BY OLIVER WANG
“Somos Asiáticos/Venceremos” is a unique musical artifact of race and resistance: a pair of Spanish-language songs, recorded by a pair of Japanese-American musician/activists, released on a Puerto Rican imprint. It’s a snapshot of New York City in the early 1970s, a heady period when various political movements converged around a pair of young artists in Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima. While both had family roots in California, the two met in Harlem in 1969, connected by the burgeoning Asian American Movement that was then uniting various groups—Chinese, Japanese, Filipino—under a new, umbrella identity. This was no small aspiration: these communities had different immigrant histories, languages, and customs. Their main commonality was surviving generations of anti-Asian racism. The Movement espoused new forms of solidarity, not only across Asian ethnic groups, but with other communities as well. Nobuko and Chris shared artistic backgrounds. Chris played French horn and guitar, and Nobuko was a professional dancer on Broadway and in movies.Together, they wanted to contribute to the sound of a young Asian America, inspired by the likes of Bob Dylan to Leadbelly to Santana. As Nobuko wrote in her 2021 memoir, Not Yo’ Butterfly , she and Chris were motivated by a simple but powerful question:“Where was our music? What is a people without their own song?” The pair’s best known composition became “We Are the Children,” an ode to the parallel struggles faced by different Asian American communities. They performed the song on The Mike Douglas Show , with Yoko Ono and John Lennon watching, and recorded a version for their own Yellow Pearl label in the early 1970s. In 1973—now joined by Chinese American musician/ performer, William “Charlie” Chin—the three recorded a new version to anchor an LP for Paredon Records: A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America , widely considered the first self-consciously Asian American album. Nobuko and Chris also wrote and performed several Spanish- language songs to demonstrate their cross-community unity. The opening lines from “Somos Asiáticos” make this gesture clear: Iijima y Miyamoto “Somos Asiaticos” b/w “Venceremos” (Discos Coqui) Circa 1971
Hablamos la misma lengua porque luchamos por las mismas cosas (we speak the same language because we struggle for the same causes) La lengua de libertad (the language of liberty) Líricas de amor (the lyrics of love) A pair of Nuyorican friends in the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, Flora and Pepe Sánchez—aka husband-and-wife folk duo, Pepe y Flora—offered to release “Somos Asiáticos” on their Discos Coqui imprint. According to Nobuko, “this was our first time in a real studio,” and while Iijima’s acoustic guitar and his and Nobuko’s vocals dominate the composition, the background studio players add a subtle bossa nova feel, with some uncredited funky flute to boot. For the B-side, Nobuko and Chris added their version of the Chilean protest song, “Venceremos” (“We Shall Overcome”).A later version of “Somos Asiáticos” was included on A Grain of Sand but “Venceremos” is unique to this single, which was only released in Puerto Rico. In her memoir, Nobuko wrote, “I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard that they played our songs on jukeboxes around the island.” While she, Chris, and William remained friends for decades to follow, outside of the A Grain of Sand album, they never recorded as a trio again, save for Nobuko recording backing vocals for Chris and William’s 1982 duet album, Back to Back . The group began performing reunion concerts in the late 1990s, but then Chris passed away from a blood disorder in 2005, inspiring filmmaker Tad Nakamura to create a documentary short, A Song For Ourselves , in 2009 about Chris’s life and times, including interviews with Nobuko and William and vintage footage of the trio performing. Nobuko, now in her late eighties, still sings and teaches dancing, and was the focus of Nakamura’s 2024 documentary feature Nobuko Miyamoto:A Song in Movement. More than fifty years after Chris and Nobuko recorded “Somos Asiáticos” for Discos Coqui, the single remains one of the most symbolically important recordings in not just their own respective catalogs, but in Asian American history.The story of its birth, and the potency of its message, is a reminder that communities aren’t just forged from common values but also from the shared struggle for respect, recognition, and unity.
Nosotros somos asiáticos y nos gusta cantar para la gente (we are Asians who like to sing for the people)
6 WaxPoetics
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