Miranda Cross
Exam Unit 3
October 8, 2014
Music from Mexico began making its way to America in the late 1800s when border culture and commerce was beginning to develop. Corrido and Ranchera developed and reached popularity in Texas when nortenos music came to Texas. Texas singer Lydia Mendoza’s song “Bad Man” became a hit and played on the radio in the southwestern US which clued listeners in to the border music scene. She and her family continued to record tangos, corridos, rancheras, and boleros that increased the presence of border music in American culture. The accordion came to Mexico in the 1860s and when it was brought over the border into Texas, the conjunto style was popularized in America. The most famous of these are polkas.
World War 2 brought Chicanos into the big cities. The combination of Chicano culture with swing and Latin jazz saw some rise in popularity of orquesta tejana. Orquesta tejana combined American big band music styles with Latin jazz. Combining mariachi with Texas Mexican music gave birth to Texachi courtesy of Isidro Lopez. Lopez is also responsible for modern Tejano’s popularity because he is the pioneer that combined orquesta with rock music.
Californian Chicano musicians were highly influenced by African American music like jazz and blues. Ritchie Valens was a force in popularizing Chicano rock music. He
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created the song “La Bamba” based on a huapango, and the song has been recorded many times since then. Tejano music achieved a surge in popularity in the 1970s as radios played more often and more record labels existed.
Little Joe Hernandez combined Tejano music with Latin rock, jazz, and blues. When he recorded “Las Nubes” (traditional Mexican tune to a ranchera beat), the song exploded and made Tejano extremely popular until the late 1970s/early 1980s. Selena Quintanilla was one of the biggest reasons that Tejano music became popular. According to the text, “[Selena’s] music represented the unique social location of Texas-Americans.” She had a great stage presence and her death was a blow to the Tejano
industry. Chicano rock grew even bigger with the popularity of Carlos Santana who began as a mariachi player before combining blues, rock, and salsa to create his unique sound. Santana’s success got other small Chicano bands opportunities to record albums. The bands Malo and War, along with many others, came after Santana and further increased the popularity of Chicano rock. The next pioneers in Chicano rock were the band Los Lobos who combined accordians and electric guitar to create an updated sound. Mariachi reached popularity in America because of the Chicano rights movement. It inspired an interest in Chicano culture, including its music. Many schools formed mariachi bands. Banda came to America because of the fourteen-piece band Banda Machos whose music came to Los Angeles and eventually spread around the country. It was easy to dance to and overcame class boundaries in the USA. Corridos came to America as polkas and waltzes in the early 1900s, but fell out of popularity before the 1940s. An updated version called narcocorridos which sang about drug running, smuggling, and crossing the border became very popular. Los Tigres del Norte were a San Jose group that sang these type of songs and helped them achieve American popularity despite Mexican disapproval. Latin pop music grew in popularity during the new millennium due to the rising population of Latinos in America. Even though regional Mexican music outsold Latin pop, the pop music took a significant sales upturn.
I went and saw Mariachi Oro de Mi Tierra performed at the Herreras Salon and it was an amazing experience. The whole audience was just so cheerful, and everybody was having a great time. The Mariachi were dressed in black charro suits, and the instruments they had were violins, guitars, trumpets, vihuela, and guitarron. The whole atmosphere was just so lively, and everybody was dress in party attire. The music they played were dance, romantic, and sentimental songs, and the genres were either ranchera, cumbias or boleros. The songs that made people excited were La Bamba (1958), El Rey (1971), Gema (1959), El Mariachi Loco, La Bikina (1964), and Cielito Lindo (1882).
Contreras, Sheila Marie. “Emergent Readings of the Post-Conquest: Indigeneity and Mestizaje in the Texas Borderlands.” Indigenous Cultures Institute. Meakan/Garzas Band, 16 Feb. 2011. Web. 11 Oct. 2011. .
Mexico’s drugs wars as well as bloody drug cartels are echoed in a controversial folk music genre commonly known as narco corridos or simply as drug ballads. They tell the stories allied to shootouts, drug lords, betrayals including daring criminal operations. Narco corridos are not a new style in Mexican music, in fact, they have been around for years, and they are popular among the old and the young. This genre has evolved to be modern fugitive music that fuses the emotional responses of antique ballads with the tense gravel of mobster rap. From global idols to rural artists documenting their neighborhood current events in the regions subjugated by guerilla war, narco corridos provides the songwriters in their homes with unique but artistic superiority, investigating the heartland of the infamous Mexican drug trafficking as well as publicizing municipal midpoints such as Los Angeles, in addition to Mexico City.
The principal music played by these early Mariachis was the SON, the popular music of the day. A mixture of folk traditions from Spain, Mexico, and Africa, the son was found in many regions of the country. The son from Jalisco is called the son jaliscience. Sones from other regions include the son jarocho or veracruzano, from the region around the Gulf port of Veracruz. The most famous example of the son jarocho is La Bamba. A typical son huasteco, also known as the huapango, is the La Malague~n a.
Ragland, Cathy. Música Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation between Nations. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2009. Print.
Music comes in many shapes and forms, and has been a magical element of inspiration and encouragement throughout time. The art of music derives from many different things, such as culture and traditions. One such type of music is mariachi music, deriving from Mexican culture and traditions. Mariachi music is often an upbeat rhythm, consisting of a band of up to six to eight violins, two trumpets and a guitar. Unlike modern music and other music bands alike, mariachi bands lack in numbers when it comes to band size. Though they are small, their music brings great significance and life to the places they perform and the people that they touch with their joyous music. In this paper, I will be comparing the culture and style of mariachi music to twentieth century modern music.
Tejano has been around for a long time, but how long? The length of time it has been around can say a lot about Tejano culture because music speaks so much for its people.
In the 1950’s country rock and rock in general was a new style of music that was unheard of, with artist like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lewis. In the 1970’s the Eagles country rock sound became very popular and when country rock faded in the mid 1970’s, bands like R.E.M. and Los Lobos became popular in the 1980’s because of their songs sounded similar to the country rock songs in the 1950’s and 1970’s. In the 1980’s and 1990’s country rock audiences were any race that enjoyed a country and rock sound that was popular during the 1980’s and 1990’s. Many different forms of country rock came because of the country rock era, with outlaw country singers like Willie Nelson and alternative country singers like Dave Alvin that is similar to country
Music and dance are important parts of Peruvian culture. “Andean Folk Music is common in Peru. People perform a stylized dance to energetic music mixed with sad songs. Popular instruments include clay panpipes, flutes, conch shell trumpets, and puma-skin drums”(Falconer, Kieran, and Quek 102). The music follows themes of religion, war, and profanity. Peruvians are always found dancing, whether at a festival, carnival, or just for fun. Music shows important parts of Peruvian culture.
The history and development of salsa “cannot be separated from the history of migration”, meaning that the music developed and changed as it traveled the globe (Román-Velasquez: 211). Due to its global influences and popularity, salsa represents many cultures: “Initially associated with the Spanish Caribbean populations of Cuba and Puerto Rico, salsa was soon claimed as the voice of the New York City barrio and as representative of the experiences of the Latino community in the United States” (Román-Velasquez: 211). The term salsa describes more than just the music, but also “ a 'manner of making music' which is a flexible blend of many genres and which is continually reblended and given slightly different 'flavours' in different locations” (Román-Velasquez: 211). As salsa globalized, so did salsa dancing, adding another performance factor to the genre. Salsa clubs and fans in
Most noticeable would be the shift from speaking ancestral native languages to speaking Spanish. Just as well, Spanish architectural influence can be seen through the gorgeous tiled roofs, proud steeples, and light yellow-orange interiors of their churches and homes. The Spaniards also left an environmental impact, such as the introduction of Spanish horses and other Spanish plant and animal species, which, in turn, sparked the famous “cowboy culture” of the Southwest. This “blended” Spanish and indigenous Mexican culture is commonly known as “Hispanic” or “Latino.” Today, this culture is still very much alive and can be seen all throughout both Arizona and the Southwest as a whole. One can clearly see the cultural impact of both the Mexicans and Spanish, through the architecture, restaurants, traditional foods, and the religious traditions and ceremonies celebrated by Mexican people in the region, such as The Day of the Dead and Cinco de Mayo. Also, there are many Spanish-named streets, towns, cities, and
To help me understand and analyze a different culture, I watched the film Selena. The film tells the life story of the famous singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. Not only does it just tell personal stories from her life, it also gives insight to the Mexican-American culture. Her whole life she lived in the United States, specifically in Texas, but was Hispanic and because of that both her and her family faced more struggles than white singers on the climb to her success. Even though the film is a story about a specific person, it brought understanding into the culture in which she lived. Keeping in mind that these ideas that I drew about the Mexican-American culture is very broad and do not apply to every single person in the culture, there were very obvious differences in their culture and the one that I belong. Mexican-American culture identifies with their family rather than individualized or spiritual identities and the culture has gone through significant changes because of discrimination and the changing demographics of the United States.
Latinoamericanitas, 1976. Print. Vélez, Germám. Phone Interview. February 10th, 2011. Waterman, Richard Alan. Folk music of Puerto Rico . Washington: Library of Congress,
...s Sub-Sahara African music that intermixed with slaves in Spain. The cante Gitano has combined with the original dances of Andalusia. Performers who have searched for the origins have found are pervasive Arab influences, touching everything from the style of performance to the very rhythms and scales of the songs themselves (Greg Noakes). Flamenco has also been influenced by Indian and Middle East dances.
The instruments used to make Mariachi music, like the guitar or violin, were introduced to Mexico by the Spaniards. Nowadays, Mariachi Music is known all around the world and there are many band groups that will go to different cities and play at events, parties, and festivals (Roldan, "Vestimenta De Los Charros O