header by Emerson Taymor, 2005
2. The Conquest
A Good Beat, And You Can Protest to It
May 14, 2006
New York Times
By JOSH KUN
THE members of Patrulla 81, a band that dresses in matching black cowboy hats and wears fake police badges, knew exactly where their Mexicans were, but they asked anyway.
''Donde estan mis mexicanos?'' they shouted from the stage of a Cinco de Mayo festival in the heart of Southern California last Sunday, 10 miles east of East Los Angeles. In the wake of the recent immigrant-rights marches and immigrant labor boycotts, what is usually just a handy way to hype a crowd resonated with a deeper meaning, as over 100,000 people answered by shouting out their home states, among them Jalisco, Zacatecas, Michoacan and Patrulla 81's own, Durango.
The music industry categorizes all the artists that took the stage at Whittier Narrows Park as Mexican regional. It's a catch-all term that includes everything from the polkas and waltzes of Ramon Ayala and the jazzy brass banda music of La Arolladora Banda El Limon to the jaunty acoustic guitar fireworks of Los Cuates de Sinaloa, who finished their set by playing a bottle-neck guitar solo using a bottle of Tapatio hot sauce. Yet despite their musical differences, they all took a moment to declare their support for immigrant amnesty. Los Cuates de Sinaloa asked the crowd to ''jump up and down if you support legalization.''
''Getting my papers was a major achievement for me,'' said the singer known as El Chapo de Sinaloa, who closed the festival in front of a 14-piece brass band as women threw bras on stage. ''I really support all the demonstrations because I know how important it is to become legal.'' El Chapo is from Sinaloa, a coastal state in northwestern Mexico, but like so many of his contemporaries, he's lived in Los Angeles for a long time, in his case the past 20 years. And his most recent hit single, ''Recostada En la Cama,'' from his self-produced album ''Tu, Yo, y la Luna'' (Disa) wasn't born on the ranch, as his thick mustache and blue cowboy boots might suggest; it was born here, at the hands of Adolfo and Omar Valenzuela, twin brothers who have helped make Los Angeles the industry home-base for Mexican regional music.
For more than a decade, the pair have lent their market-driven touch to dozens of albums. Now they are focused on something they regard as a bigger project: a pro-immigrant protest song featuring the biggest names in the genre. Though still in the planning stages, the song (which follows the recent release of ''Nuestro Himno,'' a Spanish version of ''The Star-Spangled Banner'') is set to include artists like El Chapo, Graciela Beltran, Lupillo Rivera and Conjunto Primavera, and will be written by Pepe Garza, the programming director for the city's Mexican regional radio powerhouse, QueBuena FM.
''This will be 'We Are The World' for Latinos,'' said Adolfo. ''We decided we needed to get together to a make a musical statement about what's been happening in this country. As immigrants ourselves, we believe in freedom of expression, and we believe we all have the right to follow our dreams.''
Los Cuates Valenzuela, or the Twiins, as Adolfo and Omar are more commonly known, arrived in the United States when they were 14. Now 30, they are on their way to doing for Mexican regional what Timbaland and Jermaine Dupri have done for rap music: setting a new standard for production while mastering the commercial formulas behind radio and the singles charts. The brothers have been ahead of the curve (convincing huge pop stars like Thalia and Paulina Rubio to record banda songs) and behind it, ready to cash in on dance crazes.
''Mexican regional music used to be based in Mexico,'' said Aldolfo. ''But that's all changed now. It's all about Southern California. Mexican artists know that they have to be heard over here in order to become successful. The market is too big to ignore.''
Mexican music has had a powerful presence north of the border since 1848 (when Mexico lost half of its land to the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War) and in Texas, tejano, or Tex-Mex, music has long defined the state's sound. But for the Mexican regional industry in Southern California, a new story begins in 1992, when KLAX, a Los Angeles radio station specializing in banda, beat out Howard Stern to become the city's No. 1 station.
That boom was the result of a rise in Mexican immigration to South Los Angeles, but also of the shooting death of Chalino Sanchez, a tough corrido, or ballad singer from Sinaloa. Chalino became an instant hero for rising stars like Lupillo Rivera and Jessie Morales, part of a generation of Los Angeles-raised Mexicans weaned on English-language gangsta rap. The writer Sam Quinones called this transformation the ''Sinaloazation of L.A. Mexican culture'': rural Mexican songs and fashion (hats, boots and gold belt buckles) were the new symbols of cool for immigrant Southern California.
''Mexican music in California used to be all about the older musicians,'' Mr. Valenzuela said. ''But since the banda boom of the early 90's, it's been all about a younger generation.''
Today, with communities of recent Mexican immigrants spreading out across the country, Mexican regional music has become the top-selling Latin genre in the United States. According to a report by the Recording Industry Association of America, it made up nearly 50 percent of all Latin music shipments in 2005, more than pop, salsa or reggaeton. And in Los Angeles major commercial stations like QueBuena -- the festival's radio sponsor -- and KLAX's current incarnation, La Raza, bring it to new ears every day.
The pioneering rapper Chuck D once called hip-hop ''black America's CNN.'' Regional music has been serving a similar function for the Mexican immigrant community, and for a lot longer. Starting with one of the first songs recorded by a Mexican artist in the United States -- Los Hermanos Banuelos' 1926 ballad about an undocumented dishwasher, ''El Lavaplatos'' -- it has been a platform for building community while broadcasting the hardships of border crossings, deportations and manual labor.
By the 1970's the Tex-Mex pioneers Los Pinguinos del Norte had already recorded the prescient ''Mexicano Americano,'' which imagined a map of Mexico that stretched from Zacatecas in Central Mexico to Minnesota. Two decades later in the face of Proposition 187 (the 1994 California ballot initiative that would have denied many public services to undocumented immigrants) the Baja California quartet La Tradicion del Norte sang about the urgency of applying for citizenship, on ''Voy a Hacerme Ciudadano.''Perhaps the music's greatest statesmen, though, are Los Tigres del Norte, who just released their 36th album, ''Historias Que Contar'' (Fonovisa), and appeared at the May 1 march in downtown Los Angeles. ''I didn't come here to cause trouble,'' they sang on their 2001 hit ''Somos Mas Americanos'' (''We Are More American''). ''I'm a hard-working man.''
''Immigration is not just a political issue,'' Omar Valenzuela said. ''It's a cultural one, and at this moment the U.S. is witnessing a cultural revolution that all this music is a part of. What many don't know yet is just how much the U.S. is being enriched by it. ''
The smell of carne asada hovers over an ornate two-story house on an idyllic tree-lined street in Burbank, just minutes from the headquarters of NBC and the Walt Disney Company. The Valenzuelas bought the house last year, as the offices for their scrappy empire, Twiins Enterprises. With an expansive recording studio nestled off a breezy patio, it's the kind of self-sufficient music complex they fantasized about owning back in 1990 when they first came to Los Angeles -- on the 4th of July no less -- from their native Culiacan, the capital city of Sinaloa.
Their father, a veteran of the local music scene, had played there with the respected Banda Tierra Blanca, but soon the only performances available were the ones bankrolled by drug mafiosos. ''He'd tell us crazy stories,'' said Adolfo, who took up trombone and flute while Omar studied clarinet and saxophone. ''He didn't want us to grow up to be musicians and have to play for the narco guys. So he sent us to art school, and eventually to the U.S.''
They spoke no English and moved in with an aunt and uncle living in the Boyle Heights neighborhood on the East Side of Los Angeles, where they enrolled at Roosevelt High School and were quickly introduced to the rules of Mexican-American identity by a cousin who was a gang member. ''We started dressing like cholos'' slang for Mexican-American gangsters ''because our cousin told us it was the way to dress -- white T-shirt, Dickies,'' said Omar as he stood in the shade of their backyard patio, dressed like Adolfo in a pressed grey suit and a dark necktie. ''We were middle class in Mexico, and then suddenly we were cholos in the projects. We were miserable. It wasn't what we were used to.''
One of Roosevelt's music teachers, Jose Arellano, recognized their talents and helped land them jobs playing shows with Celia Cruz and Tito Puente. (The twins have since established their own music scholarship program at the chool.) At 16 Omar won a city jazz award, Adolfo was invited to tour with a salsa orchestra, and music scholarships to the University of Southern California and Cal State Northridge were soon being offered to them.
''We were immigrants who didn't speak English, and we were winning jazz contests,'' said Adolfo, who bought a fake passport and driver's license to hide his illegal status from university officials. ''We were part of the All-American Jazz Band, with high school students from across the country, and we were barely American.''
After witnessing the paltry wages of working session musicians they turned to production. While still teenagers, they engineered albums by the singers Carmen Jara and Marco Quintero, and even worked with Panamanian dancehall star (and reggaeton pioneer) El General. At 19 they began producing albums for Mexico's legendary Banda El Recodo, including ''Lo Mejor de Mi Vida'' (2001), which sold over a million copies in the United States. That success confirmed their belief that the immigrant market was now stable enough, and big enough, to stand on its own.''The music is only popular in Mexico after it is popular here,'' said Adolfo. ''We focus on the U.S. market because we know it will soon cross back into the market in Mexico.''
That belief lies at the heart of Ladisco, their new record label venture with Universal Music. Using Los Angeles as their main target, the twins hope to tap all sides of the Mexican immigrant market, from recently arrived migrants who still identify with their home state to first- and second-generation Mexican-Americans who grew up listening to rappers like Nas and Tupac.
So for every Eddie G, an 18-year-old bilingual rapper from Long Beach whom they have signed, there's El Negro de Tijuana, a cheeky singer who belts what he calls ''sexo-corridos'' (though few of his songs are actually about sex). There's also Victor Ochoa, better known as El Mayo de la Sierra, the smoky-voiced practitioner of sierreno music, a sort of urban country genre they are hoping will be the next big thing. They've also put together Los Tiradores, a hip-hop compilation featuring Mexican M.C.'s from West Coast cities including Fresno, El Centro, Indio, who are bound to get blank stares from most rap geography students.
''Ten years ago,'' Adolfo said, ''all these hip-hop kids were listening to quebradita,'' a gymnastic dance style associated with banda music, ''and dressing in sombreros, but now they're coming back to hip-hop.''
The baby-faced and wiry Eddie G, whose oversize white baseball cap stops just where his enormous diamond earrings start, said he is too young to come back to hip-hop. Rather, he was born into the music. ''Hip-hop is my everything,'' he said as he took a seat in the Valenzuelas' backyard. ''But I wouldn't feel strange at a banda show. It's not new to me. It's where I come from. My mom listened to Vicente Fernandez and all that pura ranchera stuff.''
While most of Eddie G's debut album, ''The Mex Threat,'' focuses on women's thongs and party rhymes, he takes a break to address immigration on ''Mex 2 the Max,'' urging Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to unite across the border that separates them. ''With so much immigration, everything is all mixed up these days,'' said Eddie G, whose mother sneaked across the Tijuana-San Ysidro border while she was pregnant with him. ''Which is why I think politicians are up in arms now, they want to put big borders back up just when they're starting to come down.''
Eddie G's label mate, El Negro de Tijuana (born Obed Ibarra Samudio), knows border politics first-hand. He says he used to be a pollero, border slang for a people smuggler. ''I don't consider it a bad thing,'' said Mr. Samudio, who grew up in Concordia, Sinaloa, but has been living in Tijuana for the last 15 years. ''I was helping people. But it's dangerous work. People get taken advantage of. People get killed. It's not the kind of life my mother could be proud of.''
The Valenzuelas plan to market Mr. Samudio's music mostly throughout California and Arizona, states with a high density of immigrants from Northwestern Mexico. With large immigrant communities now thriving in over 40 states from Georgia to Wisconsin and Maine, ''you really have to pay attention to region,'' Adolfo said. ''We are very conscious that Arizona record buyers are going to be from Sinaloa, Sonora and Chihuahua. So we're going to put artists on the shelves who they identify with. In Atlanta people are mostly from Guerrero and Michoacan, so we'll sell our music from Tierra Caliente over there. In New York most people are from Puebla, so we'd send a sonidero group. We have to be aware of where our people are immigrating to, but also where they're immigrating from.''
The opinion earned a round of nods from everyone sitting at the long patio table overflowing with plates of freshly cooked tortillas and bowls of chunky guacamole. With Sunday afternoon in full swing, there were soon as many musicians weighing in on the conversation as there were cousins, nieces and children.
''This is more than just producing music for us,'' said Omar. ''This is
a big political movement. We have a voice now as a people, and we hope
that our music can help make that voice be heard.''