Pachuco Boogie and the Zoot Suit Riots

Anthony Macías' Mexican-American Mojo

The 1930's were the dark days of so-called Mexican "repatriation" in the US.  Even so, the Los Angeles bloomed, with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans a core part of the population.

This is what mainstream music sounded like in the late 1940s and early 1950s  in the USA. Pretty bland stuff.

 

Teresa Brewer - "Put Another Nickel in the Jukebox" (1950)

African-Americans were making some  pretty exciting R&B and jump blues, featuring jump bass and "honking" tenor sax.

 

Louis Jordan - "Caldonia" (1946)

Why are your big feet so long?

 Roy Milton and His Solid Senders - "Milton's Boogie"  (1946)

Joe Liggins - "The Honeydripper" (1945)

Roy Brown - "Good Rockin' Tonight" (1947)

The Jitterbug, Boogie Woogie and Lindy Hop were the names of the related dances that accompanied this music. 

The great Mexican comedian Tin Tan, who grew up between Ciudad Juárez (in Mexico) and El Paso (Texas), made a name for himself in the Mexican film industry of the 1940s and 1950s doing a Pachuco character. Here is Tin Tan's version of Pachuco dance:

An African-American musician's tribute to his Mexican-American fans.

Chuck Higgins - "Pachuko Hop" (1952)

Mexican-American bandleaders adopted boogie-woogie, jump blues, and the rest as well.

Don Tosti - "Pachuco Boogie"

Lalo Guerrero's "Chicas Patas Boogie"

Mambo, the popular 1950s Afro-Cuban dance, was also "pachucofied":

Lalo Guerrero - "Los Chucos Suaves"

Don Tosti - "Guisa Guacha"

Don Tosti - "El Tirilí"

Mexican and Mexican-American intercultural confusion: "El bracero y la pachuca"

Some lyrics here, from the liner notes to Smithsonian Folkways' Pachuco Boogie compilation.

Youth culture was inter-ethnic, as we see in Ritchie Valens' high school band, The Silhouettes, and the story of Ralph Lazo.

Pachuco style guide and caló glossary (from Pomona College)

Harlem zoot suiters

[Left] A young man named Frank wears his "drapes," a variation on the zoot suit style, 1944. | Photo: Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library/Shades of L.A. Collection || [Right] Ramona Fonseca (later Frias), poses in a zoot suit, June 26, 1944. | Photo: Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library/Shades of L.A. Collection (KCET)

From left to right: Alba Barrios, Francis Silva, and Lorena Encinas, held in prison in connection with "slaying during the zoot suit period," 1942. | Photo: Courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library (KCET)

Girls, asserted members of what police officials described as the "black widow girls’ gang," shown as they prepared to get into a police car, 1942. | Photo: Jack A. Herod, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times (KCET)

Mexican-American Zoot Suiters Stripped and Beaten during the Zoot Suit Riots

Pachuco culture is still revered by many Mexican-Americans — and further afield!

Conjunto and Orquesta

Please read Manuel Peña on conjunto and orquesta. Here is some amazing music to accompany your reading. Spend some time with this great music, listen carefully with headphones on. In general, embedded videoclips are more important than examples that are just linked.

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Conjunto, the pre-war generation

Narciso Martínez, again, El Huracán del Valle, letting the bajo sexto do what an acordion's left hand usually does, the better to go bananas with the right hand.

Pedro Ayala, with tololoche joining the accordion and bajo sexto on the schottische.

Bruno Villareal, the first to record: here

Lolo Cavazos, ripping it up as an old guy: here

Santiago "El Flaco" Jiménez, Sr., with tololoche,  here

Conjunto, the post-war generation

Valerio Longoria sings and plays a ranchera, with drum set.

Valerio Longoria again, performing a bolero (called, "Baby, Don't Smoke in Bed") - note the guitar, drum kit, and more complicated minor chord progression

Tony de la Rosa, a great song here

El Conjunto Bernal had a very professional sound - great tenor voice (Gerardo Reyes), harmony singing, Eloy Bernal's agile bajo sexto, and not one but two sick virtuoso chromatic, rather than diatonic, accordions (more buttons, more ways for your polka to go horribly wrong) played by Óscar Hernández and Paulino Bernal:

(Here they are many years later, after going Christian, doing a cumbia against horoscopes and other forms of "witchcraft")

And then, after the 1960s...

.. conjunto music went back to older, more conservative styles

(like Ramón Ayala and the Bravos del Norte)

Orquesta music

The early, conjunto-infused orquesta of Beto Villa

(Here are links to excerpts from Villa's earliest recordings, the local mega-hits "Por que te ríes" and "Las delicias")

And then BV in the '50s, doing his mambo/tropical thing:

Jaitón smoothie Balde González and his orquesta: "Amor vencida"

More orquesta (on the ranchero side) - Isidro López's "texachi." Notice the accordion alongside the big band:

Little Joe and the Latinaires:

Little Joe again, here in English singing rock/rhythm & blues:

In a similar vein, Sunny and the Sunliners more Tejano here and below, singing straight-up Sam Cooke-style Rhythm & Blues :

On the jaitón side of orquesta, Sunny and the Sunliners (above), Latin Breed, and Jimmy Edwards.

On the ranchero side, Isidro López (above), Agustín Ramírez, Freddie Martínez, and Joe Bravo

Peña's post-Chicano orquesta experimentation: Little Joe y La Familia's "Las nubes" (here in English) - (love the prog-rock lick at 0:31):

Extra bonus video - Little Joe's 1986 "Redneck Meskin Boy" here

Borderlands: Matachines and Alabados, Corridos and Conjuntos of the Southwest and the Borderlands

"Chulas Fronteras"

Music and religion in the Old Southwest

Matachines

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Alabados

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Here are links to the amazing audio recordings made by Juan B. Rael on the 1920s and housed and posted online by the Library of Congress. In 1940, Juan Bautista Rael of Stanford University, a native of Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, used disc recording equipment supplied by the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center) to document alabados (hymns), folk drama, wedding songs, and dance tunes. The recordings included in the Archive of Folk Culture collection were made in Alamosa, Manassa, and Antonito, Colorado, and in Cerro and Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico.
Some examples of alabados are:

• "Venir, alma devota," sung by Luis Montoya of Cerro, New Mexico. (To listen to the track, click where it says "Listen to this recording.")
• "Por ser mi divina luz," sung by Ezequiel Arellano of Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico. 

Song: Corridos
Racist violence in the West
Gregorio Cortéz 
Corridos and their 6 parts
One recorded version of the Corrido de Gregorio Cortés, from the 1950s.

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The great Lydia Mendoza "La Alondra de la Frontera"/The Border Lark. Her classic "Mal hombre" is definitely in the "love stinks" lyrical category.

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Norteño-Tejano Dance Music from Northern Mexico and the US Southwest

Tuba-licious village brass band.This band looks like they're playing at a town fiesta.

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Tex-Czechs' polka brass. This is the Patek family from Shiner, Texas playing the "Circling Pigeon Waltz."

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More Tex-Czechs, now polka-ing with accordions - sound familiar? (p.45)

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Traditional chirimía and drum (pp. 45-46) from Autlán, Jalisco, Mexico:

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Los Tamborileros de Linares, traditional ensemble from Nuevo León, Mexico (pp. 46-47):

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Narciso Martínez (accordion) and Santiago Almeida (bajo sexto) play "La Cuquita," their first recording, from 1935 (p. 51-54)

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Last, but far from least - accordion titan (and zookeeper) Narciso Martínez, the "Hurricane of the Valley" and unidentified bajo sexto player ripping it up at a little bar in Edinburg, Texas in the late '70s. From Les Blank's amazing documentary Chulas Fronteras:

"Uno, dos, one, two, tres, cuatro!" (What is US Latinx music?)

Some of the oldest music in the US is Latino. Alabados in New Mexico



Some very old Mexican music was composed in what is now the US, such as the "Corrido of Joaquín Murrieta."


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Music of the Spanish Caribbean in New Orleans: Jelly Roll Morton's "Spanish Tinge" in "The Crave"



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So you could say that the US has been obsessed with Latino music since long before this:


For example, with Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball's Cuban bandleader husband.

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Latinos have also taken on US music in their own ways: Lalo Guerrero's "Chicas Patas Boogie"

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Sometimes Latinos appeared in the middle of the mainstream, but you wouldn't know unless you paid attention. Sam the Sham & The Pharoahs' "Wooly Bully," a song by Sam (born Domingo Samudio) about his cat.



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But the Latino influence in US popular music is central. This rock classic, "Louie Louie," by the Kingsmen...



... is deeply indebted to Latino music.



Specifically, René Touzet's "Cha cha cha del loco" (0:00) and Chuck Berry's calypso-influenced "Havana Moon" (3:04) were the inspirations behind the original version of "Louie Louie" (6:10) by Richard Berry, an African-American bandleader with a large black, Mexican-American and Asian-American audience.

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Once you start looking for them, Latin melodies and Cuban basslines are everywhere in pop, rock, and R&B. The Doors have a lot of good examples, like "Riders on The Storm":

 Stevie Wonders' "Don't You Worry about a Thing," mixes soul with  Cuban son.

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Hip hop is another example of Latino participation in US popular music. Nuyoricans Big Pun and Fat Joe were important figures in '90s New York Hip Hop.



But Puerto Ricans were present in hip hop from the beginning. From a scene shot live at Club Dixie in the Bronx in the seminal 1983 hip hop movie "Wild Style," members of both the Cold Crush Brothers (Charlie Chase) and the Fabulous Five (Whipper Whip and Rubie Dee) were Puerto Rican.

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Latinos' musical creations often had a deep political significance. The salsa movement, and Latino life in New York City, captured in the 1972 film "Our Latin Thing."



Much more recently. Mexican-American artists like the LA-based band La Santa Cecilia, have been outspoken about immigration issues, as in their song "El Hielo," the title of which is a bilingual pun on ICE.


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The music of US Latinos influential both here in the US and in Latin America. New York Dominicans Aventura:


Or the transnational banda and corrido movement, much of which is produced in L.A. Here, for example, the transnational superstar Jenny Rivera of Long Beach, CA, live in Hollywood



And thw acrobatic quebradita dance that can be found throughout Mexico was actually invented by Mexican-Americans here in the US.

And it's even been influential for some Americans like Rhyan Lowery, an African-American from California who ended up becoming a professional ranchera singer:

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Hybrids:
Mexican-American Carlos Santana's Cuban rock. "Black Magic Woman":



L.A. Mexican-Americans' Akwid's banda-rap. "Jamás Imaginé"



Dominican-American Prince Royce's bilingual version of "Stand by Me"