Transcripts

MAYA LOPEZ: The idea was to get the full representation of all of the different Mexican music that is played and performed and listened to here in Minnesota. So I didn't want to just focus on the stereotypical mariachi or just one kind, I wanted to be able to give the audience an example of all of the different kinds of music that are Mexican music. We go from mariachi to disco to cumbias to rap and it's all Mexican music.

SPEAKER: Were you surprised at the variety of styles that you encountered?

MAYA LOPEZ: I was surprised. I didn't realize that things such as cut number 2 of the Monterrey Polka, that that was such a large part of the culture. Some people identify that music perhaps as European music, but to the Mexicans, that was their music in those days.

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The elders that were in the project that I've been able to show the CD to, when they listen to that cut, they get up and start dancing and, Oh, remember that old song that the Castillos used to play and the Kiko used to play and Harriet Island and we used to dance to this, and so it brings back a lot of memories. And I was a bit surprised by that.

SPEAKER: Was the West's side of Saint Paul, is that kind of the center of the Mexican music in Minnesota?

MAYA LOPEZ: Well, historically, it was, especially starting in about the 1950s. Because the majority of the population began to settle out from the rural areas into the urban areas to find employment. And so the community grew here. And there was a quote in the book by Rick Aguilar that I used that to me sums it up. He said that in the 1950s, the West Side was a hotbed for music.

And he means any kind of music. There was jazz going on here. There was all kinds of musical influences being brought in and mixed with our Mexican and Latin music. There were mambo orchestras, large orchestras, big bands, small groups, conjuntos, mariachis, trios, all the different kinds of music, and it was all happening right here on the West Side.

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SPEAKER: Very few of the recordings on the CD are more than 10 or 15 years old. Why is that?

MAYA LOPEZ: It has a lot to do with the history of our people. Because generally we were a migrant community, we weren't able to bring equipment with us when we were traveling around. And also we didn't have the means to purchase things such as cameras and record players and recorders that would document our musical history. So it's very difficult to find any documentation.

Mostly the Rangel family that had the foresight, perhaps, of wanting to do home recordings for their own archival purposes, and the girls and Kiko would sing to the recorder and record their music, and that was perhaps the first recordings that occurred for Mexicans here in Minnesota, and we do have those recordings on the CD.

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SPEAKER: One of the other recordings on the CD is by Nicolas Castillo, who you describe as the musical father of the West Side. What do you mean by that?

MAYA LOPEZ: Nicolas Castillo is an example of the kind of humble real person that was a hard worker in those days and didn't take the time to record himself. He was a folk musician in our community. And as far as I can determine, he's the only person who wrote down some of our oral history in that time period, because his lyrics of his corridos are much like poetry, and he talks about day to day occurrences on the West Side and in Saint Paul in the Mexican community.

We were lucky that Phil Nussbaum from the State Arts Board had gone and done he'd done a recording on a DAT machine with Nicolas Castillo right before his death. Even though his voice is old and everything, I think you can kind of tell what an amiable man he was and why everyone on the West Side cared for him so much.

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SPEAKER: You have music from the '60s and the '70s where the scene got a little more political, I guess. Tell me about some of the representation from that era.

MAYA LOPEZ: Yeah, that was the era that for me, was the most fun to research, because so many of the people that are alive today remember those times, and they had all kinds of anecdotes, and the stories were hilarious about the afros, you know, and people getting together and jamming and with the bell bottoms and everything.

But musically, it was a very interesting time, because Santana was really big and Chicano and War and Tower of Power, and all these bands, and people were going from the original orquesta tejana groups to incorporating the horn sections and then incorporating a little bit of funk and a little bit of disco, but the Mexican was still in there.

And I think we got a neat recording that I got off of reel to reel that Frank Trejo lent me. It was a band that was quite popular for I'd say over 15 years here on the West Side, and their name was [? Quien. ?] And they're performing the traditional old song Coochie Coo.

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