| | |  Entertainment | July 2008 
Born in America, Heart in Mexico
 Josh Kun - New York Times
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| | Born in the U.S.A. but at home south of the border, Shawn Kiehne, a k a El Gringo, is out to bring Mexican music into the American mainstream. (John Burcham/The New York Times) | | |
Los Angeles - The first time the singer-songwriter Shawn Kiehne appeared on national television, he denounced the Bush administration’s plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, boasted that some of his best friends were illegal immigrants and declared his unequivocal love for the Mexican people.
None of which would normally raise an eyebrow on “Don Francisco Presenta,” a top-rated weekly talk show on Univision, the nation’s most-watched Spanish-language network. But Mr. Kiehne (pronounced KEEN-ee), who donned a black cowboy hat and range-worn jeans crowned by an impressive silver buckle, is not your average Mexican performer.
In fact, he is not Mexican at all, but a white Southwestern country boy of German stock who calls himself El Gringo, a name that’s as much a reference to his American birth certificate as it is his less-than-brown skin. With the Mexican population of the United States on a steady rise (according to a 2006 census survey, people of Mexican origin make up nearly 10 percent of the country), Mr. Kiehne might just turn out to be the face of a gradual shift in mainstream cultural taste.
Mr. Kiehne, 32, was invited on “Don Francisco Presenta” to perform “El Corrido del Gringo,” a sweeping autobiographical song that explains how he went from being a middle-class rancher’s son from Los Lunas, N.M., to raising three bilingual children with his Mexican wife, recording an all-Spanish CD, “Algo Sucedió” (Univision Records) and spending his nights singing about cantinas, ranchos and señoritas to Mexican and Mexican-American audiences across the country.
“People always ask me how I became El Gringo,” Mr. Kiehne said between bites of tacos during a recent trip to Los Angeles. (In honor of his surroundings, he traded his usual cowboy hat for a Dodgers cap). “I wrote that song because I wanted to tell them about what I believed in. I am not some manufactured record label idea. This is music that I love. This is a culture that I love. This is me.”
In the song, awash in the accordions and bajo sextos (12-string bass guitars) of Mexican norteño music, Mr. Kiehne tells his Mexican listeners that he was born “on the other side of the river,” where he learned to love Mexican music working alongside Mexicans on a Texas ranch. But in its final minute he switches to a bold cross-cultural political commentary:
I respect immigrants and of this I’m sure
We need to be good neighbors and not build a wall
To my illegal friends who live in the U.S.
As a gringo I want to tell you to keep dreaming and fighting
This country needs your effort and your work.
When he sang the lines on “Don Francisco Presenta,” the studio audience erupted in hollers and applause. Just like that, Mr. Kiehne went from being a potential novelty act to being the real deal: a gringo who not only chooses to sing in Spanish, but is also willing to fight for the other side.
“We can’t control political borders, but we can control social borders,” said Toby Sandoval, a veteran Mexican composer and arranger who has worked with Paulina Rubio and Pedro Fernandez and is now helping write songs for Mr. Kiehne’s second release. “That’s where Shawn comes in. As immigrants it’s our responsibility to absorb this country with open arms. But for a native of this country to open his arms to us, to Mexico — you have to respect that.”
In the history of regional Mexican music — the clunky catch-all for traditional styles ranging from folkloric rancheras to the honking brass of banda sinaloense — there’s never been a figure quite like Mr. Kiehne. While white artists like Joe Ely and Doug Sahm have infiltrated the world of Tex-Mex music and nearly every generation of African-American music has inspired its own cadre of white imitators, regional Mexican has been hermetically sealed from outsiders.
“It’s just not normal for a gringo to be so interested in regional Mexican,” Mr. Sandoval said. “You see it with hip-hop all the time, or in world music when white artists go to Africa or Asia to discover themselves. But it just doesn’t happen with Mexican music.”
The music’s almost entirely Spanish lyrics, its roots in rural working-class Mexico and its century-long association with migrant labor and accompanying waves of immigrant nostalgia have kept the music in both a commercial and social vacuum. Factor in heated political debates over immigration policy and xenophobia, and you have one of the few genres left that seem immune to hipster trend spotting and crossover marketing campaigns.
“Regional Mexican is a very jealous genre,” said Pepe Garza, program director at La Que Buena, 105.5 FM, Los Angeles’s top regional Mexican station. “It’s like country. If you’re not from Nashville, you’re not legit. You have to have the right credentials to play Mexican music. It has very complicated emotions and politics, and it’s not easy for someone who didn’t grow up with that to be able to fit right in.”
Which is why Mr. Garza is skeptical that El Gringo will spawn a legion of mainstream disciples: “From a marketing perspective, El Gringo is perfect, because he has no competition.”
Mr. Kiehne’s interest in Mexican music began in high school; he worked summers at Rancho Cornudas, a cattle ranch owned by his family just outside El Paso. He herded cattle and roped steers alongside the seasonal Mexican laborers who had come north from Chihuahua and Durango, most of them without papers.
“I learned to see the world through the eyes of those vaqueros,” said Mr. Kiehne, who also spent a college semester living in Culiacán, Sinaloa, a central hub of banda music, where he met his wife. “If I had five kids and couldn’t support them in Mexico, I would do the same thing that they are doing. Here they were, thousands of miles from their families, sending money home, only talking to their wife and kids on Sundays, only seeing them two or three weeks a year for Christmas, and they never talked about being tired. Anyone who leaves their homeland to come here and look for a better life and work that hard should be admired, not criticized.”
On the ranch Mr. Kiehne received a crash course in immigrant culture. His fellow workers taught him Spanish and clued him into the secrets of Mexican soap operas and game shows; despite his prior allegiance to the country music of George Strait and Marty Robbins, they got him hooked on “La Puerta Negra,” an influential 1980s norteño hit by Los Tigres del Norte. On weekends he was invited along to the big Saturday-night Mexican bailes, or dances, across the border in Juarez.
“That’s where I really got exposed to the heart of the Mexican music scene,” he said. “Soon I realized that I really loved the music. At first I was still quickly turning the dial to a country station. But once I started to understand the songs, the music started to grow on me, and now it’s all I listen to.”
In 2003 after leading a string of local country bands in New Mexico, Mr. Kiehne began to write and sing his own songs in Spanish, performing around Albuquerque to Mexican and Mexican-American audiences. “The reception was 100 percent positive,” he said. “People were amazed that when I sang, I didn’t really have an accent. They were like, ‘Are you really a gringo?’ ”
The initial idea was to perform using the name he earned down on the ranch — Shawnito — but his Mexican brother-in-law convinced him otherwise. “He told me, ‘Man, you should be the Eminem of Mexican music,’ ” said Mr. Kiehne. “’Don’t call yourself by your name. Call yourself El Gringo. People will see it on the marquee and say, ‘We have to go see what this guy is up to.’ I trademarked the name before I even had any songs.”
After winning second prize in the 2005 “El Gigante de Mañana” contest (Univision’s take on “American Idol”), Mr. Kiehne used earnings from his day job selling real estate to put out “Algo Sucedió,” his debut album as El Gringo. (It has since been released through Univision Records with a bonus duet between Mr. Kiehne and the Regional Mexican star Jenni Rivera.) While the original album sold 3,000 copies, the major-label version has sold nearly 10 times that, a more-than-respectable number for a regional Mexican debut.
Of the album’s 12 songs Mr. Kiehne wrote five, including his Spanish makeovers of two favorite country songs, Rodney Crowell’s “Making Memories of Us” and Toby Keith’s “I Love This Bar.”
“My voice is a country voice, and I grew up on country music, so I couldn’t really hide that,” said Mr. Kiehne, who hopes to model his future sound after Intocable, a leading regional Mexican band that mixes norteño with rock and country.
For now Mr. Kiehne is busy road-testing El Gringo, opening for Intocable on its current American tour and going it solo in mostly small Mexican bars, nightclubs and radio festivals throughout the country, often in cities that a decade ago would never have been on a norteño act’s itinerary.
“There are Mexicans everywhere now,” he said. “I’m playing in Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Kentucky. In these places, deep in Middle America, the shows are packed, and it’s all Mexicans. Davenport, Iowa? There are Mexicans in Davenport, Iowa?”
If the Latino population triples by 2050, as a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center predicts, it won’t be just Mexicans listening to music like norteño in Davenport, Mr. Kiehne says. Bands like Intocable and Los Tigres del Norte will soon be as widely recognized as Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias.
“There are plenty of Anglos in this country who like Mexicans and like Mexican culture,” said Mr. Garza of La Que Buena. “There are almost a million Anglos who even live in Mexico because they love it so much. El Gringo represents this population. He can be their voice.”
It’s a role that Mr. Kiehne is proud to embrace.
“Ricky Martin helped make it O.K. for white Americans of my generation to like Latin music,” he said. “I want to do the same thing for norteño. I want it to appeal to mainstream white America while staying true to the Mexican sound.”
“A year ago my friends and family would never have gone out to buy an Intocable CD,” he added. “Now they do. I’d like to think this is just the beginning.” |
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