Do Chicanos have "Soul"?

 

                                                                                  

Lorca, transcending "soul."

     Though I like the blues, and I am a child of the 1960’s rock ‘n roll generation, as a California Chicano, I don’t think I can claim the “blues” as my musical heritage.

     Recently, I heard two rock musicians discussing the roots of rock ‘n roll, one was white the other black, both claimed the blues as their legacy, from its formative years in the Mississippi Delta to the streets of urban Chicago, a musical tradition that grew out of Southern slavery and gospel music.     

    Now, as a California Mexican, I realized the tradition of which they spoke had nothing to do with me. Our ancestors didn’t arrive on slave ships, nor did they own the plantations where slaves labored until emancipation in the 1860’s. Our ancestors didn't land on Ellis Island, and, by proxy, inherit the history of European, African slavery, or its cultural heritages, like language, music, food, literature, or clothing.

      The reason I started thinking about any of this was because I found it strange that so few Chicano musicians became international blues or rock stars. Probably, Ritchie Valens was on his way, until his death at the young age of 17, already with a number of hits behind him, including his biggest La Bamba, something of an early crossover.

     Chris Montez had some big hits, and he travelled Europe but was never a household name. Maybe Trini Lopez, though more of a pop singer, and Los Lobos, to some degree. The most famous, for sure, is Carlos Santana, whose name is recognized around the world. Yet, what is interesting about Santana is his rock ‘n roll is an amalgamation of rock and Latin sounds, like percussion, chord progressions, and melodies.

     There were some Chicano bands who had number #1 hits, like Cannibal and the Headhunters, Question Mark and the Mysterians, El Chicano (originally the Premieres), big in their hometowns and geographical regions but not in the spotlight around the world, or at least, not for very long periods of time.

     I know you can find some crazy-good Chicano blues and rock musicians everywhere in the country. So, why has none of them made it “big?” I have a friend who says it was a form of racism. Record companies didn't know what to do with Mexican rock 'n rollers, like how to market them. They were neither Mexican nor American. In some circles, Black Americans were more American than Chicanos. 

     Could it be, even though many Chicanos are technically skillful musicians, they didn’t inherit the “heart of the blues,” not like African American and white musicians who carry the South in their bloodline, whether genetic or cultural. Black musicians carried the Delta blues all the way to Motown, hip hop, and rap. One might even argue that at its roots, pure country music carries gospel and Delta blues in the core of its musical DNA.

     So, does that mean Chicanos don’t have “soul?” I mean, first you’ve got to have the “blues” to then be able to have “soul,” right? I’ve heard country musicians talk about a certain soulful feeling in blue grass and country; after all, they have gospel music at their core, the same as the blues. Chicanos don’t have gospel music as their cultural or musical roots.

     Santana is interesting. First of all, consider the name. He turned to guitar after first learning to play the violin in Tijuana's bars with his dad’s band. It was after the family moved to San Francisco that Carlos says he became the blues-rock man, who is known for his rendition of Latin rock. As much as he talks about his “blues-jazz” influences, is he really a blues-jazz-rock man, or does his music legacy come more out of the Perez Prado, Tito Puente, and northern Mexican border tradition, electrified and modernized by Gibson, Fender guitars and Marshall amps, with mighty percussion sections inflaming his sound?

     So, if Mexicans, who were either born or migrated to the U.S., didn’t inherit the Delta-Chicago blues legacy, what did we inherit?

     I’ve been playing rock ‘n roll on a guitar since I was twelve, yet my earliest musical memories were listening to mono-sounding Mexican regional songs, border music, coming from my grandmother’s radio, probably the only Spanish language program, at the time, so most of the Mexican neighborhood was listening to the same songs.

     It was probably the same in barrios across California and the Southwest. We weren’t listening to the Delta greats, like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Lightening Hopkins, or Big Mama Thornton, nor did we make the musical transition north to Chicago. We heard music of Lydia Mendoza, Las Hermanas Huertas and Padilla, Trio Los Panchos, Los Dandys, too many mariachis to name, and vocal greats, like Jose Alfredo Jimenez, Ricardo and Antonio Aguilar, Pedro Infante, Lola Beltran, and so many others.  

     As a child of Mexican grandparents and Chicano parents, it’s not so much that I loved my grandparents’ music, I had no choice. It seeped its way into my pores, much like the blues seeped into the pores of African American and Caucasian Americans from the deep South. Yet, what we all called, collectively, “Mexican music,” still tugs at my heartstrings, today. If I hear the first strains of a mariachi playing La Negra, or the guitars playing a norteña or corrido, something stirs inside me, the “blues,” or “soul?” I don’t think so. For me, the music of my ancestors, though I don't understand it all, tugs a little harder at my heart strings.

     Mexican music, from the border to Vera Cruz and the badlands of Jalisco, comes out of the tradition of la guitarra Andaluza, the Spanish guitar, introduced to Spain by the Arabs, made popular by the gypsies of Andalucía, the core instrument in both Delta blues and Mexican music. The border songs of my youth incorporate Mexican indigenous song, the melodies of the Aztecas and Maya, but they also include the strains of Europe, particularly, Germans, Poles, and French. Without an accordion, where would Flaco Jimenez be?

     The “feeling” of transcendence produced by border music might be kin to the Delta blues or Motown’s “soul.” It’s what the grand Andaluz poet, Federico Garcia Lorca identified as “Duende,” discovered in the gypsy siguiriya called, cante jondo, loosely translated as “deep song,” a translation that doesn’t do it justice.

     According to Lorca, “It is the voice of the people.” It is “depended upon the ‘personality’ of an individual performer, and upon his or her search for the spirit known as ‘duende.'” Like Robert Johnson at the crossroads, Lorca says, “Not that the artist simply surrenders to the ‘duende’; he or she has to battle it skillfully, on the rim of the well, ‘in’ hand to hand combat,” or else sell his soul to the devil. (Lorca, In Search of Duende)