Pop Music and Culture: CuBop, Up-Rock, Boogaloo and Banda. Latinos Making Music in the United State: Pachuco Boogie and the Zoot Suit Riots

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)