Historical Songbook: “Los Hijos de Hernández” (1986)

Los Tigres del Norte are the most famous and accomplished conjunto band in Mexican musical history.

Their own story spans the border between California and Mexico (the group came together in San Jose, CA), and does so while playing norteño music that has a lot of cultural significance for Mexico’s north and the US Southwest (especially Texas). In short, they are emblematic of so much of the transnational character of Mexican American history.

Los Tigres are famous for their style of corridos, a Mexican folk tradition that often communicates the particulars of everyday life of most mexicanos, including their social/political struggles. For Los Tigres, their narco-corridos—songs that detail aspect of the illegal drug industry—are some of their most famous. Hardly confined to the dramas of the drug wars, they are a politically and socially-conscious group for a host of other issues as well.

In 1986, they released a song that demonstrates their both their radical sensibilities and its artistic expression, “Los Hijos de Hernández.” The song tells the story of an encounter at the border between a man and a border agent. Here is a quick translation:

Returning from my land,
and crossing the border,
an officer asks me
to fulfill my duties.
That if I had papers
I have to show to them.

And while he was reviewing them
I heard him murmur
something that made me angry.
That with so many emigrants already
many North Americans
can not work.

I told him very angrily
that which you murmured
has a lot of truth.
Latin Americans,
in the view of many Americans,
have taken away their place.

If we work very hard
and are not “chicken” either,
if life must be risked
in the fields of combat,
they have advanced us
because we know how to fight.

My children were born here,
ignoring the prejudice
and the discrimination
their homeland claimed,
and on the battlefield
they showed heart.

There no one noticed
that the Hernández’s they signed up
were cannon fodder.
Maybe my sons took
the places not filled
by the sons of some Saxon.

If on the payroll
look you in disgust
at my name in Spanish,
you will see on another list,
that upon reviewing, are missing in action.

While this he shouted,
the migrant wept,
and he said with emotion:
you can cross the border
anytime you want.
You have more valor than me.

Though the song is from the 1980s, and about the 1980s, it is also all about the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s. It testifies to the widely-held belief that Chicanos and mexicanos were disproportionately sacrificing their lives for a nation that denied them substantive equality in most other sectors. In this way it is a reflection of the ways the Vietnam War remained such an unsettled event, both for the wider US society as well marginalized communities within that larger whole (like that of Mexican immigrants).

Or maybe its a tale that reflects the hidden ways the US did grapple with the lessons of Vietnam. After Vietnam, the US armed forces were all-volunteer, with the hugely unpopular draft coming to a formal end just before the conclusion of US military involvement in Southeast Asia. Among the many strategies the military would come to employ to assure a ready supply of able-bodied, trained soliders, would be to create new targeting strategies to attract more young men of color.

“Los Hijos de Hernández” reflects the contradictions of this increasingly “brown” army. Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans alike would often be coveted and welcome into the US military while still forbidden entry or effectively marginalized within the US.

“Los Hijos” is a fantastic song in so many ways. Among its more powerful qualities is its desire to voice an experience that is so true, often (and tragically) unifying within the ethnic Mexican community, and yet almost completely absent from the mainstream US imagination. As a snapshot of the mid/late 1980s, the song also unifies the narratives of (im)migration, labor, war, and memory in a very powerful way.

Elephant Seals

Our annual summer camping trip to Big Sur includes an annual stop in San Simeon to see the molting elephant seals.

(© TFSS, 2013.)

Historical Songbook: “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off” (1986)

The year 1986 holds a lot of special meaning for me. I turned 13 in May 1986. I got confirmed, I graduated 8th grade (finishing off my time at the school I had attended since first grade), and began high school. It was a time of big transitions in my life, a time I remember quite fondly.

I remember 1986 also being a strong year for pop music. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was an artistically great year. In many ways the most memorable songs that year were masters of genre and convention. There were a lot of catchy songs, though, a diverse set of “one hit wonders” and signature songs from performers who helped define the decade.

Jermaine Stewart falls into the former category. Born in 1957, Stewart and his family moved to Chicago when he was 15. There, he became friends with Jody Watley and Jeffrey Daniel while all three worked as dancers on the show “Soul Train.” When host Don Cornelius decided to create the group Shalamar in the mid-70s, Watley and her dance partner Daniel famously made the cut while Stewart did not. Instead, he ended up as a back up dancer for Shalamar but (apparently with the help of Culture Club’s Mikey Craig) his dreams of being a singer came to fruition when he signed with Arista records in the early 80s.

“We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off” was the first single off Stewart’s second album, Frantic Romantic (1986).  It would also be the singer’s biggest hit, peaking at #5 in the US. The Wikipedia entry for the song says it was featured in an episode of Miami Vice, which was something of a hit maker in its early days. I don’t particularly remember that but I do remember hearing the song everywhere that year. Everywhere.

The song is almost artfully safe. It makes use of so many pop/dance conventions of the time, but does so in a very likable and almost “perfect” way. The “na-na-na’s” that accompany the lyrics, the synthetic/electric percussion, the obligatory horns, the catchy keyboard melody, and the rhythmic guitar riff—they’re like a laundry list of 80′s pop conventions. But Stewart and crew enlist those pieces well. I always thought the “climb” of the song (“So come on baby won’t you show some class/Why you wanna move so fast”) as one of the meatiest examples of the “classic” 80s sound you could find.

The song was also lyrically safe—literally! In the AIDS-era of safe sex and the Moral Majority-era of strict abstinence, the song was an R&B articulation of wider social fears, concerns, and conservativisms. (Perhaps even those within urban communities of color.)

Like much of the 80s, the song holds a particularly powerful alternate meaning as well, although not I’m not sure it was intentional at the time. Stewart was gay. I’m fairly certain it was not publicly “known” at the time but—with his soft-spoken demeanor and classically effeminate mannerisms—I also don’t think it would have been a surprise to anyone who saw Stewart in interviews.  In any case, he sadly died of AIDS-related causes in 1997, at the age of 39.

His queerness gives the song a sweet and, maybe, sad additional meaning, but not for the moralistic irony (a singer preaches sexual abstinence but dies of a sexually-transmitted disease). I think it can potentially transform his desire for a slow and intimate relationship, instead of a quickie, into a critique of a particular version of gay life in the 80s, one marked by profound homophobia and accompanying sexual secrecy. The song communicates the desire for a “traditional” relationship, which can be both conservative (since it reifies the standards of heteronormativity) and radical (since it longs for the stability and “natural” pace afforded by being socially accepted rather than relegated to the sexual margins and underground). The song can be a gay desire to experience love the same way as every heterosexual person can, something of a political “climb” to the present-day refrain of marriage equality.

Like I said, I don’t think this is intentional in the song, although I’m also sure that Stewart and others would have at least considered the possibile multiple meanings of a gay man singing a song like this. Sadly, that story may be forever lost.

Historical Songbook

I’ve taught a class for the last seven years that focuses on the racial justice movements of the late 50s to the early 70s. We learn a bit about the mainstream Civil Rights Movement but spend much more time on radical movements involving black, Chicano/Latino, Asian American, and Native American youth.

The very first mini-lecture for the class is something I devised about two years before I first taught the class. It’s a short historical exercise based on specific images and a song from the mid-60s. The main objective of the exercise is to frame what I like to call “historical empathy”–the critical practice of viewing the past through the eyes of those who lived it, with the critical understanding that you are destined to fail in that practice.

Music seemed to be a great way to help transport my students into another time and, perhaps at best, to keep them cognizant of the ways they might rush to judge the past by their own present subjectivity. As I tell them, how you think or feel about the political projections of the youth we study are secondary to first grasping how they envisioned and acted on their own “truth.”

And so, I began including a song into most classes, not only as a way to teach historical empathy but also to show them how radical, critical, and utopian understandings of racial justice found expression in the musical arts.

Well, I’ve found myself thinking lately about the kinds of classes I’ll develop and teach for the last 15-20 years of my professional career and, as I do, music seems to be one of the more powerful analytical organizing tools for me. Specifically, I am starting to conceptualize teaching a class based on the 80s and 90s. But there is very little historical scholarship on the recent past. In fact, in many ways, the mainstream narratives of this period remain unwritten. Accordingly, the question of what to teach is really open and filled with critically-creative possibility for me.

(Let me jump in here to say I know it might seem weird to non-academics for me to be thinking about the back end of my career when that “back” is about 25 years away. But in my world it’s not unusual for people to teach certain signature courses for decades. More importantly, historical work is slow and the expectation I have for myself is that I teach courses that align with the kind of historical research/writing I want to do. I have a current research project and another in development, and after that I might only have another two or so major projects left. I would hope to begin teaching courses relating to those other research topics within the next 5-7 years, in the hopes that doing so for some time will help me with those projects. And so, I’m starting to think now about the courses I might teach years from now to help me write about stuff I will write about even more years from now.)

As I start to think about what I would teach in this undeveloped class on a week-by-week basis, music seems to help me identify possibilities. At least maybe it helps provide me a way into those times as a professional historian, as well as a professional nostalgist.

And so I’m going to start something here that I am going to label “Historical Songbook.” These posts will usually involve me writing about one song from the 80s or 90s and using it to make sense of a particular moment, topic, theme.

These aren’t going to be long essays or anything (although, as you can tell from this brief introduction to the project, I can always be wordy). They will be spaces where I can explore some things and maybe even “think out loud.” While my big picture goals are pretty historical and analytical, I’m hoping to be more impressionistic than anything else.

My goal is to also begin to use my blog more regularly, as a space for me to write in non-scholarly and non-authoritative ways. Simply put, to write “me.” But that doesn’t mean non-historical. History is more than my job. It’s my hobby, my intellectual love, and my enjoyment. My thought is that I can share the way I might build a narrative for a time period by riffing off of music, another great love.

I don’t know how many regular readers I have out there these days (hi Steven!) but that doesn’t matter much. I’ve come to realize that what I write here is more for me than for anything else. If my blog is to be anything useful, it has to be a space for me first. Maybe then, in the end, it can at least interest my kids when they want to look back and rediscover their old man from a new angle.

So I hope you enjoy. I’ll try to be pretty regular with these posts and make it my Monday writing warm-up. Of course, the academic life holds few promises other than regular avalanches of “unexpected” work.

Like this:

Pomona College had its graduation ceremony last Sunday. I had the pleasure of presenting a Pomona College trustee for an honorary degree. Here’s the video.

Latinos are here to get your daughters pregnant!

NBC has announced its fall 2013 line-up and it includes a show featuring a Latino family!

The show–called “Welcome to the Family”–stars young up-and-comer Joseph Haro (who’s had roles on “Glee” and “Awkward”) and Ricardo Chavira (of “Desperate Housewives”). Normally, I would be praising this as a step forward, especially for a network that hasn’t done much to represent non-white characters since Bill Cosby. But then I saw this preview for the show:

This show is a prolonged and recycled version of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” with one huge twist–it confirms rather than seeks to dispel some of the prominent and racist stereotypes Latinos face in the US.

Latinos are the second largest ethnic/racial group in the US, second only to what the Census labels “non-Hispanic whites.” Television does not reflect this basic reality. I don’t think anybody would disagree that this is a major problem–not only for entertainment but for our collective need to forge a healthy, multiracial society. The images we encounter in the media are part of that evolving recipe.

NBC has had a hard time presenting a more diversified face reflective of the present and future. When they have it’s usually been in small ways that also come with fulfilling a larger stereotype. For example, I would cringe every time I saw a Latino gangbanger on “Law and Order,” a show that also featured (for a time) a very human Latino character (Reynaldo “Rey” Curtis) played by Benjamin Bratt.

Show’s like “Friends” or “ER”–both which took place in cities with large Latino populations–only rarely ever featured brown faces as part of their worlds. When they did, it was cause for celebration. I can remember how excited I was when ER nurse Chuny Marquez (played by Laura Cerón) had her own story arc in the top-rated NBC drama.

NBC should be the best poised for a real integration of Latinos. They are the worst network by ratings, putting them in a position of very little to lose by taking a chance. They also own Univision, the major Spanish-language network of the US. With projects like NBC Latino they have shown a desire to not only tap into the Latino consumer market, but to do so by providing them products that meet our particular needs and experiences.

“Welcome to the Family” is not that show. It is a show that portrays the integration values of the 1960s with the un-interrogated race awareness of the 21st century. In our present day context–when racialized fears helped frame massive deportations, structural poverty and under-education, and social marginalization–it feels like a bigger set-back than any advance.

“The Language of Love”

This short but endearing film was written by Kim Ho, the 17-year-old Australian who also performs in the lead role.  It began as a monologue called “Transcendence,” which won a competition that allowed Ho to develop it further into this short.

Directed by Laura Scrivano, “The Langauge of Love” is about a teenage boy discovering his sexuality and, ultimately, his love for his best friend.

If you’d like to learn more about the making of the film you can visit here.