For our playlist series Resonance, we ask curators to find points of connection and conversation between different, potentially diverse recordings in the Smithsonian Folkways catalog. In this iteration, Quetzal Flores and Martha González of Quetzal trace the musical path from their 2021 album, Puentes Sonoros.

Listen on Pandora here

Puentes Sonoros is a culmination of decades of collective research, practice, experience and convivio. This sonic bridge was built on a foundation of generations of folk and traditional music communities. This bridge was designed and engineered by those same hands that work(ed) the fields, sweatshops, factories, construction and so on. It's these hands that evoke stories of regenerative resilience in the face of abandonment, exploitation, patriarchy and white supremacy. It is precisely these voices we chose to center in our playlist. Lydia Mendoza, Woody Guthrie, El Teatro Campesino, Nobuko Miyamoto, Grupo Naidy, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and so many more who have paved many bridges with bricks of truth, offering us a mobility towards healing, justice and emergence.

We invite you to submerge yourself in the indomitable wisdom shared through familiar words and melodies over rough hands on skin, cracked nails on strings and resonating wood, encapsulating the past, present and future in sonic manifestations of our collective consciousness.