Xiuhtezcatl: Taking Back The Land And ‘Seeing A Material Shift On The Road’ (Hotstar)

 “For me, the awareness and being tapped into the land we are in is very important,” says Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, a.k.a “X,” who blends contemporary hip-hop and R&B sounds with powerful messages as an activist, model and speaker.

“When we’re playing a show in Berkeley, it’s not just, ‘We’re going to go into this venue and turn up and release our project,’ it’s about understanding whose land we are on and having an awareness of the indigenous people, not only historically but still there fighting to defend that land.”

That’s appropriate, with Xiuhtezcatl’s upcoming release (May 14) titled “Take It All Back,” a campaign aimed at supporting the Indigenous Land Defenders that stood up to stop then-President Donald Trump’s visit to the Black Hills on July 3, 2020, where 20 people were arrested. Some face charges. 

“We went to shows this last year consulting elders in that space and having community conversation with folks and actually inviting my audience, before the show started, to gather and sit with elders to learn from and around issues affecting those people,” the barely 20-year-old adds, with Mexica roots, a Boulder, Colo., upbringing, current base in Portland, Ore., and spiritual home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“That kind of grounds and anchors everything we do. As we are planning out our tour, we start thinking of different ways, how do we acknowledge the land as part of building and growing our audience and having this intimate relationship? Not with the city as a market to sell more tickets but in a more profound way to inspire our audience to consume the music, but with that different ideology and awareness of how to move around the world. That work we started to do before the pandemic, I’m really excited to pick up again.

That particular show, Feb. 29 at Cornerstone Berkeley, was the release party of his collaborative Voice Runners album with hip-hop artist Tru. Although his plans were put on hold shortly thereafter, he says the pandemic brought some awareness and perspective to performing, going on tour and organizing. 

“This album release show, the energy at that show, with the songs we were performing, the audience that came through, it felt really parallel to a lot of moments I’ve spent in the streets, marching and protesting and engaging and organizing communities,” he says. “It was a similar feeling but it was inside a music venue. We were connecting energetically in such a powerful way. We were moshing together and then we transitioned to a really intimate moment where me and my brother Tru were performing and speaking this poetry from the stage standing still and capturing this audience.” 

“For me the most exciting way to combine the movement work I’ve done my entire life with the touring element is through how we build and engage our audience and community.”

When X says “my entire life,” he means it, as a video of a 6-year-old Xiuhtezcatl can be found on YouTube depicting an eloquent-beyond-his-years little boy telling a large crowd to take responsibility for its own actions and protect the Earth with common-sense measures like turning off the lights or water tap after use. 

“A lot changed in the last year,” he says. “The movement from Black Lives, the uprising to protect Black life that happened in the early spring and throughout the summer, brought a lot of perspective to the work we’ve been doing in the climate and environment space. 

“A lot of folks are continuing to realize these environmental issues, social justice issues, indigenous sovereignty issues, they don’t exist in a vacuum. In order to fully successfully have a grounded understanding of what our society is experiencing, we have to be intentional about organizing with other sections of these different movements.” 

And, he says, that’s just what has happened. 

“I’ve spent a lot of time with climate organizers that were reviewing and re-framing a lot of their organizing to really fit a stronger lens to focus on equity and justice, looking at the climate crisis as not just an energy issue or a sustainability issue or a fossil fuel problem, but as a human issue that interconnects with communities that predominantly affect black and brown and indigenous people. That’s part of what shifted in the last year and what the pandemic underscored.”

While these issues may sound like more typical for the college social studies course or educational discussion, the awareness impacts art, inclusion and popular culture.

“It was an important year for me of introspection, creatively and artistically as well as looking at my involvement with climate and environmental justice movements,” Xiuhtezcatl says. “The whole environmental space was challenged in a very big way. Is your work explicitly anti-racist, is your work actually grounded in justice for the communities you speak on? It was a lot on many levels, and now that things are beginning to open back up in a safe way, I’m really excited to have these campaigns and projects reach deeper than I have previously to the pandemic.”

With festival dates under his belt including Electric Forest, California Roots Festival, Northern Nights and supporting dates for artists including SOJA and Nahko And Medicine For the People, Xiuhtezcatl says touring is ripe for a “material shift” in awareness of the land and its people. 

It’s therefore not surprising that X takes a community approach to finding solutions to complex environmental issues as well. 

“I think one place to start is to understand whose land it is you’re on. That’s one of the grounding ways we can think about this. If we look at the fact that 80% of the world’s biodiversity is protected by indigenous people, which are like 5% or less of the world’s population. Indigenous stewardship of the land is such an important part of mitigating the climate crisis and keeping carbon in the ground.

“Look all around, indigenous communities are waging battles for the land, for the communities and preservation of clean water, and that’s not just for them or us or these individual reservations or communities, it’s for the whole world, you know. They have global implications.”