At Houston’s protests for Lorenzo Salgado, the culture is the point

Folks dancers perform at a protest following the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents.

Evan Mintz / Houston Chronicle

I’ve been to plenty of protests, from Zuccotti Park to Hermann Park, but the march for justice at Dunlavy Park on Sunday was the first time I had ever seen one that involved a performance by dancers in traditional Jalisco skirts — a whirl of color amid black-and-white protest signs. 

In fact, nearly all of the events I’ve been to following U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fatally shooting Lorenzo Salgado Araujo have involved music in one way or another. And that has been an intentional choice. Anything you read about Salgado is bound to mention his love of music — specifically ranchera. Songs by genre legend Antonio Aguilar played in the background at his funeral on Thursday. I heard “El Rey” on a Bluetooth speaker at a City Hall vigil last weekend. And there was a DJ blasting Tejano music under the shade of live oaks in the Montrose park on Sunday. 

In my car, however, you’ll hear a very different sort of music. The Mathletes — a local low-fi indie rock band led by singer-songwriter Joe Folladori, who has been a prolific contributor to Houston’s music and avant-garde theater scene for the past quarter-century or so. You may have seen his latest performance, Katy Perry Candy Darling Mary Magdalene, at the Match Theater earlier this year. 

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That’s because I’ve found myself listening to one of his songs on repeat ever since federal agents killed Salgado: “That’s When I Reach For My Culture.” 

The title is an inversion of a line often misattributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, but actually is dialogue from Nazi playwright and poet Hanns Johst. 

Roughly translated from the original German: “When I hear the word culture, that’s when I reach for my revolver.”

Consider that, as one New York Times theater critic put it, the “essence of the cultural ideals of the Third Reich.” Values like freedom and democracy are secondary. The violence is the point. 

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Of course, in our free society, things are supposed to be the other way around. The point of the revolver, the reason why we have police and military and have given them a state monopoly on bloodshed, is to foster a peaceful, copacetic republic where culture can flourish. Any violence that we allow should be considered means to that greater end — means that should be rarely seen, highly controlled and only barely tolerated. 

John Adams put it well. 

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”

Reading so many interviews with Salgado’s sons, it seems that the longtime Houstonian had his own way of expressing that sentiment. 

“I love our dad, he worked hard,” Ronaldo, the oldest of Lorenzo’s three boys, told The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo. “He always told us that we needed to do well in school so we don’t end up like him in the sun.”

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I almost laughed when I first read that line. It’s practically a paraphrase from 30 Rock character Jack Donaghy. 

“We’re an immigrant nation,” the fictional NBC executive says proudly. “The first generation works its fingers to the bone making things. The next generation goes to college and innovates new ideas. The third generation snowboards and takes improv classes.”

That last sentence is the punchline — and an argument for why we need continued immigration to refresh our nation’s ambitions. But it is also the gleeful truth. Fathers — and forefathers — endure hard labors so that the next generations are free to learn and create and discover better ways to live. The ancient Greeks called it Eudaimonia. 

If you want to see what this looks like in Houston, take a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and look at the names of donors on the walls. Local business leaders who spent decades of their lives amassing incredible wealth have apparently decided that the highest and best use of their money is to house some of humanity’s highest cultural achievements for the benefit of everyday Houstonians. The final refined product in the oil and gas pipeline is modern art. 

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In our free society, every police officer, soldier and, yes, ICE agent is supposed to exist in service of that cultural achievement. So that we can continue the chain of fathers working hard so that their sons can live better lives — lives where they’re free not just to listen to music, but to study it and make it.

The improv classes are the point. The Jalisco skirts are the point. The culture is the point.