Chicano Heart, Chicano Soul: Mestizaje, Americana, and Revival

The above playlist is a more limited and linear exploration of the genre from roots to contemporary songs. Below is a collection of pretty much all contemporary musicians (with a few exceptions), with a lot of overlap with the primary playlist. Below the playlist is an introductory essay on the topic.

In his foreword to Ruben Molina’s “Chicano Soul”, which remains one of the only texts whose sole purpose is the exploration of this musical genre, Alex La Rotta quotes Gloria Anzaldúa’s “The New Mestiza”: “I am visible — see this Indian face — yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They'd like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven't, we haven't.” Mexican-American culture has long been invisibilized in the United States: despite their roots running as deep as any others in our nation, Mexican-American identity has always been framed more around the first than the second. We continue to view Mexican-Americans and their cultural products as first and foremost foreign, and they often remain participants in American popular culture, rather than owners, in a way distinct from most other groups in our nation. There is nowhere that these issues come to light more than in Chicano Soul music: before the Chicano movement of the 60’s, which aimed to claim space for young Mexican-Americans who rejected being seen as only Mexican or as only American, there was the birth of Chicano Soul. Alongside the advent and popularization among Mexican-Americans of the lowrider, Chicano Soul is incredibly important in looking at the ways Mexican-American youth were engaging with American popular culture in their own ways and claiming it for themselves, as a rejection of the framework through which we categorize culture, music, and people. See, as Anzaldúa says, there has long been an expectation of passivity from Mexican-Americans. When they started to play Soul music, it was seen as Mexican-Americans playing Soul music, participating, borrowing, or even assimilating. Again, they found themselves facing a paradoxical dichotomy, one in which they were either foreign, hypervisible and other, or American, invisible, non-distinct. Chicano Soul, despite our failure in its recognition until now, is a direct response to these issues of identity: it served to create a third, safe, space for a new generation who were frustrated by the fact they could only exist in these polar opposites. They had no place for themselves, and yet it was at this same time they were being ushered into segregated communities where they found themselves surrounded by other similarly frustrated Mexican-American youth. It was the perfect storm for the creation of a distinct musical and social culture, which revolved around a close relationship with the popular culture of other youth in the country, including car culture, emerging Rock music, and the sweet sounds of African-American Soul.

American popular culture, in a general sense, has historically existed defined by a sort of racial binary. In it, Black culture has been hyper-visible in a way that we might not expect. What is more American than Jazz, than Rap, than the Blues? Even despite the ways through which this country has long fought to subjugate and demean Black culture, it has found its way into the heart of Americana, and is everywhere. Modern pop cannot exist without the chords and patterns of the Blues. Jazz, as it exists in the corporate elevators of fancy high-rises across America, cannot exist without Black people and their close relationship with American popular culture at every turning point in our history. Even when the Minstrel act was America’s most popular, its existence cemented Black America as part of Americana. As the Minstrel act was going out of style in the early 20th century, masses of Mexicans were leaving their country following the revolution, and settling across the Southwest. By the time the 40’s and 50’s rolled around, they had been in this country for multiple generations, and their kids saw themselves as Americans. At this time, a new wave of migration was occurring both during and after the Bracero program, which aimed to bring over needed Mexican laborers to work on American fields and in American factories during World War II. As this new generation too had kids in the US, there were two groups of Mexican-American youth around the birth of Chicano Soul: one whose roots reached back, who saw themselves as increasingly American, and one who more than the other spoke Spanish at home, heard corridos more than the popular big band music of the time. Though these groups were different, they found shared community in the fact that outside of the Mexican-American communities, they were seen as equally foreign by the rest of America. They weren’t allowed into White spaces, and yet didn’t live the same lives as their similarly marginalized peers. They were frustrated, as it seemed the only way to prove to America their existence was to assimilate, and their connection to heritage, to Mexican culture, was too strong and too important to leave behind for that purpose. So they began to do their own thing: to engage in American popular culture of the time, but to do so within their own communities in the ways they could: they bought and fixed up the cars they could afford, and made them their own. They created and frequented music venues filled with their own peers and played all the music they liked: not just Soul and Rock and Jazz but Mambo, Corridos, everything they were hearing at home or in their communities. In these spaces, they also started to play their own music, influenced by the Doo-Wop Soul which had become so incredibly popular within lowrider car culture, and yet also with influences from those other genres which had been celebrated alongside Soul. To them, this was all theirs, and so the boundaries between genres faded, and often the same groups who would play more soulful ballads would follow them up with upbeat songs to dance to. This was a declaration of identity, and a claiming of space. Mexican-Americans were here and they had their own things going, close enough to the mainstream American popular culture so that it couldn't be foreign, and enough their own that, at least in their own communities, they knew that they weren’t melting in the pot.

Scholars such as Franciso Orozco, in his dissertation “Chololoche Grooves: Crossroads and Mestizaje in Chicano Soul of San Antonio” and the majority of the field of Chicano Studies, has drawn a line between these proto-Chicano cultural forms, and the explicit politics of the later Chicano Movement, which was at its peak from 1965 to 75. As Mexican-American youth continued to carve out space for themselves, and as America continued to invisibilized what they strived to do, they found ways to more explicitly declare their existence, to call themselves something new, to become Chicano. What has not been so explicitly explored, however, is the close relationship between the story of Chicano Soul and the Americana canon as a whole. Americana, as we’ve discussed, exists through a binary through which we categorize American cultural products. Popular culture, in Americana, exists at the crossroads of the two categories, Black and White, through the advent of Jazz, but then also its appropriation by White artists, through the Blues, but then also the incorporation of elements of the Blues into Country. In this way, Americana is dependent on hybridity, it is multinational, coming from the African traditions which we imported through slavery, and from the equally varying European traditions from the many many waves of European immigration throughout our history. And yet this multiplicitous identity of Americana is not recognized, and Chicano Soul serves as a perfect example. It too comes from the interaction of a group of distinct American youth with American popular culture: it does not exist in Mexico, it is American. And yet it isn’t just Soul. It is characterized by the inclusion of latin instruments and rhythms, such as the Güiro (scraper), and clave rhythm, organ, the occasional lyric in Spanish, and the placement of Doo-Wop vocals alongside elements from the newly emerging Rock and Roll movement, such as electric bass and guitar. It is created out of the same processes as everything else within Americana, and yet it still exists in that paradoxical categorization. It is American, but only when seen as Mexican-American artists participating in a Black musical culture. It is foreign, but only when we recognize how it exists as distinct from the Soul being played by Black musicians. We must dismantle the framework through which Chicano Soul does not exist at the center of the Americana canon if we wish to have a progressive and liberating understanding of our own history.

There is another chapter to the story of Chicano Soul. While the history surrounding its existence as a form of pre Chicano Movement protest is important, so too is the revival of the genre in the past decades. There, we have a few things to unpack. First is the idea of identity in Chicano Soul music. One of the first rockstars to be known as Chicano was Lil Julian Herrera. He was the son of Hungarian immigrants, and yet had moved to East LA and become so close with a Mexican-American family there that he took their name. Similarly, an artist at the forefront of the revival of Chicano Soul, Bobby Oroza, is Finnish-Bolivian. It seems that in the context of Chicano Soul, there are three things that are important to its categorization: the place from which it comes, the identity of the musician, and the sound itself. Even while the music as a whole is used for declaration of Chicano identity, it seems the artists themselves don’t necessarily have to fit that mold. Other groups within the revival such as Thee Sacred Souls and Durand Jones and the Indications aren’t made up entirely of Mexican-Americans, and in fact Durand Jones and the Indications have no Latine band members, and yet they are celebrated as bringing back the oldies sound, as pura raza, and often co opt and speak to the Chicano and Mexican-American identities through references to lowrider culture and homage to Chicano imagery. Ivan Fernandez, in an article for KCET, perfectly sums up the way that Chicano Soul, both modern and classic, goes beyond solely a easy to define genre, “That phrase, [Chicano Oldies], however, does more than simply recall a style of music. It can also recall long, hot summer days spent in parks or backyards barbequing with friends and family and late nights cruising down a large boulevard in a beautiful, vintage car, typically a lowrider. The music was perfect for those moments and perfect for professing one's love to a special someone (or overcoming heartbreak caused by a formerly special someone, if you were unlucky). It's a style and a vibe that has spent many decades since the 1960s alive as a living piece of nostalgia from a bygone era at car shows and family gatherings”2. This Chicano Soul revival is also interesting because the label Chicano had been born out of conversation of two generations of youth, and out of a very specific new and growing culture, and yet now is used as a symbol of cultural pride among Mexican-Americans with less of an emphasis on when exactly their family immigrated to this country. Because of this, much of Chicano Soul has evolved in different ways with the revival. There is much more Spanish language inclusion in this generation of music, as shown by artists such as Thee Lakesiders and Chicano Batman (whose music is much more Chicano than it is Chicano Soul, but some of whose songs fit nearly perfectly into the genre). The revival is about nostalgia for a time when Chicanos felt fully free in expression, and about creating a new space for new generations of Mexican-Americans and other Latines to express and celebrate their hybrid identity.

Hybridity is at the core of Americana. There is no American form of music, no American literature, no American people, that don’t come from a multinational dialogue, a history of migration and subjugation. The musical form of Chicano Soul speaks perfectly to these qualities of Americana, yet it has little been recognized for its role in the early Chicano movement, let alone the way that the genre disproves the framework through which we so comfortably look at our own history. To recall the work of textile artist and folklorist William Morris, music has the power to liberate, to shape the mound of possible futures, and to make the invisible visible. And Chicano Soul has done this, both in the 21st century and in the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s, when it began carving out a place in America for a people who would not allow themselves to continue to be viewed as foreign, but who as readily refused to melt in the pot. We need not look farther than the youtube comment section on the thousands of available Chicano Soul tracks to understand that each and every one is telling the same story as Gloria Anzaldúa: “I exist. We exist”.

Tracklist: Chicano Heart, Chicano Soul

Introduction

This playlist moves in chronological order, charting Chicano Soul music and the accompanying culture from its influences in classic and doo-wop Soul, to the golden early era, to its contemporary revival. A few themes that come up time and time again throughout the playlist are the latin influenced percussion and organ, paired with the distinct often high-pitched ethereal vocals, and a Rock/Surf influenced electric sound on bass and guitar. Also important is the way that Chicano Soul spaces often placed ballads like Should I Take You Home right alongside more upbeat tunes with more audible latin influences, such as Hurt So Bad. A contemporary example of this process would be how groups such as The Altons play indie rock tracks back to back with full ballads, or how groups like Chicano Batman do the same, mixing, psych, funk, and Soul in new and inventive ways from song to song, leading to a great variety of sounds in pop tunes like Black Lipstick, funky ballads like Itotiani, and pop-soul in Freedom is Free. This speaks to how Chicano Soul functions not only as a music genre but as a statement of identity, an energy, a hybridization which is at the core of Chicanismo, more than a set of rules, a celebration of all that is or could be Chicano, from Soul to Mambo to Rock.

Tracklist (Spotify Link)

• You Send Me - Sam Cooke

  • Sam Cooke is often regarded as one of the kings of Soul music. He pioneered and made popular the Doo-Wop sound which is very important to the birth of the Chicano Soul sound. You Send Me in particular is a song in which those floaty background vocals are very audible and present, though the main singer is in a lower register than we will hear from many of the other songs later in the compilation.

• I’m Your Puppet - James and Bobby Purifoy

  • There are a few things to note here. Firstly, this song was incredibly popular within the lowrider culture associated with the birth of Chicano Soul. As such, it was commonly played alongside new and growing recordings of Chicano groups, both who played other Doo-Wop Soul, and groups playing Rock as well. And secondly, there is a modern Chicano Soul song entitled Nobody’s Clown, which very closely resembles this one in terms of melody and thematic content, as it follows the life of a Chicano puppet in East LA, and directly relates the content of both songs to the Chicano identity.

• Should I Take You Home - Sunny and the Sunliners

  • The first song in the compilation made by a Mexican-American artist. Characterized by Doo-Wop backing vocals paired with the distinctive organ and saxophone combo, and the later to become popular higher singing register. This is the beginning of a split from traditional Soul (ie Sam Cooke), in terms of tone of the whole song: it sounds warmer, funkier, incorporating elements of a new emerging rock and of big band Mexican forms of music. The electric bass is also front and center which is not at all common to other forms of Soul music. Sunny Ozuna is considered one of the pioneers and most important figures in early Chicano Soul music, and so his inclusion also speaks to the topic of authorship in the context of Chicano Soul.

• Take Me For a Little While - The Royal Jesters

  • This song drives home many of the points made about the previous song: the highly audible organ, the upbeat, funkier instrumentation, the high energy, the call and response between the two layers of vocals, the (what I believe to be) electric bass. Both The Royal Jesters and Sunny Ozuna are from San Antonio and grew up at the same time in two distinct areas of the city, so in many ways their music was in conversation as much with Black culture of the area as with each other.

• When We Get Married - Joe Bataan

  • My musical vocabulary is failing me, but even my less-than trained ear can hear something distinct and common in the vocals between this song from New York raised Joe Bataan and what we will eventually hear in contemporary Chicano Soul from artists like Thee Sacred Souls. There is something distinct continuing to emerge, in the electric instrumentation, here guitar playing a similar role to that which organ was playing in the previous songs, and in the vocal style which I still fail to describe. A further note is that Joe Bataan is not Chicano in any strict sense of the term: he is Filipino and Black, and yet here the sound is still relevant, and the song shows up on Chicano Soul and “Oldies” playlists on every music platform possible.

• The Town I Live In - Thee Midniters

  • This song is important for the blending of the lines between Soul and Rock, and for the lyrical content which speaks directly to the Chicano community in East Los Angeles from which it was coming. In fact, the one thing that I can’t shake about this song is the melodic similarity it bears to songs by contemporary Chicano punk/indie rock group Beach Goons, which can be seen in almost all of the songs off of their album Hoodratscumbags. Though these are two very different genres, here we see a space in which both are coexisting and being played and pioneered by the same group, out of a celebration of both Soul and the new emerging Rock of the time.

• Hurt So Bad - El Chicano

  • Besides the name of the artist pointing to the importance of identity, the instrumentation of the track, most of all the traditional and easily recognizable latin percussion instruments paired with the funky organ and rock riffs being played on guitar, points to the hyper-presence of hybridity within the Chicano Soul genre. The song itself strays far from some of the previously established norms of the genre, in that there is no lyrical content, and the instrumentation makes it seem a lot closer to a mambo in the way that the layered percussion plays in between beats. However, this speaks to another important aspect of the Chicano Soul movement: the creation of a safe space for early Chicano musicians: songs like these, more reminiscent of the genres that these young musicians were hearing at home than what was being listened to by their non Chicano peers. The song itself is also an adaptation of a classic Doo-Wop Soul song not originally recorded by a Chicano group.

• Baby, I Love You - Sueños

  • This song serves to link the two groups of songs included in the compilation: classical Chicano Soul and the modern revival. It fits all of the themes previously discussed, and important to the contemporary portion, it emphasizes the smooth and ethereal aspects of the genre while playing down many of the Rock influences. Like the previous song, this ballad is included on an album that puts it alongside upbeat Rock-influenced songs with more prevalent latin sounds, again most notable in the use of other types of percussion beyond the drumset (specifically the Güiro). An example of this is their song Y Que. This interesting phenomena is very important to the theme of liberation and creation of safe space within Chicano Soul. On Y Que, they sing “Listen. We shouldn’t be fighting, we came here to party. We brought our homegirls to dance and have a good time”.

• La Vida Es Fria - Jason Joshua

  • The first of the contemporary songs, we discover here a few new things: the topic of language begins to rise to the surface, and the combination here of lyrics in both English and Spanish speaks again to the hybridity at the center of Chicano identity. It’s smooth, it’s soft, the vocals sing and float, and Jason Joshua himself is even known as La voz de Oro. There’s an interesting and distinct instrumentation choice in this song with the inclusion of a string instrument, perhaps a violin, which is part of the reason it makes the list.

• When You Go (That’s When You’ll Know) - The Altons

  • The call and response vocals in conversation with each other again summons images of classic Doo-Wop Soul, confused again by the inclusion of the organ playing latin-influenced chords and the Güiro playing a sort of swinging clave rhythm in the background. This Güiro seems to be of particular importance to me in differentiating the genre from other Soul, and gives it its distinct and subtle sound. Again, the electric instruments are important as they speak to the continued blurred lines between this and other genres, as this group plays not only traditional Soul ballads but also Rock songs such as In the Meantime.

• Can I Call You Rose? - Thee Sacred Souls

  • I chose this song purely for energy. How silly it seems to me to write this as the track note, but part of what is interesting to me about the Chicano Soul genre is just its magic, and the fact that despite the absence of glaringly obvious markers of the genre in the majority of its songs, there is something that gets communicated that keys the listener into the fact it’s Chicano Soul. This song fits all the tropes we’ve laid out, but even so, each individual thing is so elusive and hard to latch onto. I’m left, not pondering instrumentation or vocal style, but vibe, and it seems to me that this vibe, this tone that comes from the genre, epitomized in this song, is vital to understanding and studying the genre as a whole.

• Cruising to the Park - Durand Jones and the Indications

  • Here, the sound of the kick drum sort of imitated the role and sound of the Güiro in previous songs. The subtle nod to the cadence and energy of Chicano Soul is what leads this song to create that same Chicano Soul tone, and to often be categorized as Chicano Soul, despite being made by a band from the South who play other types of Neo-Soul and yet were discovered and celebrated by the continuing lowrider community. This celebration led the group to write and record this song as an ode to cruising culture. They also recorded a version of the song in Spanish with a Mexican-American, Portland based artist, Y La Bamba, named Cruising to the Parque.

• This Love - Bobby Oroza

  • The inclusion of this track again comes down to the interaction of two factors, being vibe and authorship. It is Chicano Soul because it follows lots of the same expectations of other songs in the compilation: organ, distinct vocals, slow, funky, rhythm. And yet Bobby is not Chicano, he is Finnish-Bolivian-American, and grew up in Helsinki. The song makes us ask questions: what makes this different from other Neo-Soul? Is Bobby part of the Chicano and Americana traditions because his music is? And the most important question of all, does any of this discussion of genre placement matter if the top comments on his song are about how much they appreciate the revival of oldies, and how much pride they feel towards an artist like them bringing them home?

• Si Me Faltaras Tu - Thee Lakesiders

  • This song organizes many of the traits of Chicano Soul in a bit of an interesting way: the slightly heavier and quicker instrumentation gets paired with the high pitched ethereal vocals. It feels a lot more like an indie rock tune, and yet it’s still reminiscent of the oldies scene, of lowrider culture, of cruising with the wind rushing through the windows and tunes flowing out. The song Parachute by the same group even has a music video shot in black and white, where both of the artists are dressed in 50s Chicano fashion, with slicked back hair, shot on the banks of the LA river. That speaks to the point of Chicano Soul: the importance of both halves of the name, the Chicano identity, and the Soul identity.

• Nobody’s Clown - Los Yesterdays

  • Seeing as how the playlist began with I Am Your Puppet, it seems fitting to end on a song which shares its sound and theme. This song is important because of its music video, which includes incredibly potent Chicano imagery, which again alludes to the importance of identity in Chicano Soul alongside the more easily audible musical component. Again we see the distinct latin sound of the Güiro being replaced by the drumset, with the hi-hat here playing the rhythmic role of the Güiro in our earlier tracks.

Bibliography (Key Sources Bold)

1. Feola, Josh. “A Guide to Chicano Soul on Bandcamp.” Bandcamp Daily, Bandcamp, 5 Oct. 2020, https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/chicano-soul-list.

2. Fernandez, Ivan ‘Afroxander’. “A New Generation of Musicians Are Revitalizing Chicano Soul Music.” KCET, 7 Feb. 2022, https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/a-new-generation-of-musicians-are-revitalizing-chicano-soul-music.

3. Frith, Simon. “7 - Music and Identity.” Questions of Cultural Identity, Sage, London, 2013, p. 103.

4. Jimenez, Stephanie. “Exploring Chicano Identity and Music.” Panoramas, University of Pittsburgh, 28 Jan. 2021, https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/art-and-culture/exploring-chicano-identity-and-music.

5. Macias, Anthony F. Mexican American Mojo Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968. Duke University Press, 2008.

6. Macias, Anthony. “Latin Holidays: Mexican Americans, Latin Music, and Cultural Identity in Postwar Los Angeles.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 30, 2005, pp. 65–86.

7. Macías, Anthony. “Becoming Mexican American: An Empowering Exemplar of Social and Cultural History.” Kalfou, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017, https://doi.org/10.15367/kf.v4i2.160.

8. Molina, Ruben. Chicano Soul: Recordings Et History of an American Culture. Texas Tech University Press, 2017.

9. Whiteley, Sheila, et al. Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity. Routledge, 2017.

10. Orozco, Francisco, and Shannon Dudley. “Chololoche Grooves: Crossroads and Mestizaje in Chicano Soul of San Antonio.” University of Washington, 2012.