Mexican American Mojo

Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968

Anthony Macías, Ronald Radano, Josh Kun, Ronald Radano, Josh Kun

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780822343226
  9780822343394
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822389385
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Stretching from the years during the Second World War when young couples jitterbugged across the dance floor at the Zenda Ballroom, through the early 1950s when honking tenor saxophones could be heard at the Angelus Hall, to the Spanish-language cosmopolitanism of the late 1950s and 1960s, Mexican American Mojo is a lively account of Mexican American urban culture in wartime and postwar Los Angeles as seen through the evolution of dance styles, nightlife, and, above all, popular music. Revealing the links between a vibrant Chicano music culture and postwar social and geographic mobility, Anthony Macías shows how by participating in jazz, the zoot suit phenomenon, car culture, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and Latin music, Mexican Americans not only rejected second-class citizenship and demeaning stereotypes, but also transformed Los Angeles.

Macías conducted numerous interviews for Mexican American Mojo, and the voices of little-known artists and fans fill its pages. In addition, more famous musicians such as Ritchie Valens and Lalo Guerrero are considered anew in relation to their contemporaries and the city. Macías examines language, fashion, and subcultures to trace the history of hip and cool in Los Angeles as well as the Chicano influence on urban culture. He argues that a grass-roots "multicultural urban civility" that challenged the attempted containment of Mexican Americans and African Americans emerged in the neighborhoods, schools, nightclubs, dance halls, and auditoriums of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. So take a little trip with Macías, via streetcar or freeway, to a time when Los Angeles had advanced public high school music programs, segregated musicians' union locals, a highbrow municipal Bureau of Music, independent R & B labels, and robust rock and roll and Latin music scenes.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Mexican American Generation, Music, and Los Angeles
• 1. Mojo in Motion: The Swing Era
• 2. The Drape Shape: Intercultural Style Politics
• 3. Boogie Woogie Breakthrough: The Rhythm and Blues Era
• 4. Come On, Let’s Go: The Rock and Roll Era
• 5. Con Sabor Latino: Latin Jazz, the Mambo, and Latin Holidays in Los Angeles
• Conclusion: Alternate Takes and Political Generations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index