As a native Texan, of the Brown variety, trust me on this one: Dress a Chicano in creased Wrangler jeans, Justin Roper boots, and a black Stetson hat and he or she isn't necessarily a gringoized dork.This so-called "redneck" style is actually more complex. And in the hands of Raza, subversive even. The real obstacle to recognizing this other practice of a Latino experience has been the absence of Tejanos in the cultural landscape of film, TV, and Univision. The reality is millions of Tejanos exist. And right now, at a theater near you, like the long-awaited-for Sleeping Giant, they are rising. And the world, I predict, will forever be divided into the age before "Selena," the movie, and the far more interesting and accurate one, afterward.
Until now, the definers of hip Chicano cultura (or any Chicano culture for that matter) have mostly been California-based writers and thinkers like Guillermo Gomez-Pena or Richard Rodriguez. Playwrights like Cherrie Moraga. groups like Culture Clash, Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino. Films like "Zoot Suit," "American Me," and "La Bamba." And as far as political issues, the national Latino discourse has usually centered on issues like 187, 209, Pete Wilson and the UFW: Think of a Chicano and an East L.A. cholo comes to mind; mention the border, and it’s Tijuana/San Diego not Juarez/El Paso that you imagine.
But no more. Because of the 2000 theater-wide "Selena" exposure, Tejanos, their music, and their accompanying onda will now be seen as its own unique synthesis of Mexican and American elements forming an unabashed, and, till now, unacknowledged alternate Pocho aesthetic, a way of life thriving for years now in the far reaches of neglected Aztlan. And the seemingly incongruent style of Tejano music fans will be the primary signifier of a people at ease with their region, their contradictions, and their own particular hybrid influences.
But first let's follow the money; because there'd be no story without it.
Real Tejanos are very different from you and me. They don't, for the most part, care much about the latest border theories, there is no need to march against 187, and the word "Hispanic" doesn't quite bristle down there the way it does, in say, Berekely or at UCLA. But don't let that fool you, progressiveness, like post-movimeinto identity, is nuanced. Tejanos, instead -- quite naturally, thank you very much -- drink Big Red with their breakfast tacos (flour, of course), vote Victor Morales for U.S. Senate, and support, with their middle- and working-class paychecks, a multimillion dollar regionally-based recording industry.
And just two years ago, after one dark Friday morning, when their Reina de Tejano, Selena Quintanilla Perez, was shot dead at a Day's Inn Motel in Corpus Christi, 60,000 of them emerged from under the gringo-media's baffled radar to file past her open casket in just over 11 hours. A solemn vanguard to the 3 million or so that would, among many other massive demonstrations of buying power later, send her posthumously released "Dreaming of You" CD quadruple platinum and counting.
Cut to California, where Hollywood, glued like everyone else to CNN, took notice, smelled the dollars, and reacted accordingly. So much so that in the months that followed while the veneration of the Brown faithful continued with impromptu vigils and instant shrines, Hollywood came forward bearing picture deals. Proving once again, movie moguls have never met a market they didn't like.
Until "Selena" the movie came along, the largest Hollywood-backed,
Raza-produced film, was Gregory Nava's "Mi Familia," a movie five long and difficult years in gradual development despite an attached star package that included the definitive "Who's Who" list of Latino talent. Contrast that creeping half-decade effort with the relative ease of the "Selena" green light -- no script, no stars, no famous director -- yet within months a Warner Bros. commitment of $20 million, triple the previous big Latino "record" of the $6 million "Mi Familia."
The marketing of Selena is nothing new. Coca Cola was broadcasting the singer's image via Spanish language commercials on both sides of the border since the late 80s. But with the Warner Bros. campaign, for moviegoers from the Lower East Side to Miami Beach to Echo Park (and all gringo points-in-between), Cowboy hats, Wranglers, and Tony Lamas will no longer only be associated with gabacho cowboys but also with a thriving, Tejano, middle- and working-class experience. They will witness in the crowd scenes, among the extras, a reappropriation of a Vaquero style -- itself lifted and temporarily detained through the years by John Wayne- and Willie Nelson-types -- returned and now representative of a people that have produced, among many other things, a sizable middle class, a State Attorney General, and an Ex-U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
"Selena,’ is the first major Hollywood Latino-made film set in contemporary Texas. This regional shift cannot be overestimated. It is significant in that it will lead to an expansion of what the U.S. Latino experience actually encompasses. First in terms of style, and then, perhaps, by example.
The film depicts a side of U.S. Latino life not seen outside the Lone Star State, much less in mainstream U.S. media. In the movie we see Brown people on horses, the destruction (literally) of a lowrider, middle class homes with backyards, barbecues, white and brown neighbor kids playing together on the same street, a Chicano R&B scene that goes back decades, gente talking without accents, gente saying “ya’ll,” Anglos racism along condescension by Mexican Mexicans, a Chicana named “Heather” asking for Selena’s autograph, Raza of all ages dancing polkas and cumbias, and constantly, throughout every crowd scene, there in the film’s margins, in the periphery of its brown extras, you see hats, Cowboy hats, hundreds of them.
Subcultural style can often be seen as a gesture of resistance to a dominant society. In the case of urban and middle-class Tejanos, their reappropriation of “cowboy” attire right from under the Willie Nelson’s nose hints at the exciting possibilities of hybridity and asserting a rightful place in the cultural landscape.
Look at what’s happening with our primos el el otro lado who continue to push the style envelope to refreshingly sacrilegious extremes. Pause at any Siempre en Domingo and gaze in awe at how groups like Banda Zeta and Super Banda Radar have taken the awww-shucks, downhome cowboy duds of Tex Ritter and Bob Wills to wild, P-Funk, Mothership extremes. It's a flamboyant style that would even embarrass some of the more flashy Tejano groups, such as La Tropa F, or even Los Dinos themselves.
Down Mexico way, the laconic cowboy of gringo invention has given way to an audacious in-your-cara Spanish-singing variety, one your average "Hee Haw" fan would barely recognize. With foot-long sashaying fringes, white leather chaps, and sparkling sequined band names emblazoned on oversized boots, buckles, and collars, minimalist these guys ain't. It's clear to see how our Latino artistic tastes can not only run to the, uh... decorative, but to the wonderfully subversive as well. As art critic Coco Fusco puts it, all part of a tradition "in which kitsch is deployed self-consciously as a gesture of cultural resistance." Or, as mi carnal Pelón would reiterate: "la tuya, Garth Brooks!"
So what does all this, finally, have to do with a Tejano style, with "Selena" the movie, and with the transgressive power of reappropriation and reinvention? I think it goes back to her name. "Se-LEE-na," she pronounced it, not the "correct" Spanish pronunciation of "Seh-le-na." And that's the way her millions of fans on both sides of the border and throughout her career have repeated it, unquestioningly. Like Chicanos have been doing since El Espiritu Plan de Aztlan in 1969, and its then radical call for self-determination and the power of self-naming, Selena's "mispronunciation" is a unique reflection of her race, her country, and her life. A personal process experienced by that of her old fans in creased Wranglers, Justin Ropers and Stetson hats. By Californios in baggy pants and Ben Davis who, like many Anglos, knew of her only after her death. And by many middle class Brown people everywhere, who will watch the movie, someday, on HBO and not even realize that they are still part of a Movement.
Originally published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian 1997