ParentSounds 02: Jose Carlos Mayorga
Living a life of art and music while raising two young men: an experienced papa offers some perspective.
Good morning and welcome back to ParentSounds. Whether you are receiving this as an email in your inbox, or reading it later on via our homepage, we're happy you're here!
Since the first issue of ParentSounds we've received quite a few new subscribers - so if you haven't seen it already, be sure to check out our first parent profile from two weeks ago. We spoke to Pivi Weiss, a Berlin-based dancer, face and body painter, and mom to a four year-old boy, about her parallel journeys as an artist and, since her son was born, a parent.
We're going back to the future this week with our next parent, Jose Carlos Mayorga. Originally from Guatemala, Jose Carlos first moved to Chemnitz, Germany just before the birth of his first child nearly 20 years ago. Now based in Berlin, today Jose Carlos leads ARTivisten e.V., an NGO dedicated to building cultural bridges through music and the arts. At ages 19 and 16, his two sons are almost all grown up.
In many ways Jose Carlos represents what those of us with smaller children might see as sort of distant, far-off dream: older, well-adjusted kids, increasingly able to look after themselves as they approach adulthood and start to make their own way in the world. Job done! But it wasn't so long ago that Jose Carlos was a 23 year-old man putting his music studies on hold as he prepared to move to a new culture and become a father for the first time.
For the second issue of ParentSounds, I asked Jose Carlos to look back on what it was like to become a parent at such an early age, and to share some thoughts on how he has managed to combine art, music, and family while raising two young boys in the years since. I found his responses to be both inspirational as well as, on some level, validating. As a person who also likes to drag my baby and toddler along with me to my favorite activities, it's encouraging to see where that can lead.
Let's turn it over to Jose Carlos.
ParentSounds: Tell us a bit more about who you are and what kind of creative work you do
Jose Carlos Mayorga: Hi, I'm Jose Carlos Mayorga, I'm originally from Guatemala but I'm living since 12 years here in Berlin.
Since 2019 I am running ARTivisten in cooperation with other coworkers, friends and migrants like myself whom I have met here over the years. The idea is to create a platform to support artists and creative people, especially migrants, both by staging events as well as by providing a place to find networking, which is not always so easy as an immigrant being here. We can support them with knowledge and expertise in the field of event management, for example, or by connecting them with other organizations that maybe can offer more help than us.
We can also offer (depending on capacity) some assessment about how to apply for funds to help refugees and other migrants to make their creative ideas happen. But a big part of what we do is also just connecting and empowering people so they are aware that they are not alone, for example when facing different kinds of racism or discrimination. This was the motivation behind the festival we started last year called ARTivisten & Friends: Intercultural Festival Against Discrimination.
We are still growing and doing more and more regular events – like our first jam session we started this year with the "Migrant Sounds Ensemble”. We take people who are interested in making music, and put them together with professional musicians. It's working very well, and it's a lot of fun.
PS: Your first child came unexpectedly, when you were quite young. What were you doing at that time, and how did you imagine your life going before this big turn?
JCM: Well, I was 23 years old, and I was actually about to matriculate into a music school in Guatemala. And then like two or three days after that, I learned I was going to be a dad.
My partner is from Germany, and we met in Guatemala. By the time I wanted to start at the music school, I got a call from her after I visited her in Germany and she had big news for me, she told me on that call we are expecting a baby! And I was like, OMG??? Wow. I was a bit shocked, of course, but more than shocked, I was really happy. And well in that moment it was clear for me that the decision to start with music school was going to have to wait.
Eventually I decided to move to Germany (in Chemnitz) to help with the new member of the family until my partner finished her studies there, and then we decided to move to Guatemala for a while to finish my studies too. The teamwork was great, and yeah, that's how we started to be young parents.
Before our son was born I started with an exchange semester during the pregnancy at the Technische Universität Chemnitz. It was a nice time! I met really good friends there and I mean, you are waiting for the baby and you're learning a new culture, a new language, it was all pretty exciting. I was aware that my life is changing completely. But at this time I was also doing a lot of creative work - some salsa dance workshops, and playing some chords on the guitar with other people from the international community. We were cooperating at that time with a place called the CdK (Club der Kulturen). And it was a very, very nice collaboration.
And so I have always tried to stay in touch with this creative side through musicians, dancers, and other creative people and social activists. Even when our older son was already in this world, he was coming with us to these events. He was actually getting from a very young age his first contact with salsa, Latin percussions, concerts and stuff.
PS: What has it been like pursuing a career in the arts while also raising two kids in a big city? What kind of advice can you give other young parents who are just starting out?
JCM: Well, I don't know if I can call it advice, but maybe I’ll just share more of what I did. My mindset was always about trying to include the new members of the family in the kind of interests that I have and the things I like to do. Instead of seeing this like a limitation that it's not possible to attend this or that.
So it was always about doing it together if it feels good. This started when they were a little bit older, but here in Berlin you have for example the Karneval der Kulturen, in which I had the opportunity to work with the people who were organizing that for a couple of years. This was an amazing experience for me, working as part of one of the biggest events in Berlin. Doing that, I had the opportunity to work together with many creative people and artists from all around the world. Of course it was a lot of work but I really enjoyed it. I was always looking for activities for my kids to do too, like you know, could you please help me to hand out some flyers? Or other simple activities. I always tried to involve them in the things I was doing.
Here I think it's also very important to mention how much it helps that we are living in a place with so many different cultural exchanges and creative events happening constantly. It's easy to attend something with your family and many events are also for free. You go and you meet other people in these places who maybe also have children. So I think that helps a lot to make it possible to involve the kids in these activities.
PS: You made the decision in 2019 to start ARTivisten. Was it scary to make this leap of faith while having two teenagers at home to think about?
JCM: Well, it's interesting that you are asking that specifically in the combination with raising two teenagers because I think somehow ARTivisten is like a third kid for me now. I mean, it feels like you are raising two teenagers, and then comes a third one that is somehow unexpected, but you cannot give it back because you love this kid too. And then you start to raise it, you know, in a different way.
Because it's also like starting from zero, right? I mean, you have to put everything together: the legal form, the website, all the policies. And yeah, it's not the easiest. But I did it. And it was possible. I was so happy when I finished with this, and I think back on all the time I invested. And to be honest also – going back to how important it is sometimes to combine your creative ideas with the family – I was impressed how much my kids were able to support this idea. Because they have other skills that I was missing.
For example, creating content as a non-native German, which was sometimes very stressful for me. I speak fluent German but as a foreigner you don't always know if something sounds right, like from a website or marketing perspective. So I was asking my kids all the time: can you check it to see if it makes sense? And maybe they were actually adding some more interesting things or saying yes, it might be grammatically correct, but don't say it like that because in Germany, you will not be understood.
So it goes back to the whole thing with kids – raising kids while you are interested in music or art or other creative things. And if you involve them, then somehow it just becomes automatic, I think, who knows? Maybe they can be there for you someday too.
PS: How do you think about the importance of developing yourself while also living your double life as a parent?
JCM: Becoming a father was one of the most challenging situations of my life. And that contributes hugely to developing as a person, because it's forced me to think not only on what's important for myself, but also in combination with the needs and possibilities from other human beings that are depending on my decisions.
I feel so lucky to have been able to support their interests, whether it was with the piano or with electronic music or dancing or any kind of stuff. But at the same time I never forgot my interests too. And in that way, I think it has also created this kind of mutual respect in our family. Also my partner, she sings in a choir and we always respect that this is an activity that's important for her personally. Just like I have activities that are important for me and our boys have activities that are important for them too.
So we're showing our boys all these cool musical and artistic things, but there's also this idea that it's not just for them, it's also something that we ourselves are interested in. And one of the cool things that's happening now is that my kids and I are starting to do even more creative things together. That's how the idea of the Migrant Sounds Ensemble actually started – because I wanted to recover my dream of playing guitar. It's something I've always wanted to do, way back before I had kids. And now our younger son, he's also playing the piano in the band, and the older one is helping us sometimes with photo and video recording. That's amazing, you know?
Another example is last year, when I did an Ableton Live course with our older son and now he's producing some beats of his own. We attended the whole workshop series together. I didn't just bring him there, I did it as well. It's been so nice to share with him and see when he's producing music or to hear what he has produced already or is playing. But I got a lot out of these workshops too!
PS: Last question - how do you think being a parent has contributed to your artistic and creative interests over the years?
JCM: I would say these are always pretty connected because, well, I think every parent will agree that being a parent means that you sometimes have to be really creative to find solutions. That's just how it is with kids. You don't always understand what's going on, and you have to do the best with what you have.
I'll tell you a story. One time in the early days with our older son, when we were still living in Chemnitz, I took him with me to visit a friend in Berlin. And he was, I don't know, the age of two or two-and-a-half, and I was forgetting every single thing that's possible to forget that is important to that kid on that trip. He starts to ask for this and that, and I'm thinking, this? Yes, of course. And then - uh oh, where did I put it? No, I'm sorry, I don't have this. He's asking for milk and I'm thinking, milk, ok, milk for sure. I have milk but then I don't have the lid for the bottle. That's the trip where he learned how to drink directly from the cup. You see? The kids are creative too.
But the point is that you need to be creative with what you have. And from an artistic side I would say that they really support me and that they also provide a wide perspective of other interests. For example with our younger son and the piano. Unlike the guitar, I never really had an interest in learning piano. But since he was playing, I was also eventually interested after a while just from hearing him play. And so I think it was last year, I just decided to take some piano lessons as well, just to see how it feels.
So in this way my boys help me to be more creative through the things they are interested in. Not necessarily only music, but also photography or painting or design. Our older son is very into design – he has a nice eye for detail for flyers or stuff like that. And, he was showing me some tools that he used to produce some stuff and now I find I can also do quite professional things with those same tools. It's important to me to maintain my own creativity and artistic side. But as time goes on I'm also learning more and more from them.
Support Jose Carlos and all the ARTivisten:
Make a donation on the ARTivisten website
Follow @artivisten on Instagram
Thanks again to Jose Carlos for a really inspiring interview. And thanks to you for making it to the end of this newsletter!
If you know someone who you think we should talk to for ParentSounds, if you yourself would like to be featured, or if you have any other questions or feedback, please reach out to us at parentsounds@substack.com. We'd love to hear from you!
Before we close, I wanted to highlight one interesting, thought-provoking link which I enjoyed over the last week. I'll generally try to do this at the end of every newsletter (it won't always be about parenting):
Tech layoffs are turning the internet upside down. I've been subscribing to different Substack newsletters for a long time (some paid and some for free). And while I've always taken the idea that subscription-based newsletters are going to change the internet with a bit of a grain of salt, it does feel notable that more and more writers are turning to Substack at the same time as the ad-based internet is experiencing big layoffs. The link above is a post from Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, one of the most successful names in journalism over the past decade. None of this was enough to prevent Disney, who owns the publication, from laying off two-thirds (!!) of the FiveThirtyEight staff a few weeks ago. Something is clearly broken in the existing model of the internet, and it's not just our attention spans. If you're interested in supporting alternate ways of creating and consuming content that don't rely on mass data collection and hyper-targeted ads to keep us glued to our screens, there are more options than ever before!
That's all for this time. Thanks again for reading and see you again in two weeks!
We'll leave you with some parent zen: