" Gatas Y Vatas " : Female Empowerment and Community-oriented Experimentalism in Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gatas y Vatas is an annual all-female music festival in Albuquerque that started in 2010 featuring solo performances by local musicians. Initiated by young Hispanic women as an attempt to counteract the white-male dominance of the music scene, Gatas y Vatas has become a catalyst of female empowerment where participants experience liberation while defying gender norms in an all-inclusive environment. While there is a complete freedom in the style of music played in the space of the festival, most of the performers have engaged with sound experimentation that challenges any given categorization. The literal translation of Gatas y Vatas is: “lady cats and gals.” However, this word choice contains cultural subtleties that should not be overlooked: in some Spanish-speaking contexts, “gata” is used as a synonym of a sexy woman, and a “vata” implies some kind of a tough gal, someone to be respected. Drawing from ethnographic research, in this paper I explore the festival as a space where each participant becomes a “gata” and a “vata” through the inscription of a cultural exercise of resistance and belonging. As Benjamin Piekut has noted, experimentalism is a grouping, not a group; not what is described, but what is performed as experimental. I argue that the musicians associated with Gatas y Vatas perform a feminist experimentalism while embracing a gendered identity of a “burqueño pride.” While locally rooted, the festival is an alternative performance space for the configuration of a community of performers that contest issues of race, class, and gender. The result is a community-oriented