Rock con Raza, Raza con Jazz

Abstract

Luis Rodríguez’s autobiography, Always Running, covers the period of his youth in Los Angeles from the mid- to late 1950s through the height of the Chicano movement. The relationship he describes between blacks and Chicanos had been evolving since the early 1940s, when African Americans began migrating to the city in substantial numbers:

I often lay back in my garage room, listening to scratchy records of Willie Bobo, Thee Midnighters, War, and Miles Davis. Sometimes oldies; the “Eastside Sound” revues, old Stax and Atlantic rhythm & blues: Wilson Pickett, Rufus Thomas, Solomon Burke and The Drifters. And of course, Motown.

For the most part, the Mexicans in and around Los Angeles were economically and socially closest to blacks. As soon as we understood English, it was usually the Black English we first tried to master. Later in the youth authority camps and prisons, blacks used Mexican slang and the cholo style; Mexicans imitated the Southside swagger and style—although this didn’t mean at times we didn’t war with one another, such being the state of affairs at the bottom. For Chicanos this influence lay particularly deep in music: Mexican rhythms syncopated with blues and ghetto beats.¹

Rodríguez’s observations encapsulate several issues that are addressed in this chapter: the breadth of the musical tastes of Chicano Angelenos; the cross-cultural affinities, influences, and borrowings between Chicanos and African Americans as expressed in style, language, and music; and the socioeconomic context within which this process evolved.²