Connecting the Dots from the River to the Gulf: Turning River Data Flow into Sound Performance Speaks Volumes for Rio Grande Ecology
Marya Errin Jones*
Abstract
The site-specific performance project, There Must Be Other Names for the River (2019–2024), utilized 50 years of river data to sonically express into an unknown future the impact of human interaction and intervention along key sections of the fourth largest river in the United States, the Rio Grande. This once flourishing, now jagged, drought-prone river basin the United States claims for itself is shared with the country of Mexico—and for thousands of years there was no boundary or border. Through performer recollections, mapping the politics of water and the data itself, the project proposed to rethink how the river resonates across modern borders and through existing communities. There Must Be Other Names for the River reveals the art of noise as creative intervention, drawing us back to the water as intentional stewards, reflecting the power of the Rio Grande to nourish and change us through time.
Keywords: Rio Grande, river data, sonic expression, border politics, water stewardship
“We can no longer assume that systems, both climatic and human, will always work as they have in the past.” (Paskus)
There Must Be Other Names for the River, created by Marisa Demarco, Dylan McLaughlin and Jessica Zeglin, turned 50 years of river flow data of the Rio Grande into a graphic sound score for six performers. As one of the performers, I was offered the challenge of interpreting the data through sound, expressing key points of the water’s presence or absence along the river as it made its way from the mountains of Colorado, to the desert, to the gulf and, then, the Atlantic Ocean. The piece has traveled much like the river, weaving itself through highlands and canyons, experiencing several interactions, beginning with a capella performances by voices belonging to members of the Albuquerque arts community, including Celia Ameline, bug carlson, Hannah Colton, Austin Fisher, nicholas b jacobsen, Becki Jones, Keegan Kloer, Lazarus Letcher, Ana Alonso Minutti, Tanya Nuñez, Peri Pakroo, Quela Robinson, Anna Rutins and Maggie Siebert. The piece traveled to the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Bosque (forest) in Albuquerque, where it was sung by Monica Demarco, Ryan Dennison, Kenneth Cornell, Antonia Montoya, Mauro Woody and Jessica Chao, who stood at the water’s edge in late winter to sing the score.
These early, foundational performances were vocal-only, with the very first presentation of the data taking place on the banks of the Rio Grande, shared solely among the artists, as the singers performed to the river and to the surrounding plant and animal life. The performance then journeyed to public exhibitions and concerts at the University of New Mexico Art Museum. I stepped into the river of this work at The National Hispanic Cultural Center and again at SITE Santa Fe as part of the spring 2023 exhibition, Going with the Flow: Art, Actions and Western Waters, curated by Brandee Caoba and Lucy Lippard. The last performances of this work presented in Santa Fe were sung in order of the flow of the river by Monica Demarco, Ryan Dennison, Kenneth Cornell, Antonia Montoya, Mauro Woody and myself, singing the final destination of the river water as it met the sea. Through the praxis of performance, I propose that There Must Be Other Names for the River asks us to listen to the voice of the river, before accepting the interruptions of coloniality.
In 2019, Demarco, a veteran journalist and musician, called on her community of experimental noise artists, which includes members of bands and groups she co-founded—Chicharra, Death Convention Singers, Milch de la Machina—to use our instruments, acoustic and electronic, and our vocal instruments, filtered and manipulated through guitar pedals, to interpret the river flow data. We were asked to consider how human intervention has shaped the Rio Grande over the years. This practice allowed us to imagine how water is harnessed for our use, but not how it flows through our lives: where it begins or how it arrives to us, beyond our neighborhood water treatment plant, when we turn on the faucet to bathe or drink. We may live at half a dozen different addresses over the course of a lifetime, but how often do we consider the bodies of water we also call home? There Must Be Other Names for the River asks that we consider how human intervention changes the river—channeling it, disrupting it, damming it.
This reflection on our relationship with water set the stage for a deeper engagement with the river’s geography and history. There Must Be Other Names for the River traces the Rio Grande’s journey, beginning at its headwaters in Colorado (Demarco), where snowmelt from the mountains gives it life, flows down to Albuquerque (Dennison) and nourishes the cottonwoods that anchor the soil near the shore along the Bosque. The water is then held captive and controlled by the Elephant Butte Dam (Cornell) for the purpose of settler recreation. From there, the water moves through Jurarez and El Paso (Montoya), bound together in a type of arm-wrestling battle, wringing out the water drips, and pours down each fist. The river then crosses into Texas at Big Bend (Woody), flowing through the canyons cut by glaciers 300 million years ago. This area is also a dance between the borderlands of the Rio Bravo del Norte (Rio Grande) and the Rio Concho basin in the state of Chihuahua in Mexico.
Finally, after an 1,800-mile journey, the water reaches the mouth of the Rio Grande, located in Brownsville, Texas, at a site known as Boca Chica (Little Mouth) by the Spanish who colonized the area. The town of Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, shares a bridge with Brownsville, connecting the two towns across the river and the border. From the mouth of the Rio Grande (Jones), to the Gulf of . . . the Gulf of . . . By proclamation of the current President of the United States, the Gulf of Mexico is now called the Gulf of America. The GULF of America. A lump forms in my throat at the thought of uttering this new name that represents the transformation point where the freshwater of the Rio Grande meets the salty, briny waters of the gulf of . . . the gulf of . . . .
If you go to Google Maps and zoom out, it still says, “Gulf of Mexico.” All of that blue creates space to dream. From there, you are reminded that the inlet has been identified on maps as the Gulf of Mexico since 1550. The word “Mexico” was taken from the Nahuatl word “Mēxihco” whose etymology goes back to an earlier nomenclature, to mean Navel of the Moon. Dig deeper and you’ll discover that the earliest maps of Mexico reveal how much of America was Mexico. Take a deep breath and zoom into the same Google map and suddenly myopia sets in. Suddenly, the Gulf of Mexico is the gulf of ‘merica, and you’re knee-deep in crawdads surrounded by oil rigs and trade wars. This body of water also seems to be called “Gulf of the United States,” which is reminiscent of being part of a group of people called Negro, Colored, Black, African-American, over the course of hundreds of years. We, Black folk, like water, find our collective selves flowing over and under obstacles through time, collecting memories reflected in tide pools, used as a commodity for the nourishment of others’ lives and their progeny. Our mutable lives, like sandbars in the wake of the ocean’s tides, offer new vistas and unsustainable structures that soon experience erasure. I imagine there must be other names for Blackness, like a river of stolen people delivered by big water to another land. There must be songs along the journey, too.
Demarco, McLaughlin and Zeglin gained access to water-level data points along the river, indicating where and how the water flows, or doesn’t. But how do you sing river flow data, exactly? How does one interpret the intervention of a dam in a river as sound? How does one read a music score written by water? How does water express its silence? I learned to read music as a young child, in elementary school. Many of us did; if we grew up going to public school in the 1970s, we were handed a shiny, licorice colored, plastic recorder. The first song I learned to play was “Hot Cross Buns.” B-A-G. B-A-G. G-G-G-G-H-H-H-H- B-A-G. This song taught me about rhythm, pattern, capitalism, Christianity and the crucifixion in one fell swoop.
Performing the score of There Must Be Other Names for the River would require more of me than producing sounds that represent sound notation bases on a traditional, Western, music score. Having engaged in experimental music with sound artists like Demarco, I have learned that a graphic score is sound visualized and that it can be comprised of components like patterns, designs, shapes and instructions for interpreting the information. In this case, the river data score took the form of a sequence of circles, each representing one year of river flow. Their varying sizes indicated the volume of water: sometimes as large as a silver dollar, sometimes shrinking to the size of a pinpoint. When the river was dammed or the water severely restricted, the circles would shrink to a dot—or vanish entirely. Our task was to translate those visual cues into sound, giving voice to the rise and fall of the river over time.
At times, the aural experience of six singers simultaneously embodying the data is as overwhelming as a river in flood phase—overflowing its banks, rambling outward and spreading across its floodplains. There are moments where sound is suppressed, evoking water held behind concrete barriers or the silence of a dry, cracked riverbed.
To translate the data—yearly measurements of the river’s volume at various points along its path to the sea—into a score that could be sung, Demarco, McLaughlin and Zeglin chose to color-code the score to represent natural attributes of the landscape surrounding the river and its serpentine ebb and flow. Green signifies the alpine region of the San Juan Mountains in northern Colorado, where the Rio Grande begins as snowmelt. As the river winds into New Mexico, near Taos—where Tewa people established Taos Pueblo over a thousand years ago—the palette begins to shift. Flowing through the Bosque in Albuquerque, the score’s color transforms again, capturing the cottonwood trees as they yield to the color palette of fall. Their heart-shaped leaves shimmer in the wind, turning a rich mustard yellow as the temperatures drop in the high desert.
Two hours south of Albuquerque, the Rio Grande water is subject to reclamation by the Elephant Butte Dam that restricts the water’s flow, represented by the color slate grey. Juarez and El Paso, the twin cities split by the Rio Grande and the jurisdictions of two, opposing nations, are symbolized by alternating layers of white clay and oxidizing bands of iron deposits in shades of pale pink. The Rio Grande takes a turn as it tumbles across the border, curving back towards southwest Texas, at Big Ben. As it threads through villages, canyons and borderlands of Mexico and the United States, the color used is turquoise. Finally, the waters of the Rio Grande that began as melted snow fall in the mountains of Colorado meet the deep, lapis lazuli blue of the gulf. There, its waters linger and merge with the salty sea—quenching our thirst, yes, but also readying us to confront both memory and possibility, at that liminal place where land meets shore, and past meets future.
Performance is born from observing nature. We imitate the songs of birds—maybe their songs were the first tunes humans sang. But what is the voice of the water? How do we hear and express it?
For me, this translates into moments where the composition emerged as deep, full-bodied chest voice sounds, giving way to the ache of a distant hunger for air, spiraling into an unquenchable thirst. In performance, I found myself developing vivid images around the data flow I sang. I imagined the first people who drank from a river that was already millions of years old when they arrived. I also wanted to speak to the water within me—the water sources in me as an acknowledgement of self. As I sang, I reflected on how humans and nonhuman beings have interacted with the river’s flow—from the mountains to the gulf—and how, in times of drought, it has drawn cries of worry and heartbreak, when the river becomes nothing more than a drying sandbar. I imagined all the ways water has been withheld or controlled to favor the development of Anglo settlements and gated communities. At times, my interpretation of the dots on my score barely produced sound; the intake and exhalation of my breath representing a year of longing. And then, there was nothing. No water. No sound. Where there is no breath, there is death.
Missing data from 2010 to 2019 points to a time when the river’s mouth was stilled into silence. At this point in the score, the composition drops off into a secret ravine, a bottomless pit where thick, black slashes of redaction float endlessly, like dead letter ticker tape for a bureaucratic parade. This information has been released and was shared during the final performance of the work, but there was a time when government agencies would not relinquish the data to the creative team. While it’s not entirely clear why this information was withheld, one can guess: people were dying as they attempted to cross the Rio Grande—indicating human intervention that weaponized the river’s power.
The United States used tax dollars to stop people from migrating across the river. On the 24th of June 2019, (graphic, view with caution) the bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his young daughter Valeria were found face down in the water on the bank of the Rio Grande at Matamoros, Mexico. Valeria was tucked inside Oscar’s shirt, certainly as a means of holding onto her while navigating the river. In 2024, asylum seekers were met with the violence of razor wire installed along 100 miles of riverbank where Texas meets Mexico. For this section, I was instructed to cease all sound and write the following statement on a sheet of poster board:
“River flow data kept by the International Boundary Commission are not publicly available after 2010 for more than 850 miles of the Rio Grande, from Big Bend to the Gulf of Mexico. Singer pauses while data are not available and resumes vocalizing for projected future dates.”
My song of the river came to an end. After the fixed data of the score concluded, performers moved into future projections of sound the river might make. We were all in aural agreement that the river lived. After surviving all of us, the river exists, somehow, into the liminal space of an unknown future. Together, we produced laser sounds and plasma-based aircraft noises. The pterodactyls made a triumphant return, apparently! There were also the voices of future people, speaking and chanting a yet unknown language. Still singing. We are still singing.
While I had the unique experience of interpolating the data, singing as the mouth of the Rio Grande, I also struggled, knowing that I am a settler on stolen land and a descendant of the enslaved, stolen and sold. Remarkably, the musicians creating the collective voice of the river were all people of color, considering nothing short of Land Back will allow Brown, Black or Indigenous control over Turtle Island and her rivers. Singing as the Mouth of the River at Matamoros gave me the chance to imagine Black people migrating too—many fleeing enslavement in the Gulf Coast states to seek uncertain freedom in Mexico. A mass Mexodus, if you will (Mexodus is the name of a new hip hop musical created by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, looking at the Underground Railroad that traveled South). I imagined the sweet relief after making it across the Rio Grande in 1830 to discover that the Afro-Mestizo Mexican President Vicente Ramon Guerrero created a special decree to declare slavery outlawed in (most) of Mexico (Vincent).
As There Must Be Other Names for the River dissolved into the Gulf, I sang to myself the story of the wreck of the last slave ship to arrive in the Americas, Clotilda, still submerged in the Gulf of Mexico near Mobile, Alabama. I think of how the Rio Grande nourishes me today—and how easily it could slip through our hands, should we fail to listen to the voice of the river
Bibliography
Going with the Flow: Art, Actions, and Western Waters. Site Santa Fe. Accessed 12 Mar. 2025.
Paskus, Laura. At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate. U of New Mexico P, 2020.
Vincent, Theodore G. “The Contributions of Mexico’s First Black Indian President, Vicente Guerrero.” The Journal of Negro History vol. 86, no. 2, 2001, pp. 148-59.
*Marya Errin Jones is an interdisciplinary artist and playwright working with lo-fi puppetry, loop pedals and mixed media. Her work has been presented at HERE Arts Center, Brown University and Tricklock Company. She founded ABQ Zine Fest and the now sunsetted music/artspace, The Tannex. Marya has received grants from the Jim Henson Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Her zines are archived at MIT, Tate Modern, and Barnard College. Currently, Marya is a PhD student in American Studies at the University of New Mexico, where she explores Afro-futurism, temporality, and experimental performance. Her writing appears in Hyperallergic and Southwest Contemporary. maryaerrinjones.me.
Copyright © 2025 Marya Errin Jones
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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