Ken Burns Hates Mexicans

Live! From Guadalajara, Mexico...

Vexing: Female Voices from the East L.A. Punk, just opened last night in Guadalajara, Mexico, as part of the city's big annual bookfair. This current edition of Vexing, a hybrid show of historical objects and contemporary art, film and video, is an encore presentation from the original exhibit held last year at the Claremont Musuem of Art.

I have a couple of films in the show, was at the opening, rubbed shoulders with L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (who, I discovered, like most Hollywood actors, is way shorter in person), and met legendary punk rockers Alice Bags and Teresa Covarrubias. Interesting show. Free champagne in real glass flutes. Met a bass player from a Journey tribute band AND a guitar player and drummer from a Kiss tribute band -- all of them female. Ran into artist Shizu Saldamando. Great night.

Tonight is an outdoor concert featuring the Sirens, straight outta Highland Park, LA; Chicana punk rock supergroup Las Tres; and Lysa Flores. Pics to come. Until then, here's a video about the OG Vexing show starring my fave Pflugerville academic Colin Gunkel.

UPDATE: Turns out Colin's been blogging all week about the Vexing show...photos, videos, commentary. Here's a clip from the opening where the camera walks through the rooms. That's me, by the way, at 0:17 talking to Lysa Flores. Antonio Villaraigosa is nowhere to be seen.

Vexing in Guadalajara - From the Archives

Ask your average rock fan about the origins of Punk and they will most likely think of England, the Sex Pistols, and God Save the Queen. Dig a bit deeper and their thoughts may cross the Atlantic over to CBGBs, the Ramones, and the dynamic 70s New York scene. When pressed further, only a few of these average rock fans will make the mind trip cross-country and mention the L.A. scene of Darby Crash, X, and West Coast punk in general. And for said average rock fan to imagine Raza in this Hollywood mix of mohawks and nihilistic self-expression?, forget about it. When the historical L.A. scene is remembered, if at all, the Ken Burns Effect operates in full simplistic and reductive force: West Coast/LA punk is considered a white boy thing with nary a person of color about.

And of course that notion is wrong.

Like with most American cultural movements in the last fifty years, throw a rock at it and you'll hit a Mexican. The So Cal punk rock scene was no different.

Don't get me started on the bands of brown youth infusing the scene, I could catalog and pontificate for days: the Plugz, Los Illegals, the Brat, Thee Undertakers, Alice Bags and the Bags (real name Alicia Armandariz -- and featured in the photo above), a pre-El Vez Robert Lopez and his Chula Vista band the Zeros, and up in the Bay Area Alejandro Escovedo and his SF band the Nuns (who opened for the Sex Pistols at the English band's infamous last show at the Winterland.) The list goes on and on and the influence and impact of the bands incalculable. Just last year doing research on San Antonio alt bands for a TV show, I stumbled across a sizable group of 18 to 20ish Mexican American punk rockers not only familiar with the early brown L.A. punk bands and avid collectors of the scene's long out-of-date LPs and articles, but the kids were home-grown post-colonial experts on the subcultural history of the bands. A surprising feat considering these Tejano kids living two time zones away and born decades later. Voices carry indeed.

Which brings me to the latest edition of the LA Weekly and their cover story on the "the birth of Los Angeles Punk." The piece takes as its focus the Hollywood punk rock club the Masque, which the article describes as "a literal hothouse in which about a hundred punks briefly bloomed, with their messy assignations and brash experiments in volume and nihilism in the late-’70s merging into one great big purifying brushfire that consumed the worlds of music, art and fashion." Of course I quickly went through the piece curious to see if the Ken Burns Effect informed the article. Trouble was, there was not a lot of there, there. Written in conjunction with the release of a photo book - Live at the Masque: Nightmare in Punk Alley -- the piece, not surprisingly, lacked any kind of historical depth and subsequent analysis. It was more press release than well-researched article.

For something more substantial we have to go back to this 2003 article in Los Angeles Magazine by Josh Kun on another famous L.A. punk club, the Vex, "an oasis for Eastside punk bands who were tired of hustling for gigs on the Westside," deep in the heart of East L.A:

The story of L.A. punk has long been the story of punk west of the L.A. River. Penelope Spheeris's 1981 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, released when the Vex was in full swing, ignored the Chicano contingent completely. More recent histories of the scene, like Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen's We Got the Neutron Bomb, treat it like it was treated back in the day, as one of punk's unincorporated ghettos, marginal barrio music with permanent residence in history's footnotes.

"I always felt that our scene was invisible and unrecognized," says [Willie] Herron. "It wasn't anything that many other bands or writers were interested in. When they would review our shows, they just didn't get it. We had to remain in the shadows. We couldn't be ourselves and represent the East L.A. we knew. We couldn't be white punkers, and we didn't want to be white punkers. We were trying to come up with our sound."

For more alternative history on L.A. Chicanos punk, KCET posts L.A. artist Diane Gamboa's black and white photo documentation of the scene at their website here, along with Marisela Norte's thought on the Vex, as well as mp3 downloads of a couple of Brat songs.

And finally, I leave you with a few video clips...see the Plugz perform Jokerman with Bob Dylan on a 1984 David Letterman appearance here. The Brat live at Plaza de la Raza here. Alice Bags live at the Troubadour in 1978 here. And in a where-are-they-now clip, here's the Plugz at their Echoplex reunion show this past weekend.

Originally posted November, 2007

Is Thanksgiving a White Holiday?

Long Thanksgiving weekend ahead. And, yes, I do celebrate the holiday, if by "celebrate" you mean eat turkey, hang out with family, and watch the Dallas Cowboys. But since I pretty much work from home the concept of "taking the day off" is sort of moot. Ni modo...

Interesting discussion going on over at Guanabee.com where skeptical raza are furiously debating whether or not Thanksgiving is a "white" holiday, and thus, be definition, a dorky celebration open to scorn, befuddlement, and bemused Latino estrangement. Set aside for a moment what is meant by "white"-- since that's a whole semiotic and cultural thicket worthy of someone's ethnic studies dissertation and not a mere blog post -- but the issues raised in analyzing the holiday are, for me, fascinating.

First of all, Guanabee.com is great. I read it everyday. It makes me laugh. I love the tone. And even better, on occasion, amidst the well-written snark, funny Wilmer Valderrama put-downs, and comedically suspect right-wingish pokes at Latin American lefty strong men (Castro, Chavez, and Che), there emerges from the posts and comments section insight into All Things Brown and contemporary. The "Is Thansgiving White?" flareup, and the post's subsequent comments, a case in point.

The tendency by some of the commentators to reduce an American ritual circa 2007 as "white" is as lazy and simplistic as doc filmmaker Ken Burns reducing the discussion of race in this country as a Black/White thing. Thanksgiving, like most cultural events in the United States, is actually transformed by the ongoing Latino participation from its gringo, Norman Rockwell origins to something more complicated.

I mean, try telling a couple of biker-looking, 250 lb., 4th gen Tejano's standing in line at the HEB with their 20 packs of Bud Light and Tony Romo Cowboy jerseys as they stock up for the holiday that they are being "white." Thanksgiving for these vatos is a four-day weekend, Butterball turkey, Tia Nesta's pinto beans next to the cranberry sauce, from a can, and kicking back with tios, tias, and cousin Esperanza's gabacho boyfriend from college named Jeff, but he's cool, since his gringo throwing-arm is an athletic talent highly coveted during the annual touch football game held in the street every year after dinner.

Raza Thansgiving Anxiety, I'm thinking, doesn't break down into a Brown/White thing, but rather, I suspect, into an immigrant vs. homegrown thing. And being "immigrant" -- as old school Nuyoricans and 3rd and 4th gen Mexican Americans all across Aztlan will tell you -- doesn't necessarily define all that is to be Latino. Granted, that's not to say the sight of a giant Underdog balloon at the Macy's parade probably isn't a bit strange to a Oaxacan food vendor newly transplanted to New York.

(It must be like how I felt when was in D.F. during the World Cup and witnessed hordes of happy drunk Mexican soccer fans scampering up the El Ángel de la Independencia to pee on the monument's eternal flame. Bewildered. Or the way I feel when forced to watch El Chavo de Ocho at the laundromat on Sunset, I mean, I understand it's supposed to be a comedy -- actors mug for the camera and a laugh track points out the punchlines -- but for warm and fuzzy childhood memories of after school TV delight give me Gilligan's Island any day.)

But back to turkey day. Ultimately, there is value in the scrutiny of Thanksgiving. Kind of makes you think about U.S holidays in general and why we recognize the events and how we celebrate them. Is Memorial Day a "white" holiday given the overwhelming number of raza veterans dying for a country that for years discriminated against them? Is the Fourth of July a "white" holiday? How about Cinco de Mayo, especially as practiced and sponsored by U.S. beer companies. And finally, of course, a consistent immigrant observation/critique of Thanksgiving points out the problematic Pilgrim - Indian origins of the holiday given the subsequent genocide of Native Americans. What's up with that?, they might say. A useful question. And while I don't have the answer, at the end of the day, I welcome the examination.

Originally posted November, 2007.