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How has migration influenced the development of mariachi music in Texas?

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How has migration influenced the development of mariachi music in Texas?

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How does migration affect language across the border?

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How does migration affect language across the border?

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I think that the answer to this question is.... because....

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Body Size, Coping Strategies, and Mental Health in Adolescent Female Athletes, International Journal Sports Science and Coaching

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Body Size, Coping Strategies, and Mental Health in Adolescent Female Athletes, International Journal Sports Science and Coaching

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Sport-Specific Injuries and Medical Problems in Figure Skaters, Wisconsin Medical Journal 

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Sport-Specific Injuries and Medical Problems in Figure Skaters, Wisconsin Medical Journal 

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How do people's views/opinons on "illegal" mexican-american immigrants differ from the US and Mexico based on the media portrayal?

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How do people's views/opinons on "illegal" mexican-american immigrants differ from the US and Mexico based on the media portrayal?

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The opinions and media portrayal in both Mexico and the US are negative and portray immigrants in a poor light. They both use words like "illegal", "dangerous", and "enforcement", which make us perceive immigrants as people we don't want in our country. In reality, immigrants help our communities and actually make them safer.

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How are immigrants from Latinx countries portrayed in U.S films?

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How are immigrants from Latinx countries portrayed in U.S films?

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I think that based on past films I've seen, Latinx people are portrayed as low-income, unintelligent and, especially in men, alcoholics

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what is the difference in between growing up  bilingual and  learning a new language at a young age by yourself  help someone to get more opportunities and learning/communication resources    

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what is the difference in between growing up  bilingual and  learning a new language at a young age by yourself  help someone to get more opportunities and learning/communication resources    

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Where did all of her emotion and anger come from? How is the role of women perceived in Mexico as well how does it tie into the stereotype?  

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Where did all of her emotion and anger come from? How is the role of women perceived in Mexico as well how does it tie into the stereotype?  

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I think that all of this emotion came from the amount of disrepute she faced being openly lesbian and a Chicanx women. In Mexico women aren't supposed to be seen as angry. So her showing this emotion may have triggered some people.

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How has tejano music shaped the identity of Mexican-Americans?

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How has tejano music shaped the identity of Mexican-Americans?

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What challenges or experiences did Gloria E. Anzaldua face because of her work?

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What challenges or experiences did Gloria E. Anzaldua face because of her work?

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I think she had to face some sort of discrimination or hate for the things she produced, because back when she was alive topics she discused werent really a big thing?

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how has  migration birth rates increased and decreased over the years. 

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how has  migration birth rates increased and decreased over the years. 

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How does the media portray haitian immigrants ?

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How does the media portray haitian immigrants ?

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i think the reason haitian immigrants are portrayed the way they are is because everyone is basing it off what they see on the media

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How did indigenous and cajun cuisine influence Tex-Mex cuisine?

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How did indigenous and cajun cuisine influence Tex-Mex cuisine?

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I think this might be because in Texas black people and indians (or if you're using the politically correct term, native americans), are the minority. Mexicans and other latino people are the majority.

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https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/menus/5-influences-on-regional-cooking.htm

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Top 5 Influences on Regional Cooking in the United States

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Immigrants settled in the United States and flooded the country with foods, methods of preparation and recipes native to their home country. The culmination of all of these influences has made up the varied and delicious American cuisine we have today.

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what challenges do journalists at the U.S. Mexico border face, and how are they impacting the worlds perception of Mexico?

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what challenges do journalists at the U.S. Mexico border face, and how are they impacting the worlds perception of Mexico?

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I think journalists face violence, and government restrictions are holding them back from showing the whole truth. I think that the world, for the most part, shows not the whole truth, because of the limitations of where journalists can go

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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/texas-mexican-food

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50 miles north of Austin lie the remains of a gravel floor and wall. While it may seem unassuming, it's what's left of the oldest-known house in North America. Just outside the home is a cooking site strewn with the ancient traces of meals cooked with fire. This is where the history of what can be called Texas Mexican food begins, and where it gets its character as comida casera, or home-cooked food.

The house is one of the extraordinary findings at the Gault Archaeological Site. Between 1999 and 2002, researchers recovered an astonishing 1.4 million artifacts in the area, among them the house floor, which researchers speculate could date back as far as 15,000 years. The burnt rocks outside are even older, at 20,000 years.

The people who lived there were "broad-spectrum hunters and gatherers," according to Dr. D. Clark Wernecke, Executive Director of the Gault School of Archeological Research. They cooked pronghorn antelopes, turkeys, deer, rabbits, ducks, and quail, and his team has identified turtle bones, mollusks, and burnt frog bones. "And if they are eating turtles and mollusks, I have no doubt they are eating fish and crawfish," Wernecke adds.

They also ate other familiar Texan specialties, such as pecans and black walnuts, along with acorns, grapes, berries, and tubers. Although plant foods do not survive over millennia like bones, stones, and shells, archaeologists are able to analyze tools with a procedure called starch grain analysis. Starch grains are pretty indestructible, says Dr. Wernecke, and they adhere to the edges of tools. Some of the starch grains show signs that they were boiled.

Over the last 9,000 years, the repertoire of these early home cooks expanded from fire roasting and boiling to include baking in earth ovens, steaming, drying, smoking, stewing, and roasting. They utilized mortars to grind mesquite pods and nuts, and prepared dishes with squash, corn, and beans, all foods from that ancient period. In many ways, families who lived at the Gault site ate much like Texans eat today.

"Everybody we are talking about is a modern human being, exactly like us," says Wernecke. They were a highly sophisticated and knowledgeable culture, but that's not the history that is generally told about the first peoples of Texas. "It's God-awful if you look at most fourth grade textbooks," he says, noting that illustrations sometimes represent early Texans as "hunched over and hairy and somewhat apelike." The Gault site is changing that false, demeaning narrative in two important ways.

First, it corrects the scientific record. Wernecke says that the story that many Texans are taught, that people arrived in the area 13,500 years ago, is false. Gault shows that people were here perhaps even 25,000 years ago, and that they did not constantly migrate, but settled into developed societies.

Second, and more importantly, the Gault site is "changing the notion that these are half-naked people running around after big animals," he says. Their tools and cooking techniques were not 'primitive,' as they have often been described. Quite the contrary, those tools are important inventions, and according to Wernecke, "we still use every single one of them."

These techniques were common throughout the entire central and south Texas region, where robust trade was supported by an extensive system of travel routes. Dr. Alston Thoms is an anthropologist at Texas A&M who has excavated and surveyed archaeological sites all over Texas. He says that the Gault site, together with others throughout the state, presents a clear picture that local indigenous people were well-travelled, even to what is now Mexico City.

Indigenous peoples continued living in Texas under harsh circumstances, finding continuity and identity in their cooking.

This is why the indigenous food of Texas resembles the food of Mexico, with its squash, corn, beans, prickly pear cactus, chiles, and chocolate. Across Central and South Texas and northeastern Mexico, the Karankawa, Tonkawa, Coahuiltecan, and others developed the distinct style that is today's Texas Mexican food. By the 17th century, they had incorporated the pigs, cows, goats, and sheep, as well as the spices like black pepper, cumin, and garlic brought by the Europeans.

But more recently, the names and identities of Native American peoples were erased. In 1837, the Standing Committee on Indian Affairs of the Republic of Texas issued its report to then-President Sam Houston and declared: "The People called Lipan, Karankawa and Tonkawa your Committee considers as part of the Mexican nation and [are] no longer to be considered as a different People." Texas's native peoples suddenly became Mexicans.

Thoms says that this type of erasure eventually led to expulsion. In the 1800s, groups that still held to indigenous identities, including the Tonkawa and Caddo, were forcibly removed from Texas into Oklahoma.

Yet indigenous peoples continued living in Texas under harsh circumstances, finding continuity and identity in their cooking. To this day, says Thoms, indigenous Mexican Americans in Texas today are "sustained on the same foods as their ancestors." And beyond that, he notes that tomatoes, pecans, chiles, squash, and beans "are all Native American foods that sustain the whole world today, and they were domesticated right here."

Attempts at erasure notwithstanding, Texas Mexican families continued cooking and enjoying the delicious culinary heritage of their ancestors. Comida casera still relies on ancient techniques, such as roasting for the famous barbacoa (beef cheeks) and drying for machacado (dried beef strips). The cuisine is also a feature of local Mexican restaurants. In Houston, celebrity chef Sylvia Casares, a native of Brownsville in South Texas, leads the vanguard, giving resonant cultural expression to a cuisine that has gone largely unnoticed, lost in the shadow of Tex-Mex.

Food writers of the 1970s began defining the Mexican food of Texas as an Anglo-Texan creation. They started calling it Tex-Mex, describing it as south-of-the-border food transformed by American tastes, with the indigenous roots of the food completely overlooked.

"I get angst when it comes to Tex-Mex," says Casares. Knowing that her food can be described that way, she says it's completely different from what most people have experienced. Her restaurants don't use spice powders or canned goods, and "our dishes don't have all that yellow cheese," she says. Instead, she cooks the regional cuisine she ate in South Texas every day until she went off to college.

At her two Sylvia's Enchilada Kitchen restaurants, the menus proudly list "North of the Border" plates such as calabacita (squash) enchiladas and crab in a creamy seafood sauce. She serves quail that's grilled on mesquite, just as it would have been done by families at the Gault site thousands of years ago. It's served with corn, also grilled, and charro beans, made with the pintos which are an iconic element of Texas Mexican cuisine.

Casares, who has been invited to showcase her food at the James Beard House in New York City, says that people don't necessarily understand that this food has evolved over millennia. "They just know it's wonderful," she says. "I cook the foods that our grandmothers, our mothers, our aunts cooked at home." That's the way it probably was in that home of 15,000 years ago at the Gault site as well, with people enjoying the pleasures of home-cooked food.
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Long Before Tex-Mex, a 15,000-Year-Old Cuisine Left Its Mark

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50 miles north of Austin lie the remains of a gravel floor and wall. While it may seem unassuming, it's what's left of the oldest-known house in North America. Just outside the home is a cooking site strewn with the ancient traces of meals cooked with fire.

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https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/tex-mex-foods

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Tex-Mex foods are a combination of Native American and Spanish cuisines, which came together to make a distinct new cuisine. Foods also reveal some of the cultural differences between such regional groups as Mexican Americans in South Texas and those in West Texas. The first Spaniards to arrive in Texas encountered a variety of Native American groups who ate different diets. The nomadic tribes lived off the land, eating game, fish, and available edible plants. Sedentary groups, such as those at La Junta de los Ríos, cultivated such crops as corn, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, squash, pumpkins, sunflower seeds, and peppers. Their squash was likely the cushaw, a winter squash that could be eaten in its tender stage or allowed to mature like a pumpkin and stored for winter. These cultivated foods were supplemented by wild plants and game, and some Native American groups had the domesticated turkeys. Wild game included deer, rabbits, javelinas, and quail. Wild plant foods included such products of cacti as nopales (prickly pear leaves), tunas (prickly pear fruit), and pitahayas (a sweet cactus fruit). Others were the sotol plant (usually baked in pits), the century plant and lechuguilla (both members of the agave family), and the mesquite bean. The Spaniards introduced wheat and a number of domestic animals-including pigs, goats, cattle, and sheep-along with a number of fruits and vegetables.

In early times, the Native Americans ate corn in one form or another at almost every meal. In its tender (roasting ear) stage, it is eaten fresh as elotes (either boiled in water or cooked over coals in the shuck) or boiled and dried for future use. In West Texas, the ears are called chacales. Boiled and dried fresh corn is also added to various other dishes, such as the West Texas Lenten dish comida de quaresma. In its mature stage, corn is toasted on a comal and ground into fine powder on a metate. This powder can be eaten dry (with cinnamon and piloncillo-raw sugar) as pinole or cooked in water or milk and eaten as atole. More commonly, the ripe corn kernels are boiled in water with lime added to remove the hard shell and swell the corn into a hominy-like state. It can then be used to make the breakfast dish posole (cooked with meat, chiles, garlic, salt, and sometimes other vegetables and seasonings). This processed corn is ground on a metate to make masa for corn tortillas (later, small hand-mills, or molinas, became available to speed the process) or to make nixtamal for tamales. Earlier in the twentieth century, corn tortillas were made almost daily, but tamales were made only on special occasions, particularly Christmas. When wheat flour became readily available in the 1930s, the flour tortilla began to replace the corn tortilla. Few people make corn tortillas today. Most buy them from the store and make flour tortillas, which are so much easier to make, at home. Corn tortillas form the basis of a number of popular dishes-enchiladas, tacos, chilaquiles, chalupas, quesadillas, tostadas, botanas, and others. The masa can be cooked in thicker patties to make gorditas filled with ground or shredded meat, chopped lettuce and tomatoes, and grated cheese. Most Texas-Mexican corn dishes, and the equipment used to prepare them, have names derived from the Aztec language, Nahuatl.

Another staple eaten daily was frijoles, or beans. In the earliest times, these were either kidney beans, tepary beans, or sometimes the black beans more common in Mexico. When they became available, however, pinto beans became the overwhelming popular choice. These were boiled in an olla (clay pot) and eaten as frijoles enteros, frijoles de la olla, or frijoles graniados. These may be reheated a time or two and served in the same form. As they are reheated, they tend to become soupy, and in this phase are referred to as frijoles familiares. Then the whole beans are fried as frijoles fritos. Finally, they are mashed and refried in lard with green chiles and onions or garlic-the well known dish found in burritos and served as side dishes with most Mexican foods in restaurants: frijoles refritos or machacados. Combined with other foods, beans may also be served as such dishes as frijoles a la charra (beans cooked with tomatoes, onions, cilantro and chiles), frijoles con queso ( frijoles enteros or familiares with grated cheese), frijoles con chorizo (beans with Mexican sausage), and frijoles con quelites (beans with pigweed, an edible plant growing in the wild).

Squash was boiled as calabasa cocida or sliced and dried as rueditas. The latter could be stored and used later. Perhaps the favorite squash dish was calabacita, squash boiled, chopped, and fried with onions, tomatoes, and cheese. Cooked with meat to make a type of stew, it became calabacita con carne; cooked with chicken, it became calabacita con pollo. Pumpkins were used to make empanadas,among other dishes.

There were numerous dishes made from various meats, both from domestic and wild animals. Some of the more traditional ones are from pork, including chicharrones (fried pork rinds and various internal parts); from goat, including cabrito and machitos (called buriñate or buruñate in West Texas and burrañate in New Mexico); and from cattle, including fajitas. When a goat is butchered, machitos are made from the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and other internal parts, which are chopped and wrapped in the tela (visceral lining) and tied with a piece of the tripa, or small intestine. This is then cooked a la parrilla (on a grill) or al horno (in the oven). Another traditional dish from West Texas, deprecated by Anglos and acculturated Mexican Americans) is morcilla, a dish made from pig blood that is still prepared in rural areas of Spain. The blood is cooked inside the pig's cleaned stomach and then fried with chile, chopped onion, chopped tomatoes, garlic, and oregano. An older custom calls for adding raisins and nuts. Various caldos (soups) and adobos (a type of pickled meat dish) were also common. When a large animal, such as a steer, was butchered on the ranch, it was shared among the families there. Meats could be dried, made into chorizo, or cooked and immersed in lard. Carne seca (dried meat, sometimes called tasajo, or jerky) could last long periods and was prepared as guisados (stews) and a popular breakfast dish, machacado, made of shredded carne seca, eggs, and chiles. Chickens and turkeys were also common in most rural areas. They provided such dishes as arroz con pollo (chicken and rice), calabacita con pollo (chicken and squash), pollo guisado (stewed chicken), and chicken soup. Eggs could be used in such dishes as chorizo con huevos (sausage with eggs), papas con huevos (potatoes with eggs), and huevos rancheros (an egg dish prepared with chiles, onions, and other spices). Women also made fresh cheese from cow's and goat's milk, called queso blanco or in West Texas asaderos. They also made butter and jocoque (buttermilk) and such confections as leche quemada (caramel candy) and arroz con leche (rice pudding).

Dishes made from wheat flour (brought by the Spaniards) include a number of breads and confections. The same dough used to make flour tortillas at home can be cooked in an oven as pan de agua. A popular pastry, the sopapilla, is made of flour tortilla dough rolled and folded, then fried in hot lard and served with honey or another sweetener. Buñuelos are flour tortilla fried until crisp, then sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. Pan blanco (or bolillos-also a slang name for Anglos) is a small, spongy loaf. Pan de campo was a wheat bread commonly cooked in cow camps in both West and South Texas. The various sweets made from wheat flour are legion, the more common ones being pan dulce (Mexican sweet bread), bizcochos (anise cookies), and cupcakes (sometimes called mamones because of their shape). These various pastries are an integral part of most fiestas, particularly quinceañeras, weddings, birthdays, and Christmas and New Year celebrations. Desserts include capirotada (a type of bread pudding) and arroz blanco con leche cocido (or simply arroz con leche), a rice and milk dessert with raisins and sugar.

Although traditional foods reveal the strong cultural ties between Mexican Americans in West Texas and those in South Texas, they also reveal the cultural differences. West Texas Hispanics are much more closely tied to the New Mexican culture. In West Texas and New Mexico, for example, enchiladas are typically prepared flat: the tortilla is dipped into hot grease and then into chile sauce, placed on a plate, and covered with grated cheese and chopped onions. The process is repeated until one has a stack of three or four tortillas, upon which a fried egg may be placed to make enchiladas montadas (mounted enchiladas). Beef or chicken is reserved for the rolled enchiladas originally popular in South Texas and now available around the world. Some dishes are not shared at the folk level but spread in popular culture (as exemplified by restaurants, for instance). Fajitas, for instance, widely available in restaurants, are a common folk dish in South Texas but not in West Texas. Working-class Mexican Americans in South Texas like tripitas, though the dish is not very popular in West Texas. ( Tripitas are traditionally fried in a cooker made from an old plow disk set on three legs of pipe over an open fire or coals.) Morcilla, made of pork blood, is common in West Texas but not in South Texas. Despite regional differences of taste at the folk level, however, various Tex-Mex dishes have become popular world-wide. See also FOLKLORE AND FOLKLIFE.

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The Handbook of Texas is your number one authoritative source for Texas history. Read this entry and thousands more like it on our site.

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Along the U.S.-Mexico Border, Journalism Is an Act of Resistance

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New book collects oral histories from journalists working along the U.S.-Mexico border, and in Mexican states hit hard by drug violence.

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https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/mariachi-music

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Although most people enjoy the atmosphere of alegría (joy) generated by a good mariachi group, few are familiar with the background of mariachi music in either Mexico or Texas. Today large mariachis with the traditional instrumentation of trumpets, violins, guitar, vihuela and guitarrón are easy to locate in all Texas cities, while smaller groups are ubiquitous entertainment in Mexican restaurants throughout the state.

The music they play can be quite intricate and has a colorful history covering the past 200 years. The story of the mariachi, especially its development before the twentieth century, is sketchy, but by piecing together various bits of information from historical records we can say that mariachis probably first appeared in the late 1700s as regional music groups in the small towns of Jalisco, Mexico. These groups, primarily folk string ensembles, often consisted of a harp, two violins, and a vihuela (a small five-string guitar with a rounded back). They played mostly local or regional sones (instrumental pieces), using a complex 6/8 meter. Changes came by the late 1800s, when vocals were added to many of the sones and the harp was slowly replaced by the bass guitarrón. This instrument, invented for the mariachis, is a much larger version of the vihuela with six bass strings; it produces a bass sound of great volume and is more portable than the harp.

Other changes came to mariachi instrumentation and repertoire in the twentieth century, such as the addition of the trumpet. A number of different versions account for this addition. According to Philip Sonnichsen, a noted scholar of Mexican music, the longtime popularity of the brass band in Mexico is behind it. "In small pueblos," he writes, "ensembles might well use whatever instruments were available: thus mariachis using flutes, clarinets and even trombones were known to exist." The trumpet, he states, was briefly introduced into the famous Mariachi Vargas in 1913 and the historic Mariachi Coculense de Cirilo Marmolejo in 1925.

By the 1930s trumpets were widely accepted as part of the modern mariachi ensemble, which thus acquired the ability to perform a wide variety of musical styles in addition to the regional sones of Jalisco. The versatile combination of strings, brass, a powerful bass, and the rhythm and harmony of the guitar and vihuela opened the door for commercial success. From the 1930s on, mariachis became the standard backup bands for popular singers in Mexico.

In its customary modern form, a mariachi group must include violins, trumpets, guitar, vihuela, and guitarrón. The typical mariachi must be able to perform sones, polkas, waltzes, boleros (modern love ballads), rancheras (country "ranch" songs), and any other popular song that is requested and that people are willing to pay for. Since mariachis work primarily as "request bands," playing whatever a customer wants to hear, they are often paid on a per-song basis or for the amount of time they play. With their trademark black and silver regional dress, the traje de charro (Jalisco cowboy outfit), they have appeared in movies, on recordings, and on live radio with such classic Mexican stars as Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Javier Solís, and with ranchera (ranch-country) music greats such as José Alfredo Jiménez, Antonio Aguilar and Vicente Fernández. Through this exposure, mariachi groups and mariachi music have become the best-known Mexican musical style all over the world. Who can think of Mexican music without picturing a mariachi group?

The mariachi's historical uncertainties, however, are further reflected by the mystery surrounding the origins of the word itself. Some scholars have suggested that during the French occupation of Mexico in the 1860s, local groups who played at French wedding parties came to be known as "mariachis," a derivation of French mariage. Sonnichsen, however, cites a letter written by a priest in the state of Nayarit as early as 1852 that refers specifically to "mariachis" and their music. Other stories offer further explanations: that the term comes from one of the local indigenous languages, that it comes from the name María, or that it is transferred from the name for a dance platform. Whatever the origin, the term is commonly used today to apply not only to the large musical ensemble, but to the musical style and to the individual musicians who play Mexican music, whether they are part of a large group or not.

Texas has a long tradition of musicians and guitarreros (guitar-playing singers that some might call mariachis) playing Mexican folk and popular music on request. In the 1920s and 1930s, La Plaza del Zacate or Haymarket Square in San Antonio was where the local populace went to hear such famous duos as Rocha and Martínez or the family of Lydia Mendoza sing popular Mexican tunes. In the 2010s this tradition continued in the same area, where many mariachi groups performed nightly at the well-known restaurant Mi Tierra. Besides the guitarreros, small ad hoc music groups called orquestas típicas, which probably spread from Central and Northern Mexico, existed in Texas by the early 1900s. In his book The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music, Manuel Peña writes about this tradition of string and wind ensembles among South Texas Mexican Americans. String orquestas and their típica variants, he states, were widely known in the state by the early twentieth century, though "makeshift ensembles...must have been in currency long before. These continued to exist until the 1930s, when better-organized wind orquestas, patterned after the American swing bands and featuring saxophones, trumpets and piano began to appear with increasing frequency." The presence of such groups, using an instrumentation and folk or popular song repertoire similar to that found in mariachi groups, may explain why the mariachi style caught on so easily in Texas.

From about 1930 through the 1950s, the mariachi style gradually became the national popular music of Mexico. Lagging a decade or so behind, mariachi music in Texas began to become popular between the 1940s and the 1960s with the constant influx of immigrants from central Mexico. The new arrivals, who had not grown up with the local Texas-Mexican conjunto or orquesta Tejana musical styles, brought their own stylistic preferences with them. The popularity of mariachi music was also growing in the non-Hispanic population as more and more Texans visited tourist areas of Mexico. By the 1960s Spanish-language radio had proliferated over South Texas and could be found in major urban areas throughout the state. At that time stations in the Fort Worth-Dallas area played primarily mariachi music from Mexico rather than homegrown Texas-Mexican styles, partly because the area was largely populated by immigrants from central Mexico and also because of a prejudice against "lower-class" Texas-Mexican music (especially conjunto music).

The 1970s through the early twenty-first century saw continued growth in the popularity of mariachi music among all Hispanics as well as non-Hispanics in Texas so that conjunto, orquesta Tejana, and mariachi have equal and sometimes overlapping followings. The three types of music seem to have somewhat separate territories, however. Whether in large ensembles with full instrumentation or in smaller quartets or trios of varied instrumentation, mariachi groups function as popular entertainment at restaurants, house parties, weddings, and other similar occasions They also play at churches on such occasions as the memorial of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Conjuntos and orquestas, on the other hand, play primarily at dance halls or at parties featuring dancing.

Some highly polished concert mariachi groups, patterned after Mexico's famous Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, play nightclub and hotel shows in Mexico City, Los Angeles, and a few other large cities. Occasionally these types of mariachi groups can be found in Houston, San Antonio, or Austin. Several websites list cities, venues, and names of mariachi groups performing, and many mariachi groups now have their own promotional websites. Continuing immigration from Mexico, including musicians, has also helped to swell the ranks of both average restaurant-style and concert-style mariachi groups in Texas.

Today mariachi groups are not only a standard feature of the Texas music scene but are also found within the school systems. Since the 1970s, mariachi has been offered as a musical ensemble course in many universities, colleges, and public schools. Contrary to old stereotypes of out-of-tune violins and blaring trumpets, today's players are usually well-trained; many hold degrees from university music departments. Both the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at Kingsville have offered mariachi ensemble study since 1977. Junior high and high school mariachi programs date from the late 1970s in Austin, San Antonio, and several South Texas towns; from the early 1980s in Fort Worth and Houston; and from the late 1980s in El Paso. International mariachi conferences and workshops for these students were held yearly in San Antonio for many years beginning in the 1970s. In 2000 Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University) began its annual "Feria del Mariachi" concert, which included the university's own mariachi ensemble and other groups. By 2010 the event had expanded to include instructional seminars about instrumentation, stage presence, arrangement, and mariachi traditions for participants, including middle and high school students. In the 2000s similar conferences were held in Tucson, Arizona, and many other cities throughout the Southwest.

Many of these conferences have traditionally hosted and still feature performances and instruction by current or former members of the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán-probably the best-known concert-style mariachi in Mexico. The new generations of mariachi musicians produced by the schools and universities over the past forty years have continued forming groups that have perpetuated the mariachi style throughout the state and that bode well to increase the popularity of mariachi music in Texas for decades to come.

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Although most people enjoy the atmosphere of alegría (joy) generated by a good mariachi group, few are familiar with the background of mariachi music in either Mexico or Texas. Today large mariachis with the traditional instrumentation of trumpets, violins, guitar, vihuela and guitarrón are easy to locate in all Texas cities, while smaller groups are ubiquitous entertainment in Mexican restaurants throughout the state.

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After contributions from Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco, we're moving on again in the US. This guest post is contributed by Mariana Ashley, who writes on the topics of online colleges. Mariana welcomes your comments to this post either below or at her email address.

Although often dismissed as backwards and isolated, the Rio Grande Valley is one of the most culturally rich locales in America. The region, which begins at the southernmost tip of the contiguous United States and stretches to just below San Antonio, Texas, stands front and center in the two nations' increased struggles against border town, drug-fueled gang violence. And the RGV-a place where two cultures have peacefully coexisted, adopting a very particular Tex-Mex dialect-is also where I grew up.

What's wonderful about El Valle, as it is lovingly called by its diverse denizens, is that it's a place that encourages linguistic creativity. Although most from the Valley are of Hispanic origin, "pure" Spanish is hardly spoken at all. Even those who did not grow up speaking Spanish at home have appropriated Spanish words and made them their own. For example, a local radio DJ ends his show with the phrase, , meaning "I'll see ya," The correctly worded phrase in Spanish would be Te veo or, more commonly, Nos vemos, stemming from the verb ver, to see. In the DJ's signature closing, watchar is an invented verb borrowed from English.

Linguistic code-switching abounds in Tex-Mex Spanglish. The word pos, a shortened Spanish form of pues almost entirely replaces the English filler word well in English conversations. When it comes to food items, some English words are all but forgotten. For instance, if you ask for a in the RGV, no one will understand to what you are referring. Ask for a raspa and you'll be served a sweet (or spicy) cold treat to beat the summer swelter.

This environment of linguistic pluralism in which I grew up gave me a deeper understanding of both languages and both cultures. It also demonstrated to me on a personal level that borders between countries are merely imposed political and physical structures. Borders cannot stop the rejoicing of two languages made one.

Of course, Spanglish is not only found in the Rio Grande Valley, and its variations abound throughout the country as the nation's Hispanic demographic skyrockets. Interestingly enough, as it was mentioned in an earlier post on this blog, the Texas Republican Party recently established its platform, which, among other measures, endeavors to make "American English" the official language of Texas and the United States. But regardless of political maneuvering, the beautiful cadences of Tex-Mex Spanglish will surely persist, simply because the de facto use of language among its speakers knows nothing of rules or politics.

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Border town lingo: a fusion of two neighboring cultures | Macmillan Dictionary Blog

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After contributions from Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco, we're moving on again in the US. This guest post is contributed by Mariana Ashley, who writes on the topics of online colleges. Mariana welcomes your comments to this post either below or at her email address.

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In what looks like a coordinated attack on constitutional rights, the U.S. government has reportedly been targeting journalists, activists, and lawyers working to raise awareness of issues facing migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

On Wednesday, the NBC affiliate in San Diego revealed leaked documents showing that authorities - including U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the FBI - targeted these journalists and activists for scrutiny at the border and created a secret database containing dossiers that included their personal details, social media information, and descriptions of their migrant-related work.

This follows news reports in February documenting how CBP repeatedly subjected journalists to lengthy interrogation and confiscations of their cameras and notes at border facilities. The U.S. government also apparently worked with Mexican authorities to prevent photojournalists from entering Mexico to report on migrant issues.

Let's be clear: This is unconstitutional.

The First Amendment bars interference with freedom of the press and doesn't permit the government to retaliate against people based on their viewpoints. That means the government can't single people out for punishment or harsher treatment simply because it disagrees with the messages they are conveying.

The reported facts in this case look like a First Amendment disaster. Department of Homeland Security officials created a list of activists, advocates, and journalists who were working with or reporting on the migrant caravan in order to flag them for lengthy detentions and questioning at the U.S. border. And it appears that many activists and lawyers were targeted solely because they engaged in speech and association that are at the core of First Amendment protections - namely, speaking out against government policies regarding treatment of asylum seekers or engaging in legal representation of asylum seekers.

DHS also singled out journalists who reported on migrant issues. Many journalists were subjected to lengthy questioning at the border about what they were reporting on and who they had spoken to. Some were even denied entry to Mexico, apparently at the behest of U.S. government officials.

Such actions threaten the freedom of the press as well as the individual journalists' First Amendment rights. Using the coercive environment of the border to attempt to force journalists to reveal sources or other sensitive information could chill other members of the press who wish to report on subjects they know the U.S. government is interested in. It also raises the prospect of the government using its power to suppress reporting on subjects it would rather the American public didn't know about - such as the conditions facing migrants at the U.S. border - thus threatening democratic accountability.

CBP suggested in a statement that it sought to interview the advocates and journalists in part because they were on the ground during unrest near the border and are therefore witnesses to potential criminal activity. This rationale doesn't work. If it did, any journalist who witnesses or reports on pressing matters or potential criminal activity in the United States could be forced to turn over sources and information.

That would amount to an end-run around Department of Justice guidelines for when the federal government can force journalists to turn over information for a law enforcement investigation. Those guidelines require the government to satisfy a higher threshold of need before forcing journalists to provide information. They also operate as a minimum requirement to ensure press freedom.

The border is not, and cannot be, an excuse for the government to avoid complying with the Constitution. Even if CBP has the authority to stop people at the border to make sure they're admissible to the United States and are not carrying contraband, that doesn't mean it can trample on their rights or gather intelligence in the process.

The conduct of the U.S. government in retaliating against journalists and activists at the border is disturbing and unacceptable. We're exploring all available options to hold it accountable.

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The Government Is Detaining and Interrogating Journalists and Advocates at the US-Mexico Border

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In what looks like a coordinated attack on constitutional rights, the U.S. government has reportedly been targeting journalists, activists, and lawyers working to raise awareness of issues facing migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. On Wednesday, the NBC affiliate in San Diego revealed leaked documents showing that authorities - including U.S.

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what can we do to make migration a better place for immigrants

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what can we do to make migration a better place for immigrants

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How states can improve America’s immigration system

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The federal government can’t solve the crisis itself.

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More non-Spanish speaking migrants are crossing the border - Roll Call

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EL PASO, Texas — When a 6-year-old Indian migrant girl named Gurupreet Kaur was found dead in the Arizona desert by Border Patrol agents in June, the tragedy surprised many — mostly because of where the girl was from. [EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.]…

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How have migrant woman impacted the culinary Tex-Mex food?

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How have migrant woman impacted the culinary Tex-Mex food?

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How has Music in San Antonio Changed in the last 100 years?

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How has Music in San Antonio Changed in the last 100 years?

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How have migrant musicians influenced rock and roll music in Texas?

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How have migrant musicians influenced rock and roll music in Texas?

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I think rock and roll was a conversation about life and death then put into a song

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Exploring San Antonio’s country music history, from Red River Dave to the Lonesome Rose By Bill Baird

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Exploring San Antonio’s country music history, from Red River Dave to the Lonesome Rose By Bill Baird

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https://www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio/exploring-san-antonios-country-music-history-from-red-river-dave-to-the-lonesome-rose/Content?oid=26357125

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Sam Kindrick Collection, The Wittliff Collections

Country music, as a genuine subculture - as opposed to a Nashville-created product - is intimately tied to the Alamo City.

The music's roots run deep in San Antonio, all the way back to the Czech-German dance bands of the late 19th century. To be sure, a staggering number of the greats have called our city home: Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Johnny Bush, Adolf Hofner and Ernest Tubb, to name a few.

"The history of country music in San Antonio is pretty much the history of country music," said retired Express-News music columnist Jim Beal Jr.

That solid foundation has allowed country music, in its original form and its many offshoots, to thrive here. The recent opening of the Lonesome Rose, for example, and the international success of modern-day cosmic cowboy Garrett T. Capps attest to the enduring appeal of the genre - and to SA's central place in it.

To understand the significance of San Antonio in the development of country music, it helps to examine the genre's origins. Though later lumped together, country and Western originated as two distinct genres, with country representing a cleaner, commercial version of Appalachian folk, while Western music took in a wider variety of influences. Alan Lomax documented the form in his 1910 book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.

Western music, also called cowboy music and Texas music, fused many influences - including country, blues, jazz and conjunto - into a new form, and that diversity is its most salient feature. As a crossroads city, San Antonio has always effortlessly combined musical forms. Of particular relevance, and easy to forget when surveying modern country, is cowboy music's Mexican influence. And, of course, there were other shaping factors.

"Why is country music so strong in San Antonio? Well, our city has had a lot of country songs written about it, for starters," said Hank Harrison, a bluegrass bandleader and host of the KSYM show "Hillbilly Hit Parade." "You've also got a great bunch of fans here. People here know how to dance. Plus, the military presence created military jazz bands, and those jazz players feed into every scene and make everything better."

Royal lineage

"Red River" Dave McEnery was one of the city's earliest cowboy song heroes. After attending Brackenridge High School, McEnery rode the rails around the country and earned money as migrant worker and traveling singer.

His biggest hit, "Amelia Earhart's Last Flight," was also the first commercial country music TV broadcast, performed live at the 1939 World's Fair. In one memorable stunt, the legendarily prolific McEnery was handcuffed to a piano at local radio station WOAI, where he wrote 52 songs in an eight-hour period.

In addition to writing the fascinating and still-relevant tune "Shame is the Middle Name of Exxon," he penned the dark and bizarre ballad "The California Hippy Murders" about the Manson Family. McEnery also starred in films and hosted radio programs on WOAI and the legendary XERA/XERF, a 185,000-watt "border blast" radio station broadcasting from Acuna, Mexico.

Station owner Dr. John Romulus Brinkley lost his American radio license after grafting goat testicles into the genitalia of middle-aged men eager to reclaim their youthful virility. The power of the goat testes may have been phony, but it earned the physician real money. He pumped his millions into the station that became known as the X, which reached millions of American homes and made the Carter Family into country music's first superstars. Indeed, the revered musical family lived in San Antonio to be in closer proximity to the station, where they performed twice weekly.

Country icon Johnny Cash later married June Carter of the group. But that's not his only SA connection. The iconic singer-songwriter was stationed at Lackland and Brooks AFBs in 1950. While here, Cash met Vivian Liberto, his first wife, although his drug use and infidelity led to a 1966 divorce.

Jimmie Rodgers, often called the father of country music, also found his way to San Antonio.

Rodgers was known for elevating so-called "hillbilly" music by fusing it with elements of jazz and blues. His railman persona and songs captured the imagination of America, making him the first person inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

As Rodgers finished his career as a resident of Alamo Heights, Ernest Tubb was just starting. In the '40s and '50s, Tubb's tailored suits and ten-gallon hats helped elevate the genre's hillbilly image, while his use of electric guitars helped define Texas honky tonk.

As a teen, Tubb worked as a San Antonio soda jerk, taught himself the guitar and landed an unpaid job at local radio station KONO. He rode his bicycle to the station, guitar strapped across his back, for live performances.

Rodgers' widow heard those broadcasts. She took him under her wing and guided him towards stardom. Later, he returned the favor for other young performers, including Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn.

Bandleaders and songwriters

Equally important to San Antonio's evolution into a country music mecca was Adolf Hofner, a renowned bandleader who, alongside Bob Wills and Milton Brown, popularized Western swing. Born to Czech and German immigrant parents, Hofner sang songs in Czech and recorded for the legendary Okeh label. He was later sponsored by Pearl beer, after whom he named his band, the Pearl Wranglers.

Even the Texas Top Hands, Texas' oldest continuously performing band, started in San Antonio. The group, founded in 1941, still gigs to this day, proudly carrying the torch for the Western swing subgenre. Its tour bus sat parked at Austin's Broken Spoke for decades.

The Top Hands performed at the first San Antonio Rodeo and eventually became Hank Williams' backing band on his fateful last tour. After playing San Antonio venue The Barn, Williams, then sick and drunk, played his final show at Austin's Skyline Club.

The Top Hands aren't Williams' sole San Antonio connection. The country legend's signature song "Lost Highway" was penned by Leon Payne, a San Antonio resident known as "the Blind Balladeer." Payne wrote songs covered by Elvis Presley, Dean Martin and George Jones, and his "I Love You Because" and "You've Still Got a Place in My Heart" transcended the country genre to become entries into the Great American Songbook.

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Sam Kindrick Collection, The Wittliff Collections

San Antonio singer Johnny Bush's signature tune "Whiskey River" went on to become the "anthem of Texas country." After a stint in the Texas Top Hands, Bush ended up in Ray Price's band with future giants Darrell McCall and Willie Nelson, the latter of whom covered the tune and helped make it iconic.

Though not originally from the Alamo City, Bush moved here in 1952 and dove headfirst into the rough-and-tumble dancehall scene with a regular gig at the Texas Star Inn on Bandera Road.

"You had to do the standards that filled the dance floor ... back in those days, you had to keep the music going, because if you didn't, they'd fight," Bush said in 2002.

Dancehall days

In the music's heyday, Texas' innumerable dancehalls helped foster the burgeoning country scene. Those venues became the petri dish from which the culture grew.

Dozens of dancehalls dotted San Antonio during those early days. Weekend partiers could trek across town, heading from the Farmer's Daughter on W.W. White Road to Randy's Rodeo on Bandera Road to the Texas Star Inn, also on Bandera, to Floore's Country Store in Helotes and end up in Bandera at Arkey Blue's Silver Dollar, the state's oldest continuously operating honky tonk.

"In country music, the way you tell if you're going over is if the dancefloor is full," music writer Beal said. "The Farmer's Daughter, that was hardcore Bob Wills-type stuff. It was my favorite spot. The dancing was incredible there, and it was all ages. It was a family thing."

The dancehall period was widely considered a golden era for country music, helping make it "America's music."

The records also grew in popularity due to the Nashville sound, pioneered by Chet Atkins and others, which used strings and choirs to create a lush backdrop for singers. As country songs became more profitable, it also became smoother and more polished, sounding more like pop and less like the genre's roots.

But not for long. And that brings us back to San Antonio.

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Sam Kindrick Collection, The Wittliff Collections

The outlaw sound

Eager to escape that slick sound, Nashville songwriter Willie Nelson moved to a ranch near Bandera and started a weekly residency at Floore's Country Store. The Texas native's return and his several-year stint at Floore's culminated in his legendary 1972 Dripping Springs Reunion and the following year's Fourth of July picnic, a blast that unofficially launched the progressive country movement, later known as outlaw country.

That scene created a constellation of stars: Jerry Jeff Walker, B.W. Stevenson, Michael Martin Murphey, Willis Alan Ramsay and Waylon Jennings. Their music was still country, but with less polish, less production and a lot more attitude.

Venues popped up all across San Antonio catering to the new music. During the 1970s, the city gave rise to the Bijou, the Golden Stallion, the Bits and Pieces and the Longneck, part-owned by San Antonio music legend Augie Meyers.

And there to document it all was legendary SA journalist Sam Kindrick, whose Action Magazine, launched in 1975, became a chief documenter of the emerging outlaw scene. His humor and attitude have both charmed and vexed readers and adversaries for decades.

"Sam Kindrick has done more than any single person over the last 60 years to document music and entertainment in San Antonio," Joe Nick Patoski, the dean of Texas music journalism, said in an article published by Texas State University's Wittliff Collections.

Originally an Express-News columnist, Kindrick was fired for drunkenness and consorting with "undesirable types." Among these undesirables was his close friend Willie Nelson.

"First time I met Willie, he was smoking dope under a mesquite tree out at Floore's," Kindrick recalls. "He later played me a cassette of the Red Headed Stranger before its release. I told him I didn't think it'd catch on."

Kendrick went on to emcee two of Willie Nelson's legendary Fourth of July picnics, and started Action Magazine at the singer's urging. The entertainment newspaper's guest contributors included one who went by "Biscuit Wheels" and another writing from the Bexar County jail simply known as "Doc."

Kendrick credits the Medellin family and their San Antonio Press for carrying him through several rough patches.

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Sam Kindrick Collection, The Wittliff Collections

" Action wasn't a music magazine," Kindrick said. "It just covered the outsized personalities all around me."

Beyond Nelson, Ramsay and Bush, those included David Alan Coe, Leon Russell, Spanky McFarlane and innumerable greats. Though ostensibly a chronicler of outsized personalities, few were larger than Kindrick himself.

His stories are voluminous and hilarious, like the time he finagled a role in Steven Spielberg's first film The Sugarland Express, shot in the San Antonio area during the early '70s. "Goldie Hawn was a complete pothead," Kindrick said.

Another time, Kindrick lured Jimmy Buffet to San Antonio honky tonk The Longneck.

"I told him, 'I'll give you $500 and all the coke you can snort.' And he came down and played," the journalist recalls. "Packed the joint."

Kindrick was no stranger to substance abuse himself. His cocaine use and that of Nelson's road crew reached such proportions that it became grounds for termination. "If you're wired, you're fired," read signs posted on the singer's tour bus.

Excess ultimately caught up with Kindrick, and he served time in jail. His arrest, splashed across the front pages of SA newspapers, proved to be the wake-up call he needed.

"I've been sober since 1989," said Kindrick, now 82 and still sharp as a tack.

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Sam Kindrick Collection, The Wittliff Collections

Rocking the country

As progressive country took hold, a parallel strain of roots music emerged from the rock scene and hippie subculture. The psychedelic scene induced a whiplash counterreaction from hippies burnt out on light shows, paisley and feigned interest in the sitar.

Inspired by the Band's Music from Big Pink and the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, hip kids embraced stripped-down music that embraced its American roots. That hippy folk scene gave rise to some of the era's great country songwriters, and while still a teenager, San Antonio's Will Beeley was there to witness it all.

"There was a coffeehouse downtown called the Gatehouse. Another spot by San Antonio College called Doogie's," Beely said. "I was 15 and not allowed in, but I'd sneak in the back door, and I saw some amazing folks: Townes Van Zandt, Bill Moss, Don Sanders, Rex Foster, Cassell Webb, Marylou Weaver. Such amazing talent. I got to be the guy who'd play three songs between the acts. I learned a lot."

Beeley recorded two classic alt-country albums - Gallivantin' and Passing Dream - in the '70s, but by the '80s, frustrated by lack of success, he became a long-haul truck driver.

The albums were too good to languish in obscurity though, and eventually were reissued by the influential Tompkins Square record label. Beeley has since experienced a rediscovery. He was an outlier for what would later be called "Americana," a melding of progressive country and hippie folk.

"The country people called us hippies," he said. "That changed in the late '70s, going in to the '80s."

Steve Earle, an eventual pioneer of the Americana scene, was also a character from the Gatehouse and a close friend to Beeley. Now one of the genre's top acts, Earle learned his craft in San Antonio folk clubs as a teenager. He also got involved in the anti-war movement, performing Country Joe's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" on a flatbed truck during a demonstration in front of the Alamo.

"My dad, who's an air traffic controller and worked for the government, got in trouble," Earle recalled in a 2019 interview with Beeley.

Roots outliers

Earle wasn't the only Americana outlier to emerge from San Antonio's music scene.

As a member of the '60s psych group the Children, Cassell Webb recorded the lost psych classic Rebirth but went on to become a female voice in the emerging outsider country scene. Her short-lived project with Red Crayola frontman Mayo Thompson called Saddlesore produced one essential single "Old Tom Clark" in 1970, which was rereleased in 1994 by Chicago's influential Drag City label.

Subsequently, Webb performed with Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson and B.W. Stevenson, before marrying renowned punk producer Craig Leon, whose credits include the Ramones, Blondie and Suicide. She reunited the Sir Douglas Quintet for their 1981 album Border Wave, produced albums by legendary English post-punks The Fall and continued to record on her own.

Like Webb, Gatehouse regular Rex Foster connected the counterculture to the emerging roots movement. The musician joined the legendary traveling concert-turned-film The Medicine Ball Caravan - touted as "Woodstock on Wheels" - then settling in France to record the album Roads of Tomorrow, a lost precursor to the alt-country movement.

The fabled Blaze Foley grew up in San Antonio under his real name, Michael David Fuller, and performed gospel tunes with his family. After living on a Tennessee commune, he returned to Texas with a new moniker and a head full of wonderfully evocative songs that continue to influence artists today.

Then of course there's Doug Sahm, whom the New York Times dubbed the "patriarch of Texas rock and country music." The San Antonio native played steel guitar with Hank Williams and was offered a spot on the Grand Ole Opry at age 13, although his mother declined on his behalf. He even learned fiddle from J. R. Chatwell, a member of Adolf Hofner's band.

Sahm eventually left for the San Francisco scene after a 1966 drug bust. While there, he charted a Billboard hit with "Mendocino" and graced the cover of Rolling Stone twice. His eventual return to San Antonio didn't last long, however. He was reportedly beaten up by Balcones Heights policemen displeased with his California license plate.

Sahm left for Austin soon thereafter.

Commercial turn

By the time the '70s closed out, however, country music changed, becoming more commercial. That focus on accessibility over authenticity increased with each subsequent decade.

"We old timers ... we got irate when we heard the shit they started putting out. It became pop," Action 's Kindrick said. "Garth Brooks should've been hung by his heels. Him and Chris Gaines. Not that I feel that strongly about it."

Texas' dancehall culture, while still present, faded as time wore on. Its undoing?

"Netflix," said SA bandleader Geronimo Trevino III, the author of Dance Halls and Last Calls, an indispensable book on the era. "Also, natural disasters, tornadoes, and even foul play."

More than anything, though, stringent drunk driving laws ended the phenomenon, Trevino explained.

"Folks got scared to take a chance out on the highway," he said. "Back in the old days, that was less of a concern. And the old dance halls, folks brought their kids, no problem. It was a family event. But now you can't really do that as much. It's stricter with the kids being around alcohol."

Despite the dearth of dancehalls, the music lives on. Some of the older venues remain and real-deal country continues to expand and thrive, observers say.

"Everybody always talks about the good old days," Kindrick muses. "Today will be the good old days to somebody, someday. 'I remember when,' they'll say. It's all just ... evolving."

To his point, Floore's Country Store has continued to bring in the crowds by expanding their booking from strictly country to all things Americana.

"It remains vital. It's the same kind of thing, it's just they're booking music of now, not the music of the '40s," former Express-News writer Beal said.

Indeed, Americana has emerged as a thriving genre nationwide, with recent converts including Robert Plant, the famed Led Zeppelin singer.

San Antonio Rose

Meanwhile, St. Mary's Strip honky tonk the Lonesome Rose has brought live country and roots music back to the city center. Venue co-owner Garrett T. Capps, a performer who's emerged as a formidable country ambassador, explained the appeal.

"I would like to think that we're picking up a legacy," he said. "Our dream for this place is, when you open the door, it's this hotbox of energy with folks dancing."

Of course, recent spillover from Austin hasn't hurt. The rising costs of living in the city once branded the "Live Music Capital of the World" has driven out performers who can no longer afford to call it home.

"They've obviously overshadowed us in the alt-country world, but things have been changing recently," Capps added. "It's hard to find a working-class musician who lives there anymore. It's too expensive."

Larger venues like Cowboys Dancehall and even the AT&T Center cater to the more polished commercial country sound, and of course San Antonio still lays claim to country mega-star George Strait, but even the country genre itself seems to be experiencing an upheaval with the genre-bending moves of rapper Lil Nas X.

"Commercial country does well here, and it fills the AT&T Center, but nobody dances in there," Beal says. "Everybody's sitting and listening. But there are dancehalls that are still kicking, and dancing is still a crucial part of it."

Martinez Hall, for example, still provides the same program as it did nearly 100 years ago, the music writer points out. And it still makes folks dance.

"They book Czech and Polish bands and then country two-step," Beal added. "The same kind of stuff Adolf Hofner was doing."

To be sure, plenty of San Antonio artists are still holding down the old way. Foremost of those might be Billy Mata and the Texas Tradition, a heritage-minded band that's racked up awards from the Academy of Western Artists and praise from old-school honky tonkers and the press alike.

But for some, it's exciting to see bands coming up in San Antonio that can write new chapters for the music while avoiding mass-produced Nashville sheen.

The Last Bandoleros, for example, are reclaiming the genre's aforementioned Hispanic roots. Currently signed to Warner Nashville, the band toured with Sting and were praised by Rolling Stone as 2018's "most important new country band."

The act's fusion of country, rock and conjunto may be what brings the story full circle.

"You never know when something else is gonna come out," Action Magazine 's Kindrick. "You never know when somebody is gonna come out and revolutionize the whole thing. There may be another Willie Nelson out there, in another form, with another twist on the music."

To listen to an online sampler of San Antonio country favorites, visit this Mixcloud playlist.

The playlist includes:

Willie Nelson "Good Hearted Woman" (Live at Floore's Country Store)

George Chambers "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke and Loud Music"

Doug Sahm "Be Real"

Leon Payne "I Love You Because"

Adolf Hofner and his San Antonians "South Texas Swing"

Mother Maybelle Carter "Wildwood Flower"

Johnny Bush "Green Snakes on the Ceiling"

Adolf Hofner and the Pearl Wranglers "I Get So Lonesome (Since You're Gone)"

Slim Roberts "Lonesome Old World"

Texas Top Hands "You're Killin' Me"

Adolf Hofner "Shiner Song (Farewell to Prague)"

Jimmie Rodgers "T for Texas"

Leon Payne "Lost Highway"

Ernest Tubb "Drivin' Nails in My Coffin"

Charley Pride "Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone"

Moe Bandy "I Just Started Hating Cheating Songs Today"

Rex Foster "In the Spring"

Texas Tophands "You Can't Have Your Cake and Eat it Too"

Garrett T. Capps "Sunday Sun"

Johnny Bush "Whiskey River"

Augie Meyers "Memories" (Live at the Longneck)

Blaze Foley "Clay Pigeons"

Will Beeley "Sailing with You"

Saddlesore (feat. Cassell Webb) "Old Tom Clark"

Steve Earle "The Graveyard Shift"

The Last Bandoleros "Where Do You Go?"

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patriarch of texas rock and country music

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Exploring San Antonio's country music history, from Red River Dave to the Lonesome Rose

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click to enlarge Sam Kindrick Collection, The Wittliff Collections Country music, as a genuine subculture - as opposed to a Nashville-created product - is intimately tied to the Alamo City. The music's roots run deep in San Antonio, all the way back to the Czech-German dance bands of the late 19th century.

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https://www.visittheusa.com/experience/musical-roots-san-antonio-texas

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Immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe brought their own musical heritage, whose “oompah” beat continues to inform the Tex-Mex and Conjunto music you’ll hear in this Texas city.

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https://lib.utsa.edu/samusic/

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The History of Music in San Antonio - The History of Music in San Antonio

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vMXCtKE_6M

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How have migrants influence the evolution of rock music in Texas?

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What makes Texas Jazz different from other Southern Jazz?

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What makes Texas Jazz different from other Southern Jazz?

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Blues, the start of all contemporary music

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Blues, the start of all contemporary music

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https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/blues

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The earliest reference to what might be considered blues in Texas was made in 1890 by collector Gates Thomas, who transcribed a song titled "Nobody There." Thomas doesn't mention whether the singing was accompanied by an instrument, but he does indicate that it was a pentatonic tune containing tonic, minor, third, fourth, fifth, and seventh chords, all of which combined to produce something similar to a blues tune. Later, Thomas published other song texts that he had collected from African Americans in South Texas. Some of these included verses that had been noted by other writers in different areas of the South. The song "Baby, Take a Look at Me," for example, was transcribed both by Thomas and Charles Peabody in Mississippi, and "Alabama Bound" and "C. C. Rider" are variants of blues songs that Jelly Roll Morton sang in New Orleans.

Geographically diffuse sources suggest that blues musicians were itinerant and that blues was part of an oral tradition that developed in different areas of the South. By all accounts, the blues was widespread in the early 1900s. Thousands of Blacks during this period were migratory, looking for work and escape from all too prevalent racism. Blues singers were often migrant workers who followed the crop harvests or lived in lumber camps and boomtowns. Many settled down and labored as sharecroppers, leasing small tracts of land controlled by White landowners. Others continued roving from town to town, working odd jobs in the growing urban centers of Dallas, Houston, Shreveport, and Atlanta; some went north to Chicago and New York.

Blues music expressed the hardships of newly-freed African American slaves. The freedoms offered by Reconstruction were hard-won. Racism, Jim Crow laws, and the Ku Klux Klan were major obstacles to economic independence and self-determination. Still, leisure, even under the most desolate circumstances, was vitally new and served as a catalyst in the development of the blues. Early blues answered the need for a release from everyday life. The blues is an intensely personal music; it identifies itself with the feelings of the audience-suffering and hope, economic failure, the break-up of the family, and the desire to escape reality through wandering, love, and sex. In this way, blues is somewhat different from African songs, which usually concern the lives and works of gods, the social unit (tribe and community), and nature.

With its emphasis on individual experience, blues reflects a Western concept of life. Yet, as a musical form it shows little Western influence. The traditional three-line, twelve-bar, AAB verse form of the blues arises from no apparent Western source, although some blues does incorporate Anglo-American ballad forms that have six, ten, or sixteen-bar structures. Early blues drew from the music of its time: field hollers and shouts, which it most closely resembles melodically; songster ballads, from which it borrows imagery and guitar patterns; spirituals and gospel, which trained the voices and ears of Black children. These, with the exception of the ballad, were the descendants of African percussive rhythms and call-and-response singing.

Although blues drew from the religious music of both African and Western cultures, it was often considered sinful. Blues singers were stereotyped as "backsliders" in their own communities. In many areas blues was known as the devil's music. As historian Larry Levine points out, blues blended the sacred and the secular. Like the spirituals and folktales of the nineteenth century, blues was a plea for release, a mix of despair, hope, and humor that had a cathartic effect upon the listener. The blues singer had an expressive role that mirrored the power of the preacher, and because of this power, blues was both embraced and rejected by African Americans and their churches.

In Texas, blues musician Lil' Son Jackson explained to British blues aficionado Paul Oliver that it was, in effect, the spiritual power of the blues that made the music sinful. "If a man hurt within and he sing a church song then he's askin' God for help....if a man sing the blues it's more or less out of himself....He's not askin' no one for help. And he's really not really clingin' to no one. But he's expressin' how he feel. He's expressin' to someone and that fact makes it a sin, you know....you're tryin' to get your feelin's over to the next person through the blues, and that's what make it a sin." Because of the frequent lack of centralized authority in Black churches, however, community opposition to the blues varied from place to place. Rarely were blues singers completely ostracized. They lived on the margins of what was acceptable and derived their livelihood from itinerant work at house parties and dances.

In Texas, blues has developed a unique character that results from the cross-pollination of musical styles-itself a result of the migratory patterns of African Americans-as well as the impact of the recording industry and mass-media commercialization. Not only is the Black population of Texas less concentrated than that of other states in the South, but blues music in Texas also evolved in proximity to other important musical traditions: the rural Anglo, the Cajun and Creole, the Hispanic, and the Eastern and Central European.

The White crossover to blues in Texas began in the nineteenth century, when Black fiddlers and guitar songsters played at White country dances. Eddie Durham recalled in interviews that his father was a fiddler who played jigs and reels as well as blues. Mance Lipscomb's and Gatemouth Brown's fathers were songsters who played fiddle and guitar. White musicians were exposed to blues at country dances and minstrel shows and among Black workers in the fields, road gangs, turpentine camps, and railroad yards. Country singer Bill Neely said that he first heard blues when he picked cotton in Collin County north of Dallas in the 1920s, but he learned to play blues by listening to the recordings of Jimmie Rodgers. Although he was known as a country singer, "Jimmie Rodgers was a bluesman," Neely maintained. "A lot of those songs Jimmie Rodgers didn't write. He got them from the Blacks he heard when he was growing up in Mississippi and when he worked as a brakeman on the railroad." The influence of blues and jazz is also apparent in the early western swing bands of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, where the horn sections of the Territory jazz bands were imitated and developed through different instrumentation. In addition, blues and jazz influenced the growth of zydeco among African-American Creoles and impacted the Mexican American tradition, as well as a younger generation of musicians, including Freddy Fender and Ildefonso "Sunny" Ozuna who emulated the rhythm-and-blues sound.

With the growth of the recording industry during the 1920s the audience for blues expanded among African Americans nationwide. Dallas became a recording center primarily because it was a geographical hub. The major labels to produce "race records," those catering to a Black audience, held regular sessions in Dallas. OKeh, Vocalion, Brunswick, Columbia, RCA, and Paramount sent scouts and engineers to record local artists once or twice a year. Engineers came into the city, set up their equipment in a hotel room, and put the word out. Itinerant musicians found their way to Dallas, among them the legendary Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, who recorded there in 1937, after having recorded in San Antonio a year earlier.

In March 1926, Blind Lemon Jefferson became the first male folk blues singer and guitarist to record. Jefferson was from the rural East Texas farming community of Couchman (near the town of Wortham) and made his way to Dallas, where he played for tips at the corner Elm Street and Central Avenue and was discovered by a Paramount recording scout. His first two recordings were made in December 1925 with the pseudonym, Deacon L.J. Bates, apparently because they were religious songs, but for his subsequent recordings he used his given name. Between 1926 and his untimely death in December 1929, Jefferson made more than eighty recordings for Paramount and was the biggest selling country blues singer in the country. However, studies indicate that Jefferson's records sold thousands of copies to Blacks in the urban ghettos of the North, but did not sell especially well in Texas.

Nevertheless, as a result of Jefferson's overall commercial success, blues singers from around the South flocked to Dallas with the hope of being recorded. Generally, these musicians lived and worked in the area around Deep Ellum and Central Track. Deep Ellum was the area of Dallas north and east of downtown, where Black newcomers to the city came. Branching off from Elm Street was Central Track, a stretch of railroad near the Union Depot, where the Texas and Pacific line crossed the Houston and Texas Central line. Lying east of the downtown business district and north of Deep Ellum, Central Tracks was the heart of the Black community. In the area were Ella B. Moore's Park Theater with vaudeville, minstrel, and touring blues and jazz shows, the Tip Top, Hattie Burleson's dance hall, the Green Parrot, and the Pythian Temple, designed by the Black architect William Sidney Pittman.

In addition to Blind Lemon Jefferson, other important blues musicians recorded in Dallas during the heyday of Deep Ellum and Central Track. These included Lonnie Johnson, Lillian Glinn, Little Hat Jones, Texas Alexander, Jesse Thomas, Willard (Ramblin') Thomas, Sammy Hill, Otis Harris, Willie Reed, Buddy Woods, and Babe Kyro (Black Ace) Turner. Jefferson was a major influence upon the development of Texas blues, influencing not only Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter but also Aaron "T-Bone" Walker. What distinguishes Jefferson from the other blues performers of his generation was his singular approach to the guitar, which established the basis of what is today known as the Texas style. He strummed or "hammered" the strings with repetitive bass figures and produced a succession of open and fretted notes, using a quick release and picking single-string, arpeggio runs. T-Bone Walker later applied this technique to the electric guitar and combined it with the influences of the jump and swing blues of the regional or "Territory" jazz bands of the 1920s and 1930s to produce the modern sound.

In the Territory jazz bands of the Southwest, the guitar was used as a rhythm instrument to underlie the voice and horn sections. The introduction of the electric guitar occurred first in these bands, pioneered by Eddie Durham of San Marcos and Charlie Christian of Fort Worth. By using electric amplification, jazz guitarists were able to increase the resonance and volume of their sound. Charlie Christian is credited with teaching T-Bone Walker about the electric guitar and its potential as a solo instrument. In the rhythm-and-blues of T-Bone Walker the electric guitar assumed a role that superseded the saxophone, which had until then been the prominent solo instrument in jazz. The interplay between the saxophone and the guitar remained important in rhythm-and-blues, but the relationship between the instruments was transformed. The rhythm-and-blues band sound became tighter and depended more on the interplay of the electric guitar with the horn section, piano, and drums.

With the Great Depression of the 1930s, "race" recording declined. Among African Americans in Dallas, the locus of blues activity in the 1940s and 1950s shifted from the legendary Deep Ellum and Central Track area to North and South Dallas. The Rose Ballroom, opened by T. H. Smith in March 1942 and reopened as the Rose Room in April 1943, became a showplace for the best of the local and nationally known blues artists. T-Bone Walker performed there, as did Big Joe Turner, Pee Wee Crayton, Lowell Fulson, Eddie Vinson, Jimmy Nelson, and Henry (Buster) Smith. The Rose Room was renamed the Empire Room in 1951 and continued to feature the most popular R&B of the day: Zuzu Bollin, Lil' Son Jackson, Clarence (Nappy Chin) Evans, Mercy Baby, Frankie Lee Sims, and Smokey Hogg. By the late 1940s, the railroad tracks on Central Avenue were torn up to make room for Central Expressway, which was built in the 1950s, and for R. L. Thornton Freeway in the 1960s. These changes choked Deep Ellum off from downtown, and the area became a warehouse district with industrial suppliers and small businesses mixed in.

In Houston, African Americans settled mostly in three segregated wards: the Third, Fourth, and Fifth. It was in the Third Ward where guitarist Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins accompanied his cousin Texas Alexander in the late 1920s, and where Hopkins returned by himself in the 1940s to play on Dowling Street. The Santa Fe Group gathered in the Fourth Ward. They were a loosely knit association of itinerant Black pianists in the 1920s and 1930s that included Robert Shaw, Black Boy Shine, Pinetop Burks, and Rob Cooper, who performed in the roadhouses and juke joints along the Santa Fe tracks, playing their distinctive style of piano, which combined elements of blues with the syncopation of ragtime. In the Fifth Ward also there were Black blues pianists, but their style of performance was even more eclectic. Probably the most well-known of these were members of the George W. Thomas family. The eldest, George Thomas Jr., was born about 1885, followed by his sister, Beulah, better known as Sippie Wallace, and her brother, Hersal Thomas.

In Houston there were fewer opportunities for recording than in Dallas until after World War II, when several independent labels were started. The earliest to record blues was Gold Star, founded by Bill Quinn in 1946 as a hillbilly label to record Harry Choates. In 1947 Quinn decided to enter the "race" market by recording Lightnin' Hopkins, whose down home country blues expressed the foibles, hardships and aspirations of rural Blacks and their migration to the city looking for a better life. By the early 1950s, competition among independent record labels in Houston was intense. Macy's, Freedom, and Peacock (as well as Bob Shad's New York-based Sittin' In With label) were all involved in recording local and regional blues musicians, including Lightnin' Hopkins, Goree Carter, Lester Williams, Little Willie Littlefield, Peppermint Harris, Grady Gaines, and Big Walter Price.

Of the Houston-based independent labels, Peacock emerged as the most prominent. Houston businessman Don Robey founded Peacock Records in 1949 to record Gatemouth Brown, who was the headliner at Robey's Bronze Peacock club. The first rhythm-and-blues singer with whom Robey made the charts was Marie Adams, whose song "I'm Gonna Play the Honky Tonks" was a hit in 1952. With this success, Robey expanded his recording interests by acquiring the Memphis label Duke Records. Through this acquisition Robey secured the rights to the stable of musicians who were then under contract to Duke. These included Johnny Ace, Junior Parker, and Bobby Blue Bland. In addition to Peacock and Duke, Robey started the Song Bird and Back Beat labels, as well as the Buffalo Booking Agency, which was operated by his associate, Evelyn Johnson.

During the 1950s, Robey's Duke-Peacock sound rose to national prominence, but by the mid-1960s, his business started to wane. He tried to keep pace with the ever-changing popular music scene, and even recorded the White musician, Roy Head, who scored a hit with his song "Treat Her Right" on the Back Beat label. In 1973, Robey sold his recording and publishing interests to ABC/Dunhill.

Concurrent with the growth of Peacock Records, a new generation of Houston-bred rhythm-and-blues musicians began their careers, but were not recorded by Don Robey. These musicians included Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland, Joe Hughes, Johnny Watson, Cal and Clarence Green, and Pete Mayes. Playing at the Club Matinee, Shady's Playhouse, the Eldorado Ballroom, and other nightspots around Houston, these musicians emulated the music of T-Bone Walker and eventually developed their own distinctive performance styles.

Austin was slower to develop as a recording center than Dallas or Houston, although there is a long history of blues in Central Texas. In addition to rhythm-and-blues, Austin had also been the home of barrelhouse blues pianists Grey Ghost, Robert Shaw, and Lavada Durst, and of country blues guitarist Alfred (Snuff) Johnson. However, the relatively small Black population of Austin made the capital unappealing for record producers until the 1960s, when the "Austin Sound" began to attract national attention. With the influx of White musicians, including Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Ely, Angela Strehli, and Kim Wilson, the enthusiasm for blues grew significantly. The success of these musicians also benefited many older African-American blues musicians who gained a larger audience outside of their own community and performed at Antone's the Continental Club, and other venues near the University of Texas campus. In Austin, T-Bone Walker clearly had the biggest influence upon aspiring Black blues musicians, including Dooley Jordan, Jewel Simmons, and T. D. Bell. Bell himself also inspired younger blues artists, such as Herbert (Blues Boy) Hubbard and W. C. Clark. The Victory Grill, opened by Johnny Holmes on Victory over Japan Day, 1945 on East Eleventh Street was an important venue for local musicians as well as for nationally touring acts.

Over the last four decades, the interest in Texas blues has swelled, especially in the cities of Dallas, Austin, and Houston. As early as the 1960s, Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records was a major force in recording Texas blues musicians--from the barrelhouse blues of Robert Shaw and Alexander H. Moore to the country blues of Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, as well as the urban blues of Lil' Son Jackson and L.C. "Good Rockin'" Robinson, who was part of a generation of Texas musicians that moved to California in the 1940s and 1950s. In Austin, Antone's, opened in July 1975, continues to be a showcase of blues musicians from around the country, and Texas Folklife, founded as Texas Folklife Resources in 1984, has produced touring programs and public concerts. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin is an important repository for blues recordings, posters, photographs, and memorabilia in its numerous collections, including the John A. Lomax Family Papers, the Texas Music Collection, the Mance Lipscomb/ Glen Alyn Collection, and the William A. Owens Collection. In Houston, Juneteenth Blues Festival, started in 1976 by Lanny Steele, has been a major catalyst for the recognition of the blues musicians, not only in Texas, but also across the nation. Since 1985, Documentary Arts, a nonprofit organization in Dallas, has been involved in the documentation and preservation of Texas blues through the production of folk festivals, radio features, films, videos, audio recordings, and the development of educational outreach materials. In 1987 Dallas pianist Alex Moore became the first African American blues musician from Texas to receive a National Heritage Fellowship from the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts.

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The earliest reference to what might be considered blues in Texas was made in 1890 by collector Gates Thomas, who transcribed a song titled "Nobody There." Thomas doesn't mention whether the singing was accompanied by an instrument, but he does indicate that it was a pentatonic tune containing tonic, minor, third, fourth, fifth, and seventh chords, all of which combined to produce something similar to a blues tune.

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https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/african-americans

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People of African descent are some of the oldest residents of Texas. Beginning with the arrival of Estevanico in 1528, African Texans have had a long heritage in the state and have worked alongside Americans of Mexican, European, and indigenous descent to make the state what it is today. The African American experience and history in Texas has also been paradoxical. On the one hand, people of African descent have worked with others to build the state's unique cultural heritage, making extraordinary contributions to its music, literature, and artistic traditions. But on the other hand, African Americans have been subjected to slavery, racial prejudice, segregation, and exclusion from the mainstream of the state's institutions. Despite these obstacles and restrictions, their contributions to the state's development and growth have been truly remarkable.

From the beginning of European settlement in Texas, people of African descent were present. In 1528 Estevanico, a Moor, accompanied Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca across the territory known today as Texas. Estevanico was an important member of Cabeza de Vaca's expedition because he could interpret the languages of many of the Native Americans that it encountered. Along with other members of the expedition he was captured by Indians and enslaved for five years. After escaping, Estevanico and the surviving members of the expedition made their way to Mexico. In 1539 he accompanied a second expedition into the Southwest, seeking Cibolo or the "Seven Cities of Gold." This time he was killed by the Zuñi Indians and the expedition failed. Other pioneer Africans accompanied the Spanish into the Southwest, and some settled in the region known today as Texas. By 1792 Spanish Texas numbered thirty-four Blacks and 414 mulattoes. Some of them were free men and women.

Unlike Estevanico and some of the Africans who inhabited Texas prior to settlement by Anglo-Americans, most African Americans entered the area as slaves. The first Anglo-Americans who settled in Texas came from the southern United States and were accustomed to using enslaved Africans as an important source of labor. During the first fifteen years of Anglo-American settlement in Texas, from 1821 to the Texas Revolution of 1836, slavery grew very slowly. On the eve of the Revolution about 5,000 African Americans were enslaved in Texas (13 percent of the population). With independence from Mexico, however, Anglo-Americans made slavery an integral part of the Republic's and later the state's economic development, and the enslavement of African Americans grew rapidly. By 1840, 13,000 African Americans were enslaved in Texas. By 1850, 48,000 were enslaved, and by 1860, 169,000-30 percent of the Texas population. In this "empire for slavery," according to historian Randolph Campbell, the experience of enslaved African Americans was similar to that in other parts of the American South. The records gathered by Campbell as well as the testimony of African Americans enslaved in Texas attest to the fact that enslaved African Americans in Texas had as harsh and as easy a lot as those who were enslaved in other parts of the South. Two cases illustrate this fact. In 1861 a Canadian newspaper published the story of Lavinia Bell, a Black woman who had been kidnapped at an early age and sold into slavery in Texas. She escaped from bondage and told of being forced to work naked in the cottonfields near Galveston. She also told about how after her first escape attempt, she was physically mutilated and beaten severely by her owner. Other African Americans who were enslaved in Texas told similar stories of violence and cruelty by their owners. Hundreds sought to escape, especially to Mexico. But there were also cases such as that of Joshua Houston, who was owned by Texas patriot Sam Houston. Joshua, owned initially by Houston's second wife, became an important member of Houston's family. He was treated well, taught to read and write, and prepared well for his eventual emancipation by the Houston family. After the Civil War Joshua became a politician in Huntsville, and, as if to underscore his loyalty to his former owners, on one occasion he offered to lend money to Sam Houston's widow when she faced financial difficulties.

While the treatment of African Americans enslaved in Texas may have varied on the basis of the disposition of individual slaveowners, it was clear that White Texans in general accepted and defended slavery. Moreover, slavery in Texas had all of the characteristics that had made it successful in other parts of the South. For instance, slaveholders dominated the state's economic and political life. The government of the Republic of Texas and, after 1845, the state legislature passed a series of slave codes to regulate the behavior of African Americans who were enslaved and to restrict the rights of those who were free. The census counted about 400 free African Americans in 1860, although there may have been close to 1,000. Texas laws blocked the migration of free African Americans into the state. White Texans also restricted the civil liberties of White opponents of slavery in order to suppress dissent about the institution. When rumors of a slave insurrection circulated in the state in 1860, Texans virtually suspended civil liberties and due process. Suspected abolitionists were expelled from the state, and one was even hanged. A vigilante group in Dallas lynched three enslaved African Americans-Sam, Cato, and Patrick-who were suspected of starting a fire that burnt most of the downtown area. Other slaves in the county were whipped.

The Texas vote for secession in February 1861 hastened the end of slavery and set in motion the eventual liberation of the state's African-American population. Despite the objections of Sam Houston to joining a nation (the Confederate States of America) based on the enslavement of African Americans, White Texans voted three to one for secession. For African Americans in Texas, the Civil War brought freedom but it did not come until Juneteenth, June 19, 1865. In contrast to other parts of the South, where the approach of the Union Army encouraged thousands of enslaved African Americans to free themselves and run away, Texas African Americans remained enslaved until the end of the Civil War. Few were able to run away and enlist in the Union Army, as African- American men did in other parts of the South. Nor were they recruited to serve as soldiers in the all-White regiments that Texas sent to support the war effort of the Confederacy. Moreover, even after Union Army General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3 in Galveston on "Juneteenth," announcing the end of slavery in Texas, many African Americans still had to fight for their freedom from slavery for months because their "so-called owners" refused to accept their emancipation.

The Reconstruction era presented African American Texans another challenge. Many had to rebuild their lives, locate lost family members, and begin to live their lives as self-sufficient, free men and women. The establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau in the state aided this transition from slavery to freedom. But given the continuing racial animosity that separated Blacks and Whites after the war, this was not an easy task. The state legislature and several Texas cities passed Black Codes to restrict the rights of African Americans, to prevent them from having free access to public facilities, and to force them back to the rural areas as agricultural laborers. The use of the political and legal system to regulate African-American behavior and life was accompanied by a literal reign of terror in the state. According to the records of the Freedmen's Bureau, from 1865 to 1868 White Texans committed over 1,500 acts of violence against African Americans; Whites murdered over 370 African Americans. These acts of violence by Whites represented their attempts to reestablish White supremacy and to force African Americans back into their "place." In 1867 the United States Congress eliminated the Black Codes and sought to provide a modicum of personal safety for African Americans in Texas by imposing military rule and by enforcing strong federal measures such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and proposing the Fourteenth Amendment. These Congressional actions to protect African American rights ushered in the second phase of Reconstruction in the state. In this period African Americans made a substantial contribution to the transition of Texas from a slave-labor state to one based on free labor. Ten African American delegates at the Constitutional Convention of 1868-69 helped to write a new state constitution that protected civil rights, established the state's first public education system, and extended the franchise to all men. Between 1868 and 1900, forty-one African Americans served in the state legislature, and they helped to move the state toward democracy. African American Reconstruction leaders such as George T. Ruby and Norris Wright Cuney became important members of the Republican party and, along with other African Americans, dominated state Republican politics through the end of the nineteenth century. During the course of the Reconstruction period, many African Americans moved from the state's rural areas to cities such as Dallas, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. On the outskirts of these cities they established "freedmantowns," which became the distinct African American communities that still exist today. African American labor also contributed substantially to the economic development of these cities and helped the state to begin the transition from its near-total dependence on agriculture to industrialization. In 1879 a few thousand African American Texans moved to Kansas seeking greater opportunities. Other African American Texans participated in the postwar cattle boom ( see BLACK COWBOYS), while the presence on the frontier of African American soldiers, called Buffalo Soldiers by their Indian foes, exemplified the desire of many African Americans to act on their citizenship responsibilities by joining the military.

As in other parts of the South, Reconstruction lasted only a short time in Texas. White Democrats regained control of the state in 1873 and proceeded to reverse many of the democratic reforms instituted by Black and White Republicans. Between 1874 and 1900 the gains that African Americans had made in the political arena were virtually lost. In the 1890s, for example, more than 100,000 African Americans voted in Texas elections. But after the imposition of a poll tax in 1902 and the beginning of white primaries in 1903, fewer than 5,000 African Americans voted in 1906. In addition, racial segregation was established in all facets of public and private life in Texas for African Americans. In Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, public transportation and accommodations, schools, and, eventually, neighborhoods were segregated by law. African Americans in Houston and San Antonio challenged segregation on public transportation by forming their own bus and jitney companies. Dallas African Americans won a case in 1916 that overturned a residential segregation ordinance. But nothing succeeded in stemming the tide of segregation and violence that restricted the rights of African-American Texans by the early twentieth century. One form of violence used to enforce racial exclusion was lynchings, and the victims of lynchings, which did not end until the 1940s, were predominantly African American. Brutal and vicious acts of violence against African Americans, such as the "burning at the stake" of Jesse Washington in Waco in 1916 (called the "Waco Horror" by the NAACP; see JESSE WASHINGTON LYNCHING), happened too frequently for African Americans to live without some fear for their lives. Race riots , such as those in Houston in 1917 and Beaumont in 1943, destroyed African American neighborhoods. These race riots and lynchings combined with political disfranchisement and legal segregation to make African Americans less than second class citizens. As a result, several thousand African American Texans moved out of the state to the North and West in the early twentieth century. Although the percentage of Blacks in Texas fell to 20 percent of the population by 1900 and declined further in the twentieth century, their numbers grew to more than 600,000 in 1900 and 900,000 in 1940.

Despite their second-class status, African Americans built viable and progressive communities throughout the state. Almost immediately after Civil War, they established churches, schools, and other social organizations to serve their own needs. They established newspapers (the Dallas Express, Houston Informer, and San Antonio Register), grocery stores, funeral homes, and other business establishments that served a predominant African-American clientele. In the late nineteenth century African American farmers formed a cooperative to encourage African-American land ownership and to raise crop prices. From 1900 to 1940 a majority of African American Texans remained in farming, with about 20 percent owning their land while most rented farms as tenants. The Great Depression of the 1930s hastened the trend toward urbanization. In the same period African Americans in Dallas organized a cotton-processing mill, but it failed in less than five years. These self-help and economic development efforts by African American Texans indicate that they did not allow the oppression of White racism to deter them from striving to build successful communities. After the Civil War, African Americans also developed their first educational institutions. Black colleges such as Bishop, Paul Quinn, and Wiley were founded by several religious denominations, primarily Baptist and Methodist organizations. African-American churches such as Boll Street African Methodist Episcopal in Dallas also started the first schools in that city for Black children. The city of Houston provided schools for its African American citizens beginning in 1871. By 1888 the city government in Dallas followed suit.

African Americans also contributed to the state's social and cultural heritage in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Musicians such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter, Eddie Durham, Scott Joplin, and many others became innovators in blues, jazz,and ragtime. Singers such as Julius L. C. Bledsoe and Osceola Mays sang songs from the African-American folk tradition as well as their own contemporary compositions. Such writers as Maude Cuney-Hare, J. Mason Brewer, and Sutton Griggs wrote biographies and novels and recorded the folklore of African American Texans. Artist John Biggers of Houston became one of the nation's most important mural painters and an internationally recognized artist. In sports, such African American Texans as Charlie Taylor, Ernie Banks, Jack Johnson, and George Foreman earned national fame in football, baseball, and boxing,respectively. After the integration of the state's universities, African American athletes such as Earl Campbell of the University of Texas at Austin, Elvin Hayes of the University of Houston, and Jerry LeVias of Southern Methodist University had outstanding college athletic careers.

One of the most significant achievements of African Americans in the state was their participation in the Texas Centennial of 1936. This event was important because African Americans highlighted the contributions they had made to the state's and the nation's development. Through the efforts of A. Maceo Smith of the Dallas Negro Chamber of Commerce and Samuel W. Houston of Huntsville, the Hall of Negro Life was built at Fair Park in Dallas to bring to the state the works of Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas and Atlanta University artist Hale Woodruff, as well as to exhibit the paintings of Texas artists James Thibodeaux of Dallas, Samuel A. Countee of Houston, and Frank Sheinall of Galveston. More importantly, the Negro Day event held in Dallas on October 19, 1936, as the African American celebration of the Texas Centennial proved to be an important opportunity for African American Texans to meet and plan strategy to end the segregation and discrimination that they faced. Three organizations emerged from the Negro Day celebration of 1936: the Texas State Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Texas State Negro Chamber of Commerce, and the Texas Negro Peace Officers Association (now the Texas Peace Officers Association). All three organizations had as their objective to improve the lot of African Americans in Texas.

The Texas Centennial was indeed a watershed event for African Americans. After it they launched a campaign to win the citizenship rights that the state's segregation laws and racist tradition denied them. Texas African Americans won two of the nation's most significant civil rights cases. Through the selfless efforts and leadership of El Paso physician Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Houston activist R. R. Grovey, African Amercians challenged the state's white primary system three times from 1927 to 1935. Eventually, they won a Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright (1944), which declared the white primary unconstitutional. This landmark case won by African American Texans opened primaries for Blacks throughout the South. In 1950, African American Texans also won one of the major legal cases that eliminated segregation in the South's graduate and professional schools. The Sweatt v. Painter case, filed by Thurgood Marshall, legal counsel of the NAACP, and local NAACP attorney William J. Durham of Dallas, forced the University of Texas Law School to admit Black students. Although the Sweatt case was one of several cases that the NAACP filed to gain entry for African American students into graduate and professional schools, it also became one of the cases that laid the groundwork for the NAACP's challenge to segregation in public schools in the famous Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas case.

Despite the notion among some historians that Texas did not need a civil rights movement to end its legacy of racial discrimination, African Americans had to use both the courts and direct action in the 1950s and 1960s to win access to public services and accomodations throughout the state. Using a variety of methods, including negotiation and political activism, African American citizens won the right to sit on juries, equal pay for equal work for African American teachers, the elimination of residential segregation in the state's major cities, jobs on the police forces of Dallas and Fort Worth, open seating on public transportation throughout the state, and access to jobs in the public and private sectors. They also used sit-ins in Houston and Marshall to end segregation in public accommodations. By the mid-1960s, only one area of citizenship rights continued to elude African American Texans-serving in elective office. To overcome their exclusion from elective office, as well as to fight the white primary, poll taxes, and their legal disfranchisement, African American Texans formed organizations such as the Third Ward Civic Club and the Harris County Negro Democratic Club in Houston in the 1920s and 1930s, the Progressive Voters League in Dallas in 1936, and Charles Bellinger 's Negro Citizens Executive Committee in San Antonio in 1926 to mobilize the African American electorate and to influence White politicians to address their communities' needs.

In the 1950s and 1960s, African American Texans challenged this paternalistic arrangement and overcame their exclusion from elective office. In 1958 Houstonian Hattie Mae White became the first African American to win an elective office in the state since Reconstruction by winning a seat on the school board. But many citizens thought that she was White and voted for her in error. She served nine turbulent years on the Houston school board, fighting constantly to force other members of the board to implement court-ordered desegregation of the school system. After White's election, African American Texans did not win another elective office until 1966, when several African American candidates throughout the state won political races. Among the pioneers were Joseph Lockridge of Dallas and Curtis Graves of Houston, who won seats in the state House of Representatives, and Barbara Jordan of Houston, who won a seat in the Texas Senate. In 1967 Emmett Conrad became the first African American elected to a local office in Dallas (school board) and in 1971 Judson Robinson, Jr. became Houston's first African American city councilman since Reconstruction. A year later, Houstonians elected Barbara Jordan to the United States House of Representatives. Thus, she was the first African American in Texas history to represent the state in Congress.

Barbara Jordan's election symbolized the progress that Blacks had made in the state after over 100 years of racial segregation and exclusion. Despite the lingering effects of the old racist and segregationist legacy, African Americans continued to achieve in both the private and public spheres in the state. They won elective office on the city, county, and statewide levels. In 1992, for example, Morris Overstreet of Amarillo became the first African American to win a statewide office when he was elected a judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. In 1995 Ron Kirk became the first African American mayor in Dallas and in 1998 Lee P. Brown became the first African American to serve as mayor in Houston. In 1985 John Wiley Price became Dallas County's first African-American county commissioner and El Franco Lee became the first African American to win a seat on the Harris County Commissioner's Court. In 2007 Attorney Craig Watkins became the state's first African American district attorney when he won the office in Dallas County. Four African American Texans-Mickey Leland (Houston, 1979-1989), Craig Washington (Houston, 1989-1995), Shelia Jackson Lee (Houston, 1995-present), and Eddie Bernice Johnson (Dallas, 1993-present) have represented the state in the U. S. House of Representatives since 1979.

Employment opportunities have also increased significantly for African American Texans, especially in the larger urban areas such as Dallas and Houston. Since 1983, for instance, Dallas and Houston have ranked consistently in Black Enterprise magazine's "ten best cities for Blacks" because of the social, political, and economic opportunities available for African Americans. In addition, African Americans have continued to participate in the state's social and cultural life and to add their creative talents to the state's as well as the nation's artistic development. Two of many examples are the works added to American literature by Houston playwright and author Ntozake Shange and short story writer J. California Cooper of East Texas. Shange's work "for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf" played on Broadway and toured the country for several years. Her novels Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo (1982) and Betsey Brown (1985) were national best-sellers. Cooper's short stories in A Piece of Mine (1984) and Family (1991) also earned her national acclaim. In addition, musical icons such as Beyonce Knowles of Houston and Erykah Badu of Dallas have won Grammy and other national awards for their music in the jazz, rhythm and blues, and pop genres.

These achievements were the result of African American Texans' ongoing struggle for equal opportunity and human dignity. African Americans have lived in the area known as Texas as long as any other ethnic group except Native Americans. Throughout their history in the state, they have contributed their blood, sweat, and hard labor to make Texas what it has become in the twenty-first century. In 2011 over 3,000,000 African Americans lived in Texas, but they formed only 12 percent of the state's population. Two-thirds of African American Texans lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metropolitan areas. Nearly one million African Americans were spread across the state from Texarkana to El Paso and Amarillo to Corpus Christi. They made up significant parts of the populations in Beaumont, Port Arthur, Austin, and San Antonio. Their contributions to the history and culture of these smaller cities were just as significant as in those in the major metropolitan areas of the state. Overall, no matter where they lived in the state, African American citizens had to work and struggle to overcome and reverse the negative aspects of the previous 450 years. In 2013 they have made major progress toward overcoming the historic paradox that made them some of the state's most productive and creative citizens, but also some of its most oppressed.

See also ANTEBELLUM TEXAS, TEXAS TROUBLES, SLAVE INSURRECTIONS, ABOLITION, ELECTION LAWS, BLACK EXTENSION SERVICE, COLORED FARMERS' ALLIANCE, FARM TENANCY, and DALLAS BLACK CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.

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People of African descent are some of the oldest residents of Texas. Beginning with the arrival of Estevanico in 1528, African Texans have had a long heritage in the state and have worked alongside Americans of Mexican, European, and indigenous descent to make the state what it is today.

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Immigrants line up to enter the central bus station after they were processed and released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection on June 24 in McAllen, Tex. (David J. Phillip/AP)

Nearly every major media outlet last week ran the image of a small girl wailing as she watched her mother patted down by a faceless Border Patrol agent. The gripping photo of the 2-year-old Honduran asylum seeker quickly became a viral symbol of the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy that separated children from their parents. Even Trump acknowledged that the images were " bad for us."

As public outrage over the policy grew, the administration defensively released photos of older boys held in chain link enclosures, also known as cages.

These photographs vividly contrast the varying ways in which immigrants can be portrayed.

Immigration boiled over last week. Here's what Congress did - and why.

Our recent research shows that U.S. media often show immigrants the way that the Trump administration sees them: as males in detention facilities and in Border Patrol's custody. That influences Americans' attitudes toward those migrants. The current emphasis on showing children has offered a sympathetic portrayal of immigrant families that may be less common, according to our data.

Here's how we did our research

Words and images influence the way people perceive and evaluate policies. That's demonstrated by a large body of research revealing that how news stories frame immigration - who they show and how they show it - significantly influences public policy preferences on the issue. In fact, negative media portrayals of immigrants and immigration may shift white voters toward the Republican Party, the party currently associated with anti-immigrant positions. U.S. English-language news sources often offer negative story lines about immigrants, emphasizing a Latino threat.

In our article " Picturing immigration: how the media criminalizes immigrants," we explore whether news stories show photos that depict U.S. immigrants negatively. Photographs are often interpreted as objective evidence, and readers are more likely to remember images than words.

The extraordinary unpopularity of Trump's family separation policy (in one graph)

We created a database of immigration images from three national news magazines - Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report - and then analyzed the images to understand how that portion of the press presents immigrants. To be sure, our research focuses on images in just one medium - national news magazines. However, what we found is consistent with recent analyses of rhetoric used to describe immigrants in newspapers and television as well. That suggests that these three magazines offer a representative look at how the news media more generally presents immigrants.

We compiled 338 images from 181 immigration news stories that these three publications ran between 2000 and 2010 - a period of intense, as-yet-unresolved immigration debate. We examined all articles that mentioned immigrants or immigration, including stories about both legal and undocumented immigrants. The articles in our data set covered a wide range of topics, from the plight of refugees and unauthorized immigrants brought to the U.S. at a young age by their parents (often called DREAMers) to broader policy debates about the economics of immigration, day laborers and border security. We analyzed each image, recording such details as the race, ethnicity and gender of the immigrants depicted; signs of criminality; presence of the border or other border imagery; and immigrants' apparent work status - low- or high-skilled. For more details on our coding, see our article.

The press frequently portrays immigrants negatively

Our analysis confirms that through their choice of images, these news magazines reinforce the narrative of a " Latino threat," portraying immigrants as criminals unable or unwilling to integrate into the U.S.

We found images of illegality and criminality at a rate far higher than actually occurs in the U.S.'s immigrant population. For instance, while less than a quarter of immigrants in the U.S. are unauthorized, 54 percent of the images we analyzed portrayed undocumented immigrants, including photographs of immigrants illegally crossing the border or in custody of immigration officials. Immigrants were frequently portrayed in detention facilities, implying criminality. That's despite research showing that immigrants - both those here legally and those who are undocumented - are less likely to commit crimes.

Does separating families at the border discourage immigration? Here's what the research says.

While the articles in our database related to all aspects of immigration policy, enforcement also features prominently; 40 percent of all images included at least one indicator of border enforcement or the border. For example, the image accompanying the 2006 Newsweek article " Return to Sender" shows a line of men in handcuffs, connected by chains around their ankles, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers watch them board a plane. Although Asian immigration increased steadily during this period while Mexican immigration declined, the U.S.-Mexico border featured prominently in the images we reviewed.

These outlets also misrepresent immigrants in other ways consistent with a threat narrative. In a working paper, we find that like the photos depicting only boys in detention, media portrayals of immigrants similarly highlight Latino men. Only half of immigrants to the U.S. were of Latino descent in 2005; approximately three-quarters of those in the images we analyzed were identified as Latino.

Among nearly all racial and ethnic groups, male immigrants were pictured more often than female. This gap was largest among images of Latino immigrants, which showed only 21.5 percent women - although in fact, 49 percent of Latino immigrants were women as of 2010.

Our findings are similar to that of Martin Gilens and Bas W. van Doorn, political scientists whose research finds that news media are far more likely to portray poor people as black than white, despite the fact that there are more poor whites. We find that the media typically over-represents Latino men in comparison to their presence in the general immigrant population.

In other words, the current wave of images of women and children at the border is unique.

Why does the portrayal of immigrants matter?

Does it matter whether the Trump administration's pictures of immigrants primarily featured anonymous teenage boys rather than girls or toddlers? Yes. Evidence suggests that the "Latino threat" narrative adds to hostility about immigration in the U.S. Portraying teenage boys may reinforce the Trump administration's frequent efforts to imply that Latino immigrants are overwhelmingly involved in MS-13 criminal gangs. Empathetic images of girls and crying toddlers do not fit with Trump's portrayal of immigrants as " bad hombres."

How dangerous is it when Trump calls some immigrants 'animals'?

Even Trump noted discomfort with the " sight or feeling of families being separated." As Trump's positions change, the news media may wish to show women and children more often if it wants to more accurately portray immigration.

Emily M. Farris (@emayfarris) is an assistant professor of political science and comparative race and ethnic studies at Texas Christian University, focusing on U.S. local politics and racial and ethnic politics.

Heather Silber Mohamed(@HeatherSilberMo) is an assistant professor of political science at Clark University, and the author of "The New Americans?: Immigration, Protest, and the Politics of Latino Identity" (University Press of Kansas, 2017).

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Analysis | The news media usually show immigrants as dangerous criminals. That's changed - for now, at least.

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Nearly every major media outlet last week ran the image of a small girl wailing as she watched her mother patted down by a faceless Border Patrol agent. The gripping photo of the 2-year-old Honduran asylum seeker quickly became a viral symbol of the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy that separated children from their parents.

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"Latinos vastly underrepresented in media, new report finds" PBS

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"Latinos vastly underrepresented in media, new report finds" PBS

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Latinos vastly underrepresented in media, new report finds

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A new government report has found that Latinos are vastly underrepresented in newsrooms, Hollywood films and TV and other media industries.

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"Hispanics And Latinos Are The Biggest Moviegoers. The Big Screen Doesn't Reflect That" National Public Radio

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"Hispanics And Latinos Are The Biggest Moviegoers. The Big Screen Doesn't Reflect That" National Public Radio

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The signs that it's officially Hispanic Heritage Month are all around us, be it a Google Doodle or an annual film festival.

But the national attention paid to Latinos and Hispanics this time of year belies a persistent reality, according to a new report: Latino and Hispanic Americans are still underrepresented and poorly represented in popular films.

Released on the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month (which ends in mid-October) the report from USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative surveyed leading Hispanic and Latino actors and characters with speaking parts across 1,300 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2019. The report's authors also assessed the number of Hispanic and Latino directors, casting directors and producers.

"As companies celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month through online posts, events, and employee resource groups," Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founder Stacy Smith said in a statement, "the evidence is clear that concern for inclusion happens when convenient or expected and not when it comes to greenlighting films by, for, and about the Hispanic/Latino community."

Hispanic and Latino people make up nearly 1 in 5 of the U.S. population. In the county home to Hollywood, over half of Angelenos are Hispanic and Latino.

They also go to the movies more than any other group. Hispanic and Latino Americans have the highest per-capita theater attendance among all ethnicities in the country, according to a 2019 report from the Motion Picture Association of America.

Here are some of the key findings from the Annenberg report.

Hispanics/Latinos are rarely cast in a lead role

Just 7% of major films in 2019 featured a lead Hispanic or Latino actor. When it comes to speaking or named roles, about 6% of characters cast that year were Hispanic or Latino - not even a full percentage increase in representation when compared across the total 13 years of hit films.

A Hollywood diversity push hasn't advanced Latinos and Hispanics

Actors of color have landed more high-profile roles in the years following backlash campaigns to boost diversity in Hollywood, like #OscarsSoWhite. Yet in 2019, USC Annenberg found, Hispanics and Latinos trailed all ethnic groups when it came to on-screen time.

Hispanic and Latino characters continue to perpetuate negative stereotypes

When they are seen on screen, Hispanics and Latinos are often typecast in roles that involve criminality, poverty or immigration, according to the USC report. More than one-third of lead Hispanic and Latino actors in 2019's biggest movies were depicted as criminals.

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Hispanics And Latinos Are The Biggest Moviegoers. The Big Screen Doesn't Reflect That

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The signs that it's officially Hispanic Heritage Month are all around us, be it a Google Doodle or an annual film festival.

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"Latino misrepresentation in the entertainment industry results from lack of Latino representation in the media" Texas Public Radio

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"Latino misrepresentation in the entertainment industry results from lack of Latino representation in the media" Texas Public Radio

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Latinos are one of the fastest growing demographics in the U.S., but this population continues to be severely underrepresented in the media industry including TV, film, news and publishing.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform commissioned a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which found Latinos make up 12% of all workers in this industry.

That translates to approximately 14% in radio and TV broadcasting, 16% in the film and video industry, 5% of all speaking characters on screen between 2007 and 2019 and 4% of film directors.

Contrarily, Latinos make up more of the service and custodial workforce within the media industry, such as those who provide security, food preparation and cleaning services.

"I think the Latino narrative in the United States is missing from the larger American narrative," said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, who sits on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus' advisory council. "I'm convinced after all of this work and my experiences in the past that Americans really don't know who Latinos are. They don't know who among us has made important contributions to the success or the prosperity or the development of the United States."

National Press Club - Twitter

For the Latinos who do belong to the small pool of public representation, some are concerned stereotypes continue to be perpetuated and network executives fail to depict relatable experiences that resonate with a diverse Latino audience.

Ricardo Chavira, actor and South Texas Native, was acutely aware of this while portraying Abraham Quintanilla in Netflix's Selena: The Series.

"I was so happy to do it, I love that story," said Chavira. "Now, take the movie that was done 25, 26 years prior to (the series), look at all those years in between and name me a television show or a movie about another South Texas Mexican-American story."

The normality of Latino experiences and how often they align with generalized American life, Chavira argued, is a narrative less valued by the media industry but an important step in achieving diverse representation.
TPR was founded by and is supported by our community. If you value our commitment to the highest standards of responsible journalism and are able to do so, please consider making your gift of support today.

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Latino misrepresentation in the entertainment industry results from lack of Latino representation in the media

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Latinos are one of the fastest growing demographics in the U.S., but this population continues to be severely underrepresented in the media industry including TV, film, news and publishing. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform commissioned a report by the U.S.

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"More Than Just an Image: Pop Culture Representations of Latinxs and the Immigration Debate" Augustana College

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"More Than Just an Image: Pop Culture Representations of Latinxs and the Immigration Debate" Augustana College

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How has migration affected mariachi music in Texas?

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How has migration affected mariachi music in Texas?

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I think one way migration has affected mariachi music is the more people that have written that type of music while living in Mexico, will bring it over to Texas and it begins to morph and develop into new types of Mariachi genres.

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Words matter: Representation of Mexican immigrants in newspapers from Mexico and the United States

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Immigration is a persevering topic worldwide. Millions of people move from their place of origin to another location in the world looking for, what they hope, is a better life. This constant worldwide migration has been part of humanity since its inception. Today people have many reasons to emigrate…

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"Hispanic Stereotypes in Contemporary Film" Georgia Southern University

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"Hispanic Stereotypes in Contemporary Film" Georgia Southern University

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"Hispanic and Latino Representation in Film:Erasure On Screen & Behind the Camera Across 1,300 Popular Movies" 

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"Hispanic and Latino Representation in Film:Erasure On Screen & Behind the Camera Across 1,300 Popular Movies" 

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Teaching young children a second language is beneficial in many ways.

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Anyone can learn a new language. Some people find it easier than others, but all of us can do it. Learn more about becoming bilingual.

On this page:

Children can learn to speak more than one language. They can learn languages at home, at school, or in the community. Some children can speak both languages easily. But sometimes they know one language better than the other. The language your child knows better is her dominant language. Over time, the dominant language may change. For example, a child who speaks Spanish at home may start to use English when she starts school. Her dominant language could change from Spanish to English.

Speaking two languages is like any other skill. You need a lot of practice to do it well. Without practice, your child will have a harder time using both languages.

Teaching Your Child To Be Bilingual

There are a number of ways to teach your child to speak more than one language. You can:

Use two languages from the start. Many children grow up learning two languages at the same time.

Use only one language at home. Your child can learn the second language when he starts school.

Give your child many chances to hear and practice both languages during the day.

Learning More Than One Language

Every bilingual child is unique. Learning two languages depends on the amount and type of practice your child gets. The following are some basic guidelines:

Most bilingual children speak their first words by the time they are 1 year old. By age 2, most children can use two-word phrases. Phrases like "my ball" or "more juice" can be in one or both languages.

From time to time, children may mix grammar rules. They might use words from both languages in the same sentence. This is a normal part of becoming bilingual.

Some children may not talk much when they start using a second language. This "silent period" can last for several months. Again, this is normal and will go away.

Ways To Help Your Child Become Bilingual

Books. You can read to your child in both languages. You can find the books you need at bookstores, at libraries, and on the Internet.

Music. Singing is a great way to introduce a second language to your child. And, it can be a lot of fun!

TV and videos. Children's programs are available in many languages. These programs teach children about numbers, letters, colors, and simple words.

Language programs. Children can learn other languages at camps or in bilingual school programs. These give children the chance to use two languages with other children.

Talking With Your Child

Your child might have trouble using both languages. In this case, talk to your child in the language you know best. You should do this even if your child uses a different language at school. A good language model gives your child the skills he needs to learn other languages. But try not to make a sudden change in your child's routine. This can be stressful.

Remember, children all over the world learn more than one language all the time. Learning another language will not cause or worsen speech or language problems. Bilingual children develop language skills just as other children do.

If your child starts having trouble in both languages, he may need help from a speech-language pathologist, or SLP. To find a speech-language pathologist near you, visit ProFind.

Other Resources

This list does not include every website on this topic. ASHA does not endorse the information on these sites.

Learn More

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Anyone can learn a new language. Some people find it easier than others, but all of us can do it. Learn more about becoming bilingual. On this page: Children can learn to speak more than one language. They can learn languages at home, at school, or in the community.

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Leer en español The USA TODAY Network is launching a series on the Latino community in the USA called Hecho en USA, or made in America. Roughly 80% of all Latinos living in the USA are American citizens, but media coverage of Hispanics tends to focus on immigration and crime, instead of how Latino families live, work and learn in their hometowns. Hecho en USA tells the stories of the nation's 59.9 million Latinos - a growing economic and cultural force, many of whom are born in the USA.
LOS ANGELES - Preschool teacher Rosa Ramirez has a special way of asking her students to line up for playtime outside.

"Pueden pararse si llevan puesto algo de color amarillo, como una abeja," she tells them.

In English, Ramirez would say, "You can stand up if you are wearing yellow - like a bee." But this is the half of the school day in which she teaches exclusively in Spanish.

Her students are not confused by her language choice. Most of the 4-year-olds wearing even a smidgen of yellow stand up as instructed.

The preschool dual-language program at Gates Street Early Education Center in Lincoln Heights, one of Los Angeles' oldest neighborhoods with dense populations of Latino and Asian residents, is part of a growing number of bilingual education models taking root in California and across the country. Many of them are designed to serve students from Spanish-speaking families, as well as students from other cultures, under mounting evidence that learning two languages can help people from all backgrounds become stronger students.

Roughly 3.8 million students in U.S. schools are native Spanish-speakers who are not proficient in English. They make up the bulk of the approximately 5 million students nationwide identified as English language learners, the fastest-growing demographic in schools - and the lowest-performing, as judged by achievement tests and graduation rates.

Sixty-seven percent of students with limited English skills graduated high school after four years in 2016, compared with 84% of all students, according to federal data.

Language experts recommend how to improve those outcomes: More high-quality, long-term dual-language programs can close the achievement gap in literacy between English learners and native English speakers after five to six years, according to research.

The programs can be tough to implement. Hurdles include a debate over the best way to teach English learners, public hostility against those who speak a native language other than English, shortages of bilingual teachers and even the fact that dual-language programs often grow fastest in areas where upper-income parents ask for them. That's good for children who participate, but it worries advocates who want to see language-minority students have equal access.

Pressure is mounting in states where numbers of Latino English learners have surged. Mississippi, South Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas and Maryland have seen the number of English learners more than double from 2005 to 2015, according to federal data.

"If we can make children feel more whole and more ready and more accepted and welcomed and validate their prior knowledge and prior learning experiences, then we've gone a long way to making them ready to learn over the course of a lifetime," says Tara Fortune, immersion program director at the University of Minnesota's Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition.

What's the best way to teach language skills to students?

From 2000 to 2015, the percentage of Latino students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools swelled from 16% to 26%. The percentage of white students fell from 61% to 49%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Federal law requires districts to identify students with limited English skills and to serve them with an equitable, research-based program. Practices vary widely between states and districts.

Some schools use transitional bilingual programs, which teach academics such as science, math and social studies in Spanish for a few years before transitioning students to mainstream classes.

Many use English as a Second Language instruction, a set of methods and techniques originally developed to teach English to foreign diplomats and university students. Instruction happens in English, and teachers have to be certified.

Then there are "English-only" models, which call for separating language-minority children and having them learn all subjects only in English.

"It's very political because the public doesn't really understand the process of second language acquisition," says Maria Coady, an associate professor of bilingual education at the University of Florida, a state where almost 300,000 students are learning English.

"But the research is really clear on what works," she says. "Students learning English benefit from high-quality, long-term bilingual instruction programs."

Nationwide, there were about 3,000 dual-language programs as of 2015, says Santiago Wood, executive director of the National Association for Bilingual Education. That's a big increase over about 300 operating around 2001, he says, but not enough to help the surging numbers of English learners.

In some districts, the popularity of dual-language programs has led to concerns that English learners, who often come from lower-income families, will be pushed out by native English speakers from more affluent families.

At Oyster-Adams Bilingual School in Washington, for example, just 24% of students are English learners, according to school data.

Oyster's program was created to serve the Latino population, but gentrification over the past 40 years drove low-income families from the neighborhood, says Vanessa Bertelli, co-founder of a grassroots organization that advocates for more dual-language programs.

"There are more than 10,000 students learning English in D.C., and even if every one of those students enrolled in a dual-immersion school, there wouldn't be enough seats for them," says Bertelli of the DC Language Immersion Project.

"There's a lot of energy wasted on trying to allocate the pie, when what we should be doing is making more pies," she says.

Learning 'English by osmosis' does not work for most students

The USA has a complicated history when it comes to Spanish in public schools.

The country does not have an official language, but for many decades, some states made English the law of their land by embracing practices that restricted or punished children for speaking a language other than English in schools.

"The idea was time on task: put 'em in there, and they'll learn English by osmosis," Coady says. "Sometimes that works for very young kids. But for a 10th grader coming into high school only speaking Mandarin who needs to graduate in three years? There's no way that child has equitable access."

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a focus on English-only instruction became more pronounced as a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment led to ballot initiatives in several states that effectively outlawed teaching in multiple languages.

California voters approved a ban on bilingual education in public schools in 1998. Known as the policy barred many children of Latino immigrants and Latino immigrant children from bilingual education, says Proposition 227, Ramon Martinez, an assistant professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education in California.

Led by California businessman Ron Unz and supported by the lobbying group ProEnglish, which favors English-only classes and the adoption of English as the official language of state and national government, similar restrictive bans passed in Arizona and Massachusetts.

Ramirez, the Gates Early Learning preschool teacher, was a student in East Los Angeles during the ban in California. She was taught in Spanish and English through second grade before Proposition 227 went into effect when she was about 8. After that, she struggled.

"I remember my third grade, I just kind of shut down because I had an idea and comprehended English, but I didn't feel confident to speak it," Ramirez says, holding back tears. "Now coming back and working where I grew up, I feel like many years ago I was where my kids are now. I want to make sure they don't go through the lack of confidence I faced because of the language."

California voters repealed the state's ban on bilingual education in 2016. Massachusetts overturned its English-only instruction law in 2017. Arizona officials, many of whom fought fervently for years to keep Spanish instruction out of public schools, are watering down its law, in part because outcomes for English learners there have been dismal.

At last count by the federal Department of Education, Arizona had the lowest graduation rate for English learners of all states: In 2016, only 32% of them graduated in four years.

"Our English language learner population was performing worse on tests than our special education population," says Republican state Sen. Paul Boyer, a part-time teacher who supported efforts to change the law to help students learning English.

English learners make progress

The city of Vineland, New Jersey, about an hour south of Philadelphia, represents changing U.S. demographics. More than 60% of the 11,000 students in Vineland Public Schools are Latino, reflecting a long-standing Puerto Rican community and a swell of migrants from Central America in recent years. Many of those new arrivals are teens who came without their parents and have no recent history of attending school.

Some of the school's parents work in the surrounding eggplant and cauliflower fields during the day. Some are highly transient, migrating with the seasons wherever the work is.

Like many districts in New Jersey, Vineland hosts a transitional bilingual program for students who arrive with limited English skills. This year, about 800 students are enrolled. They learn their core academics in Spanish - often right next door to classes where the same content is taught in English - but they have time built into the day for speaking, reading and writing in English.

More: Vineland ESL, bilingual programs win state honors

During the first week of school this fall at Vineland High School, students in a 10th grade bilingual algebra class solved problems written on the board while their teacher wandered around, greeting students and checking their homework.

"Did you finish them all, Rafael?" she asked one student in English.

She turned and saw that another had neglected to carry a negative number through an equation. She tapped the student's answer: "Y un negativo, no?" she said.

Vineland's bilingual program has been bolstered by JoAnne Negrin, supervisor of bilingual education. Since she was hired seven years ago, she made sure that all new textbook purchases were available in both Spanish and English, so students in the bilingual program could learn at the same pace as their English-speaking peers.

She made sure bilingual teachers in the lower grades weren't delivering the same lessons in both languages over the course of the day.

"If you're repeating lessons every day, you're never going to help these children make progress," Negrin says.

Vineland's English learners show some of the highest academic improvement scores in the district, she says. Last year, the students met all the targets outlined on the state report cards.

"People sometimes question, 'How are students going to learn English if they spend the whole day learning in Spanish?' " Negrin says. "Well, our data shows that proficiency in literacy in the child's first language is a very good indicator of how well that child is going to eventually learn English."

Other small victories are happening. Kevin Sanchez, 17, who arrived from the Dominican Republic last year with limited English, won first place in a regional science fair after investigating how windmills worked and building a model of one.

Sanchez almost backed out from the fair when he learned that participants were required to make an oral presentation to the judges. Encouraged by his bilingual science teacher, Sanchez enlisted a friend to translate for him.

"It felt really good that a student like me could win in a fair like that," Sanchez says in Spanish.

Negrin, who grew up as a bilingual child abroad, translates for him.

"So often people look at bilingual programs as remedial programs," she says as Sanchez returns to his English as a Second Language class. "But here you have a kid winning a science fair. There's nothing remedial about that."

Bilingual teachers in short supply, high demand

Another major barrier to starting or expanding dual-language programs is the critical shortage nationwide of teachers who can speak and teach in Spanish and English.

More than 30 states reported critical shortages in English as a Second Language teachers and world language teachers.

As a result, more districts groom their bilingual teachers, either by helping staff achieve the necessary certifications or by encouraging former bilingual students to come back and teach.

In Texas' Rio Grande Valley, close to the U.S.-Mexican border, one district and a nearby university tried to bolster the pipeline of bilingual students becoming bilingual educators.

The Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District serves a nearly all-Latino population of 32,000 students. The district has long supported a dual-language, Spanish-English program in all its elementary schools, which has helped close the gap in the early grades for those who are learning English. Students can choose to continue in the bilingual program in high school.

After students graduate, they can continue their bilingual studies in Spanish and English at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.

The university added a minor in bilingual secondary education, says Janine Schall, chair of the bilingual and literacy studies department.

"Most of our students come from the local community and plan to return to teach in local K-12 schools after graduation," Schall said.

The university can't expand fast enough, she says. Would-be bilingual teachers often face challenges such as the cost of their education and the tests they have to take to become certified in bilingual education.

"We know that there's a greater need for bilingual education teachers than we can meet right now," Schall says.

Dual-language programs grow in Los Angeles

About 15,000 students were enrolled in the Los Angeles public schools' Spanish/English dual-language programs last year. About two-thirds of those students came from Spanish-speaking households, the others were native English speakers, according to district data.

Nearby, the University of California, Los Angeles' Lab School has hosted its dual-language immersion progr am since 2013. As a private school operated by the university's Graduate School of Education, the Lab School wasn't beholden to California's law that banned bilingual instruction in public schools.

About 40% of students in the program speak Spanish at home.

Elena Perez, a bilingual preschool teacher there, says immersing Spanish-speaking children in their native language empowers them and helps them excel past their regular education peers academically, socially and emotionally.

Her classroom features a gigantic world map, and strings and pins link students to the countries from which their families immigrated, such as Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. One morning, the class sang and swayed to the Spanish folk song "De colores."

Outside learning spaces designed to instill cultural pride, Latino students face a world full of structural barriers and racial inequalities, language experts say. They want lawmakers to pay attention to the research and make policy changes that better position English learners to succeed.

"People talk about closing the achievement gap, but it's more closing the opportunity gap," Perez says. "It's important that we come back to the original purpose of dual language, which is to serve the marginalized population."
Contributing: USA TODAY intern Jared Weber Education coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation does not provide editorial input.

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More US schools teach in English and Spanish, but not enough to help Latino kids

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Leer en español The USA TODAY Network is launching a series on the Latino community in the USA called Hecho en USA, or made in America. Roughly 80% of all Latinos living in the USA are American citizens, but media coverage of Hispanics tends to focus on immigration and crime, instead of how Latino families live, work and learn in their hometowns.

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Mexican mariachi music is made to move you. It is direct, driving, and designed to instill emotion. Happy, sad, proud, angry, desolate, romance-stricken, and rebellious are some of the moods inspired by its extroverted singers, suave harmonies, and romping rhythms. "Mariachi" means a certain repertoire of music, a special grouping of instruments, and a distinctive style of singing that create an unmistakable sound unique in the world. It has special meaning for many Mexican Americans as an emblem of their cultural heritage and a source of pride and community connections. And since the days of the Chicano Movement beginning in the 1960s, it has become a movimiento of its own, attracting millions of fans and music makers throughout the USA.

The History of Mariachi

Mariachi music has origins deep in Mexican history. The sound of its string instruments and its oldest rhythms are rooted in Mexico's colonial times (1519-1810); people from Spain and African slaves and their descendants mingled with hundreds of American Indian cultures to create a new Mexican culture marked by many regions, each with its own signature musical tradition. The music that was called "mariachi" as early as the 1850s emerged from the ranches and small towns of western Mexico, particularly in the states of Jalisco, Michoacán, Nayarit, Colima, and Aguascalientes.

When big-city radio stations, movie studios, and record companies took mariachi music to new audiences throughout Mexico and abroad beginning in the 1930s, mariachi music was transformed into one of Latin America's favorite musics. By the 1950s, its standard sound of two trumpets, three or more violins, vihuela (small guitar), and guitarrón (big bass guitar) was set. Since then, its repertoire of fast-paced sones, expressive canciones rancheras ("country" songs), polkas, syncopated huapangos, romantic boleros, and more has been heard throughout the Americas and around the world.

Mariachi in the USA

Today, mariachi ensembles are part of musical life in every country of the Americas. The USA, the Southwest in particular, is home to many thousands of mariachi musicians, and hundreds of schools host mariachi education programs. In the USA, mariachi music is just as likely to be performed in major concert halls by tightly rehearsed concert groups as it is at birthday parties, wedding receptions, baptism celebrations, and restaurants by workaday professional groups. Dozens of major annual mariachi festivals featuring local and internationally renowned groups attract audiences of thousands-both Mexican Americans who might embrace the music as a symbol of their cultural heritage and others who simply enjoy the hard-hitting, lively sounds of the music.

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¡Que Viva el Mariachi! Music, Meaning, and Movimiento

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Mariachi music is made to move you. It is direct, driving, and designed to instill emotion. Happy, sad, proud, angry, desolate, romance-stricken, and rebellious are some of the moods inspired by its extroverted singers, suave harmonies, and romping rhythms. "Mariachi" means a certain repertoire of

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Among the glories of Texas is its music, which is as diverse and vital as the state and its people. Woven into the musical fabric are country, blues, jazz, spirituals, gospel, rock 'n' roll, Tex-Mex, Cajun and the music of Czechs, Germans and other European immigrants.

These forms have not only coexisted, they have evolved and cross-pollinated as Texas has changed, becoming steadily more urban. Texas is the birthplace of Western swing, which incorporates elements of country, blues, pop, big-band jazz and Latin rhythms, and of conjunto, which combines traditional Mexican music with polkas and other European forms. Texas has nurtured zydeco, the music of French-speaking blacks, which has increasingly incorporated elements of rhythm and blues.

In Texas, you can catch a performance by Steve Jordan, who has been called the Jimi Hendrix of the button accordion. Or you can walk into a honky-tonk where a country singer in a cowboy hat is borrowing a verse from Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson about a woman who "may be in Ethiopia somewhere."

To many people, Texas music means country, so that seems an appropriate place to begin.
Country music
The white Americans who began to settle in Texas in the 1820s came primarily from elsewhere in the South, bringing with them the religious and secular music they had heard at home. Generally the music they listened to for entertainment and dancing was played on guitars, banjos and fiddles. Even here, the music was hardly a pure Anglo-Saxon strain. The banjo is apparently of African origin, and the fiddle has long had an identification with black as well as white musicians and was widely known as the devil's instrument - apparently because when a fiddle was playing, it was hard to keep still.

Distinctive regional characteristics developed in this transplanted music. Texas fiddlers generally use a relatively slow tempo and long, single-note bow strokes, permitting more variations on the melody. They tend to complement the rhythmic background provided by a guitar and possibly other instruments. Guitarists, too, developed their own style, using swinging rhythms and a greater variety of chords than the traditional I-IV-V progression that is standard in so much folk and dance music, black and white. These instrumental styles laid the groundwork for the Western swing and honky-tonk music of the 20th century.

These early Texas white musicians played primarily for dancing, often in people's homes. On a weekend night, furniture would be cleared out of several rooms for dancing to the music of local players. These were seldom professional musicians, but were usually fellow farmers who played as a sideline for a modest sum. Many also participated in fiddling contests, fierce competitions in which they honed their skills and enhanced their reputations. Often dancers moved to the music of just fiddle and guitar.

But sometimes musicians played in larger ensembles called string bands, which included instruments such as mandolin and banjo. In addition, particularly after the Civil War, Texans were exposed to musical entertainment through traveling tent and medicine shows, where they heard comedians (often in blackface) and popular songs of the day. And they heard the music of African-Americans, who sometimes performed for their masters on the plantation and sang to pass the time as they labored, both during and after slavery. Though most worship was segregated, many whites also had some exposure to African-American worship services, with their joyous interaction of preacher and congregation.

Whites and blacks alike throughout the South also had access to itinerant singing masters who taught a shape-note system, which uses symbols rather than standard musical notation, to indicate the pitch of the notes. At least one version, called "sacred harp" singing, is still heard in parts of rural Texas. And the Lone Star State, with its ranches and its cattle drives, had the tradition of cowboy music and dress, which certainly influenced the image of Texas country music and perhaps its sound as well.

Thus by the time the commercial music industry was born in the 1920s, the British folk songs that had formed the basis of early rural, white American music had already been cross-fertilized with a wide variety of music, black and white.
First country-music recording
Apparently, the first country musicians to record were fiddlers Alexander "Eck" Robertson of Amarillo and Henry Gilliland of Altus, Okla. Gilliland and Robertson, a legendary prize-winning performer, traveled to Virginia in June 1922 to play at a Civil War veterans' reunion. Then, probably on impulse, they went to New York and presented themselves at the Victor recording company - Robertson in a cowboy outfit, Gilliland in a Confederate uniform. They were granted an audition and allowed to record. The standout of the session was Robertson's recording of the dance tune "Sallie Gooden."

Robertson did not record again until 1930, but in 1923, the two men performed two songs on Fort Worth radio station WBAP: "Sallie Gooden" and another song Robertson had recorded, "Arkansas Traveler." In doing so, as Bill Malone points out in Country Music U.S.A.," Robertson "may have been the first country performer to 'plug' his recordings on a radio broadcast." With another 1923 broadcast, WBAP apparently began the tradition of "barn dance" radio shows that helped to popularize country music in cities throughout the country where Southerners migrated in search of work.

According to Malone, the birth of the country music industry can be traced to the June 1923 recording of another rural musician, Fiddlin' John Carson of north Georgia. Polk Brockman, manager of the phonograph section of an Atlanta department store, persuaded Ralph Peer of Okeh Records to record Carson. When Peer was skeptical, Brockman offered to buy 500 copies of the unpressed recording, which included "The Little Old Cabin in the Lane" and "The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Going to Crow."

To Peer's surprise, the 500 copies sold quickly, though the record was, in Malone's words, "uncatalogued, unadvertised, unlabeled and for circulation solely in the Atlanta area." Okeh pressed more copies, added the record to the catalog and promoted it. That November, the label brought Carson to New York to record 12 more numbers and signed him to an exclusive contract.
First country-music star
The first true country music star was Jimmie Rodgers, "the singing brakeman." Rodgers was from Mississippi, but lived the last several years of his life in Texas, first in Kerrville, then in San Antonio. His eclectic style, which included elements of jazz, blues and pop as well as his famous "blue yodel," would have a profound influence on later country musicians.
Bob Wills and Western swing
Perhaps the most distinctive strain to emerge from Texas, Western swing, fused the music of the house dances with a number of other styles. Bob Wills, often called the father of Western swing, began as a boy playing for dances in the Panhandle. His father, John Wills, was a fiddler who played for dances and in contests. In fact, his chief rival was none other than "Eck" Robertson. Bob Wills apparently got his famous "Ah-hah" holler from his father, for a disgusted Robertson once remarked after losing a contest to the older Wills, "He didn't outfiddle me. That damned old man Wills outhollered me," according to Charles R. Townsend's biography of Wills, San Antonio Rose.

Bob Wills also loved black music and once rode a horse 50 miles to hear the legendary "Empress of the Blues," Bessie Smith. In 1929, Wills moved to Fort Worth, where he performed in blackface with a medicine show and teamed up with guitarist Herman Arnspiger and singer Milton Brown in a group first called the Wills Fiddle Band, then the Aladdin Laddies and the Light Crust Doughboys.

The Doughboys were the creature of W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, a future Texas governor and U.S. senator who was then president and general manager of Burrus Mill in Fort Worth. He used the band to advertise his flour - and not, contrary to many reports, as a vehicle for his political career.

The Doughboys became very popular via their daily radio show on KFJZ in Fort Worth. But after a dispute with O'Daniel, Wills left to form his own band, the Texas Playboys, which, ironically, moved its base of operations to Tulsa, Okla.

Brown, too, left and formed his own band, Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, which remained in Fort Worth and performed regularly at the Crystal Springs Dance Pavilion, a dance hall on White Settlement Road. Brown died young after a 1936 car accident on Fort Worth's Jacksboro Highway. Some scholars believe his role in the formation of Western swing has been slighted, and that the group he put together was really the first Western swing band. It included steel guitarist Bob Dunn, who may have been the first to amplify the instrument and who played in a jazzy style far removed from the "weeping steel" of later tears-in-your-beer country music. Dunn, it is said, made the steel guitar sound like a trombone.

Some of Wills' early recordings feature black-dialect humor straight from his medicine-show days. But his music became increasingly sophisticated, and in his pre-World War II heyday in Tulsa, he fronted a large group that included both fiddles and horns and that could play anything from country dance tunes to big-band jazz. Wills never learned to play the "hot" fiddle style he loved, but hired musicians who could. He was a terrific performer, though, keeping up a constant line of patter ("There's a man after my own heart - with a razor") and inspiring his musicians to innovative solos.

The long career of another Texan is illustrative of the diversity of Texas music. Adolph Hofner, who became a bandleader in the 1930s, actively performed until the '90s. Growing up in the South Texas Czech community of Praha, he spoke Czech before he spoke English, and played a wide-ranging repertoire that included Wills-style Western swing with Czech lyrics, Cajun waltzes and such Tex-Mex staples as "El Rancho Grande." Hofner died in June 2000.

After World War II, tastes changed, and Wills and other band leaders could no longer afford to carry large orchestras. Wills remained active until a 1973 stroke ended his career, but his later music was more country, more fiddle-oriented, and he spent much of his time performing in Las Vegas.

Honky-tonk and outlaw country music
Even before the war, a new wind was blowing through country music, a rougher, amplified sound played by small combos for dancing in urban honky-tonks. This sound was exemplified by the 1941 hit "Walking the Floor Over You" by Ernest Tubb, who had begun his career as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator.

Other Texas musicians had great success with this style, as well, including Corsicana-born Lefty Frizzell and Ray Price, who later changed his approach to the pop crooning favored by singers such as Tennessee's Eddy Arnold and fellow Texan Jim Reeves.

Honky-tonk, whose greatest star was Alabama-born Hank Williams, became virtually synonymous with country music through the mid-1950s, when it was knocked from its perch by another form of music that, ironically, it had helped to create: rock 'n' roll. The Nashville-based country music industry responded in the 1960s with music that crossed over into the mainstream and seemed to many like nothing more than country-flavored pop.

Texans Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings were key players in the 1970s "outlaw country" movement, a fusion of country and rock that rebelled against Nashville's blandness. Nelson moved from Nashville to Austin and helped spawn that city's "progressive country" sound.

Today, as fads come and go, fans continue to support performers such as Nelson, Jennings and East Texan George Jones, whose way with a sad song has gained him a reputation as the greatest country singer around.

In addition, there's a neo-honky-tonk movement that includes such performers as Austin's Junior Brown, inventor of the "guit-steel," a combination of standard and steel guitars. Groups such as Asleep At The Wheel and Alvin Crow and the Pleasant Valley Boys keep traditional Western swing alive. Other bands fuse honky-tonk with punk rock in big-city clubs, proving that country can go anywhere.
Blues, Jazz and Gospel
Some of the Southerners who settled in Texas brought their slaves with them. The singing of African-Americans as they worked long, hot hours on farms and plantations became a part of the larger culture. Black musicians sometimes played for whites, who listened or danced. And the minstrel show, consisting of musical and comedy numbers, became very popular after the Civil War. Both white and black minstrel troupes performed in blackface.

Roots of the blues
Black music in Texas, as elsewhere, retained some African characteristics, such as the use of polyrhythms, call-and-response patterns of singing and playing and the use of bent or slurred tones known as "blue notes." The field hollers and work songs of slavery were African also in that they were often sung by people working together and reflected a collective effort and consciousness.

But after Emancipation, a new individual consciousness was reflected in the music called the blues, often played by a lone man accompanying himself on a guitar.

No one really knows where or when the blues began, but it was widespread through the South and much of Texas by the turn of the 20th century. Generally a performer would sing a line, repeat it, then close the stanza with a rhyming line that often contained an ironic twist. Though this 12-bar form became the most common, eight- and 16-bar blues also existed.

Recordings of older musicians from the 1920s provide evidence of what early blues and other late-19th-century forms were like. Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, born in Gladewater about 1875, recorded when he was in his 50s, singing and playing the guitar and a wind instrument called the quills, or panpipes. One of his songs, "Fishing Blues," has been recorded by, among others, the 1960s rock band the Lovin' Spoonful.

Another such songster - one whose repertoire ranged from blues to ballads, dance tunes and religious songs - was Mance Lipscomb. The son of a country fiddler, he was born near Navasota in 1895. After working most of his life as a sharecropper, he was discovered by the folk-music crowd in the 1960s and enjoyed considerable popularity in the last years of his life.

Leadbelly and Blind Lemon
Also a significant figure was Huddie Ledbetter. "Leadbelly," as he was popularly known, was born in 1889 on the Louisiana side of Caddo Lake, which lies on the border of northeast Texas and northwest Louisiana. Leadbelly spent much of his life in Texas, in and out of prison.

Through the efforts of Texas folklorists John and Alan Lomax, Leadbelly left a rich legacy of recordings that, like Lipscomb's, cover a wide range of styles. He is best known for popularizing "Good Night, Irene," which, with somewhat sanitized lyrics, has become a pop standard.

After moving to the Dallas area around 1912, Leadbelly found his primary instrument, the 12-string guitar, and learned much about the blues from Blind Lemon Jefferson, who later became the first country blues recording star. Born in the farm community of Couchman 70 miles south of Dallas in 1893, the young Jefferson walked the roads around his home, playing for money on the streets and in the cafes and joints of the surrounding towns. He spent time in Mexia, where the local strip of black businesses was known as the Beat, playing both alone and in a string band with other musicians.

Bob Wills, born in 1905, spent the first eight years of his life in nearby Kosse, and it's possible that he heard the young Jefferson and other musicians such as Marlin's Blind Willie Johnson, who played slide guitar and sang in a powerful, gravelly voice in a style called "gospel blues" or "holy blues." Figures such as Johnson demonstrate that church music and the blues were more closely linked than the latter's designation as "the devil's music" would indicate.

Lemon Jefferson married a Mexia woman in 1927, but he also spent a lot of time in Dallas, playing up and down the Central railroad track in the Deep Ellum section that was the heart of that city's black community life.

Jefferson was certainly not the only such musician in the area. Blind Willie Johnson was in Dallas about the same time and made his first records there. And there were strolling string bands that played a wide repertoire ranging from blues to pop tunes. One such group, the Dallas String Band, included bass player Marco Washington, stepfather of future bluesman Aaron "T-Bone" Walker.

Jefferson attracted the attention of a Paramount record scout, thanks to the efforts of a local record-store and shine-stand owner named R.T. Ashford. From 1926 until 1929, Jefferson made regular trips to Chicago to record and achieved considerably popularity in the "race" market - records marketed exclusively to African-Americans. In addition to blues, he recorded a few spirituals under the name Deacon L.J. Bates.

Blind Lemon Jefferson died in Chicago in December 1929. Apparently he froze to death, though the circumstances of his death have never been fully explained. But his brief career exerted considerable influence on many performers who followed. One of his songs, "Matchbox Blues," was recorded years later by both rockabilly star Carl Perkins and the Beatles. He was buried in Wortham, and a marker erected years later pays tribute to him and his influence.

Jefferson's success opened the door to a flood of country blues recordings by a number of artists, including Texan "Little Hat" Jones, Alger "Texas" Alexander and J.T. "Funny Papa" Smith. Blind Lemon's dexterous guitar style featured single-string runs and unconventional phrasing - what one musician called "suspended time."

This style was a major influence on T-Bone Walker and other blues players who, starting in the mid-'30s, played the new electric guitar. Amplification allowed the instrument, once consigned to the rhythm section of a large band, to become a solo instrument. Walker's style of playing lead guitar in a call-and-response pattern with an orchestra came to define a whole school of post-World War II blues, though he didn't really achieve star status until he moved to the West Coast in the 1940s.

An earthier strain of blues was exemplified by Sam "Lightnin' " Hopkins of Centerville, who was a child when he met Jefferson at a church picnic. Hopkins spent most of his life in Houston, playing an amplified version of the down-home East Texas music he had grown up with.

Piano bluesmen
Texas had a strong tradition of piano blues, too, hard-hitting music with strong elements of ragtime, the music popularized by composers such as Texarkana-born Scott Joplin. Texas piano blues developed in the rough lumber and turpentine camps of East Texas and in the honky-tonks of Dallas' Deep Ellum and Houston's Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards, in places with names like Mud Alley and The Vamp.

Robert Shaw, a member of the "Santa Fe" group of pianists named for the railroad, survived into old age running a barbecue business and grocery store in Austin, and, like Mance Lipscomb, had a late second career playing for white fans.

Another link to the past was Dallas pianist and singer "Whistlin' " Alex Moore, who continued to perform up to the time of his death in 1989, at age 89.

Cajun and country influences
Louisiana-born musicians, such as Clarence Garlow and Clifton Chenier, performed extensively in Texas and developed modern zydeco, a lively fusion of Cajun and rhythm and blues. Some scholars trace this development to Frenchtown, a section of Houston's black Fifth Ward.

An urban strain of blues and gospel was recorded beginning in the '50s at nightclub owner Don Robey's Peacock studios in Houston. Robey recorded such artists as Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, who plays both guitar and fiddle and mixes blues with country music; smooth-voiced Memphis blues balladeer Bobby "Blue" Bland; and Alabama-born Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, whose recording of "Hound Dog" inspired Elvis Presley.

Texas jazz
In jazz, Texas exemplified the swinging, blues-based Southwestern style, very different from the stately polyphony of early New Orleans jazz bands. In the 1920s, black bands such as the Clouds of Joy in Dallas and the Troy Floyd Orchestra in San Antonio performed in white hotels, sweetening their sound somewhat for these audiences.

A rougher music was played for black audiences in places such as Dallas' Tip Top dance hall, which San Antonio band leader Don Albert called the rattiest place he'd ever seen.

It was apparently in the Tip Top in 1925 that Dallas clarinetist and alto sax player Henry "Buster" Smith was hired by the Blue Devils, a top Oklahoma City-based "territory" band, one that played a regular circuit through the South and Midwest. Smith, though little known to the general public, went on to become a significant figure. Along with other Texas musicians, he became a part of the exciting Kansas City jazz scene of the 1930s. He helped to create Count Basie's theme song, "One O'Clock Jump," and was a strong influence on Charlie Parker, generally regarded as the father of be-bop, the harmonically advanced music that stood jazz on its ear in the 1940s and '50s.

Other major jazz figures from Texas included trombonist Jack Teagarden, born in Vernon, and a whole school of saxophonists - called the "Texas Tenors" because of their full, distinctive sound - that included Arnett Cobb, Illinois Jacquet and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. The Houston-born Jacquet received the fifth annual Jazz at Lincoln Center Award for Artistic Excellence on Nov. 13, 2000, joining past winners Lionel Hampton, Oscar Peterson, Benny Carter and John Lewis.

Texas-born musicians played a major role in the development of the electric guitar. In addition to T-Bone Walker, these innovators included Eddie Durham, who played with Buster Smith in the Blue Devils, and Charlie Christian, of Benny Goodman's band.

Perhaps the most idiosyncratic and controversial jazz musician to come out of Texas is alto sax player Ornette Coleman, who began in Fort Worth rhythm-and-blues bands and went on to invent a radically new music called free jazz, with his own theory of collective improvisation, called "harmolodics." Such developments indicate the power and complexity beneath the apparently simple music with roots in slavery.
Tex-Mex
Until the mid-19th century, Mexican Texans, or Tejanos, seem to have danced primarily to music imported from Spain or Mexico, played on violins and various wind instruments, with rhythm provided by guitars and sometimes by a drum. Other European forms gained popularity after being played at the court of Maximilian, who ruled Mexico during the 1860s with the backing of the French army.

The most significant innovation, however, was the introduction of the diatonic button accordion by German and Czech immigrants. Tejano musicians were reported playing this instrument by the 1870s.

Tejanos also listened to the music of guitarreros, singing guitarists who performed corridos, songs that told stories and carried news, often in cantinas and at social gatherings.

Lydia Mendoza and family
Mexican-Americans in Texas were entertained, too, by performers such as the Mendoza family of San Antonio, who toured with variedades - variety shows staged in tents and theaters. The family sang and performed comedy skits.

One of the Mendoza daughters, Lydia, became the first Tejano recording star when she was recorded in 1934 in a San Antonio hotel room playing her 12-string guitar and singing "Mal Hombre," whose lyrics she had learned from a bubble-gum wrapper. She became very popular not only in Texas, but throughout Latin America, during her long career, singing folk-based songs that often speak passionately of romantic longings.

Evolution of Tejano music
For dancing, two basic styles developed: conjunto (literally "ensemble") music and the music of the orquestas, or orchestras, outgrowths of the earlier string and wind groups.

Two major figures in the creation of conjunto, Narciso Martínez and Pedro Ayala, were born in northern Mexico in 1911. Many regard Martínez, a native of the border town of Reynosa, as the father of this style and of the very similar norteño style of northern Mexico. He is often credited with being first to combine the instruments that came to define the sound: the button accordion and the bajo sexto, a type of 12-string guitar.

Bruno "El Azote" Villarreal is thought to have made the first conjunto records, in 1928. Narciso Martínez first recorded in 1935 or 1936, with bajo player Santiago Almeida, for the Blue Bird Label at San Antonio's Blue Bonnet Hotel.

Martínez, who lived near San Benito in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, became known as "El Huracan de Valle" - the Hurricane of the Valley. He was never able to support himself with his music. In the 1970s, he worked at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, feeding the animals. In 1983, he received the National Heritage Award, the nation's highest honor for folk musicians.

The initial accordion-bajo lineup was complemented by the addition of the tololoche, or upright bass. This development is variously credited to Pedro Ayala and to San Antonio accordionist, songwriter and singer Santiago Jiménez Sr., known as "El Flaco" - the skinny one.

In the 1940s, a new group of conjunto stars, including Valerio Longoria and Tony de la Rosa, further changed the music. Drums were added, and electric bass replaced the upright acoustic instrument.

Vocals were added to a music that had been almost exclusively instrumental. The lyrics, like those of country and blues, deal with the heartaches and trials of everyday life and are often imbued with lo ranchero - a longing for a simpler, rural life.

The foundation of conjunto is the polka, but bands play a variety of styles, including the waltz, mazurka and huapango - a fast, rhythmic dance named for the town near Veracruz where it originated.

Further innovations were made in the 1950s by another seminal group, El Conjunto Bernal, led by accordionist Paulino Bernal and his brother bajo sexto player Eloy Bernal. The group employed two- and three-part harmonies. Paulino Bernal used his instrument's full range, playing chromatic models with four or five rows of buttons.

The button accordion has a distinctive sound, quite different from that of the more expensive piano accordion. Most models have from one to three rows of buttons. Like the air holes of a harmonica, each button plays two notes, one pushed, one pulled. In addition, two reeds sound each note, about a quarter-tone apart, providing a slight dissonance and the instrument's characteristically sweet sound. And playing two adjacent buttons together almost always produces what guitarist Ry Cooder calls "a pleasant third interval." The first such accordions were relatively primitive models with one row of buttons, but these evolved into a more versatile three-row model.

Conjunto became the music of the working people, those who labored on farms or migrated to the cities, where they often had to support themselves with low-paying jobs. The dance music of the more affluent Mexican-Texans was played by the orquestas. These often played the same songs as the conjuntos, but in more complex arrangements for a full band that included wind instruments seldom employed in conjunto. In The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music," Manuel Peña writes, "In the hands of such noted leaders as Beto Villa and Balde González, orquesta came of age among tejanos beginning in the 1940s. Furthermore, aspiring to be more 'sophisticated,' it turned to both the instrumentation and the repertory of American dance bands of the Glenn Miller-Tommy Dorsey type ..."

In the 1950s, the conjunto and orquesta forms began a convergence that would result in a new music known as Tejano. The very popular orquesta leader Beto Villa added accordion on some recordings and took Narciso Martínez along on short tours.

A younger bandleader, Isidro López of Bishop, Texas, made the breakthrough. As writer Ramiro Burr says, "He had recorded with conjuntos, and a mariachi, creating what he called 'Texachi.' Then he incorporated two accordions into his orchestra, which was unheard of at that time. In later recordings, like 'Mala Cara' and 'Macho Rock 'n' Roll,' López fused the rhythms of early rock into his Tex-Mex blend."

That fusion of urban and rural forms didn't come to be known as Tejano until the early 1980s. Before that, it went under a variety of names, including Mexican music, música de orquesta, música alegre, la Onda Chicana, Tex-Mex funk and brown soul.

Popular performers in the 1960s included Alfonso Ramos, Roy Montelongo, Freddie Martínez and Little Joe (Hernández) and the Latinaires. The Sunglows of San Antonio had a string of English-language hits such as "Talk to Me" and "Rags to Riches," and lead singer Sunny Ozuna appeared on American Bandstand. The group then had a series of Spanish-language hits.

A new wave of performers emerged in the 1980s: La Sombra, Mazz, Pio Treviño & Magic, Patsy Torres and La Mafia. These groups employed rock-show theatrics such as flashy costumes and sophisticated light and sound systems. Electronic synthesizers were added to the horn-driven hot dance mix.

The economic downturn of the mid-1980s may have delayed the Tejano boom, but it exploded full force in the early 1990s. Tejano FM stations from Texas to California enjoyed high ratings. The music was played in huge urban nightclubs, arenas and even stadiums. Album sales by artists such as Selena, La Mafia, Mazz and Emilio soared past 300,000 units.

According to Ramiro Burr, the boom had inevitably peaked by March 1995, when the hugely popular singer Selena was gunned down at a Corpus Christi motel by the former manager of her fan club. Her death shortly before her 24th birthday sparked a wave of even larger popularity that, for a time, masked the flattening of the Tejano market.

Though the 1990s boom couldn't be sustained, Tejano music remains popular and can be seen as part of the national and worldwide surge in interest in all things Latin.

Today, old and new forms coexist in Mexican-American music in Texas. Mariachi bands are popular, though this appears to be a style imported to Texas rather than true Tex-Mex music. Little Joe Hernández and Sunny Ozuna are still musically active. Santiago Jiménez's sons carry on his work. Santiago Jr. plays much in his father's style. His better-known brother, Leonardo "Flaco" Jiménez, has played with Ry Cooder and other rockers and for several years teamed up with the late Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers and Freddy Fender in the Texas Tornados, whose repertoire spanned virtually the music of all Texans - black, white and brown.
Rock 'n' roll and beyond
To some extent, rock 'n' roll is a synthesis of all that went before in popular music, and Texas has played a strong role in its development. Buddy Holly's 1958 appearances in England inspired, among others, the young John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton.

One English rock group, The Hollies, even took the name of the Lubbock musician, who called one of his early groups the Western Bop Band.

Southeast Texans Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter and the Vaughan brothers of Dallas - Jimmie and the late Stevie Ray - grew up steeped in the blues. Among Doug Sahm's major influences growing up in San Antonio were Bob Wills, T-Bone Walker and the Tex-Mex music that was all around him.

Texas seems to have spawned the first psychedelic band, Austin's Thirteenth Floor Elevators, as well as Roy Orbison and Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the popular Dixie Chicks. One of the Chicks, Natalie Maines, is the daughter of Lloyd Maines, a record producer and pedal steel player who has often played and recorded with Ely.

Today, all these forms of music continue to exist and interact, as new immigrant groups add influences. And discoveries are still being made in older forms. In 1994, Dallas folklorist Alan Govenar, through his Documentary Arts organization, recorded not only Alfred "Snuff" Johnson of Austin playing spirituals and black cowboy blues, but also 95-year-old black songster John T. Samples of Kilgore. Govenar has also recorded Vietnamese musicians playing traditional music and found younger Vietnamese Texans playing rock 'n' roll.

Texas Monthly magazine's May 2000 Texas music issue included a profile of Mexican-American rapper Carlos Coy, "a product of his environment, Houston's South Side, the same neighborhood that turned out underground mixer DJ Screw, rapper Lil' Keke and Scarface."

As Texas evolves, so does its music, and the possibilities seem endless.
- written for the Texas Almanac 1996-1997. It has been expanded and updated for the Texas Almanac website. Jay Brakefield is co-author with Alan Govenar of Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged (University of North Texas Press, 1998), a study of the Dallas neighborhood known for its contributions to blues and jazz.
SOURCES

All Music Guide: The best CDs, albums & tapes, ed. by Michael Erlewine; Miller Freeman Books, San Francisco, 1994.

Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music by Mary A. Burwack and Robert K. Oermann; Crown Publishers Inc., New York, 1993.

Lydia Mendoza, A Family Autobiography, compiled and introduced by Chris Strachwitz, with James Nicolopulos; Arte Publico Press, Houston, 1993.

Meeting the Blues by Alan Govenar; Taylor Publishing, Dallas, 1985.

Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing by Cary Ginell; University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, London; 1994.

Nothing But the Blues: the Music and the Musicians, edited by Lawrence Cohn; Abbeville Press, New York, London, Paris; 1993.

San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills by Charles R. Townsend; University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, London; 1976.

Tell me a story, sing me a song: A Texas Chronicle by William A. Owens; University of Texas Press, Austin, 1983.

The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working Class Music by Manuel H. Peña; The University of Texas Press, Austin, 1985.

Texas Rhythm, Texas Rhyme: A Pictorial History of Texas Music by Larry Willoughby; Texas Monthly Press, Austin, 1984.
Recordings:
A great deal of historic material is available on major record labels. In addition, two small labels specializing in folk and ethnic music are of particular interest. For information, write:

Arhoolie Records
10341 San Pablo Ave.
El Cerrito, CA 94530

On the Web: www.arhoolie.com

Documentary Arts Inc.
P.O. Box 140244
Dallas, TX 75214

On the Web: www.docarts.com

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Among the glories of Texas is its music, which is as diverse and vital as the state and its people. Woven into the musical fabric are country, blues, jazz, spirituals, gospel, rock 'n' roll, Tex-Mex, Cajun and the music of Czechs, Germans and other European immigrants.

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What did the artist hope to achieve by creating the Hostile Terrain 94 (an art exhibit)?

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What did the artist hope to achieve by creating the Hostile Terrain 94 (an art exhibit)?

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I think that they wanted people to know about all the migrants who died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.

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The new impactmania and UCSB program Human Mind and Migration (HMM) serves as a platform for meaningful broad-based engagement to take place, considering the present historical moment and the sociopolitical and environmental cocktail of issues related to migration. We are featuring migrants who have been contributing cultural, social, and economic wealth and health to their adopted countries, as well as news related to the different mass migrations occurring world-wide.

Add your migration story to the HMM program: www.hmm.ucsb.edu.

BY NATALIE GOMEZ

On their first Friday back at UC Santa Barbara after returning from Winter Break, a group of student-interns walked into a new exhibit they were assigned to facilitate at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum . Skylar Lines, a 20-year old from Napa, California, gawked at the large wall immediately apparent from the entrance - remarkable not for its artistic extravagance but it's blankness.

As a third year student majoring in the history of art and architecture, Lines was trained to know that this bare wall, systematically covered with a series of white printer papers each denoting a large letter and number, would normally be the focus of any installation.

And, in only a few hours, the museum would hold its Winter Opening Reception for wealthy donors to come get an early access look at what their money has contributed to. Staring at this grid-like image, she mumbled to her peers, "Shouldn't the exhibit be finished by now?" But as she was forced to move deeper in the room to make space for the other interns, circling around the large tables at the center of the gallery, she caught sight of the collage made of clearly worn, dirty t-shirts pinned around the doorway she had just passed through, opposite from the main wall, and a spark of understanding shone in her eyes.

"This is history," Lines said she remembered thinking. "Not just any ordinary art show."

As Lines and the other museum interns would soon learn from the visiting head curator himself, UCLA Professor Jason De León, those t-shirts on the wall are just some of the objects left behind by the millions of migrants who have attempted to cross the deadly Sonoran desert of Arizona, known for its extreme heat and dryness, in search of a better life. They were all part of the art installation in front of them called Hostile Terrain 94 .

Hostile Terrain 94 is global pop-up exhibit put on by the Los Angeles-based non-profit organization the Undocumented Migration Project , founded by De León in 2009. The exhibit aims to confront community members with the often overlooked, harsh realities of undocumented migration at the Mexican-U.S. border by requiring the participation of community members to complete the installation - a 25-foot-long wall map of the Arizona-Mexico border with over 3,200 toe tags attached. Each toe tag represents a dead body that has been found in the Sonoran desert between the mid-1990s and 2019 and contains the available and identifiable information of that person - case number, name, age, sex, date the body was located, condition of the body, cause of death and coordinates where the remains were found - which will be handwritten by the public.

Lines, along with this group of interns, would be the first to write these devastating details on the toe tags, kickstarting UCSB's very own HT94 exhibition which also includes items recovered by De León while he was conducting his anthropological research in the desert. "Writing names is powerful," Lines said, when reflecting on how filling out a toe tag for a 19-year-old girl really hit home. "The shock invites you to ask, 'How can I change this?' and take action."

Over the next few months, the rest of the toe tags will be filled out by the Santa Barbara, Goleta and UCSB communities and transported to the wall map depicting the Arizona desert at the border. Museum interns and staff will geolocate the toe tags to the exact coordinates where each person's body was discovered. When finished, 3,200 toe tags will be hanging from red map pins and all paper grids, which correspond to manila folders holding the bodies of that zone's information, will be gone.

Napa, California native Lines was pleasantly surprised that the AD&A Museum was bringing in such a politically charged exhibition to Santa Barbara County, which as of July 2018 had a population of nearly 450,000 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau . "Institutions like museums tend to stay apolitical in order to please the majority, especially if they are in a relatively small city compared to, say, Los Angeles or San Francisco," she said. "What UCSB is doing is f-ing ballsy."

Of Santa Barbara's population, 85.4% are white and 14.6% comprise other minorities - a staggering statistic until one looks a bit closer. Within Santa Barbara 45.8% are estimated to have Hispanic origins, affirming the area's diversity and potential stake in the exhibition. Additionally, from 2014-2018, 22.9% of the county's population reported they had been born in another county and 39.7% spoke a language other than English at home.

Hostile Terrain 94 is currently partnering with over 130 exhibition hosting partners both nationally and internationally, a number that was originally set to be 94 (hence the exhibition's name) but has steadily kept growing. Gabriel Canter and Nicole Smith, former anthropology students and interns of De León at the University of Michigan, now serve as the coordinators of the exhibition following their recent 2019 graduation. In January, they visited UCSB with De León to help bring HT94 to the AD&A Museum. Canter, who holds a B.A. in sociocultural anthropology, vocalized the exhibition's main purpose to the student-interns. "To get people to come together, write down the names of the dead, memorialize them and think about the U.S. policy responsible for their lost lives," he said.

In 1994, the United States implemented a new border control policy called Prevention Through Deterrence . The policy heightened border patrol enforcement at more populated, urban ports of entry which migrants were historically accustomed to crossing. U.S. Border Patrol officials believed this would discourage individuals from illegally crossing through the more remote and dangerous natural environments left less attended to, such as what they deemed the "hostile terrain" of the Sonoran Desert in Southern Arizona. However, this strategy failed as more than six million people have attempted the journey since the year 2000, with at least 3,200 of the crossers dying along the way.

"We've done the exhibit eight times now and each one was in a pretty different region, mostly with different student demographics," Canter said. "The ways each community interacts with the exhibit is always really interesting to me - and telling of certain political climates."

Although the exhibition aims to stand in solidarity with migrants across the world, Canter said not every audience has shared this notion. "At one of our earlier prototypes, I had a discussion with a group of students who were filling out toe tags. Most of them were very emotional and telling me about how the project was making them feel. Then, another student disagreed and told us that she did not feel bad for the people represented on the wall because 'they attempted to cross illegally and knew what they were doing'," Canter said.

While Canter admits hearing the student's differing perspective on immigration was difficult, he said he views it as a positive memory as it fostered a space for dialogue. "She was actually very willing to talk about this, not in an aggressive way, and all of us at the table were able to have a really stimulating and emotional conversation," he added.

With the opening reception of the museum looming closer, Leticia Cobra Lima, the 31-year-old Museum Internship Program coordinator, worried about what the emotional toll might be on her students from encountering and facilitating the exhibit.

"We have a diverse cohort of students," Cobra Lima said carefully. "The exhibition could produce a vast array of reactions."

In fact, this was the art history doctoral student Cobra Lima's main concern from the moment the HT94 exhibition was introduced to her by organizers months prior. Before the installation was fully installed, she was shown an example of a toe tag that produced "a brutal feeling" and "a lot of unexpected sorrow" in her when she saw the crosser was from Brazil - Cobra Lima's home country.

"The people directly impacted might feel differently than those born in the U.S.," she said. "Both reactions are important to make meaningful dialogue... but I want to provide them with the help they might need and only allow as much contact with the exhibition as they feel comfortable with."

Ava Robles, a 20-year-old third year from Pasadena, California, was one of the student-interns with a personal connection to the exhibition. In 1952, decades before the U.S. enacted the Prevention Through Deterrence border policy, Robles' grandfather crossed the border into California through one of the more frequented crossing points by train.

The HT94 gallery space features a table of what De León calls "Migrant Artifacts," which attempt to bring in the voices of real people who crossed into the exhibit. The migrant artifacts include objects left behind in the Sonoran Desert that the Undocumented Migration Project collected, photo albums that migrants themselves have put together from their journey and donated, and audio recordings of interviews conducted with people who have crossed.

For history of art and architecture and religious studies double major Robles, it was the 2009 photo album "It's a Dry Heat," which contains pictures of migrants on trains, that affected her the most. "I always understood intellectually what my grandfather went through," Robles said. "I'm a very visual person, so the images made me truly feel the impact of his journey and that it is not just one isolated event but a mass migration."

Later that night during the Winter Opening Reception, Robles was one of the interns working the exhibition. "Writing the toe tags is difficult when you really start thinking about the people and their lives," Robles said, after the fact. "But while helping in the exhibition and instructing visitors I was able to detach myself from my personal connection and explain it well."

Nonetheless, Robles has yet to return and work the exhibition a second time. "If I wasn't doing anything else and was asked, I would do it again," Robles said while looking down at her hands. "Though it has become harder for me to be in there as time has passed."

The wall map in UCSB's HT94 exhibition will be an evolving piece as more toe tags are to be added as the exhibition coordinators, Canter and Smith, sift through the updated data downloaded from public government records and send over new information. The United States currently still adheres to the Prevention Through Deterrence border policy, and everyday people continue to risk death by crossing. The policy has since expanded to areas in Texas, where hundreds have perished while migrating through an unpopulated wilderness.

Smith, who holds a B.A. in anthropology, recalls what it was like seeing the HT94 exhibit fully installed for the first time. "There was just a wave of silence that came across the room," Smith said. "I realized how powerful this exhibition could be. It was really overwhelming seeing the pure density of the tags and just understanding the devastating toll of U.S. policies on human lives."

"There's a lot of things going on in the media about undocumented migration, a lot of it sensationalized. We want people to realize that this is not just a headline, but something that real people are suffering through, real people who are dying at the hand of a U.S. policy," she said. "I hope that people who see HT94 will recognize the urgency at which change is needed, not sit idly knowing people are continuing to die. We all have voices and I hope that more people will use them to speak up and stand up for what is right."

UCSB is just one of more than 130 locations where the exhibit is opening world-wide leading up to the November 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. During the election year, De León and his team will collect toe tags written by the majority of the host spaces and compile them in an installation in Washington, DC. The result of the show is to be a visual representation of how decisions made by those elected to the U.S. government can lead to mass fatalities and invite others, as UCSB student-intern Lines said, "to take action."

"Not everything in a museum is going to be an abstract painting on the wall that people just 'Ooo and Aaa' at," commented Lines with a laugh before her face turned serious. "Art can act as a powerful means of political change."
impactmania's past interviews and programs have been featured in international media, a number of universities, the UN, U.S. Consulates, and have been cited by Harvard Business School, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and Duke University Press. impactmania's Women of Impact program was awarded the U.S. Embassy Public Diplomacy grant (2019).

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Hostile Terrain 94: Art as a Means for Political Change

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The new impactmania and UCSB program Human Mind and Migration (HMM) serves as a platform for meaningful broad-based engagement to take place, considering the present historical moment and the sociopolitical and environmental cocktail of issues related to migration.

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Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94) is a participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a non-profit research-art-education-media collective, directed by anthropologist Jason De León. The exhibition is composed of ~3,200 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019. These tags are geolocated on a wall map of the desert showing the exact locations where remains were found.

The Arcus Center is one of 150 global sites installing the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit. Our main purpose in hosting this installation is to participate in the global memorializing of the thousands who have died at the US/Mexico border as a direct result of the US Border Patrol policy known as "Prevention Through Deterrence" (PTD). Through the process of honoring each person represented in the project we also raise awareness of the realities of the US/Mexico border and the need for more humane immigration and refugee policies.

Hopeful Remain is an art installation designed by visual artist Nayda Collazo-Llorens. It consists of phrases borrowed from migrant oral history archives, interview transcripts, shared writings, and other sources, and was created as a companion piece to Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94). Special thanks to Marcos Ferguson Morales and Jesse Herrera, Kalamazoo College graduates and former Arcus Center Social Justice Associates, for their invaluable help in the collection of the text.

Hopeful Remain Artist Nayda Collazo-Llorens

Learn More about HT94 and Undocumented Migration Project

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Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership

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Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94) is a participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a non-profit research-art-education-media collective, directed by anthropologist Jason De León. The exhibition is composed of ~3,200 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019.

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Jason De León admits it can be a daunting task.

It's one thing to devote years to exploring U.S. immigration policies on the Mexico border and how those policies have likely contributed to thousands of migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert. It's quite another thing to take such a sensitive and data-driven issue and turn it into a compelling and interactive exhibition that is, as De León describes it, "inviting," "disarming" and, ultimately, "open to interpretation."

"I just wanted to offer the public a new kind of experience or, perhaps, a new way to think about immigration," says De León, an anthropologist who founded the Undocumented Migration Project, a nonprofit research and arts-education collective. "As someone who lives and breathes this, it's hard for me to keep up with the news cycle, and so I really wanted to find a way to educate and engage with people that didn't feel like I was talking at them, but to provide them with an opportunity to engage with the facts and walk away and decide how they want to feel about it."

This is the overall mission of "Hostile Terrain 94," a participatory exhibition that just opened at the Museum of Us in Balboa Park. First established by the Undocumented Migration Project in 2013 to be something of a ready-made installation that could be curated and reimagined depending on the location, the exhibition invites local patrons to explore U.S. immigration policies via a variety of stationary and interactive elements.

The signature piece of the exhibition is a large map of the Sonoran Desert region where participants are asked to fill out toe tags for the over 3,000 people who have attempted to cross the border and who died in the process, and then place them on the map where the person died. Local artist and curator Luisa Martínez calls the map the "core" of the exhibition, but adds that the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) allows museums to add elements to the exhibition in hopes of connecting to local audiences.

"The UMP team invites each site to contextualize the piece as they see fit and that's where I came in," says Martínez, who is a California Arts Council Administrator of Color fellow and was paired with Museum of Us in February. "What are we going to do with this map? Is it just going to be the map? Does it relate to San Diego? What else should we add to the gallery to really make it something by The Museum of Us?"

Martínez and museum staff ended up adding a number of other elements to "Hostile Terrain 94," including a floor-to-ceiling mural that explores immigration and economic border policies through the 1800s to the present day. Also on display will be objects and artifacts that were collected in the desert, as well as testimonies from family members who've lost loved ones who attempted to migrate. Other interactive elements include workshops, poetry readings, panels and other programming that Martínez says will help patrons understand the ways in which border policies also affect the San Diego-Tijuana region.

"I didn't want to shy away from the difficult conversations, but it's also about making space for people to grow," Martínez says. "There is heavy information, but it's also about giving people time and space to learn and grow."

James Haddan, the Museum of Us's Senior Director of Development and External Communications, sees the "Hostile Terrain 94" exhibition as one the first major salvos of the institution's effort to decolonize its programming and perspective since changing its name from the Museum of Man.

"We really think this exhibit is in line with the mission of the museum and the work that we've been doing especially since we changed our name last year," Haddan says. "This type of exhibit really exemplifies the values behind that name change."

The first "Hostile Terrain 94" exhibition was presented in 2013. The "94" in the title refers to the year in which the U.S. first implemented its "Prevention Through Deterrence" border policy. After the inaugural exhibition closed in 2017, De León and UMP began to think more broadly about what he calls a "global exhibition about migrant death" - one that emphasized participation and could easily be installed in a variety of spaces. De León says he always saw it as a project that would continue to evolve depending on the location.

"Every venue we partner with, they end up figuring out what additional elements and components they want to add to the show," says De León, who has facilitated "Hostile Terrain" exhibitions at dozens of locations all over the world. "Obviously for San Diego, it's much more U.S.-based programming, but since it's a bigger space, we have a lot more elements like audio recordings, video, still photography, that kind of stuff."

Still, given the troubling nature of the exhibition, De León points out that it's always been UMP's intent to present the data in a way that is sensitive to both the victims and the public.

"We're always trying to find ways to ethically and sensitively engage with the public and raise awareness about these issues without making it feel exploitative or insensitive," says de Leon. "The thing about 'Hostile Terrain 94' is that it's a pretty simple idea: Here's a spreadsheet of forensic data of people who have died in the Arizona desert and here's a wall map and blank toe tags, and we're just asking the public to write that information out. They're basically transferring data from a computer spreadsheet into a hand-written form and making these maps. And the idea is that people are looking at forensic data, but it's through their act of translating it that we hope connects them in a meaningful way to those who have lost their lives."

"Hostile Terrain 94" at Museum of Us

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays

Where: Museum of Us, 1350 El Prado, Balboa Park

Phone: (619) 239-2001

Admission $19.95, includes free admission for a year

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The inviting nature of 'Hostile Terrain 94,' a new exhibit about migrant deaths

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Jason De León admits it can be a daunting task. It's one thing to devote years to exploring U.S. immigration policies on the Mexico border and how those policies have likely contributed to thousands of migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert.

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Oct 4 2021, 10:32 PM

Hostile Terrain 94 is a participatory exhibition created by the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit organization focused on the social process of immigration and raising awareness through research, education, and outreach. This exhibit will be open to the public in the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, Vermont, and we are urging as many members of our community as possible to visit our exhibit to learn about and take action against this injustice.

The exhibit is composed of approximately 3,400 handwritten toe-tags that represent
migrating people who have died trying to cross the US-Mexico border through the Sonoran Desert from the mid-1990s to 2020. The participatory construction of Hostile Terrain 94 exhibitions is made possible by teams of volunteers from each hosting location, who participate in tag-filling workshops. These tags are geolocated on a large wall map of the Arizona-Mexico border, showing the exact locations where human remains were found. The physical act of writing out the names and information of the deceased migrants invites participants to reflect, witness, and stand in solidarity with those who have lost their lives in the pursuit of a better one. Hostile Terrain 94 exhibitions are being held at over 120 institutions across six continents with the intent to educate communities about the humanitarian crisis at America's southern border and to prompt a worldwide conversation about migration and human rights.

Hostile Terrain 94 is meant to confront participants with the brutality of the Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD) policy implemented in the United States during the 1990s. By emphasizing the devastating effects this policy has on migrants as they pursue a better life for themselves and their families, Hostile Terrain 94 exposes a violent reality; that the United States government has weaponized the ruthless environment of the Sonoran Desert against people who migrate across the Southern U.S. border. By diverting people towards riskier border crossing areas, where terrain is dangerous and the environment even harsher, Prevention Through Deterrence has become one of the harshest national border policies adopted by the United States to date.

Hostile Terrain 94 is a jarring exhibition that deals with many sensitive and emotional concepts. We encourage participants to consider the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border and its larger effects, and to stand in solidarity with all people who migrate, past or present, dead or alive, in an attempt to initiate changes in border security and immigration policies.

The University of Vermont Department of Anthropology and the Fletcher Free Library are collaborating to bring this exhibit to the Burlington area. The exhibit will be open from October 15th until November 5, 2021 in the main reading room at the Fletcher Free Library located at 235 College Street in Burlington, VT. There is a public opening reception for the exhibit on Friday, October 15th at 5:30pm. More information about the exhibit is available at: https://www.fletcherfree.org/event/hostile-terrain-94 or by emailing Dr. Teresa Mares at [email protected]

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Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit comes to Burlington - VTDigger

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Hostile Terrain 94 is a participatory exhibition created by the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit organization focused on the social process of immigration and raising awareness through research, education, and outreach. This exhibit will be open to the public in the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, Vermont, and we are urging as many members of [...]

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Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942 - May 15, 2004) was a queer Chicana poet, feminist theorist, and writer. Going by the name Gloria E. Anzaldúa as an author, her writing and poetry discuss the anger that stems from social and cultural marginalization.

She herself experienced this kind of marginalization growing up in the Mexican-Texas border as the daughter of a Spanish American and Native American.

Anzaldúa was born in Jesús María Ranch in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas as the oldest of four siblings. Throughout her childhood, her parents, Urbano Anzaldúa and Amalia Anzaldúa García, moved their family to various ranches working as migrant farmers.

Anzaldúa worked in the fields and became aware of the Southwest and South Texas landscapes along with the existence of Spanish speakers on the margins in the United States. As a result, she began to gain awareness of social justice issues and started writing about them. After several years of working on ranches, her parents decided to relocate their family to Hargill, Texas.

Education and Teaching Career

Anzaldúa received a B.A. in English, Art, and Secondary Education from the University of Texas-Pan American (now University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) in 1968.

In 1972, she received an M.A. in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin. During her time in Austin, she joined politically active cultural poets and radical dramatists, such as Ricardo Sanchez and Hedwig Gorski.

After receiving her Bachelor's in English, she started a job as a preschool and special education teacher. Around this time in the 1970s, she also taught a course at UT-Austin called "La Mujer Chicana," which she described as a turning point for her as she felt more connected to the queer community, writing, and feminism.

She later enrolled in the University of Texas' doctoral program for comparative literature but left the program. Soon after, she moved to California in 1977, where she supported herself as an independent scholar.

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The Chicana Feminist

In California, Anzaldúa devoted herself completely to her writing. During this time, she was supporting herself through her writing, lectures, occasionally teaching sessions about feminism, Chicano studies, creative writing at San Francisco State University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and more.

She continued taking part in political activism and consciousness-raising keeping in mind her main goal-to find ways to build a multicultural, inclusive feminist movement. To her dismay, she found that there were few writings by or about women of color.

The Prolific 1980s

Anzaldúa continued writing, teaching, and traveling to speaking events throughout the 1980s. During this time, she co-edited This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color with Cherrie Moraga, which was published in 1981 and won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.

In addition, she wrote the semi-autobiographical Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza which was published in 1987. Making Face Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color was published in 1990 and included writings by famous feminists, such as Audre Lorde. The book includes titles such as "Still Trembles Our Rage in the Face of Racism" and "(De)Colonized Slaves".

Themes in Gloria E. Anzaldúa's works

Anzaldúa's writing included the theme of Nepantla, meaning "in the middle" to describe her experience as a Chicana woman. From this, she created the term "Nepantlera," meaning a threshold of people that move among multiple conflicting worlds as they refuse to align themselves exclusively with any single individual, group, or belief system.

Spirituality was another common theme as she occasionally described herself as a very spiritual person and stated that she had experienced four out-of-body experienced in her lifetime. She referred to her devotion to la Virgen de Guadalupe and developed concepts of spiritual activism.

Sexuality and feminism are very prominent themes in her writing. She expressed that she possessed a multi-sexuality and even stated that she felt an "intense sexuality" towards her father, animals, and trees.

Though she identifies as a lesbian in her writing, she had relationships with both men and women. She also identified as a feminist and some of her major works are associated with Chicana feminism and postcolonial feminism.

Anzaldúa's writing brings English and Spanish together as a united language, stemming from her theory of "borderlands" identity. Her work emphasizes the connection between language and identity and expresses concern with those who give up on their native language in order to fit in with society.

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Awards and Honors

In 1986, she won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color.

In 1987, her work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza was named one of the 38 best books of 1987 by Library Journal and 100 Best Books of the Century by Hungry Mind Review and Utne Reader.

In 1991, Anzaldúa won the Lambda Lesbian Small Book Press Award for Making Face Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. This year, she was also awarded the Lesbian Rights Award.

In 2012, she was named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the LGBT History Month. In 2016, she won the Independent Publisher Book Award for Anthologies in 2016 for This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color.

Legacy of Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Around the time of her death, Anzaldúa was very close to completing her book manuscript, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, and was planning on submitting it as her dissertation. Unfortunately, she passed away in 2004 in Santa Cruz, California due to complications from diabetes and was unable to complete it. Duke University Press posthumously published it in 2015.

Today, many institutions offer awards in the name of Gloria E. Anzaldúa, such as The Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize awarded annually and the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize given by the National Women's Studies Association.

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More about Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Major works

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color - 1981

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza - 1987

Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color - 1990

Interviews/Entrevistas - 2000

This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation - 2002

The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader - 2009

Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality 2015

Biographies

Northamerican Silences: History, Identity, and Witness in the Poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Leslie Marmon Silko by Kate Adams (1994)

Gloria Anzaldúa's Queer Mestizaje by Ian Barnard (1997)

More Information and sources
Skyler Isabella Gomez is a 2019 SUNY New Paltz graduate with a degree in Public Relations and a minor in Black Studies. Her passions include connecting more with her Latin roots by researching and writing about legendary Latina authors.

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Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Poet & Feminist Theorist | LiteraryLadiesGuide

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Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942 - May 15, 2004) was a queer Chicana poet, feminist theorist, and writer. Going by the name Gloria E. Anzaldúa as an author, her writing and poetry discuss the anger that stems from social and cultural marginalization.

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Texas musicians have profoundly influenced the development and evolution of rock-and-roll and the various branches of its musical tree-rockabilly, blues rock, Tex-Mex, psychedelia, and redneck rock. Some of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's most high-profile inductees, including Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, and Janis Joplin, pioneered the direction of the musical idiom. The Hall has also honored other musicians, both native Texans and those who made a name in the Lone Star State, as early influences critical to the genre's development. These musicians include T-Bone Walker, Lead Belly, Robert Johnson, Charlie Christian, and Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.

Rock-and-roll's historic roots lie in a fusion of several musical genres that came into prominence in the early decades of the twentieth century. Texans played major roles in pioneering these varied styles, including blues, jazz, and western swing. Blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson from Freestone County, Texas, is credited as the first blues star. His recordings from 1926 to 1929 were the first blues records to be commercially successful and thus introduce what had been an African-American music form to a national audience.

In the 1930s, "race labels" recorded many black blues musicians in Texas. Two landmark sessions in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937) captured the only recorded legacy of guitarist Robert Johnson, the itinerant Delta bluesman from Mississippi. Many music historians and guitar aficionados credit these songs, which include his legendary "Cross Road Blues," for laying the fundamental groundwork for rock-and-roll. Another historic blues great, Huddie Ledbetter ("Lead Belly"), traveled to Texas where he played his twelve-string guitar with the likes of Jefferson in Deep Ellum. Field-recording pioneers John and Alan Lomax discovered his guitar prowess while he was incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary and thus brought his blues to the world. These early players inspired later guitarists like Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins, Freddie King, and Albert Collins and their Texas blues sound, a highly improvisational style that encouraged a variety of personal playing techniques. The early bluesmen played an important role in the evolution of rock guitar. Legendary groups and players from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jefferson Airplane, to Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, all credit these blues players as major musical influences. Interestingly, the song "Rock Awhile" recorded in 1949 by a little-known Houston blues and jazz man and his group-Goree Carter and his Hep Cats-has been lauded by some rock historians as a forerunning anthem to the new genre .

Texas jazz players also contributed significantly to the development of rock. In 1935 guitarist Eddie Durham of San Marcos was one of the first performers on the electric guitar, and he made the first jazz recording of the amplified instrument. Fellow jazzman Charlie Christian of Dallas further elevated the electric guitar as a lead instrument. Guitarist Aaron "T-Bone" Walker, born in Linden, forged the link to the modern electric guitar in the 1940s and established the instrument as the foremost soloing tool for rhythm-and-blues.

In Texas in the 1930s another musical sound, the interesting mix of jazz, hillbilly, boogie, blues, and country that became known as western swing, also influenced the beginnings of rock. Three bands were very representative of the catchy sound that caught on: the Light Crust Doughboys, Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, and Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Both Brown and Wills had originally played in the Light Crust Doughboys before forming their own groups, and radio presented a popular medium to reach a wide listening audience.

In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s the Big D Jamboree barn dance and radio program in Dallas cultivated local talent and recruited national acts. In additional to country performers, the show also explored new trends and presented a bluesy sound mixed with country and bluegrass (or hillbilly) music called rockabilly. Big D Jamboree and its larger Louisiana counterpart, the Louisiana Hayride, often featured one of the most visible rockabilly stars-a young Elvis Presley. Several native Texans, however, are recognized as groundbreaking rockabilly performers, including Charline Arthur, Dean Beard, and Johnny Carroll. In the mid-1950s Charline Arthur, born in Henrietta, Texas, headlined the Big D Jamboree. Her bold stage presence earned praise from Elvis, and music historians have credited her as a major precursor to rockabilly, but her aggressive manner and rowdy stage shows did not fit in with the times. Other rockabilly pioneers were Dean Beard of Coleman County and his West Texas band the Crew Cats, who recorded "Rakin' and Scrapin'" in 1956. That same year Johnny Carroll from Cleburne, a Big D Jamboree and Louisiana Hayride favorite, recorded his "Crazy, Crazy Lovin'" for Decca in Nashville. Carroll was the featured star in the cult movie Rock, Baby, Rock It! filmed with other local music talent in Dallas.

During the 1950s Houston record executive Don Robey gathered an impressive lineup of blues performers for his Duke and Peacock Records labels. One artist, Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, recorded "Hound Dog" in 1953, and the song became a major rock-and-roll hit for Elvis in 1956.

The emergence of rockabilly as a new musical style and the steady output of blues recordings set the stage for the development of a new genre-rock-and-roll. The windblown plains of West Texas furnished a wealth of musical talent. In 1956 Happy, Texas, native Buddy Knox and his band, the Rhythm Orchids, which included Knox's classmate Jimmy Bowen, learned of Norm Petty's recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico, from another up-and-coming West Texas musician, Roy Orbison. The group recorded "Party Doll," and Knox subsequently became the first artist in rock to write and perform his own Number 1 hit with that song. Bowen's "I'm Stickin' With You," originally the flip side of "Party Doll," also got into the Top 20.

In early 1957 another West Texas rocker, Buddy Holly of Lubbock, ventured to Petty's studio. The tracks recorded by Holly and the Crickets resulted in the release of their first single, "That'll Be the Day," on May 27, 1957. The song soared to Number 3 on the pop charts, and subsequent releases "Peggy Sue," "Oh Boy!," and "Not Fade Away" also met great success. The pioneering influence of Holly, an inaugural inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1986), on the development of rock-and-roll cannot be overstated. Holly wrote much of his own material, and his band, the Crickets (who were inducted in their own right into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012), brought to the forefront the combination of guitars, bass, and drums as a viable self-contained musical combo. These two precedents set the standard for rock groups. Young fans, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and other future British rockers saw Holly perform in England and were inspired to emulate him. His star shone brightly for less than two years, until he lost his life in a plane crash in Iowa on February 3, 1959. The Big Bopper, J. P. Richardson of the Beaumont area, also perished. His fun-loving single "Chantilly Lace" had been a hit in 1958. Another rising Texas musician and Holly's guitarist at the time, Waylon Jennings, was not on the plane. The crash, which killed the pilot, Holly, Richardson, and teenage star Ritchie Valens, marked the end of the first chapter of rock-and-roll, an event that songwriter Don McLean later so aptly proclaimed "the day the music died," in his anthem "American Pie" in 1971.

Texas rock-and-roll progressed, however, as the 1960s dawned. Singer-songwriter Roy Orbison carried the banner of the West Texas rockers throughout the early 1960s and, in fact, was one of the few American stars to hold his own on the charts against the rising Beatles. Born in Vernon, Texas, Orbison (in the band the Teen Kings) had made his own pilgrimage to Norm Petty's Clovis studio in the 1950s. His recording of "Ooby Dooby" caught the attention of Sun Records in Memphis, and in 1956 Orbison joined the ranks of a group of emerging rockabilly stars. He gained the reputation of a successful songwriter, but when he could not attract the interest of either Elvis or the Everly Brothers to record his "Only the Lonely," Orbison recorded it himself in 1960 and introduced to the world his soaring voice and a string of aching rock ballads that became his signature style. Rock-and-roll singers from Elvis to the Beatles to Bruce Springsteen heralded the dramatic voice of Orbison. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, Orbison, like Holly, has shown incredible staying power, as evidenced by his popular comeback in the 1980s with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne as the Traveling Wilburys and his best-selling album Mystery Girl (1989) after his death in 1988.

Mexican-American rockers entered the national rock-and-roll scene in the early 1960s. In 1960 Baldemar Huerta, better known as Freddy Fender, had a hit with "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights." In 1963 a band from San Antonio called Sunny and the Sunglows (later known as Sunny and the Sunliners) became the first all-Tejano group to play on American Bandstand. Dallas's Trini Lopez had a hit in 1963 with an upbeat version of the folk song "If I Had a Hammer." This emergence of such Mexican-American performers hinted of musical influences adopted from the rich Mexican heritage of Texas.

Also in the early 1960s Major Bill Smith of Fort Worth produced a number of artists who had national hits. Ray Hildebrand and Jill Jackson, known as Paul and Paula and formed in Brownwood, had a Number 1 song, "Hey Paula." Bruce Channel of Grapevine recorded "Hey! Baby." Denton's Ray Peterson scored a 1960 hit with "Tell Laura I Love Her," while Lufkin's J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers, a band formed in San Angelo, had a Number 1 smash with "Last Kiss" in 1964. Both songs were symbolic of the "teenage tragedy" subgenre of rock in the early 1960s. Another young Lubbock group, Delbert McClinton and the Ron-Dels, recorded "If You Really Want Me To I'll Go." McClinton, who had cut his musical teeth on the Jacksboro Highway blues scene of Fort Worth, had established himself as a rising rockabilly-blues player and went on to sustain a lengthy musical career encompassing various styles. McClinton played harmonica on Bruce Channel's "Hey! Baby." A longstanding legend tells that it was McClinton who, while on tour with Channel in England, advised John Lennon on his distinctive harmonica technique-information that the Beatle subsequently immortalized in the harmonica solo of "Love Me Do."

When the Beatles burst upon the American music scene in 1964, their performances had an impact on the growing stable of Texas musicians. Savvy music producer Huey Meaux of Houston decided to jump on the "British Invasion" bandwagon but with a distinctively Texas flavor. The result produced one of the enduring bands in Texas rock history-the Sir Douglas Quintet. Meaux approached San Antonio musician Doug Sahm, whose musical legacy established him as a quintessential rock-and-roller. Formed in San Antonio in 1964, the Sir Douglas Quintet consisted of frontman Sahm, Augie Meyers on organ, Frank Morin on horns, Jack Barber on bass, and John Perez on drums. Their stylish suits and Beatle haircuts, mandated by Meaux, were designed to give the band an English flavor and thereby to capitalize on the British Invasion. Meaux had to "break" the band in England before it played in the U.S., but the group scored a major international hit in 1965 with "She's About a Mover." The song's infectious hook was the thin "con queso" line of Meyers's Vox organ. Reminiscent of an accordion fill, this reflected the Tex-Mex influence on the group. The band eventually moved to the budding rock scene of San Francisco and released other notable tracks, including "Mendocino" in 1969.

Other noteworthy bands of the mid-1960s hailed from Texas and also echoed their Tex-Mex musical traditions. Domingo Samudio (Sam Samudio) of Dallas led Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, whose hit "Wooly Bully" topped the U.S. charts in 1965. Billboard, in fact, selected "Wooly Bully" as Record of the Year. They also enjoyed success with "Lil' Red Riding Hood." Question Mark and the Mysterians likewise tapped into their own queso organ hook, played by Frank Rodriguez of Crystal City, in their hit "96 Tears" in 1965.

Meaux also produced the early material of versatile vocalist Roy Head from Three Rivers, who later, as Roy Head and the Traits, scored a Number 2 pop single in 1965 with his soulful "Treat Her Right." Houston native B. J. Thomas was also in the Meaux stable before moving on to pop and country stardom with such hits as "Hooked on a Feeling" and "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head."

As Beatlemania swept the nation, Hollywood sought to capitalize on the British Invasion in the mid-1960s and introduced the Monkees. Bandmember Michael Nesmith was born in Houston and grew up in Dallas. Nesmith, considered the best musician in the quartet, also achieved other musical success. His song "Different Drum" was a hit for Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys in 1967. He later went on to front his own country rock band in the 1970s and became a music video pioneer, winning the first Grammy given for a video in 1981.

West Texas gave forth another popular group, the Bobby Fuller Four from El Paso. The band had a national hit in 1966 with "I Fought the Law," a tune written by Sonny Curtis of the Crickets. Fuller's success was cut short by his suspicious "suicide" on July 18, 1966.

Psychedelic and its heavier variation, acid rock, emerged from both folk-rock and electric roots during the mid-to-late 1960s. Texas spawned its share of garage bands, known for their original compositions and free-form improvisation, and these psychedelic groups had both regional and national impact. Red Krayola emerged from Houston. The punky blues of Zakary Thaks came from Corpus Christi. Mouse and the Traps was born in Tyler. The band Bubble Puppy, which formed in San Antonio, recorded in Houston at Gold Star Studios for International Artists in 1968 and scored a national hit, "Hot Smoke & Sasafrass." International Artists also signed another band-the 13th Floor Elevators. Formed in Austin in 1965, the 13th Floor Elevators commanded a devoted local following and created a potent combination when they added vocalist Roky Erickson to the lineup. His song "You're Gonna Miss Me" became a hit; it was from their 1966 album, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. A second LP, Easter Everywhere (1967), also had a strong showing. Musicologists have heralded Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators as pioneers of acid rock, but their overt drug use, also a trademark of the psychedelic culture, took its toll on the band and especially Erickson. Convicted twice for drug possession, Erickson opted for a sentence to the Rusk State Hospital over state prison in 1969. During his incarceration he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and treated with various drug therapies and electroshock. He was never the same after his release in 1972, and took years to return to some semblance of musical coherence. But in the 2000s, on medication for his schizophrenia, Erickson made a comeback. In 2005 he played his first full-length concert in two decades at the Austin City Limits Festival. Many performances have followed, including debuts in New York and London. He tourned Australia and New Zealand in 2012.

In 2008 the city of Austin held the first annual Austin Psych Fest to honor the city's historical connection to psychedelic rock and promote its ongoing expression. Conceived by the Reverberation Appreciation Society, the group went on to establish other festivals (called Levitation) in Chicago, Canada, and France. By 2015 the Austin festival was held over three days in May and included a reunion performance by the 13th Floor Elevators.

Janis Joplin, another innovator and ultimately victim of the psychedelic counterculture, burst on the rock-and-roll scene in the mid-1960s. Born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, she moved to San Francisco and joined the band Big Brother and the Holding Company. Her electrifying rendition of the song "Ball and Chain," which had also been recorded by one of Joplin's musical mentors, Big Mama Thornton, at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 immediately earned her and the band national acclaim. Rock critics praised Joplin as the greatest White blues singer, but an accidental heroine overdose ended her life on October 4, 1970. Her posthumous single "Me and Bobby McGee," penned by Texan Kris Kristofferson, reached Number 1 on the charts.

The 1960s and early 1970s saw many Texas-born musicians earning musical names for themselves outside of the state. The impressive list includes Billy Preston, who was born in Houston, Sylvester "Sly Stone" Stewart of Dallas, who performed in Sly and the Family Stone, and Houston native Johnny Nash, whose catchy "I Can See Clearly Now" reached Number 1 in 1972. Mason Williams of Abilene won a Grammy for his pop instrumental guitar hit "Classical Gas" in 1968. Houston's Kenny Rogers and his pop group First Edition had a hit with "Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In." Dallas-born Stephen Stills found fame in the late 1960s in California as a member of Crosby Stills Nash and Young.

The 1970s ushered in the radio-popular genre of soft rock, with smoothly crafted, tight songs that inspired the term "California Sound." Notable Texans helped influence the California Sound. Seals and Crofts was one of the most popular mellow rock acts of the 1970s. Jim Seals, born in Sidney, Texas, and Dash Crofts of Cisco, played as teenagers with rockabilly star Dean Beard and the Crew Cats in the late 1950s. The two, along with Beard, moved to Los Angeles and joined the Champs, who had the instrumental hit "Tequila" in 1958. Eventually playing together as an acoustic duo, they hit it big with their song "Summer Breeze" in 1972. Seals's brother Dan, who performed with John Colley in the Dallas psychedelic group Southwest F.O.B., achieved his own fame with Colley in the duo England Dan and John Ford Coley. Dan Seals died on March 25, 2009.

The Eagles, a hugely successful group of the 1970s, owe a lot of their success to two Texans. Drummer-vocalist Don Henley was born in Gilmer and played in a hometown band called Shiloh, before the group moved to California in 1969. Henley was one of the founding members of the Eagles in 1971, and his songwriting and distinctive voice helped propel the group to fame. Henley, as a member of the Eagles, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. Eagle associate J. D. Souther of Amarillo played in the Cinders, a Panhandle band of the early 1960s, before heading West. Souther wrote some of the Eagles' most memorable songs, such as "New Kid in Town" and "Best of My Love," and later recorded a hit of his own, "You're Only Lonely."

In the early 1970s the hard-edged sounds of rock and blues were still alive and well with Texas musicians. Brothers Johnny and Edgar Winter grew up in the Beaumont area and listened to the records of blues masters like Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker. Johnny attracted a massive audience with the release of Johnny Winter (1969), which showcased blues-rock guitar prowess, including a considerable penchant for slide guitar. Winter, who died in 2014, established himself among aspiring guitarists as one of the modern blues greats. Brother Edgar achieved success as a keyboardist. Edgar's part jazzy, part rhythm-and-blues tunes earned him respect as an amazing multi-instrumentalist (he also played saxophone) and vocalist.

The early 1970s saw prolific output from a band formed in Fort Worth, Bloodrock, which issued six albums from 1970 to 1973. Their second LP, Bloodrock 2, earned a Gold Record Award and included a popular single, the morbid "D.O.A." Fort Worth guitarist and vocalist John Nitzinger, though not a formal member of the group, contributed some of Bloodrock's songs.

The band ZZ Top became the Lone Star State's most successful rock act of the 1970s. This threesome emerged from the ashes of the Texas psychedelic scene. Drummer Frank Beard and bassist Dusty Hill had played in the American Blues in Dallas, and guitarist Billy Gibbons performed in the noteworthy Moving Sidewalks in Houston. Evidently he had turned heads, because Jimi Hendrix, while appearing on the Tonight Show, had praised Gibbons as the next hot young guitarist. Gibbons, Beard, and Hill came together in Houston in 1970 (after Gibbons had replaced two previous band members). They built a strong following with their touring and Southern-influenced, guitar-driven rock. Their third album, Tres Hombres (1973), went platinum on the strength of the hit "La Grange." Throughout the following decades, ZZ Top's continued popularity with releases such as their best-selling Eliminator (1983) attested to the band's popular appeal and staying power. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004.

In the early 1970s Texas gave birth to a distinctive and unusual blending of country music and urban blues and rock that resulted in a hybrid style known variously as redneck rock or progressive country. The redneck rock movement began in Austin as Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and a group of country and rocker songwriters congregated to create a burgeoning music scene. Nelson had rejected the slick commercial environment of Nashville and returned to his native Texas. The redneck rock movement inspired enthusiasm from both native Texans and Northern transplants in search of its laid-back, open-minded attitude. Rock and country musicians Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore formed the Flatlanders in rock's root town of Lubbock before each eventually moved to the Central Texas area.

Jerry Jeff Walker, B. W. Stevenson, and Michael Martin Murphey were three singer-songwriters who symbolized the redneck rock movement and garnered acclaim with big crossover hits. Walker, a transplanted Texan, penned "Mr. Bojangles," and the tune became a major radio hit for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1971. The big voice of Dallas native B. W. Stevenson belted out "My Maria," which went to Number 9 in 1973. Michael Martin Murphey's "Wild Fire" was a huge hit that went to Number 3 on the charts in 1975. The outgrowth of this flourishing Austin redneck rock scene also led to the creation of the syndicated public television program Austin City Limits, which brought numerous Texas country, blues, and rock musicians to a national audience.

The mid-to-late 1970s continued the tradition of Texan musicians gaining national and international fame. Players who had headed west in the 1960s included Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs, high school classmates in Dallas. During the 1970s each went on to success. Dallas native Marvin Lee Aday, better known as Meat Loaf, scored national hits with his musical theatrical flair, and his Bat Out of Hell (1977) became one of rock's biggest-selling albums.

The 1980s ushered in the national fame of Christopher Cross. Formed by San Antonio native Chris Geppert and consisting of some notable Austin-based musicians, Christopher Cross swept the Grammys with five awards, which included Best New Artist, Album of the Year- Christopher Cross (1980)-and three awards for the hit single "Sailing." The crisp recording and production of the songs earned Christopher Cross a place as one of pop music's biggest acts in the early 1980s. He also won an Oscar for Best Original Song, "Arthur's Theme" for the movie Arthur (1981).

The emergence of punk music and its mellower cousin new wave claimed its roots in the psychedelic bands of the 1960s, most notably Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators. Other musicians also adopted styles tinged with Tex-Mex nuances that harkened back to the influences of the Sir Douglas Quintet and Question Mark and the Mysterians. By the early 1980s punk bands performed throughout the state. The Judy's of Houston achieved moderate success. Dallas contributed acts like the Nervebreakers, and Austin spawned the Big Boys and the Next. Austin-based musicians such as Joe Ely toured as the opener for the Clash, and Joe "King" Carrasco's high energy, Tex-Mex-flavored "nuevo wavo" was a perennial draw on the club circuit. One of the early punk Texas bands that has shown staying power is the Butthole Surfers. Trinity University students Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary formed the group in San Antonio in the early 1980s. Their screeching sounds and societal satire have evoked shock and loathing in some, but have also inspired a devoted cult following for three decades.

Pop bands such as Timbuk 3 and Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians had their day in the sun in the mid-to-late 1980s. Timbuk 3's husband and wife duo, Pat and Barbara MacDonald, who had moved to Austin, wrote the very catchy "The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades" in 1986. The New Bohemians were an established band playing in Deep Ellum when they added art student and singer Edie Brickell in 1985. A revamped lineup signed with Geffen Records and released their debut, Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars (1989), which included the hit "What I Am." Brickell's airy vocal style and the band's hippie harkening image caught the public eye for a time. Both Timbuk 3 and Edie Brickell and New Bohemians were destined to be relegated to one-hit wonder status.

The 1980s saw the increasing recognition of the skill and versatility of a new generation of Texas guitarists. Numerous awards and polls in guitar magazines have heralded Austinite Eric Johnson as one of the technically best guitarists. He first turned heads as a member of the Austin jazz fusion group the Electromagnets, which featured founder Bill Maddox, Stephen Barber, and Kyle Brock, in the mid-1970s. Word of Johnson's virtuosity continued to build as he worked as a session player for the likes of Carole King, Cat Stevens, and Christopher Cross. His first solo album, Tones, came out in 1986, followed by Ah Via Musicom in 1990.

Van Wilks is another formidable guitar player in the Central Texas area. Listeners have often compared the blues rock master to ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, and he has toured with ZZ Top. Wilks released the album Bombay Tears in 1980 to critical acclaim. He and his band have also been the winners of many newspaper polls in recognition of their popular hard-rock style. Van Wilks and Eric Johnson teamed up in a memorable guitar duo performance of "What Child Is This" for the Texas Christmas Collection (1982).

The Vaughan brothers, Jimmie and Stevie, finally earned their long-sought national attention in the 1980s. Born in the Dallas area, the brothers had moved to Austin by the 1970s. Guitarist Jimmie Vaughan hit it big in the Austin-based blues group the Fabulous Thunderbirds, whose songs "Tuff Enuff" and "Wrap It Up" became national hits and featured videos on MTV in 1986. Jimmie's younger brother Stevie and his band, Double Trouble, stormed the blues rock scene with their release of Texas Flood (1983) and Couldn't Stand the Weather (1984). Both brothers had performed and collaborated at various times with songwriter/drummer Doyle Bramhall, who co-wrote several songs for Stevie and played drums on the Vaughan brothers' Family Style (1990). Musicians recognized Stevie Ray Vaughan as one of the great new guitarists. Vaughan, standing on the shoulders of the old Deep Ellum blues greats, influenced countless young players, and many guitar magazines and instructional books have analyzed his use of heavy-gauge strings and tuning to achieve his distinctively fat sound. His tragic death in a helicopter crash in 1990 cut short a remarkable music career.

Two years later the rhythm section of Double Trouble, bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer Chris Layton, teamed with Charlie Sexton and Doyle Bramhall II in Austin to form the Arc Angels. Arc was taken from the initials of the Austin Rehearsal Center. What began as a musical outlet for the members soon erupted into media labels of "supergroup." Their debut album on Geffen Records and live shows quickly attracted national exposure, but the group fell apart in 1994. At South by Southwest in 2009, the Arc Angels reunited to record and perform once more. That year they opened for Eric Clapton on his European tour.

One of the biggest Texas acts of the 1990s consisted of legendary veteran rockers Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers, Freddy Fender, and conjunto accordionist Flaco Jiménez. The supergroup the Texas Tornados released its eponymous debut album with Warner Brothers in 1990. Once again the musicians relied heavily on their Texan-influenced roots, combining Tex-Mex conjunto rhythms with catchy lyric and melody hooks that had crossover appeal in the rock world. Throughout much of the 1990s the group toured nationally and internationally and was ready to embark on a new journey when Doug Sahm died on November 18, 1999. Sahm's career epitomizes Texas rock-and-roll, a meeting of cultures that borrows from the black blues greats, border-flavored Tex-Mex, and Texas cowboy and folk music, with some doo-wop thrown in. Freddy Fender, who had started his career as a young rocker in the late 1950s, died on November 17, 2007. The Texas Tornados found new life in the 2000s, however, as Sahm's son Shawn joined forces with Meyers, Jiménez, and several original sidemen (including Louie Ortega on guitar, Speedy Sparks on bass, and Ernie Durawa on drums) to form a new incarnation of the band. They released ¡Está Bueno! in 2010. In 2015 the Tornados released a new double-CD compilation featuring songs from previous albums, some rareties, as well as six unreleased tracks in A Little Bit is Better Than Nada-Prime Cuts 1990-1996.

The significant influence shown by notable rock pioneer Roky Erickson was honored in the 1990 Warner Brothers release of Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye: A Tribute to Roky Erickson, on which various rockers recorded his songs. Another noteworthy tribute album resulted in an unlikely, but compelling combination. Twisted Willie (1996) was a compilation of Willie Nelson's songs as performed by some of the nation's top grunge bands. The alternative rock scene of Seattle in the early 1990s nodded to the legacy of the Texas Outlaw, redneck rocker Willie Nelson.

Fort Worth provided its own alternative grunge offering in the Toadies. Formed in 1989, the band gained considerable exposure with its extensive touring in the 1990s, opening for White Zombie, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bush, and other well-known acts. They broke up in 2001 but reunited for shows in 2006 and 2007 and released their album No Deliverance in 2008, Feeler in 2010, and Play. Rock. Music. in 2012. The band embarked on a new tour in 2014 to promote their album Rubberneck. The following year saw another tour and release ( Heretics).

The rise of female singer-songwriters in the rock industry in the mid-1990s also featured a Texas-born artist whose unlikely commercial path led to stardom. Dallas native Lisa Loeb secured a place in music history for achieving the first-ever Number 1 hit single without having a record deal. In 1994 her song "Stay," which was featured on the soundtrack of the film Reality Bites, bulleted up the charts. Subsequently, Loeb signed with Geffen and later participated as a featured artist on the Lilith Fair tour promoting female musicians in 1997.

The Central Texas band Sixpence None the Richer entered the music scene in the 1990s. After several years of obscurity, they finally got national recognition with their hit "Kiss Me" in 1999. After the release of their second album Divine Discontent in 2002, the group disbanded in 2004 but reunited in 2007.

Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, heavy metal bands (and their various subgenres such as death metal or thrash metal) have flourished in the Lone Star State. Arlington's group Pantera actually formed in the early 1980s but, after building an impressive following through several album releases and tours, came into their own in the 1990s. Their formidable album Far Beyond Driven entered the U.S. and U.K. charts at number one in 1994, and releases and tours throughout the 1990s cemented the Texas group as a worldwide force. Other listeners, perhaps not familiar with thrash metal's blazing tempo and heavy atonal guitar riffs, got a taste of Pantera's style when the group wrote a brief metal theme song for the NHL team the Dallas Stars during their Stanley Cup season in 1999. The band broke up in 2003. Tragically, founding member and lead guitarist "Dimebag Darrell" ( Darrell Lance Abbott) was shot and killed while playing onstage with his band Damageplan on December 8, 2004.

King's X, a band based in Houston, garnered critical acclaim for its interesting and intricate blend of vocal harmonies, progressive rock elements, and metal tendencies. Their often spiritual and introspective lyrics for their early releases led some to classify them in the genre of Christian rock, as evidenced in their successful LP Faith, Hope and Love (1990), a label that the band itself has opposed. They continued to tour and release works through 2015.

The hard-hitting rock band The Union Underground formed in San Antonio in 1996. By 1999 they signed with a subsidiary of Columbia Records, and their debut, An Education in Rebellion (2000), earned praise from critics as some of the best heavy metal of the day. Their recording and performance of "Across the Nation," the theme song for World Wrestling Entertainment's RAW show from 2002 through 2006, brought the group to an even larger worldwide audience, though they broke up not long after its release.

Another metal splash occurred for the Dallas quartet Drowning Pool in 2001. The group formed in the late 1990s and toured with alternative metal bands Sevendust and Kittie while peddling their demos. Eventually they signed to a major label, and the group's debut album, Sinner (2001), went platinum on the strength of the breakout single "Bodies." The band rode the wave of stardom as a major stage act on the Ozzfest tour, but suffered a great setback with the sudden death of singer Dave Williams in August 2002. The band continued to tour and record, however, and had issued three albums, each with different lead vocalists, through 2007. They released a live album, Loudest Common Denominator, in 2009. By 2014 Drowning Pool had released a total of five albums and also released Sinner, an expanded two-disc reissue of their debut album including bonus tracks.

In the 2000s Texas rock remained a powerful force in the music industry. The late King Curtis (born Curtis Ousley) of Fort Worth was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of rock's most talented and influential sidemen. He played tenor sax on recordings by the Coasters, Aretha Franklin, Sam and Dave, John Lennon, and countless others.

Texas musical groups and solo artists that emerged in the 2000s covered a broad spectrum of genres as well as cultural influences. Los Lonely Boys consists of brothers Henry, Jojo, and Ringo Garza of San Angelo. Their music, named "Texican Rock and Roll," draws from an amalgamation of rock-and-roll, blues, country, and conjunto. Their debut single "Heaven" in 2004 was a Top 40 hit and reached the top of the Billboard adult contemporary chart. It won a Grammy in 2005 for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.

Black Angels, a heavy psych group from Austin, originated in 2004 and represented a new generation of rockers influenced by early Texas psychedelic bands such as Red Krayola and the 13th Floor Elevators. The proverbial students teamed with the master, so to speak, when the Black Angels performed with Roky Erickson in 2008.

The Wichita Falls band Bowling for Soup, considered pop punk, produced a Billboard Top 40 hit with their cover of "1985" in 2004. Over the next decade they continued to record and tour. They announced a UK farewell tour for 2013, but apparently reconsidered the finality of those travels and later scheduled a return to the UK for a tour in early 2016.

The television sensation American Idol discovered a dynamic performer from Fort Worth in its first-season winner, Kelly Clarkson, in 2002. Lauded for her powerful voice, Clarkson won a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 2005. The singer had released five albums by 2012. Her fourth album, All I Ever Wanted, debuted at Number 1, and her single, "My Life Would Suck Without You" quickly reached Number 1 both in the United States and United Kingdom. She won a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album for Stronger (2011) and was ranked by Billboard as the fourteenth-best-selling artist of the 2000s.

The Simpson sisters, Jessica and Ashlee, both achieved considerable recognition in the pop world. Jessica Simpson of Abilene was a pop star and actress in the early 2000s, though in 2008 she delved into country music. Her younger sister Ashlee, born in Waco, won the Billboard Award for New Female Artist of the Year in 2004.

Annie Clark, a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who grew up in Dallas, received critical acclaim after the release of her debut album Marry Me in 2007. The musician, who performs under the name St. Vincent, won the PLUG Independent Music Female Artist of the Year award in 2008 and released her second album, Actor, worldwide in 2009. Her third album, Strange Mercy, hit Number 19 on the Billboard 200 in 2011. Her fourth solo album, titled St. Vincent (2014), won a Grammy for Best Alternative Album.

The Mars Volta was formed in 2001 in El Paso by Omar Rodríguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala. The group's fusion of progressive rock, jazz, punk, and Salsa attracted attention in the rock world. They won an ASCAP Vanguard Award in 2004 and have toured with System of a Down and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rolling Stone proclaimed them 2008's Best Prog-Rock Band, and that same year their fourth album The Bedlam of Goliath debuted at Number 3 on the Billboard 200. The Mars Volta won a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2009 for their song "Wax Simulacra." They disbanded by 2013. One of the group's original members, Isaiah "Ikey" Owens, died of a heart attack in October 2014.

Texas rock-and-roll at the dawn of the new millennium continued to bring both veteran favorites and fresh faces, all classified under the broad umbrella of rock music. Veteran musician Delbert McClinton still toured heavily. Guitarists Eric Johnson, Jimmie Vaughan, and Van Wilks, as well their inspired protégés such as brothers Charlie and Will Sexton, participated in a vibrant scene. ZZ Top still appeared before packed audiences worldwide. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame continued to recognize the important contributions of Texans to rock-and-roll through the inductions of Freddie King in 2012 and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble in 2014. The strength of Texas rock-and-roll also lies in the many regional and road bands playing at venues across the state. With the proliferation of home recording studios and the marketing exposure enabled by social media, YouTube, digital downloads, and live streaming on the Internet, Texas rock-and-roll bands have increasing opportunities to present their music to new audiences.

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Texas musicians have profoundly influenced the development and evolution of rock-and-roll and the various branches of its musical tree-rockabilly, blues rock, Tex-Mex, psychedelia, and redneck rock. Some of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's most high-profile inductees, including Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, and Janis Joplin, pioneered the direction of the musical idiom.

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PBS: Accordion Dreams - Cultures Of Music And Dance

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As they adapted to a new culture, familiar traditions began to change. Nowhere is that more evident than in the music. The music created by Tejanos was a uniquely American synthesis of Mexican and European styles and reflected the spirit of the people and the land in which they lived.

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us-mexico border: biden administration continues to deny journalists access to border facilities - cnnpolitics

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Biden administration continues to deny journalists access to border facilities

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The Biden administration has so far denied journalists access to border facilities amid a surge of unaccompanied minors crossing the US-Mexico border, which has raised questions about its commitments to increased transparency.

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President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that undocumented immigrants cause more crime, but new research suggests the opposite might be true. Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea

Undocumented immigration does not increase the violent crime rate in U.S. metropolitan areas. In fact, it may reduce property crime rates. These are the key findings from our recently published article in the Journal of Crime and Justice, co-authored by Yulin Yang, James Bachmeier and Mike Maciag.

Research shows that the American communities where immigrants make their homes are more often improved by their presence than harmed by it. Immigrants bring social, cultural and economic activity to the places they live. That makes these places more vital and safer, not more dangerous.

Why it matters

People from all social groups and backgrounds commit crimes. But undocumented immigrants, and immigrants more generally, are often baselessly blamed for increasing crime rates - including, repeatedly, by President Donald Trump. In the second and final presidential debate, Trump again claimed undocumented immigrants are rapists and murderers.

This notion has existed and been studied since the early 20th century, including in a 2005 analysis we conducted with a number of colleagues that concluded immigration did not increase crime rates in U.S. metropolitan areas.

But this research is often dismissed because most empirical studies cannot separate undocumented immigrants from the total immigrant population. That level of analysis is necessary to draw conclusions about the relationship between undocumented immigration and crime.

For example, we found in a 2017 study with colleagues that from 1970 to 2010 metropolitan areas with greater concentrations of immigrants, legal and undocumented combined, have less property crime than areas with fewer immigrants, on average. Critics suggested that our findings would not hold if we looked at only the subset of undocumented individuals.

Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images

So we decided to find out if they were right. Our new study is the result of that effort, and it confirms our original findings: Undocumented immigration, on average, has no effect on violent crime across U.S. metropolitan areas.

In statistical models that did identify a significant relationship between undocumented immigration and crime, we found undocumented immigration reduces property crimes, such as burglary.

How we do our work

Using two different estimates of the undocumented immigrant populations for 154 metropolitan areas in our most recent study - one from the Pew Research Center and one from the Migration Population Institute - we examined the effect of undocumented immigration on homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary and larceny crime rates.

Crime rate data came from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report program. Other data were from the U.S. Census Bureau.

[ The Conversation's newsletter explains what's going on with the coronavirus pandemic. Subscribe now.]

Using a statistical method called regression analysis to examine the data, we found that as the size of the undocumented population increases, the property crime rate decreases, on average. And the size of the undocumented population in a metropolitan area tends to have no impact on the violent crime rate.

These findings build on the conclusions of a large 2018 study in which researchers Graham Ousey and Charis Kubrin examined 51 studies on immigration and crime published from 1994 to 2014.

What still isn't known

Our analyses looked at broad metropolitan patterns, not the relationship of undocumented immigration and crime rates in distinct, specific places such as New York City and Los Angeles. Nor does our study address the reasons that immigration reduces crime, although there is plenty of other scholarship on that issue.

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Undocumented immigrants may actually make American communities safer - not more dangerous - new study finds

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The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. Undocumented immigration does not increase the violent crime rate in U.S. metropolitan areas. In fact, it may reduce property crime rates. These are the key findings from our recently published article in the Journal of Crime and Justice, co-authored by Yulin Yang, James Bachmeier and Mike Maciag.

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https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/mariachi-music

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Although most people enjoy the atmosphere of alegría (joy) generated by a good mariachi group, few are familiar with the background of mariachi music in either Mexico or Texas. Today large mariachis with the traditional instrumentation of trumpets, violins, guitar, vihuela and guitarrón are easy to locate in all Texas cities, while smaller groups are ubiquitous entertainment in Mexican restaurants throughout the state.

The music they play can be quite intricate and has a colorful history covering the past 200 years. The story of the mariachi, especially its development before the twentieth century, is sketchy, but by piecing together various bits of information from historical records we can say that mariachis probably first appeared in the late 1700s as regional music groups in the small towns of Jalisco, Mexico. These groups, primarily folk string ensembles, often consisted of a harp, two violins, and a vihuela (a small five-string guitar with a rounded back). They played mostly local or regional sones (instrumental pieces), using a complex 6/8 meter. Changes came by the late 1800s, when vocals were added to many of the sones and the harp was slowly replaced by the bass guitarrón. This instrument, invented for the mariachis, is a much larger version of the vihuela with six bass strings; it produces a bass sound of great volume and is more portable than the harp.

Other changes came to mariachi instrumentation and repertoire in the twentieth century, such as the addition of the trumpet. A number of different versions account for this addition. According to Philip Sonnichsen, a noted scholar of Mexican music, the longtime popularity of the brass band in Mexico is behind it. "In small pueblos," he writes, "ensembles might well use whatever instruments were available: thus mariachis using flutes, clarinets and even trombones were known to exist." The trumpet, he states, was briefly introduced into the famous Mariachi Vargas in 1913 and the historic Mariachi Coculense de Cirilo Marmolejo in 1925.

By the 1930s trumpets were widely accepted as part of the modern mariachi ensemble, which thus acquired the ability to perform a wide variety of musical styles in addition to the regional sones of Jalisco. The versatile combination of strings, brass, a powerful bass, and the rhythm and harmony of the guitar and vihuela opened the door for commercial success. From the 1930s on, mariachis became the standard backup bands for popular singers in Mexico.

In its customary modern form, a mariachi group must include violins, trumpets, guitar, vihuela, and guitarrón. The typical mariachi must be able to perform sones, polkas, waltzes, boleros (modern love ballads), rancheras (country "ranch" songs), and any other popular song that is requested and that people are willing to pay for. Since mariachis work primarily as "request bands," playing whatever a customer wants to hear, they are often paid on a per-song basis or for the amount of time they play. With their trademark black and silver regional dress, the traje de charro (Jalisco cowboy outfit), they have appeared in movies, on recordings, and on live radio with such classic Mexican stars as Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Javier Solís, and with ranchera (ranch-country) music greats such as José Alfredo Jiménez, Antonio Aguilar and Vicente Fernández. Through this exposure, mariachi groups and mariachi music have become the best-known Mexican musical style all over the world. Who can think of Mexican music without picturing a mariachi group?

The mariachi's historical uncertainties, however, are further reflected by the mystery surrounding the origins of the word itself. Some scholars have suggested that during the French occupation of Mexico in the 1860s, local groups who played at French wedding parties came to be known as "mariachis," a derivation of French mariage. Sonnichsen, however, cites a letter written by a priest in the state of Nayarit as early as 1852 that refers specifically to "mariachis" and their music. Other stories offer further explanations: that the term comes from one of the local indigenous languages, that it comes from the name María, or that it is transferred from the name for a dance platform. Whatever the origin, the term is commonly used today to apply not only to the large musical ensemble, but to the musical style and to the individual musicians who play Mexican music, whether they are part of a large group or not.

Texas has a long tradition of musicians and guitarreros (guitar-playing singers that some might call mariachis) playing Mexican folk and popular music on request. In the 1920s and 1930s, La Plaza del Zacate or Haymarket Square in San Antonio was where the local populace went to hear such famous duos as Rocha and Martínez or the family of Lydia Mendoza sing popular Mexican tunes. In the 2010s this tradition continued in the same area, where many mariachi groups performed nightly at the well-known restaurant Mi Tierra. Besides the guitarreros, small ad hoc music groups called orquestas típicas, which probably spread from Central and Northern Mexico, existed in Texas by the early 1900s. In his book The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music, Manuel Peña writes about this tradition of string and wind ensembles among South Texas Mexican Americans. String orquestas and their típica variants, he states, were widely known in the state by the early twentieth century, though "makeshift ensembles...must have been in currency long before. These continued to exist until the 1930s, when better-organized wind orquestas, patterned after the American swing bands and featuring saxophones, trumpets and piano began to appear with increasing frequency." The presence of such groups, using an instrumentation and folk or popular song repertoire similar to that found in mariachi groups, may explain why the mariachi style caught on so easily in Texas.

From about 1930 through the 1950s, the mariachi style gradually became the national popular music of Mexico. Lagging a decade or so behind, mariachi music in Texas began to become popular between the 1940s and the 1960s with the constant influx of immigrants from central Mexico. The new arrivals, who had not grown up with the local Texas-Mexican conjunto or orquesta Tejana musical styles, brought their own stylistic preferences with them. The popularity of mariachi music was also growing in the non-Hispanic population as more and more Texans visited tourist areas of Mexico. By the 1960s Spanish-language radio had proliferated over South Texas and could be found in major urban areas throughout the state. At that time stations in the Fort Worth-Dallas area played primarily mariachi music from Mexico rather than homegrown Texas-Mexican styles, partly because the area was largely populated by immigrants from central Mexico and also because of a prejudice against "lower-class" Texas-Mexican music (especially conjunto music).

The 1970s through the early twenty-first century saw continued growth in the popularity of mariachi music among all Hispanics as well as non-Hispanics in Texas so that conjunto, orquesta Tejana, and mariachi have equal and sometimes overlapping followings. The three types of music seem to have somewhat separate territories, however. Whether in large ensembles with full instrumentation or in smaller quartets or trios of varied instrumentation, mariachi groups function as popular entertainment at restaurants, house parties, weddings, and other similar occasions They also play at churches on such occasions as the memorial of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Conjuntos and orquestas, on the other hand, play primarily at dance halls or at parties featuring dancing.

Some highly polished concert mariachi groups, patterned after Mexico's famous Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, play nightclub and hotel shows in Mexico City, Los Angeles, and a few other large cities. Occasionally these types of mariachi groups can be found in Houston, San Antonio, or Austin. Several websites list cities, venues, and names of mariachi groups performing, and many mariachi groups now have their own promotional websites. Continuing immigration from Mexico, including musicians, has also helped to swell the ranks of both average restaurant-style and concert-style mariachi groups in Texas.

Today mariachi groups are not only a standard feature of the Texas music scene but are also found within the school systems. Since the 1970s, mariachi has been offered as a musical ensemble course in many universities, colleges, and public schools. Contrary to old stereotypes of out-of-tune violins and blaring trumpets, today's players are usually well-trained; many hold degrees from university music departments. Both the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at Kingsville have offered mariachi ensemble study since 1977. Junior high and high school mariachi programs date from the late 1970s in Austin, San Antonio, and several South Texas towns; from the early 1980s in Fort Worth and Houston; and from the late 1980s in El Paso. International mariachi conferences and workshops for these students were held yearly in San Antonio for many years beginning in the 1970s. In 2000 Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University) began its annual "Feria del Mariachi" concert, which included the university's own mariachi ensemble and other groups. By 2010 the event had expanded to include instructional seminars about instrumentation, stage presence, arrangement, and mariachi traditions for participants, including middle and high school students. In the 2000s similar conferences were held in Tucson, Arizona, and many other cities throughout the Southwest.

Many of these conferences have traditionally hosted and still feature performances and instruction by current or former members of the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán-probably the best-known concert-style mariachi in Mexico. The new generations of mariachi musicians produced by the schools and universities over the past forty years have continued forming groups that have perpetuated the mariachi style throughout the state and that bode well to increase the popularity of mariachi music in Texas for decades to come.

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Although most people enjoy the atmosphere of alegría (joy) generated by a good mariachi group, few are familiar with the background of mariachi music in either Mexico or Texas. Today large mariachis with the traditional instrumentation of trumpets, violins, guitar, vihuela and guitarrón are easy to locate in all Texas cities, while smaller groups are ubiquitous entertainment in Mexican restaurants throughout the state.

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"The Impact of Media Stereotypes on Opinions and Attitudes Towards Latinos" National Hispanic Media Coalition

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"The Impact of Media Stereotypes on Opinions and Attitudes Towards Latinos" National Hispanic Media Coalition

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https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/jazz

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High-risk journalism at the border - The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

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Mexico’s cartel violence and government corruption silence the press
From the Winter 2011 issue of The News Media & The Law, page 4. By Stephen Miller

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Welcome to Texas, birthplace and home of Tejano music.

Tejano in Spanish simply means "Texan." Tejano music, however, is Texas-Mexican (Tex-Mex) music, which encompasses several musical genres, ensembles, and styles of music, as well as a whole industry that sustains thousands of musicians and workers, independent record labels, a vibrant club and dance scene, radio programs and stations, festivals, and a loyal fan base of local and regional people, with a growing following of national and international music lovers.

Even as embattled as Tejano music has been since its beginnings in the mid-1800s in a racist and segregationist society following the Mexican-American War, and in its position amid a mainstream commercial media in the United States that espouses such things as "English only," the music has survived and continues to be an important and viable form of creative expression and cultural identity for the Tejano/MeXicano people. And in the case of the conjunto Tejano, has given rise to a truly unique and original American musical ensemble and style of music that ranks with the best and most authentic of jazz, rock, country, Cajun/zydeco, and other ensembles and musical art forms that America has given birth to and shared with the world.

A distinctive Tejano music began developing in the 1820s and 1830s with the unique confluence of peoples and cultures that came together during this time in Tejas: Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, Anglo/Texan, and US. To understand Tejano music, it is important to know the history of the Tejano people.

Tejanos are primarily Mexicans living in Texas. That means that Tejanos are Mexican/Indigenous people first and foremost. In fact, the word Tejas is an indigenous word from the Hasinai tribes of East Texas that means "friendly" or "allies." When the Spaniards colonized the "Americas" in the late 1400s and Tejas in the 1600s, they intermixed and married with the indigenous people to create a mestizo people: part Spanish and part American "Indian." Tejanos are mestizos.

This mestizo population revolted against the oppressive españoles, and Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821. Coahuila y Tejas became a northern state of the newly formed nation of Mexico. During this period the Anglos and Europeans from the United States began settling in Texas, and there was a movement by the Texians and Tejanos to secede from Mexico and make Texas an independent republic. This was accomplished at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 when Mexican president and general José Antonio López de Santa Anna was captured by the Texian forces and signed over Tejas to Sam Houston. Texas became the twenty-eighth state of the United States of America in 1845, and in 1846 the United States went to war against Mexico, which ended in 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in which Mexico ceded over half of its northern territory to the United States: New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, California, and parts of Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Utah.

The period after 1848 is important because for the first time in our history a great number of Mexicans were living in the United States, thus beginning the process that created the Chicanos. The term Chicano, which was more popularly used as an ethnic and cultural identifier among the youth during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, basically means a Mexican within the United States, albeit with a social, cultural, and political consciousness. The word Chicano comes from the term Mexica, the Nahuatl (Aztec language) name for the Aztecs. Mexicano, pronounced Mechicano (some say Meshicano), is the Nahuatl/Spanish pronunciation for Mexican. Tejanos are Mexicans and Chicanos from Texas.

We make a distinction between Chicanos whose families may have been in the United States for four or five generations, as opposed to those Mexican migrants who have just recently arrived. Chicano culture is different than Mexican, though we have a shared history and culture. For instance, whereas the Mexican's language is Spanish, within the United States Mexicans have to learn how to speak English, the language of government, laws, and schools. This assimilation and acculturation process that takes place in Chicanos and Tejanos is typical of a "border culture," Texas/Mexico, Anglo/Mexican, where two or more cultures come into contact and collide, in many ways creating a dialectical process of conflict, resolution, and accommodation - the give and take of peoples learning to live with each other and sharing each other's culture and space.

This process is key in defining and understanding who we are as a people and all of our cultural and artistic expressions, including our language, literature, food, and music. We are a border culture - Indigenous, Spanish, Mestizo, Mexican, Texan, and American - and all of our cultural expressions are a synthesis of these social, cultural, economic, and political elements that has produced unique and original forms of art, such as Tejano music. Renato Rosaldo calls this process "transculturation," where "the result is not identity confusion but play that operates within, even as it remakes, a diverse cultural repertoire. Creative processes of transculturation center themselves along literal and figurative borders where the 'person' is crisscrossed by multiple identities." Vicki L. Ruiz calls it "cultural coalescence," where people "pick, borrow, retain, and creative distinctive cultural forms. There is not a single hermetic Mexican or Mexican-American culture, but rather permeable cultures rooted in generation, gender, and region, class, and personal experience. People navigate across cultural boundaries." Tejano music crosses these borders and boundaries and is a prime example of "transculturation" and "cultural coalescence," the whole essentially being different and greater than the sum of its parts.

Manuel Peña, the foremost academic and theoretician of Tejano music and author of three books on the subject, states that " Música tejana is not one single music but several musical and musico-literary genres, ensembles, and their styles. It encompasses the major musico-literary genres covered in this book [ Música Tejana] - the corrido, canción, and what I call the canción-corrido. It also includes two major regional ensembles and their styles - the conjunto, a close cousin of música norteña [music of Northern Mexico], and the Texas-Mexican version of the orquesta, a multi-styled wind [and brass] ensemble patterned after the American swing band. Lastly, música tejana also includes yet another, more recent crop of synthesizer-driven ensembles and their styles, known since the mid-1980s as 'Tejano.'" To this I would add a number of hybrid ensembles that combine distinctive instrumentation and styles of music, such as the progressive conjunto Tejano ensemble that might combine the button accordion with synthesizer and a couple of saxophones, and a Tejano country ensemble that utilizes a steel guitar and fiddle with a button accordion and a bajo sexto (twelve-string bass rhythm guitar).

Tejano music is dance music. You cannot separate one from the other. In his book Música Tejana, Peña gives a class-based analysis of the history and sociocultural development of Tejano music and dance. In the mid-1800s, working-class Mexicans living in a primarily rural Tejas had their vocal music genres, canciones (lyrical songs) and corridos (ballads), which were sung in Spanish by a lone individual on the guitar, or maybe as a duet, or with a small string or wind ensemble. Tejano musicians sung these canciones and corridos and played their dance music at weddings and bautismos, family and cultural celebrations, and fandangos (dances) out in the country. There was still an elite of Spanish/Mexican landowners who could afford large ensembles and orchestras for their daughters' quinceañeras and bailes (more elite dances), but most of the people were poor and lived off the land. The canciones and corridos told the stories of the Mexicano/Tejano people - their lives on the rancho, their hardships, and their loves.

The corrido, a sung ballad of the Texas/Mexican border that dates back to the 1830s, is one of the earliest original forms of Tejano music and literature and has been well documented by the great Mexican American scholar Américo Paredes in his book With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. As Peña states, "the corrido of the nineteenth century responded far more vigorously than the contemporaneous canción to the intercultural encounter and its conflict - particularly the subtype Paredes has labeled the 'corrido of intercultural conflict.'" Peña continues: "The corrido of intercultural conflict thus emerged as the most symbolically effective artistic expression forged by the tejanos in their struggle to negotiate both economic upheaval and conflict with the aggressive Anglos." In the "Corrido de Gregorio Cortez," Cortez kills the Anglo sheriff who had shot his brother, then flees and is pursued by the Texas Rangers. The corrido narrates the story, usually in waltz or polka form, of how Cortez defended his brother "with his pistol in his hand" and outwitted the Texas Rangers through his intelligence and exceptional horsemanship. In the process, Cortez becomes a hero to the exploited and downtrodden Mexicano people living on the border under Anglo control. The corrido is an important communication vehicle and form of historical documentation for the Mexicano/Tejano people, and individuals and bands continue to compose and perform them to this day.

The canción-corrido that Peña mentions is a musical and literary adaptation of the more rigid corrido musical form. It still narrates a story but may have other musical elements, for instance, a chorus, that the traditional corrido would not.

The conjunto is the original Tejano/American musical ensemble and style of music created on the Texas/Mexico border. The Spanish word conjunto means "ensemble" or "group." For Tejanos, however, it has come to mean a specific type of musical group that uses the accordion as its main instrument. German and other European settlers introduced the button accordion to Texas and Mexico during the mid-to-late 1800s, and the Mexicans living there adopted this squeeze-box instrument, which was based on the harmonica. It was relatively cheap and easy to play, and it quickly became a favorite musical instrument at fiestas and family celebrations among the Mexican people. The polka rhythm and salon dance music were sweeping the world at this time, and the Mexicanos loved dancing to the accordion's harmonious instrumental melodies and fast-paced polka, as well as the beautiful waltzes, schottisches, and redovas. When the accordion was paired up with the bajo sexto during the early 1900s, this new ensemble and style became known as conjunto.

The early "ethnic" recordings by major labels in the 1920s and 1930s, participated in by many Tejano musicians such as Bruno Villarreal, Lolo Cavazos, Lydia Mendoza, and Narciso Martínez, helped to firmly embed and establish the emerging conjunto ensemble as the preferred musical group at most Mexican/Tejano working-class celebrations and dances. As the conjunto ensemble and style evolved, the tololoche (stand-up acoustic bass) was added; then after World War II, with the advent of amplification, the final two instruments to the standard, traditional four-piece conjunto ensemble were added: the electric bass and trap drum set.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, other musical styles and rhythms were integrated into the standard conjunto Tejano repertoire, such as the indigenous/Mexican huapango, from the Huasteca region in Mexico; the Cuban bolero; the Columbian cumbia; and even some blues, rock 'n' roll, country, and jazz. Stylistic innovators in the genre included Santiago Jiménez Sr. and Narciso Martínez, "El Huracán del Valle" (Hurricane of the Valley), two of the "fathers" of conjunto music; and Valerio Longoria, Tony De la Rosa, Rubén Vela, Conjunto Bernal, Esteban Jordán, and Flaco Jiménez.

The next important ensemble and style of Tejano music is the orquesta Tejana. A scaled-down version of the American big bands and Mexican orchestras of the 1920s with their large woodwind and brass sections, the orquesta Tejana came into prominence after World War II as Mexican Americans moved from the ranches to the cities and gained some degree of social mobility as more of them entered the middle class. Many of these Mexican Americans aspired toward assimilation into American life, so the "classier" orchestra music better expressed their lifestyle. Peña states that "the uniqueness of the orquesta lies in its stylistic invention - inventions that stamped a powerful bimusical identity on the ensemble. As we shall see, this identity mirrored, at the level of musical expression, the ideological structures underpinning the bicultural identity of the middle-class Texas-Mexicans who forged the orquesta tejana."

The musical repertoire of the orquesta was initially American big band jazz and popular music, with some Mexican/Latino tropical music such as boleros and mambos. However, Beto Villa, who is considered the "father" of the orquesta Tejana, began performing polkas and polkas rancheras (songs sung in Spanish to a polka beat) and waltzes, which were more of the working-class domain of the conjunto, with his orquesta and horn arrangements. This was the beginning of the distinctive sound of the Texas-Mexican, or Tejano, orquesta. During the 1950s and 1960s, bands like Little Joe & the Latinaires and Sunny and the Sunglows performed the popular rhythm and blues and early rock 'n' roll of the times, and every now and then threw in a cumbia, a bolero, or a polka ranchera sung with Spanish lyrics. Little by little the repertoire shifted to a more dominant Tejano song list.

The heyday of the orquesta Tejana came during the late 1960s and 1970s in what is known as the Chicano movement period of the civil rights era in the United States. During this time Tejano music became known as La Onda Chicana. Orquestas Tejanas proliferated throughout Texas and other parts of the United States, including such popular bands as the Royal Jesters, Latin Breed, Tortilla Factory, Ruben Ramos and the Mexican Revolution, and the renamed Sunny and the Sunliners and Little Joe y La Familia. It was during this period that the orquesta Tejana created what Peña calls a "'compound' form of bimusicality - where styles identifiable as Mexican ranchero and those identifiable as sophisticated American swing-jazz were yoked together within the same musical piece to create, in effect, a hybrid or synthetic music."

The 1970s and 1980s saw the development of the popular keyboard and synthesizer-driven Tejano bands, such as La Mafia from Houston, Mazz from the Rio Grande valley, and Selena y Los Dinos from Corpus Christi. Traditional accordion-based conjuntos continued to develop alongside the orquestas Tejanas, and then there was a third fusion of those bands that combined all three instrumental elements in different configurations: accordion, horns, keyboard/synthesizers, percussion, and so on. People like the great vocalists Chacha Jiménez with Los Chachos and Laura Canales y Los Fabulosos Cuatro were early influences. Bene Layton y Los Layton and Roberto Pulido y Los Clásicos created classic combinations of the button accordion and saxophone ensembles that paved the way for such fusion bands as David Lee Garza y Los Musicales, Jay Pérez, and Emilio Navaira and Río.

These top Tejano bands road the pinnacle of the Tejano explosion of the late 1980s and early 1990s that witnessed the major recording labels like Sony, Capitol EMI, and Warner Bros. entering the Tejano market because they saw a potentially huge market in the growing number of Hispanics in the United States, as well as the rest of Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world. That was the apex of Tejano music. In San Antonio, for instance, there were about nine Tejano, bilingual, or Spanish-language radio stations, and we had about four or five huge Tejano clubs that sat three to four thousand people. Conjuntos and other Tejano bands were playing at smaller clubs all over the city. The major record labels made a little money initially but apparently not enough for them to stay in the market. By the time Selena was tragically murdered in 1995, almost all of the major labels were pulling out of the Tejano market, and thus began a slow decline, at least in terms of "commercial" success, as Tejano music moved into the twenty-first century.

Success, however, is defined in many ways. While the commercial Tejano recording, radio, and club/promotions industry has waned over the past two decades as it has been consolidated into Tejano hands, the music side of the genre has not only survived but thrived. Never before in the history of Tejano music have there been more youth taking accordion and bajo sexto lessons at community-based conjunto programs around the state, including a few high school programs in the valley. There are numerous Chicano/Latino cultural arts centers, festivals, and awards programs in the nation, and the Tejano Music Awards and the Tejano Conjunto Festival en San Antonio celebrated their thirty-fourth and thirty-third year anniversaries, respectively, in 2014. More independent Tejano recording companies and radio programs are producing music and using the Internet and social media to promote it. But more importantly, people are creating and performing Tejano music, and it is very much alive and a part of Tejano/Chicana/o celebrations of familia and cultural identity. And on any given weekend you can hear conjuntos, orquestas, and other Tejano bands performing in city bars and barrio cantinas, where la raza dance " el tacuachito " (little opossum style of original Tejano polka dancing) and take a twirl or two to a cumbia beat while dancing counterclockwise in a circle and magically suspending time, if only for a moment.

Tejano music is all of this and more. It is local music with a global identity. It is world music that is a unique synthesis of the German/European button accordion with its polkas and waltzes, combined with the Spanish bajo sexto guitar and indigenous/Mexican rhythms such as the huapango. It is Chicano music that fuses African American blues, rhythm and blues, rock, and jazz with Mexican ranchero songs sung primarily in Spanish, though increasingly with English and bilingual lyrics. Tejano music is the adapted Columbian cumbia and Cuban bolero and the Texas twang of Tejano country. It is salsa, merengue, and reggae from the Afro-Latino Caribbean influence, combined with bilingual rap to produce reggaeton, and the early orquesta Tejana rap-cumbia "Las Hijas de Don Simón" by Tierra Tejana from Seguín, Texas. It is the jazz-polka ranchera fusion of the classic "Las Nubes" by Little Joe y La Familia, the Spanish translated conjunto country version of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues," "La Última Milla" (The Last Mile), with button accordion and harmonica by Mingo Saldívar y sus Tremendos Cuatro Espadas. And it is the reggae-cumbia version of Selena's "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom," and the Tejano reggaeton bilingual cumbia rap of the Kumbia Kings.

Tejano music still has its canciones and corridos and the traditional conjuntos and orquestas Tejanas, as well as all of the other synthesizer and hybrid bands mentioned above. The next generation of Tejano musicians are preserving and continuing to perform the musical styles begun by their fathers, some of the innovative giants in the genre, such as Los Conjunto Kings de Flavio Longoria (son of Valerio Longoria), Rio Jordán (Steve and Richard Jordán, sons of Esteban Jordán), Rubén Vela Jr. y su Conjunto, and Ricky Naranjo y Los Gamblers, fronted by accordionist Rubén Naranjo III (son and grandson of Rubén Naranjo). To this list we can add Bobby Pulido and David Lee Garza y Los Musicales, among many others.

At the same time, young, experimental individuals and bands are pushing the limits of the Tejano musical traditions: Nina Díaz from Girl in a Coma, the conjunto punk music of Piñata Protest, the reggae/ranchera/huapango/blues/jazz poetic stylings of Los Nahuatlatos, the bilingual cumbia/reggae/rap of Bombasta Barrio Big Band, and the conjunto/country/rockabilly music of Nick Gaitán and the Umbrella Man. And check out the smooth conjunto blues/jazz of blind button-accordion prodigy Juanito Castillo (you can download on iTunes his remake of Chet Baker's "I Fall in Love Too Easily," and Los Nahuatlatos' "My Main Squeeze," recorded live at the thirty-second annual Tejano Conjunto Festival in San Antonio in 2013).

Beleaguered as we have been by a racist, exploitive, segregationist, and at the same time homogenizing, colonizing Spanish and US society, culture, educational system, and media, Xicanas/os have resisted, accommodated, and survived, celebrating our "otherness" and multicultural diversity in the process. Tejano music is an excellent example of "Chicano/Tejano cultural citizenship." William V. Flores, in the book Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, states that "cultural citizenship can be thought of as a broad range of activities of everyday life through which Latinos and other groups claim space in society, define their communities, and claim rights. It involves the right to retain difference, while also attaining membership in society. It also involves self-definition, affirmation, and empowerment."

In many ways, our Saturday night Tejano dances are our church and our spirituality. They are our sacred spaces where we come together to celebrate and commune con la raza (the people) and la familia, hear some music, maybe have a cervezita or two, talk with each other, and support and affirm our cultural identity as we dance the night away before we prepare for the school and work week ahead.

As I look around, I feel positive about the future of our people and Tejano music.

I do not quite remember when I first heard or read about the concept of La Raza Cósmica. I think I read it in a poem by alurista or Ricardo Sánchez. Or maybe I heard it in a song when I was a student at the University of Texas in Austin during the early 1970s. The Chicano civil rights movement and cultural renaissance were in full bloom then, and it was the beginning of my social and political consciousness. I came to realize that I was one of these "cosmic people." That within my indigenous and Spanish blood was united all of the races of this known world: black and white from my español side, yellow and red from my indigenous side. Tejano music is a cosmic American original. It is a powerful multicultural musical and artistic expression of the MeXicana/o people, and we offer it to humanity and to all our relations in the spirit of unity, respect, justice, peace, and love. And the Creator knows that we need some peace and love in this world right now, ¿que no? ¡Ahora sí, a bailar!

In lak' ech / Tu eres mi otro yo / You are my other self. (Mayan phrase)

Juan Tejeda is a tenured instructor of music and Mexican American Studies at Palo Alto College in San Antonio, Texas, an ex-jefe danzante Azteca, and the button accordionist and vocalist for the Conjunto Aztlan. He is the co-publisher/editor of Aztlan Libre Press.

The photos in this article were provided by the Arhoolie Foundation and are part of the Musica de la Frontera Project, an archive that comprises the largest repository of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular recordings in existence. The project is sponsored by Los Tigres del Norte Fund at UCLA and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, in collaboration with the Fund for Folk Culture, with additional funding from Arhoolie Records, the UCLA Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Grammy Foundation, Lucasfilm Foundation, and others. See http://frontera.library.ucla.edu/project.html for further information.

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Welcome to Texas, birthplace and home of Tejano music. Tejano in Spanish simply means "Texan." Tejano music, however, is Texas-Mexican (Tex-Mex) music, which encompasses several musical genres, ensembles, and styles of music, as well as a whole industry that sustains thousands of musicians and workers, independent record labels, a vibrant club and dance scene, radio programs and stations, festivals, and a loyal fan base of local and regional people, with a growing following of national and international music lovers.

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Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, states that “cultural citizenship can be thought of as a broad range of activities of everyday life through which Latinos and other groups claim space in society, define their communities, and claim rights. It involves the right to retain difference, while also attaining membership in society. It also involves self-definition, affirmation, and empowerment.”

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Today, there are over 258 million migrants around the world living outside their country of birth. This figure is expected to grow for a number of reasons including population growth, increasing connectivity, trade, rising inequality, demographic imbalances and climate change. Migration provides immense opportunity and benefits - for the migrants, host communities and communities of origin. However, when poorly regulated it can create significant challenges. These challenges include overwhelming social infrastructures with the unexpected arrival of large numbers of people and the deaths of migrants undertaking dangerous journeys.

In September 2016 the General Assembly decided, through the adoption of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, to develop a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration.

The process to develop this global compact started in April 2017. The pages in this section detail 18 months of consultation and negotiation, and provide the relevant documentation for each of the events.

On 13 July 2018 UN Member States finalized the text for the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration ( Text available in all official languages).

The Intergovernmental Conference to Adopt the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration will be held on 10 - 11 December in Marrakech, Morocco.

Global Compact

The Global Compact for Migration is the first-ever UN global agreement on a common approach to international migration in all its dimensions. The global compact is non-legally binding. It is grounded in values of state sovereignty, responsibility-sharing, non-discrimination, and human rights, and recognizes that a cooperative approach is needed to optimize the overall benefits of migration, while addressing its risks and challenges for individuals and communities in countries of origin, transit and destination.

The global compact comprises 23 objectives for better managing migration at local, national, regional and global levels. The compact:

aims to mitigate the adverse drivers and structural factors that hinder people from building and maintaining sustainable livelihoods in their countries of origin;

intends to reduce the risks and vulnerabilities migrants face at different stages of migration by respecting, protecting and fulfilling their human rights and providing them with care and assistance;

seeks to address the legitimate concerns of states and communities, while recognizing that societies are undergoing demographic, economic, social and environmental changes at different scales that may have implications for and result from migration;

strives to create conducive conditions that enable all migrants to enrich our societies through their human, economic and social capacities, and thus facilitate their contributions to sustainable development at the local, national, regional and global levels.

The list of the 23 objectives can be found in paragraph 16 of the Global Compact for Migration.

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Today, there are over 258 million migrants around the world living outside their country of birth. This figure is expected to grow for a number of reasons including population growth, increasing connectivity, trade, rising inequality, demographic imbalances and climate change. Migration provides immense opportunity and benefits - for the migrants, host communities and communities of origin.