Los Angeles

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Los Madrugadores (The Early Risers) became the most popular group in Mexican-American music in the U.S. The folk ensemble was started​ by Pedro J. González, a controversial and charismatic personality considered the founder of Spanish-language radio in Los Angeles in the late 1920s. Its name – which comes from “madrugada,” the Spanish word for dawn – refers as much to the band as to its blue-collar audience, those “early risers” who listened to them perform live on the radio from 4 to 6 a.m. as they got ready to go to work. For a group that was marginalized, disdained, and persecuted during the Depression, the moniker also conveyed a certain sense of pride because it carried the connotation of being “hard workers” and “go-getters.”

González, a musician and songwriter who was also a social activist and commentator, became even more closely identified with his immigrant audience when he was denounced for speaking out against the mass deportations of the day. The radio personality was framed on trumped-up rape charges, sent to prison, then later was himself deported to Mexico where he quickly returned to radio, broadcasting from Tijuana.

González was born in the northern border state of Chihuahua in 1896. He was 14 years old at the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when he was forced at gunpoint to join the rebel forces of Pancho Villa and conscripted as a telegraph operator. In 1923, according to The New York Times, he came to Los Angeles and found work as a longshoreman.

“His habit of singing while he worked led to his own Spanish-language radio show, one of the first in the nation,” states the Times story. “His broadcasts, during which he raged against mass deportations of Mexicans, were popular with Mexican field laborers but feared by the authorities, who accused him of being a rabble-rouser and tried to have his broadcasting license canceled.”

The history of Los Madrugadores dates to these radio broadcasts from the early 1920s in Los Angeles, for which González began organizing musical groups. From the start, the ensemble featured a revolving door of singers and musicians. Although González enjoyed performing, his radio audience soon preferred his accompanying singers and musicians, especially the popular band of brothers Jesus and Victor Sanchez, who also recorded separately under their own names. Singer Fernando Linares joined the group in the early days, creating another moniker for the ensemble as Los Hermanos Sanchez y Linares. The personnel expanded to include other singers and guitarists, such as Narciso Farfán, Crescencio Cuevas, Ismael Hernandez, Jesús Alvarez and Josefina “La Chata” Caldera.

Los Madrugadores became so popular that several groups used the same name, apparently by mutual agreement, to record and perform on stage and on the radio. They included Farfán and Cuevas, who became known as Chicho y Chencho, the most popular act spun off from Los Madrugadores. Collectively and individually, their popularity eventually spread throughout Mexican-American communities in California and the Southwest, where the daily radio broadcasts served as alarm clocks for workers in farms and factories. Groups by the same name continued to work all along the border up into the 1970s.

The Frontera Collection contains scores of recordings by Los Madrugadores, including many found under the name of Pedro J. González, who was also a songwriter. (Not to be confused with Los Madrugadores del Valle, a more recent norteño group that recorded many singles and LPs for the Joey and Del Valle labels of Texas.)

Frontera founder Chris Strachwitz cited the group’s version of the classic “Zenaida” (Vocalion 8596) as one of his 50 favorite recordings from the collection, ranking it No. 15.

“I can’t get this wonderful melody out of my head—I try to sing or hum it constantly,” writes Strachwitz on this blog. “Los Madrugadores were the first to record this story about Zenaida, and they did it in two parts. Great singers, they were very popular in the mid-1930s and the song soon gained widespread popularity as well.”

In various configurations, Los Madrugadores issued numerous singles in the 1930s that enjoyed strong record sales and jukebox play. Their canciones and corridos emphasized close harmonies and accomplished guitars as accompaniment, although some of the early discs also have piano. The group recorded over 200 songs for both multi-national and independent labels, including RCA Victor, Columbia, Decca, Vocalion, Bluebird, Imperial, and Tricolor.

All the while, González continued to use the airwaves to agitate for social justice, soon drawing the attention and ire of the authorities. In 1934, at the peak of his career, González was sent to San Quentin prison on rape charges. Although the alleged victim later recanted, saying she had been coerced by prosecutors to lie under oath, the conviction was ​allowed to stand and González served six years.

The musician/activist was released in the early 1940s after appeals by two Mexican presidents and huge public protests organized principally by his wife, Maria. He was deported to Mexico and settled in Tijuana, where he immediately reassembled a band and took again to the airwaves. Undaunted, González continued to use his radio show to speak out against injustice, blasting broadcasts across the border for the next 30 years.

Los Madrugadores documented the tragic case of their leader in a two-part ballad, the “Corrido de Pedro J. González.” It was a case of life imitating art, since around the same time the group had also recorded the corrido of another Mexican-American folk hero, Joaquin Murrieta, a 19th century outlaw whose severed head was paraded on display in mining towns throughout the state. As American studies professor Shelley Streeby noted,  “...the story of the unjust treatment and criminalization of a Mexican immigrant (Murrieta) in the United States must have taken on new and tragic resonances for that working-class audience during these years of intensified nativism and forced repatriation, especially in light of González’ harsh experiences with the law.”

Both two-part corridos – Joaquín Murrieta and Pedro J. González – are part of the Frontera Collection and included in the compilation CD, “Los Madrugadores - 1931-1937.” (Arhoolie 7035).  

 Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, other events forced changes in the lineup of the original Madrugadores, especially the deaths of Narciso Farfan in 1939 and Jesus Sanchez in 1941. Despite the setbacks and challenges, the group stayed true to the determined spirit of its immigrant audience, continuing to record and perform until the 1960s.

Eventually, González was permitted to return to the United States. In 1985, when he was 90, PBS aired a documentary on his life and career titled Ballad of an Unsung Hero, which was later turned into a TV movie, Break of Dawn (1988), starring Mexican folk singer Oscar Chavez. González and his wife are both featured in the 30-minute documentary, interviewed at their modest home in the border town of San Ysidro, California. González devoted one room of the home to a museum of his life, featuring old photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and even an old telegraph key.

The show sparked a renewed interest in the aging activist among Mexican- American community activists, who started visiting the home like a shrine, according to a New York Times article about the documentary, published January 7, 1985.

“He represents an important part of cultural past and tradition,” Lorena Parlee, a historian and co-producer of the program, told the newspaper. “And the film represents not only the plight of immigrants from Mexico but from other ethnic groups who experienced discrimination and deportation.”

Ten years later, González passed away at a convalescent home in Lodi, California. The headline of , which ran in The New York Times on March 24, 1995, called him, appropriately, a “folk hero.” He was 99.

-Agustín Gurza

When I was in college, my father would make occasional trips from San Jose to Los Angeles to see the new mariachi at La Fonda, a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard His visits were more like musical pilgrimages. Dr. Gurza would say there was no place to hear a good mariachi in the Bay Area. So, whenever he’d drive south, ostensibly to visit a friend from our hometown of Torreon, he’d always make a beeline for La Fonda first. That was an 8-hour drive in those days, on the old 101 Highway. But Dad was never too tired to take in a set or two by Los Camperos de Nati Cano.

Fast forward almost 40 years. I’m standing in La Fonda again, this time as a writer for the Los Angeles Times, interviewing Nati Cano as he was about to be evicted from his longtime location. He was in the midst of legal dispute with his landlord over rent increases, a victim of the gentrification that has pushed so many Latinos out of homes and businesses in barrios throughout California. It would be a losing battle for the veteran musician who had done so much to elevate the status of mariachi music north of the border. Ultimately, in 2007 he was forced to abandon the location he had occupied for almost half a century. Seven years later, he passed away.

I always carried a touch of cultural resentment over that episode in the history of Mexican-American music in Los Angeles. All things must pass, as George Harrison said. But this transition left a bad taste. Cano, who devoted his career to promoting mariachi music in Southern California, was unceremoniously removed from the venue he had established in 1969, when there was nothing like it in our area. Cano is considered the first to create a showcase for a local mariachi by putting his ensemble on a raised stage, thus making it a focal point of his restaurant. This was at a time when the average mariachi was more commonly a strolling band of minstrels playing for tips. So, the formal, dinner-theater format was received by fans as an exciting and validating innovation.

And then Nati Cano and his Camperos were pushed aside, not for progress, but for profit.

This sad story would make a tragic corrido, if it weren’t for the surprise happy ending. This year, Los Camperos have returned to

their original, revered venue, resuming regular dinner shows as the house band at La Fonda. In its new incarnation, Mariachi Los Camperos is under the direction of Jesus “Chuy” Guzman, a veteran of the ensemble who worked with Cano and who is also a lecturer in Mexican music in UCLA’s Department of Ethnomusicology.

The restaurant has been somewhat remodeled, with a smaller stage tucked into a corner and a more open floor plan making the performance visible from the bar. Old paintings of the ensemble’s past players have been taken down, except for one. The only portrait left hanging, fittingly, is a flattering image of the restaurant’s smiling founder, Nati Cano.

The show at La Fonda continues to attract an international audience, including many tourists. At the same time, Los Camperos have kept up their busy touring schedule, carrying the standard of concert-quality mariachi music around the world.

“I can only attest to the love people have for them anywhere they've spread their magic,” says NPR music journalist Felix Contreras, who recalls seeing Cano and his Camperos at a mariachi festival in Fresno years ago. “Fresno audiences welcomed them not just for the reputation that the group had earned, but mostly because of the group's ability to play mariachi from the heart that spoke directly to the people.”

The Frontera Collection includes several recordings by Los Camperos, both LPs and 45-rpm singles on various labels. A search yields results for the group under different names: Mariachi Los Camperos, Super Mariachi Los Camperos, and Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano.

One of those singles features “Somos Novios,” the Armando Manzanero classic, backed by “Yo Sin Ti.” The songs are from an LP that is not in the database and entitled “El Super Mariachi Los Camperos en La Fonda.” The album is not dated, but my personal copy has autographs by some band members with a date under one of the signatures: August 5, 1972. That is only three years after Cano opened La Fonda, and the group picture on the cover shows the bandleader as a young man, holding his violin and smiling, of course.

The recording was released on Latin International, a local label owned by Pepe Garcia, another pioneering figure in the local Latin music industry. Garcia, a Cuban-American who had moved to L.A. from Miami, had built a mini-music empire, which he lorded over with regal authority. His businesses included the record label and a wholesale record distributor, all based at his flagship retail music store called Musica Latina, located on Pico Boulevard and only a 10-minute drive from La Fonda. The imposing corner building was a landmark of L.A.’s burgeoning record industry, with labels from Mexico opening branch offices for U.S. sales all along the Pico corridor just west of downtown. At the time, the Latin business was still largely ghettoized, concentrated in areas like “La Pico” and along Broadway, then an all-Latino shopping district, dotted with Latin record stores in a pre-gentrified downtown. Latino music mavens would gather for lunch at a Cuban restaurant called El Colmao, adjacent to Musica Latina. The restaurant is still there, although Musica Latina is long gone, along with the rest of the area’s once thriving Latin record business.

I mention that background by way of context for the importance of this early Camperos LP. It captures this seminal period in L.A.’s Latin music industry, when local artists and businessmen came together to make their mark. Some, like Cano, would succeed beyond their dreams.

Los Camperos first gained an international spotlight in 1964 when they performed at Carnegie Hall as accompaniment for Pedro Vargas, one of the most popular Mexican singing stars of the day. The concert was recorded live and released as a box set by RCA Victor. My copy of the album includes a program booklet with a small photo of Los Camperos on stage with Vargas at the famed New York venue. In a somewhat condescending review of the show, The New York Times called the concert “sentimental,” compared the singer’s popularity to a “serape,” and noted that Vargas exchanged a “brazo” during the show with the Mexican ambassador, evoking a gruesome image of the men swapping arms on stage rather than an embrace (“abrazo”). The review reflects the demeaning, stereotypical attitudes towards the music that Cano fought hard to counteract during his career.

Almost a quarter century later, Cano and his Camperos participated in another landmark collaboration, this time with singer Linda Ronstadt for her recording of Mexican mariachi standards, Canciones de Mi Padre. (The full album is included in the Frontera Collection, though neither Nati Cano nor Los Camperos are credited as one of her backup mariachis.) Ronstadt recalls rehearsing with Los Camperos in a rear storage room at La Fonda. In an interview for my 2001 profile of Cano in the Los Angeles Times, Ronstadt told me she considered the mariachi bandleader a mentor who helped her capture the authentic feel of the genre.

That album, and a sequel, Mas Canciones, that also featured Los Camperos, sparked a revival of interest in mariachi music throughout the United States. Cano pointed to those albums as a milestone in the campaign to bring greater respect for mariachi music as a genre.

Cano’s dinner-theater concept has since been imitated by other mariachis across Southern California and the Southwest. Today, it’s almost taken for granted. But it’s hard to overstate how exciting the show was when it was first introduced. Consider the following account by Daniel Sheehy, director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, who earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1979. Sheehy, who joined a campus mariachi ensemble as a student, recalls the thrill of his first visit to La Fonda in 1969.

“For my fellow student mariachi enthusiasts and me, a trip to La Fonda was akin to visiting a sacred temple of mariachi music, and Nati Cano was its high priest,” Sheehy writes in the liner notes for the 2002 Camperos CD ¡Viva El Mariachi! on Smithsonian Folkways, the label he directed at the time. “His life’s goal has been to bring greater acceptance, understanding, and respect to the mariachi tradition, and to reach the widest possible audience with his music. His uncompromising position has been to preserve the essential ‘mariachi sound,’ in his words, as the baseline of the tradition. I know that many would agree that in this, he has succeeded.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     –Agustín Gurza

Most people know that the worst natural disaster in California history was the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. But which calamity ranks No. 2? That happened in Los Angeles in 1932: a catastrophic dam break that killed 600 people, wiped out neighborhoods all the way to the ocean near Ventura, and ended the career of William Mulholland, the famed engineer who had designed the water system for the new metropolis blooming in the Southern California desert.

The midnight collapse of St. Francis Dam may have faded from memory. But it is recounted in detail in two 78-rpm recordings contained in the Frontera Collection.  One of the songs, La Inundacion de California by Cancioneros Acosta, gives a dramatic overview of the disaster. The other recording, La Inundación De Santa Paula by Esparza y Camacho, tells the terror of people downstream who were awoken as the wall of water hit the low-lying town along the flood’s 54-mile path to the Pacific.

I have lived most of my adult life in Los Angeles, but I admit I was not aware of this historic event until I found these songs in the archive. In fact, there are dozens of so-called disaster songs in the Frontera database. Consider them musical newsreels of sorts, with many told as eyewitness accounts of havoc wreaked by hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and volcanoes.

The disaster song has a long tradition in many cultures, pre-dating recorded sound by centuries. Since the 1600s in Europe, news of catastrophes spread through broadside ballads, with verses printed on single sheets of paper and sung by travelling troubadours. That tradition can be traced straight through to the terror attacks of 9/11 in the United States, which sparked a wave of new disaster songs around the world, “proving the genre’s continued social function and relevance,” according to ethnomusicologist Revell Carr.

In his essay, “We Will Never Forget,” published in 2004 by Voices, the Journal of New York Folklore, Carr explains why people love to write and hear songs about disasters, even today when news can be obtained instantly. He cites the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 as the first “globally mediated” disaster, spurring composers in the U.S. to copyright more than 100 songs within the first eight months following the tragedy.

Disaster songs “serve as catalysts for communitas and help heal psychic wounds in the disaster’s aftermath, and they capitalize upon the common human urge to bear witness—all part of the same process of coping with the chaos and confusion of traumatic social dramas,” writes Carr, now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “Disaster songs function as redressive action, communicating shared sentiments and emotions, through which a social bond with others can be solidified in the days and weeks following a disaster.”

After studying more than 200 such songs, Carr came up with six characteristics that define the genre: a true event with significant loss of life, citing of the date, empathy for the victims, a tabloid, sensationalistic style, and themes such as “unheeded warnings, human culpability, and divine retribution.” The criteria reminded me of the essay defining the characteristic of the Mexican corrido, written by the late Guillermo Hernández, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, who led the effort to bring the Frontera Collection to UCLA.  (Hernandez’s essay, “What is a Corrido?” is reprinted in my book about the Frontera Collection.) 

Many of the corrido characteristics described by Hernández overlap with Carr’s descriptions.  So, it’s no surprise that many disaster songs in Spanish are corridos. One classic example, “Corrido De Las Inundaciones” by Dueto Ray Y Lupita, fits several of the characteristics for both genres:

          Real event:                      Hurricane Hilda  

Time and Place:              September 1955, 
                                      Tampico on Mexico’s Gulf coast

          Heavy Casualties:           Sufrieron pobres y ricos
                                                Por donde pasó el ciclón
                                                Pobre el puerto de Tampico
                                                Casi todo lo arrasó.

          Human Culpability:           Todos estos sinsabores
                                                Que sufre nuestra nación
                                                Son causa de los errores
                                                Y tanta equivocación

          Divine Retribution:          ¿No creen ustedes, señores,
                                                Que es un castigo de Dios?

          Creating Community:     Aquí terminó el corrido,
                                              Y gracias por su atención.
                                              Dios quiera que lo ocurrido
                                              Nos sirva como lección,
                                              Que el mexicano este unido
                                              En la alegría y el dolor.

When I was listening to several of these calamitous corridos, I was struck by the vivid images created by the composers—not merely descriptions of the destruction, but the aftermath and human toll. The power of the word preceded the images we now see ubiquitously on TV, mobile phones, and computer screens.

As Mexican corrido expert Vicente T. Mendoza once wrote: “It’s in these cases when the corridista contributes his powers of observation, since he does not leave out the most minor detail, painting tableaus that are surprising for their realism and accuracy with the very horrors of our collective misfortune.” 

Mendoza is quoted in the web page “Corridos de Desastres,” created for students by the late professor James Nicolopulos, a close collaborator of Frontera founder Chris Strachwitz. Mendoza points to a 19th century broadside ballad about a train derailment, “El Descarrilamiento de Temamatla,” as the prototype of the Mexican disaster corrido. (This broadside, and others about Mexico train mishaps that are included in a collection of the University of Texas at Austin, are by famed Mexican printer and engraver José Guadalupe Posada.)

For personal reasons, one of my favorite disaster songs in the Frontera Collection tells of the sudden eruption of a volcano in a cornfield in Michaocán in February 1943. The song “Paricutin,” named for the volcano, starts with the true story of the farmer who was out in his field when the earth started rumbling and spewing smoke and sulphuric gases, smelling like rotten eggs. Terrified, he ran into town – “sin sombrero” – to tell his neighbors the news.

The world’s scientists and the media flooded the location, near the city of Uruapan, to document the eruption. The reporters on hand included my uncle, Luis Gurza Villareal, who filmed a newsreel of the event. The footage, which I saw in Mexico City, shows him barely escaping steaming chunks of lava falling all around him.

Not all disaster songs involve eyewitness accounts or daring close calls. Tex-Mex artist Steve Jordan and his band were on their way from Corpus Christi, Texas, to a concert in San Francisco when they heard the news about the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, which hit the San Francisco Bay Area. As the singer recounts in “El Temblor De San Francisco,” they got as far as Houston when they heard the news that the quake had flattened the two-level, 880 freeway “like a tortilla.”

In some songs, the disasters are exclusively personal. In “Centella Maldita,” Los Cardenales del Valle lament the time their mother was struck and killed by lightening. Sad, but one victim does not a disaster genre song make.

And beware the song with the deceptively disastrous title. “El Huracan,” by (you guessed it) Los Huracanes, is not about a lethal weather event. It’s a complaint about someone who blows through life like a hurricane, “spreading destruction wherever it passes.”

The Frontera Collection contains a significant share of songs about disasters in Texas; understandably so, since it specializes in Tex-Mex music of the border region. There are more than a dozen songs about Hurricane Beulah, the strongest storm to hit the Atlantic coast in 1967, making landfall just north of the mouth of the Rio Grande River, spawning a record 115 tornadoes across Texas, causing major floods and claiming almost 700 lives. There are also half a dozen recordings about Hurricane Celia, which slammed into Texas on August 3, 1970, with winds as high as 180 mph in Nueces County, leaving 28 dead in its wake and almost every single building damaged in downtown Corpus Christi.

And since there are also many small, independent labels represented in the collection, we find several songs about correspondingly local disasters that may not otherwise have been recorded. A flurry of Texas labels scrambled to record corridos about a tornado that hit Lubbock, Texas, in May of 1970, three months before Celia. These include two record companies – Jilguero and Shalovo – located in or around Lubbock itself.

Two other local examples: “La Tragedia de Teton,” about the deadly collapse of a dam on the Teton River in Idaho, was released by Don Pepe Records based in Pocatello, Idaho. And “La Tragedia Del Big Thompson” by Los Petroleros Del Norte, a corrido about the deadliest flash flood in the history of Colorado, is on the Alvarado label based in Brighton, Colorado.

But when it comes to colorful description and empathy with the victims, few disaster song match the quality of Cancioneros Acosta’s take on the Los Angeles dam collapse. I looked and looked for the lyrics online, because the vocals on the scratchy 78 rpm in the collection are hard to discern I found one web page devoted exclusively to this song, which was written shortly after the St. Francis Dam burst 88 years ago. It’s on a music website provocatively called “Modernidad y Obsolescencia” (Modernity and Obsolescence).

The last four verses describe the horrors of the 10-foot wall of rushing water crashing into sleeping communities, including a nearby camp of itinerant farmworkers, in the middle of the night. The flood caused power outages and forced residents to flee for their lives in the dark. These lyrics bring home the enormity of the tragedy.

Por el poder infinito estaba ya destinado
el que tantos inocentes debían de morir ahogados.
En menos que te lo cuento, el valle era una laguna,
y la corriente arrastraba sin dejar casa ninguna.

La gente dice familias luchaban desesperadas
cargando a todos sus hijos y sus cosas más amadas.
Se oía quejar lastimero a gente horrorizado 
Auxilio pedía a gritos. ¿Cómo ayudarlos? Dios Santo.

Madre mía no me dejes, decía un infortunado
que si me dejas solito me voy a morir ahogado.
Era una lástima oír a las madres que lloraban
y de dolor angustiadas por sus hijos preguntaban.

Una niña de tres años lloraba inocentemente
al ver que sus padres iban ahogados en la corriente.
Cadáveres se encontraban; era una lástima verlos
Supervivientes ya nunca pudieron reconocerlos.

Next time we’ll look at earthquake songs, including tunes about relatively recent temblors in Mexico City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

-Agustín Gurza