About 1,200 people attended the El Paso Firme Music Fest on Saturday, a call to action against white supremacy through “the healing power of music.” The all-day event held at Ascarate, a community park surrounded by a lake and a golf course only a few hundred yards from the border wall, featured world-class musicians including the Grammy-award winning Los Angeles group La Santa Cecilia, Chilean-French hip-hop artist Ana Tijoux, Guatemalan rapper Rebeca Lane, and the 21-year-old Mexican-American dream pop sensation Cuco, among others.
Pablo Alvarado, one of the event organizers, explained why musicians were on the front lines of the community’s response to the El Paso Cielo Vista massacre of August 3, the largest mass killing of Latinx people in the history of the United States. “We’ve gone from being scapegoats to being targets in this country. So we have to respond intelligently to that hatred, in a way that can change the whole country,” Alvarado, a labor organizer and musician from El Salvador and Los Angeles, told the audience. “We are going to conquer their hatred with our music, our poetry, and our culture. The white supremacist ideology cannot silence a cumbia or a corrido. We are here to tell our adversaries that we don’t hate them, but we also don’t fear them.”
