| | |  Entertainment | October 2009 
In Los Angeles, Songs Without Borders
 Lawrence Downes - New York Times
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| | Two street musicians take a break at the Alameda Swap Meet. (J. Emilio Flores/New York Times) | |
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.
Many of these songs will be narcocorridos, stories of bandits and outlaws updated to the age of drug cartels and AK-47s, and known to some, because of their grim authenticity and bad reputation, as “the rap of modern Mexico.”
And in all these places, even if you listen only a little while, you will hear Chalino, or someone trying to sound like him. Chalino was the nickname of Rosalino Sánchez, one of the most influential composers and singers of narcocorridos. Mexicans know him as a valiente, a brave one: armed, dangerous and doomed. Comparisons are superficial, but you could think of him as part Billy the Kid, part Bill Monroe. A hip-hop idol from down on the ranch. Maybe like Johnny Cash, if Johnny Cash truly had been Folsom Prison material. But then not really. There was no one like Chalino.
I first learned about him from two journalists. Sam Quinones, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, gave Chalino a chapter in “True Tales From Another Mexico” (2001, University of New Mexico Press). The book argues persuasively that emigrants like Chalino have been building a newer version of their country, more daring and dynamic, north of the border.
Elijah Wald, a writer and musician, traveled the length of Mexico and Mexican America to write “Narcocorrido” (2002, Rayo/HarperCollins), a definitive exploration of the genre as told by its composers and singers. In it he explained how Chalino’s raw style helped to turn narcocorridos into “the rap of modern Mexico and the barrios on el otro lado” — the other side, the United States.
With those books as guides, I set out in May to find Chalino’s legacy — to dive into the world of Mexican regional music, a hugely varied landscape of which narcocorridos are the most notorious part. For company I sought out two friends in Los Angeles who are also musicians, Pablo Alvarado (bass, guitar and vocals) and Omar León (accordion and vocals). I knew them from their day jobs, as immigrant organizers, but I also knew that like Latinos all over, they are steeped in corridos, and could answer my questions about songs by singing every word.
For a week, Pablo, Omar and I went to bars, clubs and music shops. We visited musicians backstage and in their homes. We went to swap meets, a key distribution point for new music. We focused our search in the old industrial areas south and east of downtown, where decades ago the white middle class followed trolley lines to starter suburbs. But both manufacturing and suburbia moved much farther away, and the Anglo neighborhoods emptied out, to be refilled by an immigrant tide, a flood of Mexicanness.
We met across from MacArthur Park, where jacaranda blossoms had laid a soft-brush coat of purple on the sidewalks and grass. Pablo drove and Omar sat up front. Sometimes we played corridos from a cardboard box full of CDs. They talked and sang while I listened and learned.
“He had this very unique way of singing,” Omar said of Chalino, which is to say he croaked. It was not off-key, but not pleasant, either.
“He made it seem like anyone can sing,” Omar said. Then he and Pablo started to sing a Chalino hit, “Nieves de Enero,” the snows of January, not a narcocorrido at all, but a story of thwarted love.
Ya se fueron las nieves de Enero y
Llegaron las flores de Mayo
Ya lo vez me aguantado lo macho y
Mi amargo dolor me lo cayo
The snows of January have gone and
The flowers of May have arrived
You can see, I’ve resisted like a man and
I keep my bitter pain to myself
“There’s not a single bar where you don’t hear that song after so many years,” said Omar, who is from Michoacán. “After he died, there was a Chalino in every single town” in Mexico. “There’s thousands of singers who try to sing exactly like Chalino.”
That’s the other amazing thing about Chalino. He has been dead since 1992. He was ambushed and executed after a concert in Sinaloa, his body dumped by a roadside. Plaza Los Arcos, the nightclub in Coachella, Calif., where he sealed his reputation as someone not to mess with — an audience member shot him; he pulled his own gun and shot back — is closed. He died at 31. But Chalino lives — not just in Los Angeles, but everywhere in the country Latino immigrants have settled. His songs and his imitators are all over Spanish radio, like the local station KBUE, which plays narcocorridos day and night, their jaunty accordion melodies oddly punctuated by special effects: the rattle of automatic gunfire and the rumble of helicopters.
Narcocorridos come in two styles: banda is played with brass instruments. Norteño is accordion, guitar, bass and drums. Played either way, narcocorridos are hard-core evocations of drug violence and death. The corridos pesados — heavy corridos — favor grittiness over beauty, honesty above all, and have, understandably, a bad rep. The subject matter is murderous, often disturbing, but even in that the songs are not much different from hip-hop, or lots of old-time country or blues — or mariachi, for that matter. Before the narcocorridos, old-time Mexican songs stuck to basic themes, Pablo explained: “Love, violence, revenge, plus alcohol — getting drunk and feeling melancholic.”
“Now,” he added, “it’s those four things, plus hard-core drugs.”
Given the recent agonies of Mexico’s drug wars, Mexican radio won’t play corridos pesados, and even in Los Angeles the rawest songs don’t get airtime, although they do get heard — people share bootleg CDs and MP3s. Much of the traffic circulates in homemade videos on YouTube, and even through ringtones. Narcocorridos make you feel good, Pablo had told me, at a Oaxacan restaurant in downtown Los Angeles over mole and horchata, a sugary rice drink. Pablo has a sweet tooth. He also has a taste for bitter, bloody narco songs.
It has nothing to do with dealing or using drugs yourself, he said. It’s the stories — of power and vengeance, of lust and betrayal — all to that happy beer-hall beat. If you’ve had a bad day at work, you’re sad, or lonely, a jolt of corrido picks you up.
When he hears them, Pablo said, “Oh man, I feel like I don’t give a damn,” using another word for damn. “I feel free.” He laughed.
Pablo’s not a drug dealer or user. He’s not even Mexican. He’s from El Salvador. He was right, I thought — people everywhere have been writing, singing and drawing consolation from desolate songs forever.
The three of us headed to Huntington Park, which Mr. Quinones had told me was the “core of the reactor” of immigrant Mexican Los Angeles. It’s where Pablo, Omar and I found the Botánica Jesús Malverde, a religious-goods store, next to other versions of retail redemption: an evangelical church, a juice bar, a tax-planning outfit.
Jesús Malverde is known as the patron saint of Mexican narcotraffickers. He has slick black hair and a mustache and a crisp white shirt. He is not a Catholic saint by any means, but a legendary Robin Hood figure whose actual existence has not been firmly established. Real or not, he has a shrine in Sinaloa, Chalino’s home state, a center of the drug trade. Smugglers pray to him. I bought his picture card with a prayer on the back. I slid it into my shirt pocket when a woman with a shopping cart approached us on the sidewalk and warned us to reject Jesús Malverde, since he was of the Devil.
It was a good reminder that many Mexicans refuse to be stereotyped by narco culture, even though they recognize its pull. Narcocorridos have the appeal that outlaw stories have always had among immigrants and the poor.
“If you’re poor, you get humiliated everywhere,” Omar told me, paraphrasing a hit song by Los Tucanes de Tijuana, a hard-core narco band. “But if you are rich, you get treated like a king. My friend joined the mafia because he was tired of being poor. Now he has lots of money and he gets sacks of cash every month.”
You can dance to songs like that all night, in bars and clubs like El Parral, in South Gate, where groups with names like Cartel and Combate Norteño draw a young, tough crowd. But for live music by day, it pays to go to markets and swap meets.
From Huntington Park we swung north to the Alameda Swap Meet, on South Alameda Boulevard, in a grungy neighborhood surrounded by tire shops, chain-link fencing, barbed wire and taco trucks. Inside it’s a dazzling Mexican market, where mole, the elixir paste of ground chocolate and spices, comes in industrial tubs; produce stands sell fresh cactus leaves, herbs and dried peppers; and narrow walkways are lined with soccer jerseys, Western shirts and cowboy hats. At religious stalls you can gaze on the oracular blankness of Jesús Malverde and the gently sorrowful face of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In the next stall over you can buy framed posters of Al Pacino as Scarface. In every music stall it was easy to find Chalino, his handsome young face glowering from his CD covers. He always wore a cowboy hat, with a silver pearl-handled .45 in his hand or tucked into his waist. Like many swap meets, this one had an open-air dining area, where we found a strolling musician, Manuel Torres, a stocky middle-aged man who told us he had come to Los Angeles from North Carolina. He walked from table to table, playing a bajo sexto, a type of guitar, an amplifier over his shoulder. His repertory included narcocorridos, including this one about Chapo Guzmán, the most-wanted drug lord in Mexico:
Ya conocio la pobreza
Ya conocio la riqueza
Si lo respetan respeta
Si lo ofenden se acelera
Y del infierno se escapa y se persina en la iglesia
He has known poverty
He has known riches
He respects those who respect him
If he’s offended he becomes agitated
He escapes from hell and crosses himself in church
Mr. Torres did not seem at all like a drug guy. He said he used to sing love songs in North Carolina, his own compositions, but in Los Angeles he sang narcocorridos. He had to: if you get hired for a party and don’t know any narco songs, he said, they won’t ask you back. He said his brother, a Pentecostal minister, was always scolding him: How can you sing in church on Sunday, and sing the devil’s music during the week? The answer was obvious. He wanted to eat and pay rent.
If Mr. Torres was the narcocorrido musician scratching out a living, Pedro Rivera was at the other extreme. The high point of our journey was a concert at a Los Angeles theater given to honor Mr. Rivera, a legendary corrido composer, singer and businessman who gave Chalino his first record deal. Don Pedro is also father to a musical dynasty; his sons and daughter are huge regional-music stars in their own right.
At the New LATC, a gleaming nonprofit theater in a renovated old bank in the heart of downtown, I met Pedro Rivera on the day before his tribute concert. A genial older guy in a black leather jacket with dark movie-idol hair and mustache, he patiently explained, in Spanish then English, the curious pull of Chalino. The first time you listen to him, he said, you can’t stand it; he’s too harsh, too nasal. The voice makes you wince. Then you play him again, and you still hate him. But something about him grabs you — his honesty, his passion, the story — and you want to listen to him again and again.
I thought of that the next night, at the concert. A banda group set up at the rear of the stage, a dozen guys ready to raise a brassy racket. In front of them, eight mariachis. At center stage: Don Pedro, in red shirt, white jacket and pants, white cowboy hat. He sang his old songs while his family sat up front: his sons Juan, Gustavo, Lupillo and his daughter, Jenni, and behind them a mess of in-laws and grandchildren.
Jenni, Lupillo, Gustavo and Juan have eclipsed their father and become big stars of Mexican regional music, though for Jenni — “la Diva de la Banda” — and Lupillo, the better word is enormous. They both sell millions of CDs and fill stadiums. She was heading to a show that Sunday at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. News that the Rivera family was all gathered in a little nonprofit theater downtown would have started a stampede on the street outside, I was told. But the younger family members had not been billed as performers, and the 500-seat theater was not filled.
There were plaques and applause, a video tribute. The music cranked up and rolled on. It was like sitting in on a family reunion, with a hard-drinking family: the siblings had six-packs of Tecates in shopping bags under their seats, and kept passing around plastic cups and a bottle of pink tequila. The night got looser and happier as decorum slipped away.
Soon enough the children joined their father onstage. They sang: Jenni with Pedro, Jenni with Lupillo, Pedro with Jenni and Gustavo. Each song had a beauty and discipline that belied the heavy tequila flow. They carried the audience to rapture, especially one older woman with upswept hair, miniskirt, knee-high boots and leopard sweater, who screamed and clapped and waved her arms and shouted out every word. She and the rest of the audience refused to leave, as encores led to encores. Don Pedro was all smiles. I was able simply to enjoy it as a beautiful evening, since I’m not versed in famously tortured Rivera family dynamics and since most of the Spanish lyrics swept past me. (Elijah Wald had told me that even the harshest narcocorridos are merely sweet-sounding polkas if you don’t know the words.)
We didn’t go to Don Pedro’s afterparty, at a club known to be dark and claustrophobic. Instead we ended up at Chalino’s and then El Dorado, a humble place with a pool table and a mellow crowd. Late in the evening we spilled onto the sidewalk. Pablo got dinner from a taco truck and I talked with Fidel Franco, a brother of the club’s owner, who acknowledged that ever since Chalino, the corrido phenomenon seemed to be taking a darker and bloodier turn. While older performers never shied away from violence, drug abuse and sadistic cruelty, newer ones seemed disturbingly eager to wallow in it.
“It won’t last,” he said. “It’s the good stuff that survives. The songs that you want to listen to again and again.”
JAUNTY MUSIC OF A DARK SIDE OF LIFE
A quick introduction to the regional music of Mexico can begin the minute you arrive in Los Angeles and get behind the wheel of your rental car. Tune the radio to KBUE FM 105.5/94.3 FM (“Que Buena”) for heavy day-and-night doses of narcocorridos.
The music can also be found at dance clubs like El Parral (2800 Firestone Boulevard, South Gate; 323-563-6211; elparralrestaurant.com), El Rodeo (8825 Washington Boulevard, Pico Rivera; 562-942-0755; www.elrodeonightclub.com) and El Farallon (3226 Gilman Road, El Monte; 626-401-2569). Smaller, humbler dives like Chalino’s Bar (7208 South Broadway) and El Dorado Night Club (4253 South Main Street; 323-231-7772) have live music a few nights a week. Lots of bars and clubs do; you’ll know you’re in the right spot if you see a handwritten sign outside saying something like: “Banda Sinaloense,” or brass music from Sinaloa, a Mexican state with deep ties to the narcotics trade.
At swap meets and shopping centers you’ll find not just corrido CDs, but also the full taste of Mexican Los Angeles, as powerful and strange as it gets. The force of it might hit you as you stand in front of a church facade in Plaza Mexico (3100 East Imperial Highway, Lynwood; 310-631-6789), a shopping mall built with Disneyish exactitude to evoke an old Mexican city, not for Anglos but nostalgic Mexicans, some of whom raved to me about its authenticity. It’s fake but it’s not, because the Mexicans make it real. The Mercadito (1814 East Fourth Street; 323-261-0111), a lively three-story market, has live mariachi and norteño musicians. The Alameda Swap Meet (4501 South Alameda Street, Vernon; 323-233-2764) has musicians strolling through its food court. The CD vendors at the Los Angeles City College Swap Meet (4133 Marathon Street; 323-913-3931) have every narcocorrido singer you’ve ever heard of, and lots of up-and-comers.
For armchair travelers, Arhoolie Records (www.arhoolie.com) has a vast corrido catalog. You can also explore the Frontera Collection (frontera.library.ucla.edu), to which Chris Strachwitz, the head of Arhoolie, donated tens of thousands of 78 and 45 r.p.m. records. The collection is being digitized and made available to the public online, which can put you in corrido heaven for years and years to come.
Lawrence Downes is an editorial writer for The Times. |
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