It’s easy to call The Navigator a concept album. But about what exactly, is a bit more complicated. Puerto Rico, certainly, but also New York. Gentrification, obviously, but also urban modernity writ large. Colonialism, absolutely, but also ecological crisis. Identity, perhaps above all, but grounded in cultural connection to land and landscape. Like axes on a grid, or cross streets on a map, these problems are connected across Alynda Segarra’s navigation of Nuyorican culture. To clue us in on this journey, Segarra names as inspirational heroes political activists like Sylvia Rivera and the Young Lords alongside musicians like Nina Simone and Woody Guthrie. As a critical evolution of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s sound that explodes the boundaries of Americana, The Navigator charts a path that is both musical and political.
Liner notes for the LP come in the form of a mock playbill that sets up the narrative of the album, figuring sides A and B as two acts. The story is set in a fictionalized New York City where the teenage heroine, Navita, is transported forty years into the city’s gentrified future. When the album came out in 2017, Segarra said of the story’s setting “in my mind, Trump is mayor in this place,” but it is poignantly unclear if they are referring to the present day setting of the narrative or the future one—or both. Hopeless and restless, Navita wished to be removed from her world, rid of attachment to the city and her family as she knew it. That wish takes her from bad to worse: an unrecognizably gentrified city and fractured community.
Side A of the LP explores the all-too-familiar shocking Manichean binary of suffering and joy that leads to Navita’s disillusionment. “Living in the City” sets a tone of extremity and ambivalence in the city apartment tower: “Fourteen floors of birthing / And fourteen floors of dying.” Segarra sets scenes of drug overdose and dead-end daydreams against bright jangly rock, paralleling birth and death. This thematic parallel returns to bookend the first act in “Halfway There” as Navita reaches the end of her rope, reflecting that “Mothers and babies / Well they’re both the same / Oh, they’re born to each other / And they’re given a name.” All we have is each other, for better and worse.
In between, “Hungry Ghost” is about the Ghost Ship tragedy, a key prism for Segarra’s particular critique of gentrification that puts the land back into culture and vice versa, linking together migrant diaspora, punk culture, queerness and art as a patchwork counterpublic against both colonial land theft and capitalist normativity. Then the title song provides a turning point in the story, summarizing the frustration of Navita: “Today I feel weak / But tomorrow I’ll feel a queen…All this hurt I’ve suffered / It just begins again.” Even further, “The Navigator” poses the deceptively simple question that underlies this anxiety of everyday survival, “Oh, where, where will all my people go? / The navigator wants to know.” This question, repeated in the chorus, enmeshes the circular stuckness that Navita feels with the landscape itself. We can’t go on, we have to stay alive; where this happens is as important as how.
The second act opens on “Rican Beach,” where Navita’s people have been outcast. The second verse of the song lists a history of violations, easily reducible to analogy: “First they stole our language [Spanish colonization, boarding schools] / Then they stole our names [Anglicization, settler place-naming, blood quantum] / Then they stole the things that brought us fame [cultural appropriation] / And they stole our neighbors [deportation] / And they stole our streets [gentrification] / And they left us to die on Rican Beach [ghettoization, redlining].” The directness of this narration contrasts with Navita’s ambivalence so far. At first glance it may seem like an overwhelming list of disparate violence, but the throughline is the relationship between identity and place. Language and culture are paralleled with community as both people and place. The chorus takes this even further: “Well, you can take my life / But don’t take my home / Baby, it’s a solid price / It comes with my bones.” The abstract connection between people and home is made concrete by bones in the ground. Through life and death, geography becomes ecology.
“Rican Beach” was the lead single from the album, poignantly released in 2016 and dedicated to water protectors in both Standing Rock, North Dakota, and also Peñuelas, Puerto Rico, a lesser known site of protest against coal ash contamination of groundwater that marked a flashpoint in a long history of Puerto Rican activism and ecological disaster. The line that Segarra drew between Standing Rock and Puerto Rico connects to a third point: the structural and geographic racism in Flint, Michigan. When it comes to contamination and exploitation, the line conceptually separating people from land is thin. The fictional setting of Rican Beach is an open metaphor, meant to stand in for those real-world sites of environmental violence and resistance but also for the equally ambivalent segregation and vitality of New York (and New Orleans and Los Angeles). In the context of contamination and ecological crisis, along the axes of racism and colonialism, Segarra makes the case for a new environmental politics that centers the relationships between land and people.
To fight for a different future, The Navigator demands from us a radical connectivity. Navita’s story of intense ambivalence inspires a reciprocal relationship between politics and art by provoking a commitment, any commitment really, even or maybe especially an ambivalent one. Navita “returns home” by recommitting to it, she moves on by moving through. Maybe the Navigator’s real provocation is that all commitments are ambivalent. One cannot choose between culture and identity, place and people, responsibility and autonomy. These ambivalent distinctions are not lines in the sand nor binary spectrums, but rather overlapping fields of emotion, attachment, and desire. If these overlapping fields form a kind of map, it is up to each of us to navigate a path. When Alynda Segarra claims their Puerto Rican heritage while maintaining both their attachment to New York City and their disillusionment with America, they accept and exceed the ambivalence of resistance. When Segarra both demands and enacts artistic resistance they lead by example. Their navigation of identity and culture charts a path, but it’s up to us to follow. Where do I come from? Who are my people? How do I do right by them, and our shared home, and myself? The Navigator wants to know.
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