San Cha’s Sonic Reinventions
San Cha. Photo by Evan Benally Atwood
Marimar, the classic, Thalia-led 1994 telenovela, follows the titular character's inner and outer turmoil as she deals with romance, betrayal, and a drastic new identity for survival. Concurrently, while Thalia starred in MariMar (and sang the show’s theme song), she commanded stages across the globe with her stunning music, such as "Piel Morena," which mesmerized audiences through radio and television.
Although Marimar was a heteronormative, traditional novela in regards to gender roles, patriarchy, and wealthy villas, musician and songwriter San Cha has found similar telenovelas from the ‘90s ripe for dazzling reinvention.
Marimar loosely inspired San Cha, born Lizette Anabelle Gutierrez, when she created La Luz de la Esperanza, a full-length concept album with neo-novela themes. By crafting a telenovela through an album of music, transforming the telenovela into a malleable form, San Cha flips societal, social scripts as much as she tilts music formulas on their head. While the album is a concentrated effort of this telenovela concept firing on all cylinders, in 2025, Gutierrez adapted La Luz into a full-fledged opera called Inebria Me. In a format that welcomes high drama, sexual tension, suspense among other unfurled scenes of deception, Gutierrez’s in-the-flesh evolution of the 2019 album melodramatically glistens for audiences to feel San Cha’s artistry in a new capacity.
In Spanish, the word “sancha” translates to “mistress,” and Gutierrez is simultaneously reclaiming the male conjugation of “San” meaning “saint” in Spanish. Additionally, while San Cha’s icon status continues to rise, her compelling approach to musicianship doesn’t neatly become flattened by commercial demands. The formative pedigree of her working-class Mexican origins in the Bay Area, her indefatigable courage to belt onstage, and her receptive ear as a music vessel for Rancheras, electronic music, and Cumbia is a recipe for becoming a household name.
Following her time in church choir during her youth, singing remained a passion of hers yet there wasn’t yet a concordant connection between her sonic muses and the particular intensity of her specific voice. Selena, Britney Spears, Gloria Trevi, Chavela Vargas, and Juan Gabriel all made lasting impressions through their unapologetic approaches to music in English and en Español. When San Cha was coming into her own as a singer, she realized that while her idols inspired her, key a-ha moments in her life weren’t happening as a vocalist, in the classroom, or the cathedral. Her instructors in her earlier years prescribed her voice as being too raspy, implying an incongruency with religious traditional music, which became far from a stifling obstacle in the future.
In a conversation with Fifteen Questions, Gutierrez shares how drag performances and Rasquache modes of DIY music awoke her distinct sound. “I’ve learned so much about my voice by singing drunk at night clubs or backyard/house shows, and following drag performers,” she says. “Having to deal with bad microphones and amps has taught me a lot of patience and projection and how to overcome bad sound with the one instrument I always carry with me, my voice.”
As a fan of the undisputed Queen of Latin Soul, La Lupe, Gutierrez’s admiration reverberates in melodic, full-bodied stark vocal pain throughout the melodramatic and larger-than-life, brash assembly of music in La Luz de la Esperanza. San Cha harnesses her emotive experience of growing up Catholic and singing in her church choir; prayer is its own piercing percussion in the musician’s body of work. In a Los Angeles Times article, Gutierrez remarks upon her faith in relationship to music: “And when you’re singing the same things over and over and over … how could that not be a spell? How is a song not a prayer?”As San Cha herself roves through unrest and aural incantations, her hallowed dual skill of songwriting and singing is ever present. This interplay of pain and percussion vibrantly melds in La Luz de la Esperanza.
“ ‘La Luz de la Esperanza,’ which translates to the light of hope, casts a focus on the result of collapsing traditions of patriarchal romantic partnership, specifically marriage. ”
Thirteen robust (un)lucky tracks in San Cha’s album, La Luz, released in October 2019. Drums, percussion, saxophone, flute, clarinet, guitar, keyboard, and backing vocals all create a sonic communion in LLDLE. San Cha’s previous EP, titled Capricho Del Diablo, takes a dark musical tone head-on that she created in response to a real-life harrowing falling out she experienced with her former mentor. La Luz de la Esperanza, which translates to the light of hope, casts a focus on the result of collapsing traditions of patriarchal romantic partnership, specifically marriage. On this record, three songs especially showcase how she collides against the telenovela form by injecting electronic music as a pronounced futural music frequency to alchemize waning stereotypes into archetypes of femme liberation.
Colored with crisis and endless tears shed by the protagonist named Dolores, track five, “Levanta Dolores,” does not provide the listener with any relief. In the throes of a dysfunctional marriage, Dolores weeps about the psychological strife caused by her elite, wealthy husband, Salvador. Juxtaposing a traditional fairytale wedding, Dolores gathers that by no means has her entitled power-hungry husband provided her any romantic bond or genuine love. Instead, Dolores is stuck in bed feeling trapped in the labyrinth of matrimony. The lyrics “Este juego se terminó aquí” alludes to the ending of any promise or harmony through love.
Yet, by the next song, San Cha drastically shifts to an ethereal realm in “Alimentate en Mi.” Hurt by downtrodden sentiments and mental entrapment, Dolores receives a visit from Esperanza, a genderless aura. The spirit becomes Dolores’s new obsession and lover in a visceral, yet nonhuman capacity. The steady drum beat that clearly plays starting at the one-minute, 26-second mark is a balm. Though still somber, the flutes that play concurrently offer notes of promise, a type of self-invigoration that will materialize sooner or later. The instruments together offer a similar rhythm to what might sound during a procession, like in a funeral. Further into the album, Gutierrez freely experiments with genre as she skillfully offers Dolores’s tale of rebirth without the compromise of gender role rigidity.
“Horos,” the Greek root of “horizon,” means “boundary,” and in the 10th track on the record, “Por el Horizonte,” Dolores seems to be at an impasse between a self she thought she knew and the restrictions of her binding marriage. Approached vocally in a focused operatic string of notes in the final minute of the song, lyrics of despair leap out: “Que será de mi si no te puedo ver?” Stripped completely of backing vocals, strings, and hums, the final 20 seconds feel more like a poem as San Cha goes acapella. She instills a haunting warning: “Te buscaré y te encontraré . . .,” referencing her fleeting yearning and eventual contact with the elusive otherworldly Esperanza.
Following “Por el Horizonte” is the standout track “Exorcism.” In this track, as the loved ones in Dolores’s life erupt with worry, they stage an exorcism, hoping to retain any sense of “normalcy” in Dolores’s depleted marriage. San Cha deploys a menacing laugh reminiscent of Vincent Price’s delicious echoing guffaw in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video. A cacophony of tears, demons rejoicing, and a kind of levity for Dolores become enmeshed and exuded musically.
Bypassing tradition, Dolores’s exorcism ends with a 2.0 healed version of herself, relinquished from self doom, and fluttering from the kinship she feels with the spiritually nourishing Esperanza. Individual tracks only scratch the surface of San Cha’s cunning ability to simultaneously have inter-music-genre experimentation while concocting a beautiful concept album.
In May 2025, Gutierrez presented her new experimental opera, titled Inebria Me—an adaptation of La Luz de la Esperanza. Taking place at Performance Space New York (formerly PS 122), the downtown NYC fixture for performance art, San Cha finds avenues to embody the sonorous album through set and sound design, as well as a cast of musicians that is a battalion of talent including stefa marin alarcon, Dorian Wood, Carolina Oliveros, and Darian Donovan Thomas. Thomas also led the way as the stage director of the opera and assembled the musical arrangements. Given that Inebria Me differs from La Luz de la Esperanza by including new songs, this iteration of the tale drives home the cinematic feeling that San Cha herself is developing for this project’s future. With some collaborators returning, San Cha led a West Coast tour of Inebria Me at the tail end of summer 2025. One of the most notable Los Angeles stops was the iconic REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater), a multidisciplinary arts center.
For the live performance, the combination of costumes, lighting, sound design, and acting makes it evident that San Cha’s ambitious visions only blossom with collaboration, adding a physical texture to her already vast album. The Catholic imagery, the newly created songs, and unflappable commitment from the entire cast of performers enlivened the album, making it a must-see show for any fan of live performance. Melding melodrama with a campy climactic fight scene, death and life are synonymous at the sonorous conclusion of Inebria Me.
“Melding melodrama with a campy climactic fight scene, death and life are synonymous at the sonorous conclusion of ‘Inebria Me.’ ”
While it is easy to slip into only recognizing the restraints from archetypes and stereotypes of the telenovela or the mirage that there is one monolithic Latin pop or Latine sound, San Cha’s music, especially in La Luz, does its own type of theorizing that expands notions of what arbiters of taste anoint as classic or archival. Reifying the music repertoire of the present, there are harmonies between queer theory and the tempestuous sonic experiments guided by San Cha.
In the 2014 essay “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Queer Analytic,” scholar Deborah R. Vargas offers a theory on “Lo Sucio”: “such smells, tastes, and touch may also offer different modes and techniques of perseverance for queer lives, loves, and lays within and in relation to intolerable racist projects of citizenship so reliant on consuming, repairing, and calculating our tomorrows, our joys, and our dirty traces.” Therefore, even in the face of anxiety-driven surveillance and societal behavioral norms, the feeling and taste of being sucia nonetheless can function as a liberatory act. Dolores’s destiny with Esperanza invites a pathway or portal from this album and Vargas’s “techniques of perseverance,” which may reroute from the current ensnared political moment under the Trump administration’s targeting people of color and immigrants vehemently. As Dolores’s transformative act of becoming animated by something not quite tactile yet very much present in her reality, the album’s protagonist embraces this queer nonhuman touch to course through Lo Sucio as a site of sanctuary, for spiritual and physical refuge.
With Inebria Me, this performance has a transportational ability to take audiences full throttle blazing into traditional beliefs of the Catholic faith met with a cosmic innovative reimagining of identity, spiritual trust, and the thorough work that life provides through faith. Guiterrez’s galactic prowess through form and religion heartily emanates in La Luz, even a half-decade later.
