For a lot of people, the default perspective of the American experience is a white one. Just yesterday, the president said he planned to create a national commission promoting a “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.” The “1776 Commission” would counter what Trump referred to as “left-wing indoctrination in our schools,” a description that for him includes discussion of slavery or oppression.
Yet oppression, or at least exclusion, is the American experience for too many citizens who aren’t in possession of the unspoken attribute Trump seeks to reinforce with his commission: whiteness, specifically male whiteness. Jason Isbell sang pointedly about that perspective in his 2017 song “White Man’s World,” and it’s a topic non-white musicians have addressed, too. Angelica Garcia’s take is particularly compelling on “Jícama,” a 2019 song that she included on her excellent 2020 album “Cha Cha Palace.”
A Virginia transplant born in Los Angeles, Garcia is American, full stop. But her experience of being American is filtered through her family’s roots in El Salvador and Mexico, rather than the white European worldview that informs Trump’s proposed commission. Like many people of color, she’s had to learn to navigate the difference. “That’s an American experience that a lot of people have: feeling like you’re one way when you’re with your family, but then you have to go out into the world or the workforce,” Garcia told Vanity Fair in February.
Jícama addresses that idea, too: the song “is a sharp celebration of cultural duality as Garcia embraces her distinctive American-ness while holding fast to her Mexican and Salvadoran heritage,” I wrote in June for Paste’s “Best Songs of 2020 So Far” list. The tune is a bare-bones construct with keyboards and a minimalist beat supporting Garcia’s fulsome vocals, and she waits until the last couplet to make her point explicit: “I've been trying to tell you, but you just don't see / Like you, I was born in this country.”
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