Soy Celesté Is the Denver Punk Band You Need to Watch

True political punk isn't dead, and neither is the riot grrrl movement. For proof, just listen to Soy Celesté.

When the band's founder, Celesté Martinez, belted out her song "Feminism Is Intersectional" from the HQ stage during this summer's Underground Music Showcase, nearly everyone in the audience joined in for the titular chorus. It was a powerful moment for Soy Celesté, which was playing the festival for the third time. In ripped fishnets, jean shorts and armed with an electric guitar, Martinez made the declaration with vigor: that feminism is unlimited, multi-faceted and, most important, for all.

The song is off Soy Celesté's debut full-length, Feminista Manifestó, which is available on all streaming platforms and will be celebrated with an all-ages release show at D3 Arts on Saturday, September 28. There will be a special guest, too: Ceora Bustamante-Trinidad, the eight-year-old musician and daughter of local musician Joshua Trinidad, who performed with Los Mocochetes at UMS. Pink Hawks — another must-see Denver band — will open the show.
Feminista Manifestó is a massive undertaking that Martinez has been crafting for three years, culminating in a searing, fifteen-track magnum opus that translates politics, feminism and identity through punk, Chicanx folk and cumbia with lyrics in both Spanish and English. And Soy Celesté's sound is as intersectional as its brand of feminism: Martinez pulled from a wealth of research on figures in the Chicana feminism movement, from theorists such as Rosa Maria Gil and Carmen Inoa Vazquez to visual artists like Ester Hernandez, Alma López and Yolanda López, as well as the 1981 feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back.

"Intersectional feminism really emphasizes that feminists are people with multiple identities, and they overlap and intersect, and they have different positions of privilege or oppression or power in our society," Martinez explains. "And we're moving from that being a radical thing to that being more of a standard."
Before she formed Soy Celesté, Martinez was part of the queer, feminist punk collective TuLips. While she had already released her debut solo EP, Unwinding, in 2022, she missed collaborating, and asked Stevie Gunter, with whom she performed in TuLips, about playing bass for Soy Celesté. In addition, "I was very intentional about reaching out to a person of color to be my drummer," she says. "I wanted to carry that over from the legacy of what TuLips was. Especially in punk music, it's not the norm."

She then connected with Saladin Thomas, a drummer in To Be Astronauts, and the trio knew from the first practice session that Soy Celesté was complete. The core group also collaborates with Emmanuel Luna on keys and with Trinidad, who has built a reputation as the local scene's go-to trumpeter.

"I'll bet some folks are curious as to why my bandmates are predominantly masculine or cis men," Martinez acknowledges. "One is access — who is available if you're a BIPOC artist in our community in Denver? But also, it's necessary to have cis men or masculine-identified folks committed to this liberatory effort. It's interesting to hear Sal's reflections, and the same with Stevie as a Black trans person. ... They all share with me what they're taking from it, and also what they're bringing to it. There is a lot of collective care in the process."
Martinez was born in Santa Cruz, California, and grew up in San Antonio before heading to Denver to attend Regis University on a music scholarship for vocal performance; she minored in sociology, which ignited her passion for Chicanx history and feminism. "One of the things that really stood out to me was that Chicana feminism is an actual framework," she says. She read about the Ten Commandments of Marianismo — the opposite of machismo — that comprises "very colonial standards and gendered expectations for women," Martinez notes, adding that marianismo is in essence "toxic femininity." (The commandments include such statements as "Don't be an old maid, independent, or have your own opinions" and "Don't wish anything but to be a housewife.")

She decided to reinterpret the commandments in the album's opening track, "Los Mandamientos Femeninos." The song "goes through each one of these ten beliefs that are culturally ingrained so often for Chicanas and Latinas," she explains. Because these commandments are normally found in English, she decided to use Spanish to "widen the audience," Martinez adds.

"My hope is to invite more Chicanas and Latinas to consider that perhaps what gives our identity meaning was not from a place of choice, so what would it mean to wrestle with our cultural identity?" she poses. "What would it take for us to each find our own truth in how we want to relate to our culture and gender identity in real time?"

Across the fifteen tracks are some covers that Martinez chose to align with the album's overall message. An excellent bilingual version of "Identity," mixing folk punk with the Latin horn section of Pink Hawks, pays homage to Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, whom Martinez recognizes as "a crucial ancestor for women of color in punk."

"I really wanted to be intentional about not just uplifting feminine archetypes, but also acknowledging whose shoulders I stand on," Martinez says. "Since Poly Styrene's death, there's been a lot more conversation around her life and her legacy in more popular culture. But I still feel that in the punk scene, there's not always such an acknowledgement of Black women and their contributions. I really see her as kind of like the godmother of punk...and 'Identity' naturally fits."
Soy Celesté also examines feminine archetypes in covering Mexican folk songs "La Llorona" and "La Bruja."

"I wanted to create arrangements of the songs in forms that resonate with how I personally relate to them," Martinez explains. "Both of these feminine archetypes may come across as dark, which is why both have influences of heavy metal."

The music isn't lost in the message — Martinez is exceptionally detailed when it comes to music theory and how it can bolster storytelling. Lyrically, themes are evident, but Martinez also notes that she uses a similar composition structure for the opening track, "Los Mandamientos Femeninos," and "Más de Una Puente," as she sees "these two songs directly in conversation with one another."

"Más de Una Puente" translates to "More Than a Bridge," referencing This Bridge Called My Back. Martinez re-engaged with the feminist texts last year while navigating a family member's illness, as well as her responsibilities as the eldest daughter. "I definitely was wanting a creative outlet to express how I was feeling about the gendered expectations that come with being the oldest daughter from a more traditional Mexican-American family," she explains. "And what came out was 'Más de Una Puente.'" She says it was the most difficult song for her to write, taking six weeks.

"It's also more of Latin-folk style melding with the riot grrrl punk-rock sound," she adds. "You hear that toward the end, especially with more driving bass rhythms."
This is where her "nerdy musical-theory side comes in again," she says with a laugh. "I wanted this to be an overture, so you actually will hear some of the rhythms more directly in 'Más de Una Puente' in the intro song, but if you listen to 'I Am Not (an Object),' there's some structural similarities in that song, as well."

Soy Celesté has already been performing songs from the album live, but the upcoming release show will see the band play Feminista Manifestó in its entirety. "I was really trying to make sure that this could be a free and all-ages show so it could be that widely accessible," Martinez says. "Because, man, four-year-olds will go the hardest for you."

The show is the second of a three-part concert series called Movimiento Music that Martinez is spearheading with Bruce Trujillo of Manos Sagrados as part of an oral-history archive project on the local Chicano movement that she is building with the University of Denver's Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of (in)Equality. The concert will be livestreamed and included in a formal archive at DU, and later at History Colorado.

And Soy Celesté provides another medium for the movement, as Martinez uses her voice to celebrate heritage as well as change, education and freedom.

"The themes of Soy Celesté are just so explicitly feminist, because that's just my politics," she says. "I can prompt the conversation here. And it's really interesting to see how audiences will interact with that. There are times where I'm really rocking hard on 'Feminism Is Intersectional,' and the room is silent because they're really listening to the words. And other times? Folks are screaming."

She concludes with a grin: "I don't think there's any wrong way to participate."

Soy Celesté and Pink Hawks play D3 Arts, 3632 Morrison Road, 7 p.m. Saturday, September 28; the show is free.