1994: 7 YEar Bitch, ¡Viva Zapata!

By AJ Strosahl

A Threat and a Promise: ¡Viva Zapata!

In 2000, when I was twenty years old and walking to a party after dark, a stranger chased me through my Seattle neighborhood. He’d kept a plodding, unsuspicious pace behind me at first, then exploded into a frenzy of motion, suddenly in pursuit. I was fast, young, and lucky. I outran him, ducked into an open pizza place. The counter guy gave me a slice of pepperoni and a Sprite, then went outside and checked the street to make sure the man who had chased me was gone. I sat inside dumbly, trembling and picking at my pizza, then two women I didn’t know walked me back to my apartment.  

“Don’t worry,” one said. “We’ll get you home safe.”

As we walked, we talked about some of the darker potential fates I had just been spared, which is to say: we talked about Mia Zapata. Even seven years after her murder––then still unsolved––she was Capital Hill’s realest ghost.  

In the summer of 1993, Mia––a punk singer who had come to considerable local acclaim with her band, The Gits––was beaten, raped, and strangled to death with the drawstring of her hoodie. Her body was found in an alley a few miles away from the neighborhood where she lived and worked, the same neighborhood where I lived and worked the night I was chased. She was 27. Her murder punctured the illusion of safety for women in the Northwest music scene, and my life and social consciousness were shaped by its aftermath.  

Mia’s community was desperate to make sense of her death, to make sure the world knew it mattered. By the time I was out of high school, no one seemed to harbor much hope that they would find her killer. There were songs and poems and books and benefit albums. There was HomeAlive, the anti-violence organization founded in the wake of Mia’s death, which taught self-defense to women and told us we could take back the night. There were rape whistles given out free at merch tables, along with condoms, zines and posters. Everyone missed her, but as time passed, Mia The Person grew less distinct in collective memory. Her posthumous selfhood became almost entirely symbolic, in the way of many famously-murdered white women: for better and worse, Mia was a martyred saint.

For girls like me, who grew up poring over record shop bargain bins and scrounging for decent fake IDs we could use to see bands that only played the bars, Mia was both cautionary tale and cultural ancestor. She was a reminder to keep our heads up, pay attention, look after ourselves and each other. She was our buddy system at shows, where we threw elbows at men who tried to press too close to us in the churning crowd. She was the padlocks we latched to our keychains in case we needed something heavy, with which to strike. She was the pepper spray in our pockets when we rode our bikes to the good burrito place that was open late. She was the exact location, known by heart, of each payphone on the walk home. It was her name we invoked when some asshole was being creepy and we needed shorthand for why we had to leave right now. 

Mia’s monstrous fate reminded us of our vulnerability, but also of our own power. We were so furious, so sickened, at the threat the world posed to us. Our anger was not situational, her plight made it clear: our rage, our terror, was a permanent condition. There was a measure of quaint hope in our outrage: we were young and could still be surprised by the ugliness of the world. We put the free rape whistles on ball chains and wore them around our necks, proudly. We wrote Mia’s name on our Converse and sewed patches of her likeness to our peacoats and purses. Mia had been fierce, vital, and perfectly of her own time. An artist. And some sneaky, roving predator had dragged her off to a bad death, because he could.  

7 Year Bitch’s 1994 album, ¡Viva Zapata!, is a tribute to Mia and was released almost exactly one year after her murder. The band––which had suffered its own recent loss in 1992 when its founding guitarist, Stefanie Sargent, overdosed––used proceeds from the record to help fund HomeAlive, cementing Mia’s legacy. It was one of the first CDs I ever bought for myself, and the clerk at the record store is the person who first told me about Mia. I was fourteen. It was also the first music I’d ever heard that was violent in the exact way that being a young woman felt violent.

The album cover is a painting of Mia in a scorched, vaguely apocalyptic landscape at sunset, a small church visible in the distance behind her. The image is explicitly political, explicitly confrontational: Mia is wreathed in ammo and staring directly out of the image, unsmiling. She is alone. There are yellow roses, her favorite flower, on the ground beside her.  

The first time I heard the whole record, it demolished me. It still does. It is needful and enraged and horny and plaintive and vengeful and curious and histrionic and brutal. Its gallows humor cuts deep. It goes hard.  

The first track, “The Scratch,” starts with a roar:

I want it!, lead singer Selene Vigil bellows. Give it to me! I love it!

The song perfectly encapsulates the tone of the album as a whole: what sounds raucous and sexy when it begins transforms into something overtly menacing by its end. Ostensibly about wanting someone else’s husband, “The Scratch” concludes with a warning:

You better watch out what you're wishing for

I will have my cake and I will eat it too, just like you.

Vigil’s voice is a kick in the teeth; the instrumentation is the precise, pummeling fist that follows. The music is so blaring and audacious that it is easy to miss its exacting nature, and the completeness of its concept. It is anti-nihilist: everything matters, anger is urgent, injustice cannot stand, sisterly solidarity is essential. When it came out, ¡Viva Zapata! was new folklore––a regional myth-making apparatus disguised as an album––and listening to it felt like clawing Mia out of her killer’s grip and back to us, where she belonged.

Though the record is a tool to memorialize Mia and grapple with the senselessness of her death, the band never loses sight of the fact that the greatest danger for most women is a call coming from inside the house. On “Damn Good and Well” (one of the only downtempo tracks), Vigil muses: perhaps my best is what you detest.  

He loved her truly, but he loved her cruelly, she sings on “Icy Blue.” If he can’t break your heart, then maybe he’ll break a couple of ribs. She asks: are you going to let him love you to death?  

In the album’s world and in ours, female bodies are sites of unthinkable psychic and physical violence. 7 Year Bitch uses nearly every track on ¡Viva Zapata! to shrewdly return that violence to sender. In “Kiss My Ass Goodbye,” Selene warns: Get under my skin or on my nerves, then you’ll get what you deserve.

“M.I.A.” most directly explores Mia’s murder; the lyrics speak to the impotent fury of not knowing who killed her. From the double-meaning of the title to the repetition, “M.I.A.” could almost be an invocation, a taunt to lure a monster out of hiding. Vigil sings gutturally, soulfully, from a place that sounds like hell: 

Mother may I?

Momma Mia

I'll see ya. 

I’ll see ya.

I’ll see ya.

I can't see

I can’t see

I can’t see

I can’t see.

It's dark here.

No direction.

Just aggravation.

Aggravation over losing you.

To who?

No justice.

No clue. 

Throughout, she addresses the killer urgently; her desperation to know his identity is searing and uncomfortable. Vigil cuts him down to size by comparing his impact on the world with Mia’s (Will there be hundreds mourning for you? Will they talk of the talent and inspiration you gave? No! Who besides your mother will stand in sorrow at your grave?). She claims the agony of not knowing (I can’t see!), and in the next breath, the next verse, delivers a warning (I’ll see ya, I’ll see ya, I’ll see ya). Her rage is inquisitive (I crawl inside and look out), purgatorial (some things don’t come full circle, circle, circle. Pace. We walk in place.), and cleansing (Who do you suspect? Who is not afraid to die? Who would tell such a lie? Who runs away? Who do we fear?).  

Each verse is a claustrophobic set-up for the ferocious closer:

Society did this to you? Does society have justice for you? Vigil sneers, as the tempo picks up and blasts of frantic guitar cut in.  By this point in the song, you’ve been worked over, pulverized almost. 

Does society have justice for you? 

The band has you flat on the ropes when they deliver the haymaker: 

If not, I do.

To the killer, it’s a threat.  To Mia, it’s a holy promise.  

The night that I ran from someone who might have harmed me, I’d been working at a coffee place for a few years. It was across the street from the Comet Tavern, where Mia spent her last night on earth, and open late. I often didn’t get off work until 1AM. After my shift, I’d usually go to one of the adjacent bars where my fake ID worked, then walk the six blocks home to my apartment. It was a small, busy, largely queer neighborhood, and I was accustomed to walking everywhere, at all hours. I’d been mugged once, hassled countless times and spent my evenings at work rousting nodded-off heroin addicts from the bathrooms with a brass bell. I’d never been particularly pressed about any of it; city life was the same as it ever was.  When I told friends what happened, I tried to brush it off in the same breath.

“Nothing happened,” I’d say. “Not really. Just a close call.”

It took me years to realize that, unintentionally, I’d been lying. The violating, animal terror that his racing footfalls set off in my body was unwelcome, destabilizing, and worst, it lingered. In a not-insignificant way, a man I didn’t even know had altered my reality.

I think of Mia often since that night, in moments of ordinary or outsized dread: in my 20s, when a man I’m seeing holds his forearm across my throat for too long and again when I am too drunk to stand and a different man I thought was a friend spends an hour trying to pry my clothed thighs apart, while I struggle and resist. In 2017, I think of her when my sister gets assaulted at gunpoint on a curb outside our home in Oakland. Again when one of a carful of visibly drunk men screams, “fat bitch!” as they roll by me, and my retorts die on my tongue, because no one is around and I’m afraid they could hurt me if they wanted to. I think of her every time grotesque police violence turns a political protest into a riot; every time I see someone abuse unearned, undeserved power. I think of her when I hear an album made by a young musician whose desires and fears and rages are bound up together seamlessly, like Torres’ Sprinter, Often’s Dirty Saint, Julia Jacklin’s Crushing or Sharon Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow.  I think of her when Roe falls. I’m almost 42 now, and I think of her anytime I walk home after dark.  

And, of course, I think of her when I listen to ¡Viva Zapata!. It’s a sacred text, born of rage but not cruelty, and it requires too much of its listener to be background music. I listen to it sparingly, and savor it. Although it is familiar to me in the best way now––I know every verse and pause and breath, the timbre of every howl––it makes me feel too many things. As I’ve aged, the  myth built around Mia’s memory has also lost some of its potency. Now, I am better able to imagine Mia not as her symbolic self, but as a person. A young woman whom I didn’t know, but who once lived. She had loving parents. She was in a band. She was from Ohio. She played classical piano before she ever picked up a guitar. 

When I was twenty, twenty-seven seemed grown-up––a sad age to die, of course, but fully adult. Now that I am middle aged, I know that twenty-seven is preposterously, wastefully young. I wonder: what was the last song she heard? I wonder: who was the last person she kissed? I wonder: on the last night of her life, before she met her killer, was she was humming a tune?  

That night in 2000, the world was still almost three years away from Jesus Mezquia being identified as Mia’s murderer. Mezquia was caught by technology that didn’t yet exist when he killed her. He may not have even known or cared that he’d left DNA, in his saliva, on Mia’s body while he was biting her breast. It was a crime of opportunity. Mezquia didn’t know Mia; he had simply happened upon her. He was free for ten years, before they finally found him.

I’ll never know what would have happened if the stranger had caught me. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Maybe he chased me for the same reason Mezquia brutalized a young woman he saw alone on a Seattle street one night: because he wanted to and because he could. I don’t think about the strangers’ footfalls behind me very often and it doesn’t matter what he ‘would have’ done. Time only moves in one direction; I’m grown now and he is a minor blight on my memory. Most of the time, I have the luxury of not thinking about him all.  He didn’t catch me; I got home safe.

Nearly 30 years on, ¡Viva Zapata!’s staying power and clarity of purpose still astounds me. It will not let you forget Mia or the grim reality of her death, but it will chase some of the helplessness away. From its first note to its last, I know what it wants––what it demands––from me: stay angry, stay ready, see clearly, be true, keep bleeding. Remember Mia’s fate and the fate of others like her. Remember her. Keep the boot off your neck by any means necessary. Protect each other with everything you have. Make shit. Break shit. Call the threat by its right name to steal some of its power, then meet whatever remains.  

AJ Strosahl is a writer who lives and works in Oakland, California. Her fiction and nonfiction work has been published or is forthcoming from Ruminate, Cleaver Magazine, Blue Earth Review, CRAFT, and other outlets. She is working on a novel, Only in Pure Air, loosely inspired by the Huanghe Shilin ultramarathon disaster. Find AJ on Instagram @ajs1025, or at www.ajstrosahl.com.