Kristy Martinez has loved punk music since she was in high school 20 years ago. Then, the fashion and the rebellious ideology felt like “armour,” she says.
But when Martinez — an Azusa, Calif., resident who is of Chicana and Yaqui descent — realized that Indigenous people have been making punk music since around when the scene emerged in the mid 1970s, it opened a world she didn’t know existed.
Martinez was watching a punk music documentary when she noticed a flyer advertising a show by the band Los Crudos near Flagstaff, Ariz., in one of the shots. The poster, which depicted a simple, black and white sketch of a cartoon punk rocker with long hair, was for a “rez show” 30 miles outside of the town on the Navajo nation. Martinez remembers pausing the documentary in awe, trying to get a closer look at the poster — and the …