms that do not correspond to their biological sex]. We played at Duke and there was a student protest happening, and [we] were able to give [the crowd] details on that. We’ll oftentimes invite someone who’s doing work in the community to come up and speak too.”

The DB track “Tall Boys” on Full Communism is especially germane, and serves an indictment of the tall and unapologetic dudes at shows who take up space, block the view of shorter non-men, and violently mosh against smaller bodies without their consent.

Fuck you tall boys!

Your hair looks dumb

Your hat looks dumb

Your beard looks dumb

Your gauges look dumb

Get to the back

Tell me off?

I’ll cut your dick off!

“Tall Boys” applies to every punk show that’s ever been played, but in light of last January’s Observer article, “We’re Not Going Anywhere: Growing Up Latino and Punk in America,” the song serves also as a direct condemnation of specific men like NOFX’s Fat Mike that have been the agents of violence against her at shows she’s been to as a fan. In the article, Ruiz tells Michelle Threadgould about her first punk show when she was 14 years old, Warped Tour in San Francisco in the year 2000, when Fat Mike during NOFX’s set told the crowd: “If you’ve got a hot girl in front of you, I want you to feel her up. Do it, ’cause she can’t get away.” This violent colonization of the body that is endemic to the capitalist project of the United States manifests itself tangibly for the first time for so many young women of color in this way, at the very place—the punk show—that they were promised they’d feel safe. “Every punk show is an agent of capitalism,” Ruiz tells me, her words reflecting the minutest self-critical glint.

This project manifests itself too in the body politic of the cities in which punk communities form and grow in clusters. “[It all] comes back to this idea of land—land and culture. It’s physical land and cultural land—writing, music, anything that is thrusting against and pushing into a future of [inclusive] art and music and cultural scenes.” And these scenes that live on grassroots land of community organization and culture in bigger cities like New York and smaller cities like New Haven alike are permanently at risk of becoming repossessed by the government and by private institutions. She is angry that time has allowed big institutions to propagate the lie so widely understood that culture is made by the landed gentry. “People of color and poor people making art and culture is inherent in our history. So it’s upsetting when people think art and music are this extraneous thing or a luxury. It’s not—for us, it’s always been a method of survival and resistance.” It’s time, institutional memory, and the historical homogeneity of power that have enabled universities like Yale to repossess community land in New Haven—like the now-defunct People’s Art Collective, where Ruiz tells me Downtown Boys used to play often at the LGBTQ Youth Kickback in connection with New Haven Rising. In light of the Next Yale movement of last November and the legacy of slavery that still drips off the tongues of students forced to live in a college named after John C. Calhoun, students must keep their shoulders pressed against the backs of the administration and the Yale Corp- oration with the recognition that this legacy is firmly entrenched in the stolen Quinnipiac land upon which the University sits and in the broken windows and shuttered-up homes, small businesses, house venues, and community organization spaces that line the streets of our up-and-coming shopping districts.

After the national public suffering and exhaustion faced by Americans of color in 2015 and 2016—after Black Lives Matter began—it feels silly to dance. It feels wrong to scream and mosh and read Pitchfork as if the past two years haven’t marked a watershed in our national landscape, the fallout of which we have yet to witness. The efforts expended in our pain, our screams, and our bodies will not be enough in this lifetime to reap the rewards of a world that has never existed for the preservation of our lives. Knowing all of this, Victoria Ruiz chooses, before the roaring crash of guitars, sax, sound, and color in “Monstro” to beg this of the void: 

Why is it that we never have enough with just what’s INSIDE OF US?

Today—TODAY!—we must scream at the top of our lungs

That “we are brown! We are smart!”

I am dumbfounded at how simple this all is, and how okay it makes me feel. In the flood of names—Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and all the hundreds we’ll never learn or remember—that scroll like movie credits before our eyes every day in the world’s most complex, unpronounceable language, it is okay, and even necessary, to be simple. To take refuge from the constant labor of reclaiming and redistributing power. Victoria Ruiz tells me of the song: “The lyrics are about being angry, and they’re about being ready. It’s in being Chicano, that anger—turning that anger into something that’s hopefully going to knock down the walls we’ve built around the freedom of our minds and our bodies. So what happens is brown people are smart, we get together, we resist, and we fight, and people look for this other thing that we must be; so we’re arrogant, or we’re lucky to get out of the hood, or there’s some crime we must have committed.” This is the physical labor, the feminine labor, and the emotional labor that our ancestors bore into the world for us—that we might never feel too comfortable reaping the labor of the unnamed at Columbia or Yale University. “It’s about fighting complicity and any idea of comfort,” she continues. “Comfort is not even something we want. There is so much pain right now, and there is so much happening, that comfort can’t even be a goal.” I nod dumbly in spite of myself to let her know in my own, inarticulate way that she just put into words the silent pain I felt all of last November. “The goal is identifying and asking questions in order to figure out what to do. And that’s really hard. There’s nothing easy about that, [or] recognizing that no space is safe. There’s no safe space within oppression, so why would there be a safe space in fighting oppression?” No safety in punk, no safety anywhere on Earth.

“The status quo goes looking for something else besides us just being brown and being smart. And I think that song gets at that idea that there is nothing else, that’s it. And that’s totally enough. And I think you have to do so much work to feel like you’re enough.” I’m still nodding, knowing I’d go on to tear up several times while reading over the transcript of this interview in the coming weeks. For a moment, I slip out of myself—amidst roaring saxophones and rhythm guitars, I feel myself drift to abuela’s porch in Miami Lakes, to the invisible island I have never seen but in whose soil I remain firmly rooted, to the pavement of Chapel Street and York Street and Elm Street that I walk down each morning in New Haven with my headphones on, singing quietly to myself a bilingual-political-dance-sax-punk- party-prayer that no one will hear. And I thank Victoria Ruiz for Full Communism. She smiles at me. “I think the whole album gets at that—at saying: You are enough. Let’s start with the baseline of we are enough. And then move from there.”