Annotations for Places: China

By now, Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band has a reputation up and down the California coast. Their fun-loving style is broad in its range, from cumbias like this…to Dixieland, the blues, or a mix of gospel and soca, with a little bit of Afro-Cuban percussion for spice. The members of this nine-piece band like to think of their work as Chicano world music. The band leader is Dr. Loco, also known as Professor José Cuéllar, PhD and chairman of La Raza studies department at San Francisco State University. Dr. Loco says his music is an example of what Chicano culture is all about, mixing and blending unlikely elements to create something entirely new.

We see Afro-Cuban rhythms that have been a part of our culture since the '20s. We see Germanic elements that have been part of our music since the late 1800s. We see indigenous rhythms and indigenous instruments and the reintegration and the influence of nueva canción of the '60s, the cha-chas and mambos of the '40s and '50s, the doo-wop of the '50s, 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.

You know, you've also done something that is really somewhat daring. You've taken a term, “pocho,” which if it's used by a Mexican towards a Mexican, it can be taken as an insult that you're too pocho. That means you're too Americanized, but you've in fact taken this term, and you've said that you pocho-sized something.

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 uhh...we decided to, you know, take a cultural position in saying, “we're pochos and proud of it.” You know, somos bilingües. So what? 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 razas, who trip off on how we can do this.

You mean they're the lucky ones out of…they're the luckiest ones because they can understand everything that's going on?

Well, they appreciate… you know, we appreciate it at a deeper level.

You can really hear the pocho-sizing of your music when you take a song, like "I Feel Chingon" from your album "Con Safos" or "Chile Pie" also from "Con Safos," both of these are like '50s remakes of Black songs, que no?

Absolutely, absolutely…those…I feel "Chingon" is our Jalapeño version of James Brown's "I Feel Good," and "Chile Pie" is the classic…a remake of the classic. It's always reverberated in the Chicano community…resonated. It's the "Cherry Pie."

[Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band music]

Black music is a very important part of the Chicano experience from the West Coast.

It's been an integral experience throughout. I mean, whether we're Chicanos in Tejas, we had the influence of the Louis Armstrongs and the Dixielands way back. I mean, Ernie Cáceres, Emilio Cáceres, the jazz musicians, were tremendous in the '30s, were influenced by Afro-Americans a lot from New Orleans, and then throughout the '40s and '50s, the blues had been strong. Some of our greatest blues singers, Chicano blues singers, have been tremendously influenced by the blues. Freddy Fender, you know, wrote "Wasted Days," the first Chicano blues.

Well, one of the themes that runs through most of your music is the idea of Chicano pride, and it's really especially apparent on your most recent CD called "Movimiento Music," but at some point, Dr. Loco, don't you feel like, for example, let's take "El Picket Sign." I mean, it sounded kind of predictable, kind of a throwback to the '70s or '80s, real staid, predictable, even like rhetorical kind of political music. I mean, at what point do you continue to talk, let's say, in music that is considered panfletária, really propagandistic, and, on the other hand, really wanting to do something that is communicating something else on a cultural level?

Well, you know, 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, you know, on our food and our jobs and how many people in Earlimart and in other communities are really suffering from these pesticides, and there's other…there has to be other ways of dealing with our food so that we have safe food and safe jobs.

Well, what do you say to people who believe that political music like this is really passé, that it's something of the past and that it's really from an old school, an old trend that's already gone?

Well, you know, I say to them, you know, the lyrics of "The Picket Sign," you know?

El picket sign. El picket sign. Boycott the Jolly Green Giant. El picket sign. El picket sign. Let's stop, run away in the street. El picket sign. El picket sign. Support the displaced workers. El picket sign. El picket sign. [unintelligible]. From San Antonio to San Francisco.

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.

The last piece on your CD is an interesting remake and an interesting version of "We Shall Overcome."

Nosotros venceremos. We shall overcome. Nosotros venceremos. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe we shall overcome someday. ¡Soca, Loco!

We believe that this is the essential song for the movement of social justice. I mean, it has been…it's the one that's 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 its rooted in the South and 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 Jalapeño flavor.

Speaking with us from KQED studios in San Francisco, Professor José Cuéllar, leader of Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band.

[Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band music]