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Border Music
A veteran filmmaker’s new documentary looks at the rich history of tejano.
TEXAS MONTHLY, September 1995
by John Morthland
You couldn’t ask for a more comprehensive - or more accessible - introduction to tejano music than Songs of the Homeland. Austin director and independent producer Hector Galán’s hour-long documentary film, which airs on PBS affiliates September 20, serves as musical survey and as social history. It will satisfy fans of the different sounds that fall under the rubric “tejano,” but it’s not so specialized that it leaves the newcomer behind. “That’s the key,” Galán explains, sitting in West Austin offices. “I didn’t want to preach to just the converted.”
Because the veteran documentarian relies on public and private fundings for his projects, he has always had to work overtime to explain why Tex-Mex affairs matter outside the Southwest. By and large, he has succeeded: He has created eleven segments for PBS’s Frontline series, covering such topics as migrant farm workers, race relations in the military, and immigration issues that led to California’s Proposition 187. For PBS’s American Experience series, he made the 1991 Los Mineros, which details the labor struggles of Mexican American copper miners in Arizona in the first half of this century, and the 1993 The Hunt for Pancho Villa, which focuses on the Mexican revolutionary’s attack on Columbus, New Mexico. “All our lives we’re bombarded with caricatures of historical figures like Pancho Villa,” he says, “There’s a whole history there that hasn’t been told.”
Born in 1953 in San Angelo, Galán was a product of the Chicano rights movement of the sixties and seventies. Although he did a Frontline story on Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, D.C., and wants to do a piece on the disappearance of the horny toad, most of Galán’s documentaries explore what he calls “that no-man’s-land, from the border north, where you’re neither Mexican nor American.” In Songs of the Homeland, he says, “the music is a metaphor for the Tex-Mex experience because that is music you were ashamed of when you were growing up and assimilating. Today kids are embracing it because it’s a cultural expression. It’s a part of who they are.”
With crossover star Freddy Fender narrating, Songs of the Homeland, and with the use of fading film clips and original interviews, Galán brings back to life the music from the turn of the century, when Valley tejano musicians adapted the accordion music of German and Eastern European settlers; he then works up to the modern accordion sounds of young bands such as Tropa F and the sophisticated, synthesizer-fueled tejano of Emilio Navaira and Selena. The film looks at how racism kept the music isolated until World War II, when Chicanos served as soldiers or moved to the cities, where a burgeoning middle class began dancing to the stylish orchestra sounds of Isidro Lopez and Beto Villa, Galán also includes drop-dead footage of Tex-Mex rock and rollers Sunny and the Sunglows onstage in Bermuda shorts, checkered shirts, and black shoes and black knee-high socks. Little Joe y la Familia provide the sound track to the social upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies. If the movie has a star, it’s polka accordionist Tony de la Rosa, who introduced drums and electric instruments to post-war conjunto.
As interest in tejano songs and songwriters continues to soar in the wake of Selena’s murder, Songs of the Homeland couldn’t be more timely. But Galán’s biggest splash is probably yet to come. In September 1996 PBS will broadcast his four-hour Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, which has the scope of a Ken Burns documentary. The $2 million project recounts, among other topics, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Crystal City-based La Raza Unida, and Vietnam and the anti-war movement. “The most important thing about the Chicano movement is that someone finally stood up and said, ‘I’m Chicano, I’m brown and I’m proud,’.” Galán says. “Someone finally embraced our cultural history.” Galán embraces it nearly every time he picks up a camera.
THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE
Award-winning filmmaker Hector Galán’s new documentary is an exhaustive, exuberant exploration of the Tejano musical experience in Texas. Galán traces the development of conjunto music from its humble immigrant origins to its massive current popularity. Interviews with such past and present Tejano luminaries as Lydia Mendoza, Valerio Longoria, and the ever-astonishing Flaco Jimenez provide a musical and historical backdrop for some of the most vital and original ethnic music in the world today. Not just relegated to cities such as San Antonio (the Tejano music capital of the world) and Austin’s east side, conjunto has gained fans from all walks of life and from every imaginable corner of the globe. From its cowboy past to its burgeoning future in the international music scene, conjunto is a joyous celebration of life and love, with most, if not all, of the songs dealing with those very subjects in a spirited, beautiful manner. Galán profiles this infectious, often heartbreakingly beautiful music with great style and panache in this beautifully shot documentary.