“Canción Mixteca”: A Lament That Crosses Borders (and Breaks Hearts)

In Wim Wenders’ 1984 film Paris, Texas, one of the most affecting moments is non-verbal. Ry Cooder’s sparse slide guitar shimmers in the American desert. A man’s voice rises to meet it, a song that has no name, at least for the audience. As it goes on, the film’s absent father, Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), kneels and looks skyward, as if the sound of that voice had summoned it. “Canción Mixteca” (written in 1915 by José López Alavez) spills over the scene in lilting Spanish: It’s a simple line, and it speaks to something base in anyone who has ever felt a little out of place. But for immigrants, for the child of immigrants, it’s an open wound.

The song comes, of course, as Travis starts to come into contact with his history, his life, the person he used to be, a lost soul making his way through the wide, strange expanses of the American desert. Travis is not a Mexican, but there is no musical irony in his evocation. This is a song about exile, about displacement, about a wound that will not stop bleeding, for any of us.

The immigrant is an exile. Her family is elsewhere, scattered, sometimes altogether gone. She longs to belong to one place, to let that word “home” echo with the same clear tone from inside her heart. Her home is a shard in her memory that never quite gets filled in by her new world. There is no past tense in exile. The immigrant carries her home with her.

I didn’t see Paris, Texas at the cinema. I saw it years later, after I had already left home. Palermo was far behind me, out of reach in time as well as space. But there I was, sitting and watching Travis trek through the desert, searching for something he could not quite name, when something inside me cracked open. Loneliness, disorientation, the slow pulse of quiet hope. I recognized it all.

For the immigrant, Canción Mixteca can be an anthem of belonging. It is not a nostalgic song. It aches, it is elegiac. It is for someone who can’t go home. It is for someone who is lost. The song pulls at the listener, like memory pulls us back to the bones of things we can’t quite name, not necessarily to joy, but to truth.

With a strangely raw vulnerability within its sound, these words probably mean nothing to most people. For anyone who has left their homeland by choice, necessity, or fate, however, Canción Mixteca is an almost sacred hymn. It is a voice, a voice thousands of hearts would speak in silence, that of those who work, love, and raise families in a country which is not theirs, but continue dreaming in their homeland verbalizations.

This folk song has in fact transcended boundaries to become a transnational anthem. Sung out in Paris, Texas, deserts are bridged-over emotional and literal. To remind that exile is a condition not only political-it’s a human one.

And at that moment, somewhere between Texas and Paris, and possibly Palermo and Oaxaca too, Cancion Mixteca sings no less than for immigrants-but for any person that has longed for a place which they cannot touch anymore.