In two weeks, White Crate is throwing an epic anniversary show to celebrate five years of spreading Bay Area Music Love! In addition to performances by Peña, BOLERO!, and DJ Louie Elser, we are being treated to a headline performance by one of the Bay’s best: La Doña.
Born and raised in Bernal Heights, La Doña (born Cecilia Cassandra Peña-Govea) grew up in a richly musical household, singing from a young age. Family remains integral to her work, not just because her dad still plays in the band, but because she has been diving deep into the roots of the music she grew up on and the music she makes. Today, she serves her community in SF and beyond as a solo artist, music educator, activist and cultural worker—and we’re delighted to be seeing her on stage in a couple weeks.
Read on for our special interview with Cecilia, including stories about her upbringing, the frightening car crash experience that led to the creation of La Doña, the epic three-part album she has planned next, and more.
Tell us about your earliest connections with music.
I’ve been singing as long as I’ve been talking. My mom would tell me about the first song that I started singing, which was a very epic mariachi song by José Alfredo Jimenez called “Corazón, Corazón”, and it has all these cutty key changes and time signature changes, and it was just a very hilarious thing to see a little 2 or 3-year-old girl who couldn’t even speak yet singing the song.
I’ve always been very connected to music. I grew up in a musical household because my parents were musicians, my sister’s a musician, and it was just always part of the culture. It was the first way that we had to connect to each other and that we knew each other really. It’s always been just a huge facet of my personality and of myself, and of my way of expressing and connecting to both myself and to other people. So yeah, music for me is everything.
How did you start making music as La Doña?
I was working at Pandora doing a lot of theoretical analysis of music, and I just started thinking about, wow, the production is very simple. It’s super rudimentary. It’s very boring and just so rote and kind of the same thing that you’re hearing over and over and over again. And I felt like, with my background in acoustic traditional music, I could do something more interesting. So it kind of began as, “well, this is cool, but let’s see what I can do.”
And that was in a moment where reggaeton was very much synthetically produced. It was very digital. There wasn’t a lot of integration of live instruments. Also, in more regional music, there wasn’t a lot of synthetic or digital production in that. So I felt like my space was in knowing a lot about both of those worlds, and that it was time to put my own spin on all the types of music that were coming in, that I was analyzing, that I was listening to.
So that’s kind of the first impetus. But it really began after I got into a car accident when I was maybe 25. For about two weeks, I felt my entire soul pushed out from my body. I was sitting floating above my head, watching myself go through life, watching myself live and go through the motions—and I was scared. I was like, “How do I get back in there? How do I get back in my body?” Until one day when I was in the shower, I sang “Nada Me Pertenece” from start to finish with an extra three verses and it just came out and sat me right back down into my body. A couple days later, I recorded it, and so began La Doña.
You’ve definitely done incredible work in blending modern styles with acoustic, regional traditions. Do you feel like you’ve succeeded in that too?
I think you can tell a true artist by their enthusiasm and their curiosity. So if you talk to any artist who was like, “yes, I accomplished my goal and I did it, I made it, and that’s it,” then no offense, but they’re not a true musician. They’re not a true artist.
My strength lies in my deep honoring of tradition, but also my inquisitiveness and how far I can push myself. I’m always learning about new music, I’m always studying. I’m always pushing myself musically and sonically, and I don’t think that will ever change. I don’t think there’s an end goal for me besides just to continue to make music that hasn’t been heard before and make sounds that are very unique and that still speak to so many threads of ourselves, and especially mixed Latinx people.
We grow up with so many different genres and so many different musical traditions, and to hear them incorporated and amalgamated in a respectful and exciting way—it makes us whole again. It makes us feel like all these parts of us are validated and they exist and they’re important and that we do deserve to enjoy them. I’ll just say, as the perspective of somebody who grew up playing traditional Mexican music, I did not think that was cool. Nobody else thought it was cool. It was really embarrassing. But now I’m like, you know what? Cool, now it’s more popular. But also I’m going to push it even further and see what else I can bring to the forefront of people’s listening habits, and push the envelope in terms of what can make people twerk at the club!
Are you working on new music?
Right now I’m working on, to date, my most kind of extreme and crazy huge project. I’ve been working on looking at different types of traditional music like bolero and son and salsa and rumba and these Afrodiasporic rhythms and beats and melodies, looking at how they have been planted in different areas of the world and how those fruits traverse time and space, how they’re in communication with each other, how they affect the people that play them and that hold onto those traditions.
I’ve been doing a lot of traveling. I’ve recorded a lot in Mexico, in Cuba, in the United States with a lot of people from Colombia, from different parts of Mexico. It’s been really exciting to create a three-part album that tells different stories of different styles of music in different places. That sounds very vague, but I’ve been looking specifically at son jarocho, son cubano, salsa and timba, bolero, cumbia.
They’re genres that you’ve heard me play before, but I’ve gone deeper to the root of the people that I see preserving and maintaining these traditions, and I’ve collaborated with them to create these songs that, I mean, I’ve never heard anything like: I have a five-person coro from Veracruz with a seven-person coro from Havana with a five-part harmony arrangement of my girls up here in the Bay, and just seeing how all of those are coming together, it’s just a really kind of earth-bending experience. We’re just going into mixing right now, which is really exciting.
How do you connect your musical work with your work as an educator?
Teachers are the first students. Teachers are students first, and that means that I’m always listening, I’m always learning, and I’m always studying my kids and my students. I’m also always pushing myself to learn more about what I’m teaching, just so that it can be the most cohesive. All of my lessons really have to do with learning more about my students, learning more about myself, and both parties learning together. I don’t think that education and learning is a vertical relationship. I think it’s horizontal in that I learn from them at the same time as they learn from me.
Culturally, musically, just in every sense, I’m always listening and learning from my students. It’s been really exciting to be able to involve them in recordings across several projects, and involve them in field recordings, interviews, writing workshops, and performance. Having them on stage with me is such a joy, and it’s so invigorating to see young people who care about music as much as I do and as much as I did when I was their age.
I’m happy to step into a different type of role of mentor, of teacher educator, kind of just like a big sibling who is willing and able and excited to put them on game and to put them on gigs. So yeah, it’s a hugely important part of my life and of myself, and it’s one that I have not left behind, no matter how busy it gets with performance and touring.
One thing that’s striking is your incredible fashion sense. How does that play into your vision of La Doña?
I’ve always been very interested in aesthetics and in clothing. I’ve designed a lot of my own clothing: I hand sew and I machine sew, I embroider, I do bead work. I’ve always been really into craft and into creating things to adorn myself. A lot of that came from growing up in a household where clothes and fashion were really not a thing. My mom hates shopping, she hates dressing up. My sister’s the same way. I grew up in a very hippie household, so for the first four years of my life, I wore an oversized tie-dye t-shirt and some leggings.
As soon as I was able to start sewing and shopping for fabric and finding patterns, and then graduating into working with different designers and creators, fashion became a huge part of my life and part of the show, and it’s something that I pay a lot of attention to because I think that every single part of the presentation should be very intentional.
I want people to know me. I want people to see me, and I’m most myself when I am singing my heart out with a full band in a crazy, gigantic, loud outfit. So that’s me. And it’s also, it’s also just my entire world and my outlook. So that’s how I’ve come to have three closets full of gig clothing and fighting for the closet space. I don’t envy anybody who’s trying to get their clothes in my closet.
What do you love about the Bay Area music community?
The Bay Area music community is unlike any other music community that I’ve been a part of, and it’s because it draws from so many different diverse groups of people and creative arts communities. It’s a convergence of so many different types of people who have different ways of relating to each other, and we’ve held onto the best parts of all of that.
We have the party aspect where people get together and jam and create music without the pressure of whether it’s being recorded or filmed. This living and breathing tradition of jamming and celebration is really important. Also, all of us learning so many different styles really contributes to an openness and an appreciation.
It’s rare. I am not going to shit on LA, I’m not going to shit on New York, but I would say that in other places, people kind of stick to their bag. People stick to the type of music that they’ve studied, that they’ve learned and that they’re good at, and also similarly admire and uplift other people who are within the same genre or the same practice. I would say that that’s very different than how you see people and artists and musicians functioning in the Bay. I think that we’re all very excited to learn about and expose ourselves to and uplift different styles of music that we don’t even play. And that goes back to being a lifelong student. A lot of people are excited to continue to learn and pick up new aspects and be more innovative and a little bit more adventurous with their sounds.
The other thing is just how multi-generational it is in they Bay. With all aspects of culture—be it food, fashion, music, art—we obviously do draw on previous generations and our ancestors and those who raised us. But I think that the Bay is very special and that we out here trying to function in that way. My dad plays in my band and in the family band. It’s three generations of us now with my sister’s kids. Having that deep respect and honor, but also that proximity and closeness and fun relationship with older and younger generations makes the Bay very different. It’s not like, “oh, this is cool” or “oh, that’s tradition and this is ingenuity.” It’s like, no, we’re all existing together and we’re all learning from each other. It’s less hierarchical than how I see other multi-generational music communities function.
Are there any local artist communities that really inspire you?
There’s an upcoming generation of Latin jazz musicians that are just kicking ass right now. They’re killing it, and that’s really exciting because it was like, “okay, who cares about Latin jazz anymore?” But there’s been a resurgence of interest in that.
A group that comes to mind is Mamboleo. They’re a group that I had put on my lineup for the “Por la Raza” show that I did with Galería de la Raza a few months ago. Also, there’s a really exciting collective creating queer son jarocho called Corazón de Cedro, making that more accessible and more inclusive. I always love people who are maintaining a deep traditional music, but radicalizing it and just who it’s open to and who it’s accessible to. It’s also exciting to see Family Not A Group (FNG) doing their thing. I love to see people maintaining a tradition of hip hop and rap and combining it with live instrumentation. In their case, they’re combining it with comedy and theater, and the theatrical component is really cool and unique to them.
In general, I applaud everybody who is continuing with their art outside of material success. Everybody that just rehearses for free and organizes a band for free and creates music on a dime: I think that that’s the most inspiring thing. Anybody can go to LA and book out a $2,000 studio and pay $7,000 to a famous producer and get a track that sounds like, okay, sounds pretty good. But the dedication of the educators, service workers, healthcare workers, blue collar workers, people that are in the field working 40-plus hours a week, and then coming home and doing rehearsal and recording and creating music that speaks to all of us? That’s where the celebration should be and where the energy really resides.
What would you like to see change in the Bay?
I was recently on a panel for Noise Pop, and it was like, “why is San Francisco dead and what’s wrong with San Francisco’s music scene?” And everybody wants an easy answer, like more arts and more openness and more shows.
The hard answer is deep structural change that’s coming from City Hall and anti-capitalist initiatives. That means taxing tech companies. That means taxing billionaires. That means being more intentional about the businesses that we support. It means garnering more funding for housing so that artists and musicians can afford to live in the Bay. It means putting our weight behind policies that work for musicians and for people in the Bay and that protect migrants. A huge structural change needs to happen. It’s not simply “musicians need more money so they can make music.” It’s a system that pretty much has been under attack since the 80s, since education started getting defunded, since property taxes were lowered. So yeah, I have a lot to say on that, but I think that capitalism needs to fall.
What music have you been loving lately?
I’ve recently been doing a deep dive into all my vinyl. So I’ve been looking at the roots of Fania and what’s behind all of the arrangement styles that I rely on, which is very trombone heavy, very horn heavy, where the rhythms come from, where the montunos come from, where the coro styles come from. I’ve been looking at Fania as a way to trace roots back to Cuba, to Puerto Rico, to Dominican Republic, to Mexico, and just doing very deep historic and ethnomusicological glances into my vinyl collection. And, of course, with the passing of Eddie Palmieri, I’ve been listening to him a bunch. Also, especially after my trip to Cuba, recording over there, I’m listening to a lot of early son and early salsa as well as a lot of early son jarocho.
What can we expect from your live show?
It will be the spectrum. I’m going to play all the favorites, all the bangers, but I think I’m also going to try and pull out some new material and get together some new songs, which is hard for my band because I’m having everybody play three instruments and learn a hundred different vocal parts. But yeah, you can expect very deep and lush vocal arrangements. I’m going to have all the percussionists there. So it’s going to be exciting. And I’m also probably going to do a couple of good old rabble-rousing Mexican covers. So yeah, come ready to sing, cry, laugh, drink, and dance!
