|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By: Ellen Cans
Two Big Apple venues cancelled events after finding out that the bands booked have purported ties to hate. As reported by the NY Post, two Queens bars inadvertently booked events this month with bands that allegedly touted neo-Nazi imagery. The bars—Juan Bar in Corona and Trans-Pecos in Ridgewood— had scheduled the bands Volahn and Zoloa on Jan. 26 and 27, respectively—until strong online backlash alerted them. Both bars cancelled the events and offered apologies.
The bands, however, have already been hosted in multiple different venues across New York City. Eduardo Ramirez, a member of both bands, has opened for the Nazi-affiliated band Inquisition and fronted other bands with swastika-like logos, and was seen wearing band tees of the “infamous nazi band Graveland,” per the Post. Ramirez, who is the leader of a collective of Aztec- and Mayan-themed black metal groups based in southern California, has also been seen pictured together with the cofounder of Wolves of Vineland, which has already been named as a “Neo-Volkisch hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Ramirez had also played at Oakland’s Never Surrender festival, which local activists dubbed a “Nazi fest” in 2019, as per KQED.
Todd Patrick, 49, who runs the Trans-Pecos bar, told The Post that he canceled the Zoloa show “within an hour” of the backlash received on Reddit. “Trans-Pecos booked this event through a friend who often steers punk and hardcore events in New York City: we were familiar with Salvaje Punk, who is local and has played here many times, but we didn’t know the other bands on the bill,” Patrick said in a statement.
“When the Reddit post explaining the controversy with Eduardo Ramirez got forwarded to us by many people, it was news to us,” he said. “We did our research and quickly concluded that there was a lot of evidence that this guy has a history of connections to neo-nazi groups. Neo-nazi ideology is the antithesis of what Trans-Pecos stands for, so we let the organizers know that Zoloa could not perform here. The event fell apart after that, and ended up being canceled altogether.”
Also, Juan Bar management posted on Instagram on Jan. 16th, with a post in Spanish, basically saying the event was cancelled and that the venue “is not part of any nazi ideology, we only rent the space for events.” “We were not aware of these bands, and the authorities are aware, since we have received many threats from other bands,” the social media message read, translated from Spanish. “Many thanks to the people who informed us.”
The NY Post’s attempts to seek comment from both bands and Ramirez met no reply.
Ramirez himself has not explicitly confirmed or denied his ties to Nazism, but some online posters, as well as Patrick, claimed Ramirez has co-opted Latin American symbols and integrated them with hateful iconography. “This guy did a thing where he took the Mesoamerican folkloric swastika and reversed the arms to match the Nazi one, and then he swapped out the Nazi outstretched eagle for a Mesoamerican eagle and then put the swastika directly below it, just like the famous Nazi symbol,” Patrick said. “But the thing that really caught my attention and I think others that really sealed the deal is the fact the gentleman had been involved in events … with a very well-known Nazi [and] true ‘white power’ artist. You don’t accidentally do that.”
