the early twentieth century Dadaist
movement. In one of his best-known
works, Piano Destruction Concert,he
hacked a piano to pieces with an ax on
national television. Ortiz’s “destructive
art” was not purely abstract, however. In
his series Archeological Finds,he used pre-
Columbian motifs to symbolize the
destruction brought to the Americas by
Europeans. In 1969, Ortiz founded El
Museo del Barrio, the first museum in the
United States dedicated exclusively to
Latino arts.Music
The story of music in Hispanic culture,
and in virtually all cultures, is one of tradi-
tion, adaptation and the blending of influ-
ences. Tex-Mex music for example, is an
adaptation of European band music tradi-
tions while Cuban and Puerto Rican music
is rooted in the use of African percussion
and rhythm.
What we know now as Tex-Mex, or
Tejano music, has its origins in the mid-
nineteenth century. In the 1850s, immi-
grants from Germany, Poland and what is
now the Czech Republic arrived in Texas
and Mexico, bringing with them their
waltzes, polkas and other popular forms of
music and dance. With the start of the
Mexican Revolution, many of these
Europeans fled northward from Mexico
into South Texas, where their music would
have a major impact on the Tejanos living
in the region. During the early twentieth
century, the main form of musical enter-
tainment on the farms and ranches of
South Texas were Mexican traveling bands
playing Spanish and Mexican story songs
on in traditional styles such as corrido
and mariachi.
One of the most popular singers of
these traditional songs was Lydia
Mendoza, who had been taught to play
stringed instruments by her mother and
grandmother. During the 1920s, record
labels like RCA and Paramount had
begun producing what it called “race
records.” In addition to African-American
blues singers like Mississippi’s Bessie
Smith and Texas’s “Blind” Lemon
Jefferson, the labels also took an interest
in Spanish-language music. In 1928,
Mendoza and several members of her
family recorded for Okeh Records under
the name Cuarteto Carta Blanca. By themid-thirties, she was recording as a solo
singer, and in 1934, “Mal Hombre,” her
best known song, became a smash hit on
Spanish language radio.
By this time, traveling Mexican musi-
cal groups had come in contact with areas
of Texas with heavier German, Polish and
Czech populations. In doing so, they
began to incorporate German made accor-
dions with their distinctive “oom-pah”
sound, into their own music, which came
to be known as conjunto. Among the first
and most famous Tejano musicians to pop-
ularize the accordion was Narciso
Martinez, who is known today as the
father of conjunto music. Conjunto soon
became the popular music of the working
class Tejano. Since that time, others have
followed in Martinez’s footsteps. Flaco
Jimenez, the son of an accordionist and
grandson of a man who had learned the
instrument from a German immigrant, is
the most prominent.
During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s,
some conjunto, as well as mariachi and
other traditional Mexican styles became
heavily influenced by rock and country
music, and drums, electric guitars and
keyboards and found their way into con-
junto lineups, creating yet another form of
hybrid, known as Tex-Mex music. In 1958,
a teenager from Valencia, California
named Ricardo Valencia, but better known
as Ritchie Valens took a traditional mari-
achi tune called “La Bamba” and gave it a
rock and roll beat. Baldemar Huerta, born
in San Benito, Texas, became better known
as the country singer Freddy Fender. He is
best known for his 1974 ballad “Before the
Next Teardrop Falls.”
While Mexican Americans make up
the vast majority of the Hispanic-
American population of the United States,
Tex-Mex music has always had more of a
regional appeal than a widespread com-
mercial impact. On the other hand, an
early twentieth century music style ema-
nating from Cuba in the late 1920s, known
as “son,” has had an enormous global
impact. A fusion of Spanish popular music
and the African rhythm rumba, son is
played on guitar, contrabass, bongos and
rounded sticks called claves. As son began
to spread and mix with other forms, new
instruments were introduced. Flute and
violin orchestras, known as charangas, per-
formed a version of son known as the
danzon for upper class Cuban audiences.
In the 1930s, the Spanish-Cuban band-166 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY
Tito Puente (Corbis)