LA Punk

The story of punk is a in some ways similar to hip-hop: DIY youth music celebrating the joy of not giving a shit, often in settings of abandonment, whether urban neglect or suburban malaise. It had In the case of punk, there was also a desire to reverse the pretensions and excesses of '70s progressive rock. The musicians for punk rock bands (Punk being a term reclaimed from a homophobic slur on rock that rock critics didn't like) stripped off all that to get at the propellant core of rock and roll music, not unlike the garage rock that was their direct forebear.

New York was important in punk rock history (Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, etc.), as was the LA/SoCal area, home of seminal bands like Black Flag, the Germs, Agent Orange, and many others. Many of these were part of a scene focused on Hollywood and subrubs like Orange County. These scenes were well-documented (for example in the brilliant 1980 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization (full film here, trailer here).

Meanwhile, there was also an important scene in East LA, of mostly Chicano punks and venues like The Vex, but also in people's back yards, a phenomenon that continues today.  The Vex held a the "Punk Prom" in 1980 that brough the Hollywood and East LA scenes together, but a subsequent riot at a Black Flag Show ended destroyed the venue.

Gender

A patriarchal kind of masculinity is an important element of traditional Mexican culture. This might seem odd, but the emotional costs to men of very fixed and patriarchal gender norms is a sub-text to lots of Mexican music, in which weeping cowboys, the mask of toughness loosened by liquor and seasoned by rage, are a constant trope, as in the classic "Tu Maldito Amor" (Your Damn Love) by the great film star Vicente Fernández. Unsurprisingly, country music — which also deals with a lot of masculine sadness —is popular in Texas in particular, and a number of country stars have been Texas-Mexicans. (The most famous was Freddy Fender, (b. 1937 as Valdemar Huerta). He had a big hit with "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" in 1959, but he couldn't promote it, because he was put in prison for marijuana possession (exacerbated by his association with a married white woman). He'd come back to great acclaim in the 1970s and 1980s, especially with "Before the Next Teardrop" [here sung in bilingual in a medley with another Mexican country standard, "Rancho Grande"].There were a few other Mexican-American country stars, too, though, a tradition that continues). 

Anyway...

Gender themes, or gender-adjacent themes of power and control, is also a feture of punk rock. A lot of the Chicano punk groups featured women, and gender nonconformity, in varying forms and degrees. This seems to underlie a lot of Chicano participation in punk, as well as related goth and emo forms, from punk rock masculine posturing (like The Zeros' "Don't Push Me Around" and "Wimp"), to the Chicano obsession with the working-class sensitivity of English mope-rockers Morissey and the Smiths.

Patriarchy is oppressive to straight men, but even more so to women (a theme of Jim Mendiola's tender punk film "Pretty Vacant") and femmes. The female and gay presence in Chicana punk has been string form the beginning, as with The Brat.



Alice Bags (born Alice Almendáriz) was the frontwoman, along with Patricia Morrison, of The Bags. She'd go on to found Cholita! The Female Menudo with intersex punk rocker Vaginal Davis. Bags is still at it today.

Most punk was in English, but some bands from the Vex scene went back and forth, like The Plugz, who have an amazing "La Bamba" cover and a few Spanish songs on the soundtrack for the cult classic film (starring Emilio Estevez as a punk rock slacker) Repo Man. Los Illegals were important for bilingual songs like "El Lay" (L.A.) and political songs like "We Don't Need a Tan." Ex-Illegals Robert López went on to adopt the alter ego "El Vez/ The Mexican Elvis," a campy send-up of Elvis with a fake Mexican accent.

Meanwhile there's a whole new generation of LA Latinx punks, and all kinds of goth and emo, many of which also engage in a certain amount of play with gender roles.