Ximena Violante
Ximena Violante is a Mexican trans musician, teacher, actor, and cultural producer uplifting the Latinx and LGBTQ+ community through Afro-indigenous musics. Born in Mexico City, Ximena migrated to Philly at the age of 7, where he grew up classically trained on the violin and dispossessed from his lineage. In college, music became a way for them to reconnect with their culture. In 2014, Ximena co-founded Son Revoltura, a grassroots Philly-based son jarocho collective rooted in Afro-indigenous Mexican traditional music offering weekly workshops in Spanish. In 2015, he co-founded Interminable, a Philly-based futuristic fusion band making original music in Spanish. The band explores our connections as diasporic peoples through jazz, rock, funk, and Mexican son jarocho. Ximena is a well-recognized community leader cultivating intergenerational healing, storytelling, and community-building through song and memory.
Awarded Grants
2024
Art and Change Grant (ACG)
Related grantees
Overview
Ximena Violante is the co-founder and teacher of Son Revoltura, a Philly-based collective learning son jarocho, an Afro-indigenous musical tradition from Mexico. Ximena will lead a series of 13 son jarocho workshops, alongside local teachers and community elders as well as out-of-town instructors from Mexico, DC, and/or NY. New, handmade instruments from Mexico will be provided to participants – and a new tarima, or platform, will be built for participants to dance percussively on, allowing them to partake in this improvisatory, welcoming, and powerful tradition. Ximena’s project would expand on ten years of enacting social change in Philly, continuing the legacy of this cultural tradition that was founded on Afro-Indigenous resistance to the colonial order.
