English as a Second Lyric

Having spent my life in various points east of the Mississippi, I went for years without developing much of an ear, eye, or tongue for Mexican or Mexican-American culture. To tell the sorry truth, I did not even have very much curiosity on the subject.

I knew the demographic facts of life -- that the North American future would come posted in English and Spanish. And I knew that cultural and linguistic pluralism was important. I held what I considered to be politically correct views on the immigration question (i.e. "y'all come"). But these were all just facts or opinions, held at the mental level, and without passion or gusto or real understanding of the human stakes involved.

In 1985 I got the chance to drive around the Southwestern United States on my summer vacation, and then my wife, Polly, and I motored west again in 1988. This meant that I finally had the opportunity to learn about Mexican America the same way that I've learned almost everything else of any importance in life -- from the car radio.

For stretches of several days at a time, the radio, by my choice, emitted only occasional snatches of English as I soaked up the regional ambience by listening to the border radio. My main university was KADA-AM, "Jalapeno Radio," from San Antonio, Texas, your "mas musica" station with a signal as clear and strong as tequila.

The first thing I learned from this immersion experience was that, Lawrence Welk and Myron Floren to the contrary, accordions can be cool. The second thing I learned was that the growing Hispanic cultural and demographic presence in the Western United States is not just, or even primarily, an immigration issue. The simple fact is that, in addition to the indigenous tribes, the Southwestern portion of this North American continent was also happily peopled with brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking people before there was such a thing as a United States of America. That part of our country was part of Mexico. You can still tell it if you have eyes to see and ears to hear. And the Mexican-American, or Chicano, people, on whichever side of the river, didn't come to the United States so much as the United States came to them.

When you turn the beat around like that, you can begin to see that, as the Mexican-American people emerge into greater political and cultural power, they will not be "assimilating" like immigrants. They will instead be acculturating the rest of us who came to absorb their country.

THE SIGNS OF THIS PROCESS are already turning up, and in some of the strangest places. Country Music Television (cable channel CMT) was not one of the first places I would have looked for examples of progressive populist cultural pluralism. That's not because I think that country music people are hicks and racists, it's just that I don't have cable. But then I was visiting an in-law who does, and there they were, right between Reba McIntire and Clint Black -- The Texas Tornadoes.

The Tornadoes (accordionist Flaco Jimenez, singer-guitarists Freddy Fender and Doug Sahm, and keyboard man Augie Meyer) are a kind of rainbow coalition Tex-Mex supergroup. Jimenez is a super-star within the world of norteno, or Mexican border music. Fender, who enjoyed several country-and-western hits in the 1970s, was born with the name Baldemar Huerta and was briefly billed in the 1950s as The Mexican Elvis. It was in those rock-and-roll days that Fender first met two San Antonio white boys named Sahm and Meyer who went on to become honorary Chicanos through their devotion to the music and culture of their Hispanic neighbors. They also found rock star fame in the 1960s as part of the Sir Douglas Quintet.

The Tornadoes' self-titled album is a deep, rollicking mix of Mexican, country, and rhythm-and-blues influences, with lyrics switching back and forth at random between Spanish and English. The video I caught on CMT (for the song "Who Were You Thinking Of?") simply showed the band onstage in a steamy honky-tonk playing to a dance floor filled with a genuine rainbow of brown, white, and black dancers in color-uncoordinated mix-and-match couples.

This one by The Texas Tornadoes was not the only video on CMT to go out of its way to include black and brown faces. Also in heavy rotation that week was a clip of Kentucky hillbilly Dwight Yoakum, Afro-Louisianan Buckwheat Zydeco, and East L.A. Mexican David Hidalgo joining forces for a cajun-country-conjunto-r&b fusion take on Hank Williams's "Hey Good Looking!" It was a sight, and a sound, that made me want to stand up and salute. It probably made old Hank pretty proud, too.

Meanwhile, Dave Hidalgo's band, Los Lobos, leads off their new album, The Neighborhood, with a song called "Down on the Riverbed" that is nothing more than a slight reworking of the melody to the ancient African-American spiritual "Wade in the Water." Los Lobos gives the honorable tune a big rock beat and lyrics that evoke the magical realism of Latino literature. The rest of the album follows up with the usual Lobos fusion of Latin-tinged hillbilly, blues, and r&b, alongside pop-inflected Mexican traditions.

A couple of channels over, you can catch Los Lobos's youngest cultural cousin, the Chicano rapper Kid Frost, on the hip-hop video shows. The burly Kid Frost raps in Spanish, English, and street-level Spanglish, and does it with cool aplomb and hip-hop swing.

A multicultural and multilingual Mexican-American Army brat, Frost has an album out called Hispanic Causing Panic. The first single, "This is for La Raza," aimed hard at establishing his Mexican identity front and center. The second one,"Ya Estuvo (That's It)," makes a special point of the black-brown crossover, with Frost in dialogue with an African-American rap partner who listens, digs, and then asks for the translation, please. It's a fresh mix and a hopeful one.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.