Annotations for People: Cuellar-jose

We were put down on the one side for being too Mexican and on the other side for being too anglicized. We're pochos and proud of it.

[Background--music--Chicano world] We see Afro-Cuban rhythms that have been a part of our culture since the twenties. We see Germanic elements that have been part of our music since the late 1800s. We see indigenous rhythms, indigenous instruments, and the reintegration in the influence of nueva canción of the sixties, the cha chas and mambos of the forties and fifties, the doo-wop of the fifties and the rhythm and blues and more recently the rap influence as well as influences from rhythms around the world, songo, soca and et cetera. So we decided to call it Chicano world because we think it's Chicano music and it also represents the influences of the world on our music.

Absolutely. We're very proud of being not only bilingual, actually multilingual, and not only bicultural, but multicultural. And for the longest time we were put down on the one side for being too Mexican and on the other side for being too anglicized or too Africanized. And we decided to take a cultural position in saying we're pochos and proud of it. Somos bilingües, so what? And then in fact we see that being bilingual even when changing the lyrics. We're speaking to two different, actually three different groups. Monolingual English speakers who fill in the blanks. Monolingual Spanish speakers who fill in the blanks and bilingual raza who trip [Laughter] off on how we can do this.

Fine. Well, we appreciate it at a deeper level.

[Background--music--Chicano world] Absolutely, absolutely. “I feel Chingon” is our jalapeno version of James Brown's “I Feel Good” and “Chile Pie” is a remake of the classic. It's always reverberating Chicano community, it resonated, it's the cherry pie.

[Background--music--Chicano world] It's been an integral experience throughout. I mean whether we're Chicanos in Texas, we had the influence of the Louis Armstrongs and the Dixielands way back. I mean Ernie Caceres, Emilio Caceres, the jazz musicians, they're tremendous, in the thirties were influenced by Afro-Americans a lot from New Orleans. And then throughout the forties and fifties, the blues have been strong. It's one of our greatest blues singers that Chicano blue singers have been tremendously influenced by the blues. Freddy Fender wrote “Wasted Days”, the first Chicano blues.

[Background--music--Chicano world] Well, the reason we included that song, in fact, that song was the reason... The rest of the album grew out of that song conceptually for me. And that song was a song that we performed because the farm workers are still boycotting grapes. And because we're so close to really having more and more people understand the dilemma of pesticides on our food and our jobs and how many people in Ernie Mark and in other communities are really suffering from these pesticides, there has to be other ways of dealing with our food so that we have safe food and safe jobs.

Well, I say to them the lyrics of the picket sign.

We were encouraged to produce the music because of the movement, not because of the other way around. We were encouraged by what seems to be conditions all around us.

[Background--music--Chicano world] [Nosotros Venceremos/We Shall Overcome] We believe that this is the essential song for the movement of social justice. I mean, it has been someone that sung all over the world, from Tiananmen Square to Berlin to South Africa to the fields of California. So we decided to do a remake, our own remake, blending something that would kind of reflect both its historical essence, and it's rooted in the south and the southern spirituals and the African American experience, but that has gone around the world and back and with different and interesting influences. So that's why we decided to do it in a blending of spiritual soca with Chicano jalapeno flavor.