Tex-Mex music

UNESCO Courier, March, 1991 by Manuel Pena

The cultural significance of the orquesta is inextricably linked both to the working-class roots of the upwardly-mobile Texas-Mexicans and to their desire to become more Americanized.

The orquesta, aware of this bicultural existence, vacillated between Mexican and American styles and genres, between its folk roots and its newfound urban modernity, and between its working-class origins and its increasing affluence. The historical importance of the orquesta thus may be said to lie in the desire of the Mexican middle class to overcome the contradiction between attempts at assimilation and a persistent ethnic allegiance.

The time jazz got under way in New Orleans in about 1920, the African drum, banned in America during the slavery era, had completely disappeared. So practitioners of the new music borrowed the big bass drum of the military bands, topped with a cymbal, which provided the rhythm for the famous black parades that wended their way through the city's streets at carnival time or was used to accompany funerals. The drum served essentially as a metronome; it simply kept time, with almost no attempt at improvisation. Eventually the military drum gave way to the familiar jazz drum-kit, but even so American percussionists kept to fairly rudimentary rhythmic patterns right up to the bebop era of the 1940s.

In Cuba, however, where the African inheritance was still very much alive, the popular musicians of the day used a whole range of traditional percussion instruments-congas, timbals, kettledrums, claves (rhythmsticks), maracas, guiras (grooved calabashes)-that allowed them to build up rhythms in splendid confusion. jazz musicians began to borrow these Afro-Cuban instruments in the 1940s.

As early as the end of the nineteenth century, however, black ragtime pianists in America had begun to use a bass line derived from the habanera, which the Creole pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk had brought back with him from Cuba some decades earlier. This motif, marked by a time-lag between the two hands, was taken up by the father of the blues himself, W.C. Handy, who travelled to Cuba in 1910 with the American army, and it was later adopted by such other pianists as "Professor Longhair", himself a native of New Orleans. jelly Roll Morton, the self-styled inventor of jazz, had it in mind when he talked of the Latin tinge" in his music.

When New Orleans's famous red-light district, Storyville, was closed down for good in the late 1920s, many musicians found themselves out of work and decided to travel north. New York became the new capital of jazz, and Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and a host of other pianists helped light up the nights of Harlem, then in the midst of its famous renaissance. Several Cuban musicians, notably the flautist Alberto Socarras, were attracted by the effervescent musical climate.

Puerto Ricans, who had gained American nationality in 1917, were also moving into town. They settled first in Brooklyn, then in East Harlem, a former jewish and Italian district that quickly won the name of "El Barrio". Together with the Cubans, they opened theatres and clubs that provided a market for Latin rhythms. But the outlets remained limited, so many Latin musicians were also forced to learn to play American music.