Manuel Peña is an anthropologist who specializes in Mexican American folklore and music. He has taught at Californixa State University, Fresno, since 1981 (most recently in the Department of Music) and also served as professor of anthropology and music at the University of Texas at Austin from 1993 to 1997. Peña is the author numerous articles and several books, including The Texas-Mexican Conjunto (University of Texas Press, 1985) and The Mexican American Orquesta (University of Texas Press, 1999). The following essay originally appeared in the 1993 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife program guide.
One of the most enduring musical traditions among Mexicans and Mexican Americans is the accordion-based ensemble known as conjunto (and as música norteña outside of Texas). Popular for over 100 years—especially since its commercialization in the 1920s—this folk ensemble remains to this day the everyday music of working-class Texas Mexicans and Mexican norteños (northerners). During the course of its long history, the conjunto evolved into a tightly organized style that speaks musically for the aesthetic and ideological sentiments of its adherents. In the process, this music of humble beginnings along the Texas-Mexico border has spread far beyond its original base, gaining a vast audience in both Mexico and the United States.
The diatonic, button accordion that anchors the conjunto made its first appearance in northern Mexico and south Texas sometime in the 1860s or 1870s. The first accordions were simple one- or two-row models—quite suitable for the musical capabilities of the first norteño and Texas Mexican musicians who experimented with the instrument. A strong regional style developed by the turn of the century, as the accordion became increasingly associated with a unique Mexican guitar known as a bajo sexto. Another local folk instrument, the tambora de rancho (ranch drum), also enjoyed prominence as a backup to the accordion. In combination with one or both of these instruments, the accordion had become by the 1890s the instrument of preference for working-class celebrations on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border.
In Texas, these celebrations were organized frequently—too frequently for some Anglos, who voiced their disapproval of fandangos, or "low-class" dances, in the newspapers. For example, the Corpus Christi Caller and the San Antonio Express on more than one occasion expressed Anglos' negative attitudes toward tejano music and dance. In one report, the Express equated music and dancing with idleness and concluded that "these fandangos have become so frequent they are a great curse to the country" (August 20, 1881). This typical attitude developed early on and persisted well into the twentieth century.
Border Conflict and Identity
Américo Paredes, who died in May 1999, was professor emeritus of English and anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin as well as one of the founders of the school's Center for Mexican American Studies and Center for Intercultural Studies of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. His scholarly research and writings focused on the folklore and culture of the area along the Texas-Mexican border. Among his books are With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero and A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border.
Conflict—cultural, economic, and physical—has been a way of life along the border between Mexico and the United States, and it is in the so-called Nueces-Rio Grande strip where its patterns were first established. Problems of identity also are common to border dwellers, and these problems were first confronted by people of Mexican cultures as a result of the Texas Revolution. For these reasons, the Lower Rio Grande area also can claim to be the source of the more typical elements of what we call the culture of the border.
If we view the border not simply as a line on a map but, more fundamentally, as a sensitized area where two cultures or two political systems come face to face, then the first border between English-speaking people from the United States and people of Mexican culture was in the eastern part of what is now the state of Texas. And this border developed even before such political entities as the Republic of Mexico and the Republic of Texas came into being. This area—presently Tamaulipas and the southern part of Texas—was originally the province of Nuevo Santander. Nuevo Santander differed from the other three northernmost provinces of New Spain (New Mexico, Texas and California) in an important way: it was the least isolated of the frontier provinces. Great expanses of territory separated the settlements in New Mexico and California from the concentrations of Mexican population to the south. The same was true of the colony of Texas until 1749.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo settled the conflict over territory between Mexico and the United States, officially at least. It also created a Mexican American minority in the United States, as has often been noted. But it did not immediately create a border situation all along the international line. The Nuevomejicano in Santa Fe, the Californio in Los Angeles, and the Tejano San Antonio were swallowed whole into the North American political body. The new border—an imaginary and ill-defined line—was many miles to the south of them, in the uninhabited areas that already had separated them from the rest of Mexico before the war with the United States. The immediate change in customs demanded of Tejanos, Califomios, and Nuevomejicanos was from regional subcultures of Mexico to occupied territories within the United States.
Such was not the case with the people of the Lower Rio Grande. A very well defined geographic feature—the Rio Grande itself—became the international line. The river, once a focus of regional life, became a symbol of separation. When the Rio Grande became a border, friends and relatives who had been near neighbors now were legally in different countries. If they wanted to visit each other, the law required they travel many miles up or down stream, to the nearest official crossing place, instead of swimming or boating directly across as they used to do. When they went visiting, they crossed at the most convenient spot on the river; and, as is ancient custom when one goes visiting loved ones, they took gifts with them: farm products from Mexico to Texas, textiles and other manufactured goods from Texas to Mexico. Legally, of course, this was smuggling, differing from contraband for profit in volume only. Such a pattern is familiar to anyone who knows the border, for it still operates, not only along the Lower Rio Grande now but all along the boundary line between Mexico and the United States.
There was generally favorable disposition toward the individual who disregarded customs and immigration laws, especially the laws of the United States. The professional smuggler was not a figure of reproach, whether he was engaged in smuggling American woven goods into Mexico or Mexican tequila into Texas. In folklore there was a tendency to idealize the smuggler, especially the tequilero, as a variant of the hero of cultural con flict. The smuggler, the illegal alien looking for work, and the border-conflict hero became identified with each other in the popular mind. They came into conflict with the same American laws.
Border conflict, a cultural clash between Mexican and American, gave rise to the Texas-Mexican corrido (a topical narrative folk song) in the eighteenth century. As the corrido emerged, it had assimilated the older romance originally from Spain. Novelesque romances became corridos adapted to local conditions. One presumes the existence of some remnants of heroic romances in the echoes found in the language of the corrido.
The first hero of the corrido is Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, who is celebrated in the 1859 corrido precisely because he helps a fellow Mexican. Other major corrido heroes are Gregorio Cortez (1901), who kills two Texas sheriffs after one of them shoots his brother; Jacinto Treviño (1911), who kills several Americans to avenge his brother's death; and Rito Garcí (1885), who shoots several officers who invade his home without a warrant. Still sung today is "El Corrido de Mariano Reséndez," about a prominent smuggler of textiles into Mexico, circa 1900. Reséndez and his activities were so highly respected that he was known as "El Contrabandista." The tequilero and his activities, however, took on an intercultural dimension; and they became a kind of coda to the corridos of border conflict.
It was a peculiar set of conditions, prevailing for a century, that produced the lower border corrido, an international phenomenon straddling the boundary between Mexico and the United States and partaking of influences from both cultures. Though the corrido owes a great deal to the romance and Mexican balladry, the Englishspeaking culture also had its influence on border balladry. The Anglo-American served first of all as a reacting agent, but the border Mexican's attitudes about the Anglo-American and his customs become part of border culture as well. The American folklorist, particularly the folklorist of Texas, finds the balladry of the lower border as much his province as that of the Mexican ballad student. Transcending national boundaries, the border heroic corrido belongs to Texas as much as to Mexico. A product of past conflicts, it may eventually serve as one of the factors in a better understanding.
Bibliography
Paredes, Américo. (1993). Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. Austin, TX: CMAS Books (Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas).
Américo Paredes
Despite Anglo disapproval, the conjunto and its dances thrived among tejano workers, eventually eclipsing all other forms of music for dancing. Yet, popular as it was, the conjunto remained an ad hoc ensemble until the 1930s. No permanent combination of instruments had been established prior to that time, perhaps because creative and material forces had not yet crystalized to spur radical stylistic development. To be sure, some changes had been wrought by the 1920s, as the button accordion and the bajo sexto by now formed the core of the emerging style, while such common European dances as the redowa had been regionalized and renamed. The redowa itself had been transformed into the vals bajito, in contrast to the waltz, which was known as a vals alto. Indeed, most of the repertory for the dance, or fandango, was of European origin and included the polka, mazurka, and schottishe, in addition to the waltz and redowa. One regional genre from Tamaulipas, Mexico, the huapango, rounded out the usual repertory of conjuntos until World War II.
Beginning in the 1930s, an innovative surge rippled through the emerging conjunto tradition, as performers like Narciso Martínez (known as "the father" of the modern conjunto), Santiago Jiménez, Lolo Cavazos, and others began to strike out in new stylistic directions. This new surge of innovation must be attributed, at least in part, to the active commercial involvement of the major recording labels in the music of the Hispanic Southwest. From the 1920s, companies such as RCA Victor (Bluebird), Decca, Brunswick, and Columbia (Okeh) began exploiting the musical traditions in the Hispanic Southwest, hoping to repeat the success they had experienced with African American music since the early 1920s. Under the commercial impetus of the big labels,
which encouraged record and phonograph sales, radio programming and, especially, public dancing (much of it in cantinas, to the dismay of Anglos and "respectable" Texas Mexicans), musicians like Narciso Martinez began to experiment. By the end of the 1930s, the conjunto had begun to evolve into the stylistic form the ensemble reached during its mature phase in the post-World War II years.
Without a doubt, the most important change came in the 1930s, when Narciso Martínez began his recording career. Searching for a way to stamp his personal style on the accordion, Martínez abandoned the old, Germanic technique by virtually avoiding the bass-chord buttons on his two-row accordion, concentrating instead on the right hand, treble melody buttons. His sound was instantly distinctive and recognizable. Its brighter, snappier, and cleaner tone contrasted with the older sound, in which bajo sexto and the accordionist's left hand both played bass and accompaniment, creating a "thicker," drone-like effect. Martínez left bassing and chordal accompaniment to the bajo sexto of his most capable partner, Santiago Almeida.
Narciso Martínez's new style became the hallmark of the surging conjunto, just as Almeida's brisk execution on the bajo sexto created the standard for future bajistas. Together, the two had given birth to the modern conjunto, a musical style that would challenge even the formidable mariachi in cultural breadth and depth of public acceptance. Indeed, by the 1970s it could be said that the conjunto, known in the larger market as música norteña, was the most powerful musical symbol of working-class culture. Martínez, however, remained an absolutely modest folk musician until his death. He never laid claim to anything but a desire to please his public. Yet, as Pedro Ayala, another of the early accordion leaders, acknowledged, "After Narciso, what could the rest of us do except follow his lead?"
In the years following World War II younger musicians rose to prominence—la nueva generatíon (the new generation), as Martínez himself called the new crop of accordionists. Led by Valerio Longoria, who contributed a number of innovations to the rapidly evolving style, the new generation quickly brought the conjunto to full maturity after the war. Longoria started his trailblazing career in 1947; however, his greatest contributions date from 1949, when he introduced the modern trap drums into the conjunto. Combined with the contrabass, introduced in 1936 by Santaigo Jiménez, the drums rounded out the modem ensemble, which after 1950 consisted of accordion, bajo sexto (sometimes guitar), drums, bass (electric bass after about 1955). Jiménez also is credited with another major contribution: he introduced vocals into the ensemble, which prior to World War II had restricted itself almost exclusively to instrumental music. After Longoria's move, most of the older genres—redowa, schottishe, etc.—were abandoned as the polka and the vocal, in the form of the canción, ranchera (either in vals or polka time), became the staples of the modern conjunto.
Several highly innovative performers followed Valerio Longoria. Among the most notable is Tony de la Rosa, who established the most ideal conjunto sound in the mid-1950s—a slowed-down polka style, delivered in a highly staccato technique that was the logical culmination of Narciso Martínez's emphasis on the treble end of the accordion. Los Relámpagos del Norte, a group from across the border (Reynosa), made significant contributions in the 1960s, synthesizing the more modern conjunto from Texas with the older norteño tradition to create a style that reached new heights in popularity, both in Mexico and the United States. When the leaders of Los Relámpagos, Cornelio Reyna and Ramón Ayala, went their separate ways, the latter formed another conjunto, Los Bravos del Norte, and that group went on to make significant contributions in the 1970s that kept the norteño tradition at its peak.
But perhaps the label of "greatest" belongs to a conjunto that had its origins in Kingsville, Texas, in 1954—El Conjunto Bernal. Led by accordionist Paulino Bernal and his brother, bajo sexto player Eloy, El Conjunto Bernal began early on to lift the conjunto style to new heights, as the Bernals' absolute mastery of their instruments allowed the group to probe the very limits of the conjunto style. Bolstered by some of the finest singers and drummers within the tradition, El Conjunto Bernal came to be acknowledged as "the greatest of all time." The successes of El Conjunto Bernal's musical experiments, especially in the 1960s, have never been duplicated.
Since the 1960s, the conjunto has remained rather static, despite the advent in the 1980s of so-called "progressive" conjuntos, which incorporate newer, synthesized sounds into the basic style. Neither these newer conjuntos nor those who pursue the older style have succeeded in transcending the limits set by El Conjunto Bernal, but this relative lack of innovation has not slowed the spread of the music. Thus, despite its relative conservatism, the tradition has expanded far beyond its original confines along the Texas-Mexico border. In the last thirty years the music has taken root in such far-flung places as Washington, California, and the Midwest, as well as in the entire tier of northern Mexican border states, and even in such distant places as Michoacan and Sinaloa.
As it spreads its base in the United States, norteño conjunto music, especially as synthesized by Los Bravos del Norte and its successors (e.g., Los Tigres del Norte), continues to articulate a Mexican working-class ethos. In its stylistic simplicity, its continuing adherence to the canción ranchera and working-class themes, and most importantly, in its actualization in weekend dances, the conjunto remains the bedrock music for millions of people whose everyday culture is Mexican at its core. More than that, however, the conjunto represents a clear musical and ideological alternative to the Americanized forms that more acculturated, upwardly mobile Mexican Americans have come to embrace. Accordionist Paulino Bernal best summarized the musico-ideological significance of the conjunto when he recalled the sharp status differences that existed among Mexican Americans of an earlier era:
… at that time there was a division—that he who liked the orchestra hated the conjunto. That's the way it was: "Who's going to play, a conjunto? Oh no!" Those who went with Balde Gonzalez [a middle-class orchestra] were not going to go over here with a conjunto. (Personal interview with the author.)
Thus, although nowadays it is patronized by many ethnically sensitive, middle-class Mexican Americans, conjunto continues to represent an alternative musical ideology, and in this way it helps to preserve a Mexican, working-class culture wherever it takes root on American soil. Endowed with this kind of symbolic power, conjunto has more than held its own against other types of music that appear from time to time to challenge its dominance among a vast audience of working-class people.
