18 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
HEREFORTHEH O L I DAYS
ELSONERODELAN AV I DA D
F
ifty years ago, Mike Amadeo, a com-
poser and musician from Puerto
Rico, bought a record shop on Prospect
Avenue in the South Bronx and renamed
it Casa Amadeo. It’s now a mecca of
Latin music and a landmark on the Na-
tional Register of Historic Places. The
street signs out front read “Miguel Angel
(Mike) Amadeo Way,” and Amadeo
himself, eighty-five, is still behind the
counter, six days a week, selling CDs,
LPs, musical instruments, and Boricua
knickknacks. Cash only, hand-Sharpied
price tags, boom box blasting the salsa
monga of Víctor Manuelle, El Sonero
de la Juventud.
The other day, two members of
the band Los Lobos, briefly in town,
stopped by for a look. They’d heard
some things about Amadeo, but he
knew nothing of them. “They’re Mex-
ican?” he said. “Then no.”
Mexican, in a way. One of the visit-
ing Lobos was the percussionist, guitar-
ist, and songwriter Louie Pérez, who had
formed the group, in the mid-seventies,
in East Los Angeles, with a few high-
school classmates, including David Hi-
dalgo. The other was the saxophonist
and record producer Steve Berlin, a Phil-
adelphian who joined the band in 1983,
while it was recording its first release on
a major label, “... And a Time to Dance.”
Amadeo paid them little mind when
they came in to browse.
“More cowbell,” Pérez said, gestur-
ing toward a glass case full of cowbells
painted with the colors of the Puerto
Rican flag. Another case held bright-
hued maracas. “We do the same thing
with our cars,” he said.
Amadeo brought out some claves,
and he and Berlin compared the timbre
of a few, taking turns tapping along with
the music on the boom box. Berlin
bought a pair, along with some goatskin
maracas, a plastic guiro with a scraper,
and a CD featuring the saxophonist
Chombo Silva. “Sax players are rarely
featured in Latin music,” Berlin said.
“Chombo was, like, the only one.”
Pérez fiddled with Berlin’s maracas.
“Get your own pair,” Berlin said. “Just
fourteen bucks.”
Los Lobos started out as a “hippie
Chicano” outfit, then passed through an
East L.A. punk phase before settling
into the Mexican-inflected folk rock
that it became known for. Along the
way, the group began exploring a wider
array of traditional Latin music. Pérez,
pointing at the walls of CDs of almost
exclusively Caribbean music, said, “We
listened to this stuff later on, when we
got more sophisticated.”
In October, Los Lobos released an
album of Christmas songs, “Llegó Nav-
idad.” They’d been talking about doing
one for years but had recently got a nudge
from Rhino, their label. They brought
in two friends—Gustavo Arellano, who
until recently wrote a nationally syndi-
cated column called “¡Ask a Mexican!,”
and the writer and historian Pablo Ygle-
sias, a.k.a. DJ Bongohead—to dig up a
batch of potential songs. They wound
up with a hundred and forty-six; ulti-
mately, Los Lobos recorded and released
a dozen. The specimens range from the
son jarocho of Veracruz to Freddy Fender
Tex-Mex and Venezuelan salsa from the
seventies. There are a couple of old nov-
elty hits (“¿Dónde Está Santa Claus?”),
a Pérez-Hidalgo original, and, naturally,
as a closer, “Feliz Navidad.”
“When it comes to a Christmas hit,
all you need is one,” Berlin said. “Look
at Mariah Carey. Or José Feliciano.”
He wasn’t necessarily expecting one for
Los Lobos this time around. “If I make
what I spent on my MetroCard, I’ll be
Democratic-controlled state legislature,
which will assume office in January and
is expected to pass gun restrictions. But
such stunts aren’t likely to win many
people over: the measures that the leg-
islature will probably take—such as re-
storing a law that limited individuals
to one handgun purchase per month—
have broad, bipartisan support.
Nor do the courts pose an insur-
mountable obstacle to sensible gun laws.
It’s true that the 2008 Supreme Court
ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller
established an individual’s right to keep
a gun in the home, outside the context
of the “well-ordered militia” stipulated
in the Second Amendment. It was an
extraordinary reinterpretation of the
Court’s previous jurisprudence on guns.
In 1991, the conservative former Su-
preme Court Chief Justice Warren
Burger, referring to the expansionist
view of the Second Amendment that
Heller later enshrined, called it “one of
the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the
word fraud, on the American public by
special-interest groups that I have ever
seen in my lifetime.” The retired Justice
John Paul Stevens published a book last
summer, shortly before his death, in
which he called Heller, a 5–4 ruling
whose majority opinion was written by
Antonin Scalia, “unquestionably the
most clearly incorrect decision that the
Supreme Court announced during my
tenure on the bench.”
But even Heller contained impor-
tant caveats and, partly because of them,
in the years since, state courts have up-
held the vast majority of gun-safety laws
they’ve been asked to rule on. (Last week,
for the first time in nearly a decade, the
Supreme Court heard oral arguments
in a Second Amendment case, New
York State Rifle and Pistol Association
v. City of New York, New York. But,
because the city had repealed the law
before the case came before the Court—
lifting the restrictions that the gun-
owner plaintiffs in the case objected
to—it may be moot, and therefore un-
likely to yield a substantive ruling.) In
Heller, the Court noted examples of the
kinds of constraints that would be “pre-
sumptively lawful”—“laws imposing
conditions and qualifications on the
commercial sale of arms,” for example,
or those banning guns in certain pub-
lic places. “Like most rights, the right
secured by the Second Amendment is
not unlimited,” Scalia wrote. It is not
“a right to keep and carry any weapon
whatsoever in any manner whatsoever
and for whatever purpose.”
Those are words that gun lobbyists
often choose to forget, though they were
written by a man who must be a hero
to them. The Democrats still running
for President shouldn’t let them forget.
Stronger gun laws are popular and nec-
essary—and they’re also constitutional.
—Margaret Talbot
