Songs Without Borders

In my Arizona hometown, I grew up listening to my neighbor, Ray Ramirez, strumming and singing Mexican border songs–corridos. Lawrence Downes of the NY Times writes of a modern version of such songs:

CHALINO’S Bar looked promising. We walked under its arching neon sign, past the steel-bar door into pulsing darkness. It was after 10, still early. The place was mostly empty; couples here and there shared private islands in the gloom. Pablo, Omar and I got Tecates and a table. The jukebox was playing banda, Mexican brass music in the Sinaloa style, an oom-pah band wailing away in waltz time.

It was enjoyable — a toe-tapping beat at bone-shaking volume — but we wanted live musicians. The only performers there were hostesses, lined up at the bar waiting to trade close attention for expensive drinks. After a while I went out for air, and started talking with two men smoking by the back door. We had a short Spanglish discussion about the situation. No bands were playing tonight, the men said, but we could try the El Dorado Night Club, a couple of miles away, in South-Central Los Angeles. After politely cautious small talk — no, I wasn’t with Immigration — they suggested we go together. With that we followed our new friends along wide, dark boulevards — across Florence Avenue, up South Broadway to South Main Street, through a low-rise industrial terrain of concrete and stucco, past empty strip malls and auto shops, our route stitched by the glow of light poles, which far outnumbered royal palms this far south of downtown.

It was a short ride deep into the heart of Mexican Los Angeles, never far from the long shadow of Chalino Sánchez.

There are many ways to know a city — through its restaurants or museums, its landmarks or outdoor spaces. But one way to get to a city’s heart is to immerse yourself in its music. You might think that would be impossible to do in Los Angeles, a landscape far too huge, too varied, too dizzying to ever sort out.

But if you stick to the Los Angeles that has been remade by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, the parts shaped by waves of immigration, assimilation and reinvention, you travel on remarkably stable ground. Wherever you go in this rich, sprawling terrain — getting off the freeways, driving through downtown and then heading generally south and east to suburbs like Vernon, South Gate, Lynwood, Huntington Park, El Monte, Pico Rivera — you can follow the sounds of the Mexican countryside.

In clubs, bars, swap meets and concert halls, from car radios and ringing cellphones, you will hear corridos, old-time folk ballads in the banda and norteño styles. “Corridos are part of the literature of the common people,” wrote Chris Strachwitz, who founded Arhoolie Records and has spent a lifetime collecting and studying traditional Mexican music. Click here for the rest of the story.

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