The New, Young Mexicans

                                                                             

The first new, young Mexicans, West Los Angeles, circa 1940

     Having lived in Los Angeles most of my life, I thought -- I can describe an L.A. Mexican. The first concept forming in my mind was Chicanismo. I suppose I still have the image of 1940’s Mexican Americans who returned from wars in Europe and the Pacific, bought homes on the G.I. Bill, assimilated, and watched their kids and grandkids land good jobs or go off to college. Then, the Mexican American transitioned into 1960’s Chicanos, and pretty much stayed that way into 2023. 

At least, that’s what I imagined. Apparently, I was wrong. 

     Sure, I always knew the Mexican community in Los Angeles was vast, with different subcultures, some who called themselves Chicanos, many more who didn’t, some acculturating into the different facets of American society. In fact, when I began to question it, I realized not many of my third and fourth generation relatives or childhood friends, now in their seventies, called themselves Chicano. If we’d even talk about our Mexican-ness, which we didn’t often, we’d just say, “Mexican, Latino,” or, in some cases, the dreaded, “Hispanic.” 

     Turns out ethnic labels weren’t high on the priority list of my friends’ most pressing problems, personal or societal. If you ask them if they are Chicanos, they won’t deny it. The word becomes conceptual, an ambiguous state of being, something they should be but don’t really understand. If push came to shove, they'd call themselves Americans, Mexican, Mexican American, or Latino. 

     Even through the 1960s and ‘70’s ethnic American renaissance, for many, the word Chicano had an old-fashioned ring to it, used more by my father’s zoot-suiter generation, spoken only in private, among other L.A. Mexicans, never among their Anglo friends, whose tongues mangled the word if they tried to say it. 

     When I thought about it deeper, I realized those who use the word easily and comfortably are my raza college-educated friends and colleagues, like me, pseudo nerds and book worms, who, though they hailed from tough and tumble barrios of L.A., preferred brains over brawn, as their early educational discipline helped them survive the traditional and orthodox walls of academia, no easy feat. Most of our friends didn’t go to college. Why? In those early years, jobs with medical insurance, vacation time, and retirement plans were plentiful. Why interrupt life with more school? 

      It was Mexican American scholars who uncovered the term Chicano and adopted it as a personal identifier for the greater Mexican American community, a way to take their identity into their own hands. The term caught steam with activists and artists in the turbulent sixties and seventies, especially among raza teachers who explained the concept of Chicanismo to their students. Still, the word was not ubiquitous in the larger public square. I mean, even my mariachi-listening, taco-loving grandchildren, in age from thirty to eight, have never uttered the word Chicano as an individual modifier. They’re Mexicans, as far as they are concerned. 

     In his book, Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood, reformed criminal, actor, activist, and restauranteur, Danny Trejo, an icon of Chicanismo, rarely uses the word “Chicano” in his memoir. Mostly, he uses Mexican or Latino, like when a bully challenged him to a fight after school, Trejo says, “I was the kind of Mexican who couldn’t wait after school,” or the first time he went to juvenile hall, his uncle Gilbert told him, “Stick to the Mexicans, first off.” 

     In Trejo’s world, as in many of our worlds, the word “Mexican,” though steeped in old-west stereotypes, was also buoyed by mythical figures like Moctezuma, Cuactemoc, Juarez, Zapata, Villa, Adelita, Maria Talavera, Murrieta, Flores Magon, Maria Felix, Tiburcio Vasquez, Elfego Baca, Art Aragon, Reies Tijerina, Corky Gonzales, Dolores Huerta, and Cesar Chave, names that carried the kind of power he sought. Trejo never associated it with Mexico Mexicans, alone. He was a proud U.S. Mexican, and a Chicano. 

     So, it was with surprise when I listened to 31-year-old documentarian, and self-described “L.A. Mexican,” Erick Galindo, who, with his friends, created the mega-successful podcast Idolo: The Ballad of Chalino Sanchez. Galindo awakened me to an entirely different Mexican community in Los Angeles, and the Southwest, probably in the millions, which makes me question Chicanismo in L.A. today, maybe across the entire country. 

     Though the story mentions L.A. as much as Sinaloa, Chalino's birthplace, rarely, in the nearly two-hour podcast is the word “Chicano” used. Mostly, listeners hear “L.A. Mexican.” Galindo’s tale tells the theories behind the mysterious death of the corrido balladeer Chalino Sanchez. The podcast, with both an English and Spanish version, has reached audiences of millions, in the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America. That’s millions of Mexicans, and yes, including Latinos from the Caribbean, and Central and South America. 

     Galindo began his documentary career as an L.A. teenage Mexican growing up in Paramount with roots in Sinaloa, his first job at the Paramount swap meet, and not just a swap meet, but an experience, a world within a world, where rappers and norteno bands were selling cd’s from crates. Galindo says, “Chalino’s a big part of a culture that I am a part of – L.A. Mexican.”  

     I’d guess many of the L.A. Mexicans I know have never heard of Chalino or his music, and if they did, they’d probably think him just another immigrant singer, and switch him off –fast, not understanding the cultural earthquake he created beneath their feet. Sanchez, a gangster, corrido songwriter, who hailed from the badlands of Sinaloa, started his career in Los Angeles, recording his first record in Long Beach, and his career catching fire among young L.A. Mexicans, first, causing the Eastside kids to trade in their sagging pants and hoodies for boots, jeans, cowboy shirts, and tejanas (cowboy hats). 

     A youthful Yarel Ramos, a Chicana/Mexican American anchor at Univision says, “An L.A. Mexican is someone who is a hybrid who lives in this hyphen…connected to their roots in some way, who lives and breathes L.A., is proud of their city but who is also proud of their Mexican heritage and who rock in a L.A. Dodger hat but also bumps, you know, to Chalino or Tigres or Tucanes or Banda el Recodo, proudly in the car, no matter where you’re at.” 

     USC professor, John Kun, who has studied the corrido, says, “His (Chalino Sanchez) popularity in L.A. was a wakeup call to Mexican and Mexican American youth in L.A. to say we’re going to own our culture. We’re going to celebrate who we are. L.A. is the regional capital of corridos, and narco-corridos are a central part. Chalino was instrumental in making that happen.” 

     Okay, as a community college teacher who taught American, Chicano, Mexican American, and ethnic literature, I studied the corrido, narco-corrido, Los Tigres and singers like Chalino Sanchez back in the late 1990s. I had to. I was trying to understand the transitions happening within the “Chicano” community, but culture is constantly changing, percolating beneath the surface, and when it rises who knows what manifestation it might take. 

     Growing numbers of Central and South American students in Los Angeles wanted to see themselves in the curriculum. I’m a third generation Mexican, and my first-generation Mexican and Central American students were teaching me about a Latino L.A. of which I knew nothing. So, there I am, still teaching Chicano literature as if we’re in the 1970s and the Chicano Moratorium and Walkouts reign supreme. Of course, students need to understand history and the start of ethnic awareness, which probably didn’t even start in the glorious 60s but back in 1779, when the first settlers reached San Diego and San Gabriel from Sonora, a whole other argument among Chicano/Latino scholars. 

     Is this new L.A. Mexican of Galindo’s generation not new at all? No, they aren't. They are the American born children of 1980s Mexican immigrants who worked the fields from Yakima to Calexico, like Santa Maria born and bred Mexican American corrido rapper Francisco Rodriguez, whose band, Arsenal Efectivo, helped introduce “trap corridos.” Rodriguez says: “When I first started my band, we were dressing in crocodile boots and wearing big tejanas and sombreros. But now I’m dressing in blinged-out clothes and blinged-out jewelry, I got a grill in my teeth, and that’s something that has never been seen in our culture — Mexicans who wear a grill and sing corridos.” 

     The "trap corrido" takes the traditional corrido and fuses it with elements of rap, folk, hip hop and rock ‘n roll. The thing is this younger breed of Mexicans are American kids, many of them first and second-generation. They are fluent in English and Spanish, grew up on Tupac, Imagine Dragons, Byonce, Snoop Dog, Foo Fighters, Arcade Fire, as well as Trio Los Panchos, Antonio Aguilar, and Maldita Vecindad, and Bad Bunny. They are taking rock en espanol to a whole different level.

     Take Riverside’s teenage sensation Ivan Cornejo, whose music has already hit millions of streams, and reached the top ten in the Billboard 500. Cornejo, who speaks fluent English with a hip, young accent, chooses to write his music in Spanish, not quite corrido, not quite rap, something in between, a new genre, including twelve string and requinto guitars. His songs are a blend of Chalino Sanchez, John Prine, and Cuban greats, Silvio Rodriguez, Carlos Varela and alternative rock. 

     Cornejo counts Los Tigres del Norte and Arctic Monkeys among his many musical influences. Cornejo sings, as many young Latino singers, in the vein of Bad Bunny and Peso Pluma, with a passionate romantic moan, and a painful whine, mostly on key, but off key, unconstrained by music’s conventions, like Chalino or Dylan, when he wants. Sixteen-year-old Yaritza Martinez and her brothers Mando and Jairo, Yaritza y su Esencia, natives of Washington State, children of farmworkers, singer, songwriters whose music reached millions on Tik-Tok and broke the top five on the Billboard 500, besting Chicano legend Ritchie Valens. 

     These young artists are songwriters and poets, telling their stories in a way they've chosen for themselves, rocking and rapping cumbias, corridos, nortenas, traditional music with the latest musical styles and tastes, and even more astounding, they have Capitol, RCA, Columbia, and Universal Music fighting over them, something few, if any other L.A. Mexican musicians experienced.

     What this younger generation of U.S. Mexican/Latino artists have, and what many Chicano musicians and artists of past generations failed to garner, were cross-border personas, appealing to audiences numbering in the millions, from Detroit to Lima, Denver, Phoenix, and Compton to Culiacan, Tepic, the Bronx, even to San Juan, Puerto Rico, not only changing the sounds of music but the face of an entire culture, or what Galindo calls, the “L.A. Mexican.” 

     As a professor, I didn’t hear their voices, their art, or their culture as I should have. My focus was too narrow. Hopefully, the new, younger generation of professors is listening and looking to horizons beyond, to new definitions of Jose Vasconcellos' Raza Cosmica.