Perhaps only someone with a background as unusual as Downs's could pull off such an album. Her documentary filmmaker/ professor father met her Mixtec Indian mother, a singer, in Mexico City while he was working on a film about the migration of the blue-winged teal (turns out humans aren't the only creatures crossing the border for a better life). Downs spent her childhood moving back and forth between Oaxaca and Minnesota. In 1984, when she was 16, her father passed away and she moved back to St. Paul, where she lived with relatives and attended college at the University of Minnesota.
She had inherited her mother's musical talent, and when she entered school, she majored in voice and took up opera. But Downs bridled at the latent cultural imperialism of the university. The only music worth their study was from Europe, her professors claimed. Downs resented the Eurocentrism, but she didn't have the confidence to believe in herself yet. All she knew was she wanted out.
"What happened to me -- and I think it happens to a lot of us -- is you get tired of having rigid control in your life in the educative system," she says, in a husky voice accented faintly toward the "yah sure, you betcha" of Minnesota. "In the music, I knew there had to be something else out there besides learning French, German and Italian songs. I wanted to explore something else -- I didn't know what it was. When you're young, you often don't know what it is you're looking for. Dropping out kinda helped me discover who I was and what it was that I was looking for."
At first, she became a neo-hippie. She spent the late '80s truckin' in the wake of the Dead. Like her mother, who didn't teach her daughter the Mixtecan language she used with her family, Downs rejected her heritage. She died her black hair blond and spoke English. She sold jewelry in the street to make ends meet. She says she was a little angry then and a lot lost.
"I was really unhappy," she remembers. "I didn't quite know why I was here, and I thought that somehow questions like that have answers. Then you realize that they don't, that in the end, life is about the act of living. I learned a bit of that, and as years go by, you start to really enjoy life more."
She also smoked a lot of pot -- "so much that I became a vegetable," she said in another interview. "The drug thing is cool if you survive it," she says with a laugh now.
After two years on the fringe, she re-entered society with a new resolve. "What I enjoyed about the Deadheads was that they were a very marginal group of people," she says. "My parents were first-generation up from poverty -- my mother was very poor, my father as well. They worked very hard to get an education, and then they really wanted that for me. It's complicated, because I think that's what we're suffering from -- I think you become dead in the head. And then you gotta go back in time and reach back for that thing your parents had, but you don't know how to do it."
Eventually, Downs went back to school, albeit with music on the back burner. "I realized that I could work out my major on my own terms -- interdisciplinary or something like that. It was women's studies, literature and philosophy, and I did my own study of weaving" among the Triqui Indians in Oaxaca. "That took me in the direction of the women's world, particularly Indian women in Mexico."
She hadn't entirely left her hippie past behind. She was attending Rainbow Gatherings in Mexico, an experience she likens to time travel. "You go back in time when you go to those Rainbow Gatherings," she says. "There would be this whole area where everybody would be naked -- you just really experience how it would be to experience ourselves as cultural animals. And so that contributed to my philosophy about textiles and weaving and that brought me back to music. I thought this is art -- life is art."
And comparisons to a certain artist are inescapable for Downs. Not only does she look eerily like Frida Kahlo (if she entered the iFest's Frida look-alike competition, she would easily win), but her background is also strikingly similar to the painter's. Both Kahlo and Downs had Oaxacan mothers and fathers of European background, and both were fascinated by Oaxacan textiles. Kahlo was a communist; so was Downs's father. Downs courts the comparison -- her publicity shots resemble Kahlo self-portraits -- but, hell, why not? It's her birthright.
