Music

Backed by science and heart, Moms Clean Air Force, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group whose goal is to protect clean air and children’s health — and EcoMadres, their Latino community outreach program — educates families about why they should care about climate disruption, air pollution and toxic chemicals, and engages them in taking action to preserve their futures — all with the help of music.

With data that Latinos in the United States are disproportionately impacted by climate change, an initiative called EcoMusica was born.

As part of EcoMusica, SonTierra, a multi-ethnic ensemble of Latino musicians whose name means “we are the Earth,” perform tunes that offer hope and encourage listeners to reach out to legislators and leaders. The music played at outreach events incorporates a number of Latin music styles: cumbia, banda, bolero, merengue, balada and Andean folk.

They will be performing at the annual EcoMadres Summit in Las Vegas on Sept. 12, Moms Clean Air Force tells Billboard Family.

Who is SonTierra? With an age range of about 11 to 64 years old, the multi-generational band includes Edgar East (Panamanian), Edgar Solís (Mexican), Gabriela Valdivia (U.S.-born; Brazilian mother, Mexican father), Karen Stein (Colombian), Leo Roldán (Argentinean), Marián Vivas (Venezuelan), Stephanie Rivera (Cuban), Valentina Weihe (U.S.-born; Mexican mother, Puerto Rican father), Valery Figueroa (Venezuelan) and Víctor Lara (Mexican).

“I wanted SonTierra to include youth and children at a professional, quality level because we are working for their future,” Stein, both a performer and the group’s manager, shares in an interview with Billboard Family. “And if we’re going to gain trust with Latino communities, we don’t just have to come in and sing at them. We have to sing with them. Including people of various generations and of various ethnicities, it is important to make Latino communities feel like, ‘Oh, we could be [a part of this].’ They can identify with someone on stage.”

The collective of musicians released a 12-track, mostly Spanish-language (with some English, on a few bilingual songs) album of originals and covers, titled EcoMadres, on Earth Day 2023. The album is available to stream on SoundCloud.

Stein had a hand in penning nine of the dozen songs, all of which address climate change, air pollution, ecosystem destruction, environmental justice, taking action and finding hope.

EcoMadres tunes include “Mama,” which she says was written inspired first by her musician mother who sang to her, and then by Mother Earth, with the lyrics “Hoy este arrullo es para la madre tierra/ Que tiene fiebre, que tiene fiebre y no la escuchan, no la escuchan/ En su agonía, en su agonía” (“Today this lullaby is for Mother Earth/ She has a fever, she has a fever/ And we aren’t hearing her agony”).

Other album tracks include “Corrido p’al Congreso” (“A Corrido for Congress”), a message to the U.S. government in mariachi style with corrido and ranchera rhythms, and “Legado” (“Legacy”), written from the perspective of children looking ahead to their future, in the style of bolero. “El pico del tucán (“The Toucan’s Peak”) is set to a cumbia beat and tackles a tough topic: solving “the dilemma between what humans want and what the earth needs to continue to sustain us.”

Born and raised in Colombia, Stein is the Iowa field coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force and EcoMadres. Her heart and roots are in music.

She grew up on a rural farm. On a call with Billboard Family, she cites she’s from and her mother as the reasons she’s a musician.

“The location where we grew up was so isolated, [with] no electricity, so there were very few distractions. I grew up paying a lot of attention to sounds,” including the sounds of nature, animals, and the men on the farm milking the cows, says Stein. “They’d talk to the cows and oftentimes they would sing to the cows. They would just hum,” sometimes to pop music and sometimes to traditional songs.

Meanwhile, her mother was a trained classical pianist who “ended up in this godforsaken corner of Colombia,” Stein jokes. “Of course she hauled a piano down into the farm, right?”

As a young child, Stein would pick up her mom’s knack for music.

“She discovered that since I was young I was able to carry a tune, and so she would harmonize with me since I was very, very little, and that trained my ear to maintain a melody,” says Stein.

Her family ended up moving to Costa Rica, where Stein had music lessons and sang with the Costa Rican Symphony Choir, and she was awarded a scholarship to attend Grinnell College in Iowa. Before she uprooted, she learned as much as possible in traditional guitar technique from the enclave of Latin-American artists who were living in San José at the time. “It was at a time when there were a lot of military dictatorships in Latin America, in the early to mid ’70s,” she recalls. “Costa Rica was a politically neutral country. A lot of the artists who were outspoken against governments, they were musicians. They were theater people. They were writers. They ended up in Costa Rica. I had a lot of mixed feelings about the States because of the United States’ involvement in supporting some of these governments that were making artists escape. But I was at the same time fascinated. It was just, you know, everybody wants to try to understand this country.”

“That’s the beginning of why I consciously connected to music,” she says, “though I studied biology and French. And as soon as I got my master’s in the sciences and horticulture, I decided to switch back to music and become a full-time musician. Those are the roots: rural upbringing and political. The timing of political upheaval in Latin America put me in the path of a deep connection with a large variety of Latin music styles.”

“It’s been home again to go [back] to music,” says Stein, who’s the founder and director of Artes Latinas, a consortium of several different ensembles.

Since 2019, she’s been involved with Moms Clean Air Force, who eventually asked her to join the EcoMadres initiative.

“This is a powerful group of women,” Stein tells Billboard Family, adding that they act on just the right balance between “the heart and the brain.” “I think it has to do with our work being centered on children. I mean, it keeps us vulnerable. We’re not afraid of being vulnerable as human beings while we’re being purposeful and organized and professional in our environmental work. The combination is very powerful.”

Stein says, “The Latino community, whether they still speak Spanish at home or not, or Portuguese … Whatever region or country — you know how diverse Latin America is, it’s incredibly diverse … But regardless of where we’re from, there’s one thing that we respond to, and that is music. In a visceral way.”

EcoMusica’s use of live performance at community outreach events concerning climate crisis has become “a tool to build trust in the Latino community,” she explains.

“This is a tool to start reaching the Latino and Latina community a little more widely than we had been, because that was also on the mind of Moms Clean Air Force at the time. How do we expand? How do we make our program relevant to Latino and Latina communities who are disproportionately affected by these things that we’re working on, the air pollution and the environmental justice issues and climate effects?”

The team’s hope is that the music naturally resonates with those most impacted by climate crisis.

As Stein points out, the group can “recognize the other reality is that the communities that are most impacted by the climate crisis and by pollution are people who for whom acting on climate is a luxury.”

“We have to understand this,” she says. “They’re not at the level of being able to devote 10 hours a week to fighting climate crisis. No, they just stopped at the supermarket and bought 30 bottles of bottled water feeding the problem that we’re having, because they’re afraid of the water pollution coming from their faucet. They just came home from working three jobs. How do we get them to sign a petition? The trust has to come first.”

Stein emphasizes that the environmental justice work they’re collectively doing “resonates with every member” of SonTierra, and praises each musician’s contributions.

“I want to say that what stands out to me is how remarkable every individual in the group is, and how honored I am to have them there because they’re not just good musicians,” says Stein. “And I’m talking about the 11-year-old girl. And I’m talking about this 18-year-old young woman and the 22-year-old young woman, and then us geezers … The rest of us are seasoned touring musicians. But each one of us has a purpose for being in SonTierra.”

Stein adds, “I would like to tell all the communities who read this: You don’t have to be Latino or Latina if you want to bring us to your community because you want to work on climate issues or environmental justice issues as a field organizer for EcoMadres and Mom’s Clean Air Force. If they want to invite SonTierra to the community, it doesn’t have to be a Latino community. It can be any community. It can be an African American community. It can be an African community. It can be an Asian community. It can be, you know, the Methodist Church in New York City.”

Those who wish to learn more, or to join Moms Clean Air Force’s fight against climate disruption, can find resources and learn about action points at the organization’s official website.