Her music is Mexican at heart

National Catholic Reporter, May 12, 1995 by Dawn Gibeau

When Donna Pena became music director at Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, St. Paul, in the mid-1980s, she demurred at taking charge of the Spanish-language Mass for a year. She knew no Spanish, although her parents were Mexican-American and she had spent part of her youth in the parish. Today, Pena speaks Spanish fluently, having learned it through music. She speaks it at home with her husband, a native of Mexico who plays in a local mariachi band, and with their children.

She composes music for worship that alternates between Spanish and English and some that can be sung entirely in one or the other language. Among her compositions that are used widely around the nation are "Digo Si, Senor (I Say Yes, Lord)"; "On Holy Ground"; "Against the Grain"; "Levanto Mi Alma"; and the psalm setting for Psalm 23, "Nada Me Falta."

As she began learning more and more about the Spanish Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe, she realized the parish was using "music from a long, long, long time ago, just translated into Spanish and being called Hispanic music." At that time a movement was starting for the Hispanic church to claim its identity, "and this music was not giving them an identity at all."

So Pena, who composed music in English when she was in high school, started composing for her parish. That required setting aside all her worries about not being considered Hispanic because her skin was too white and her language was English. Gradually, she sensed the great diversity among Hispanics.

She said she tells her husband, "It doesn't matter which side of the border you're from or which language you speak if you're Mexican at heart. I tell him that if he were a true Mexican, he would speak Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec people. But we are both speaking the language of the oppressor," whether English or Spanish.

When she began composing, she belonged to a band that sang in Portuguese and Spanish, "and we were doing salsa and cumbia and all these Latin rhythms. So I knew what Hispanic music should sound like. I tried to relate that sound to the psalm settings." Nurture, including introduction to the wider world of music publishing, came through a local forum at which musicians who created Christian music critiqued one another's work.

Pena increasingly writes "music with a message," she said. "A lot of it is quoting scripture and saying, `This is how we should be living.' We have to look at what is happening around us in our world and be responsible for that. It's been very important for me to let Hispanics realize first of all that we've been oppressed (and that) when we don't object, we are responsible for the oppression continuing."

Pena's concern with social justice/liberation theology themes comes not from studying liberation theology but from majoring in Chicano studies at the University of Minnesota and experiencing U.S. Hispanics' struggles, especially migrants'and farmworkers'.

Her understanding deepened when, with a group of artists, she visited El Salvador and Nicaragua in 1990. That resulted in the Salvadoran-flavored music that permeates her third collection, La Tierra, La Gente (The Land, the People), in 1991.

Her new collection is called El Salvador. It contains "La Misa Salvadorena," written by Guillermo Cuellar and commissioned by the late Archbishop Oscar Romero. Parts of that Mass, which she says is very popular in El Salvador, have been used in the United States by people who did not realize its source, Pena said.

She also would like to popularize Nicaraguan composer Carim Mejia Godoy's "Misa Campesino," which she says is a beautiful Mass that is very expressive of liberation theology.

"I think people (in the United States) need to hear that," she said. "They need to hear something other than that God is love. They already know that."

Pena knows what she does and does not want to tackle. Not another "Holy, Holy." Not another "Memorial Acclamation." "There's such a glut of that stuff," she said. She wants to do an all-English album and perhaps some secular compositions. She wants to bring into the liturgy an acoustic-guitar sound reminiscent of Crosby, Stills and Nash.

She is working on a Mass that can be sung in Spanish or English. In Spanish, she "has the rosary half-set to music. It's going to be presented as a play. I use the Hispanic experience in place of the mysteries." She has been working on the rosary piece for three or four years and said it is "going to be really a good piece."

Some churches that are not Catholic also use Pena's music. On Saturdays she works at a Lutheran church, Todos Los Santos, in Minneapolis. "That I do for fun, because they have a band I get to work with," she said.

A vivacious aficionado of salsa music, Pena combines rhythm and melody with her abiding appreciation of the connection between God and the people of God. Since she was a child, she said, "I've always viewed the scriptures ... as being for the poor, kind of to uplift the poor."