.Norteño Exposure

A dying musical tradition benefits from fresh blood & family values.

Valentin Romero Jr. wipes invisible sweat off his brow when speaking of Rio Hondo, the sweltering Texas valley town — population two thousand, twenty miles north of the Mexican border, twenty miles west of the Gulf of Mexico — where his father and uncle were raised. Val’s wife, Arly, born in the balmy Philippines, lays it out plainly: “I won’t go there until they get air-conditioning,” she says with a laugh. Indeed, in eighteen years of marriage, she has yet to visit.

Fortunately, Conjunto Romero has brought a little slice of that borderland and its music to Northern California, where Val Jr. (accordion and electric bass), his brother Alfredo (drums), father Val Sr. (bajo sexto — a large twelve-stringed guitarlike instrument), and Uncle Lauro (accordion and electric bass) have kept the norteño flame burning since the younger siblings decided to take up music in 1998.

Norteño — music evolved from accordions brought to the Texas borderland by German and Czech immigrants in the late 19th century — is named for the Northern Mexican provinces where it slowly evolved into its current four-piece existence of accordion, electric bass, bajo sexto, and drums. The generic name for that quartet, conjunto, is also often used interchangeably with norteño. To further complicate matters, sometimes the line between Tejano (literally, a Texas-born Mexican) and norteño music can be tough to draw.

Or not. “There’s no big difference,” one player told me. “In Texas, they like to do more difficult stuff.” And indeed, sometimes folks chuck it all and call the whole shebang “Tex-Mex.”

Whatever he calls it, Val could’ve picked no better teacher than Tio Lauro. In the midst of his migrant-worker youth — picking everything from sugar beets in Michigan to cotton in Mississippi — young Larry was engaged in the latter when he and his father found an old Hohner two-row accordion in a furniture store. Thus began the adventure that Lauro, now a spry seventy, continues to this day with his family in Conjunto Romero.

So here we stand in the Romeros’ rehearsal space — actually the basement of Val Sr.’s Daly City home, its entryway marked by a Texas flag. Lauro rides his bandmates quickly through a polka, two redowas (“A minor,” he declares, and the quartet kicks it into high gear), and a few other European musical remnants. There’s no doubt who’s in charge here.

Indeed, Lauro is a veteran of the San Francisco Mission bars, where he worked for two decades in different ad-hoc norteño ensembles. He’s a traditionalist, then and now, and bristles at the thought of playing other styles with his accordion. “These drunks, they’d ask me to play Santana,” he says. “I’d say, ‘You think Santana can play a polka?'”

Val laughs at this story. It seems this generational battle now plays out in his brother, too. Alfredo was once heavily into rap, and opines that he’d like the band to maybe do some originals someday. But Uncle Lauro is having none of it.

To Val, norteño is simply the Mexican equivalent to country and Western. As if to prove the point, Conjunto Romero sways into a close-to-morose song that ends each chorus on the line Until you made me cry. Tears in your beer, Lágrimas en su cerveza, verdad. Just to show that he knows a musical cousin when he hears one, Lauro next tries to goad the family into a conjunto version of fellow Texan Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.” No dice.

Chris Strachwitz, founder of El Cerrito’s Arhoolie Records, has spent a lifetime recording and filming regional musical styles like norteño. He produced the touching 1976 documentary Chulas Fronteras, which followed the conjunto scene on the Texas borderland. Unfortunately, he sees this style as a bit of an anachronism in the Bay Area scene these days, since people are now much more into banda, the Sinaloan music rich with trumpets, trombones, and percussion. “Norteño’s not music typical of the area, except maybe some dives in Redwood City,” he says. “There are some Tejanos who are into it, but many of them have drifted into the middle class, and this is a rural, workers’ music.” Uncle Lauro, too, notes that the sound of the Mission bars is now that of the recién llegada (the just-arrived) — often Salvadorans with their own musical preferences.

Strachwitz adds that “Norteño is still considered the ‘life of the borracho [drunk].'” But when he went to a recent Tejano Music Conference in Las Vegas, “There was barely an accordian there.”

Mindy Gross, who volunteers with Strachwitz once a week while working on her anthropology master’s at SF State (her thesis is on norteño music and its place in the social structure), isn’t so sure this music is disappearing entirely. “It was big [in the bars] in the ’60s and ’70s, even into the early ’80s,” she concurs. “But it doesn’t function solely on the streets. It’s historically been used in the social context of weddings, quinceañeras [the traditional fifteenth birthday party for girls], and other family social events.”

As for the idea that youngsters might not dig the music so much, she demurs. “I’ve found that [through the music] people find some kind of connection to the South Texas border area, through their grandparents or parents.”

But not everyone.

Manuel “Juan” Delgado picks me up in front of Oakland’s Coliseum Burgers — just yards from where the Raiders (or, this year, just their fans) kick some serious ass on Sundays — in a silver Ford Lightning, the cab plastered with a System of a Down window decal, the radio pumping out Latin rock music. Delgado, who stands an imposing six foot five and plays electric bass for local club favorites La Ene Ka, tells me straight up: “We’re not your typical norteño band.”

Delgado, 27, grew up in San Jose, listening to his father’s records, including selections from Los Tigres del Norte (the genre’s Rolling Stones), the ones he calls “classic norteño.” But discovering English-singing rock bands like Nirvana as a teenager — followed by those stylized nü-metalers System of a Down — led the fledgling bassist to evolve musically, accommodating peers who came to see his band in clubs like Mongo’s in Fremont. “We have great respect for the tradition as Mexicans,” he explains. “But we try to get the audience involved too.”

That band used to be called the Norteño Kings, but it’s La Ene Ka now, which references the old name (La = the, Ene = N, Ka = K), but also satisfies Delgado’s desire to “get away from all the bands that were ‘Norteño this’ and ‘Norteño that.'”

So, unlike its more staid forebears, La Ene Ka’s four-man lineup uses the latest in wireless technology to scramble excitedly about the stage. They don’t dress old-school, either. The legendary Ramon Ayala (cofounder of the equally legendary Los Relámpagos del Norte), for example, is all spangles and fringed leather, the flashier the better. “He has his own tailor down in Mexico,” Uncle Lauro told me.

Not so La Ene Ka. “Each of us, on our own, yeah, we might wear cowboy boots or something,” Delgado explains. “But we’re trying to interact with our generation, so we wear Dickies onstage, and maybe Nikes or some other kicks.” He notes that the drummer, who cut his teeth on punk rock in Gilroy, is a monument to human-skin artwork, and “I’ve got some tats myself.”

A week later, at Oakland’s Day of the Dead Festival, La Ene Ka hit the stage kitted out like Zapatistas: Delgado in black-and-white camouflage pants and a black ski mask, the bajo sexto man in suspenders made of bullets. Delgado shouts out a few cumbias, leads a few “culero” chants, and denounces President Bush from the stage; the crowd calls for an encore. Their guitar cases still say Norteño Kings, but La Ene Ka are norteño in name only — these guys have clearly moved on.

Contrast that with the scene at another Day of the Dead stage, where traditionalists Grupo Extremo, whose latest record is called 100% Norteño, entertain an older and more staid audience while wearing matching black hats and brown leather jackets.

Norteño’s history is full of child prodigies. Current San Antonio accordion star Robert Casillas, for example, began at the ripe old age of seven, and figured heavily in this year’s International Accordion Festival held in his hometown. In that same city, Flaco Jimenez was gigging nightclubs by the age of sixteen. Follow East 14th Street down from Fruitvale a few miles, and you’ll find the East Bay’s own wunderkind, Joaquin Trujillo of San Leandro, who got a late start. He was nine when he started on the squeezebox, and is now fifteen, a junior at San Lorenzo High School, and the star of Los Trujillo de Sinaloa.

The Trujillos like their cars and their music one style: classic. Jose Sr. picks me up at Bayfair BART in a flashy cobalt-blue Chevy Caprice classic circa 1976, painted by son (and drummer) Fidel. “For us, music is entertainment and an obligation,” the paterfamilias explains.

Born in Cozala, in the hills of Sinaloa province, Jose Sr. admired his father’s guitar, and borrowed it whenever he could. Now sixty, he has made sure that musical torch is passed, because Los Trujillo de Sinaloa, like Conjunto Romero, is strictly a family operation: Joaquin on accordion; ten-year-old Jose Jr. on bass; and Fidel, eighteen, on drums. Forgive the boys for lacking a bit of energy today: They arrived here at 5 a.m. after a Saturday night gig in Sacramento.

Not that mom Virginia minds. “No, the music they make is beautiful, and it keeps them busy and off the streets,” she says. “And they usually only play once or twice a month.”

Getting gigs through word of mouth and local appearances like the Capitol Flea Market in San Jose, Los Trujillo is old-school, musically and otherwise. Outfitted in smart cowboy hats and rather heavy-fringed leather jackets in the style of Ramon Ayala, the band plays weddings, birthday parties, and other family-tinged events. Jose Sr. admits that, yes, on nearby East 14th Street, there could be bar gigs, but “We’re on a different path.”

He writes some of the group’s songs, as does Joaquin, and they break into the son’s original “El Paisano,” a polka, as I take some pictures. Jose and Joaquin are also the primary singers, and they favor the rancheras, songs of longing typified by Vicente Fernandez’ “Volver.” (You may know it from Los Lobos’ cover.)

Jose Jr., dwarfed by the blue electric bass that he plays quite well (he began at age five), mentions that he likes the corridos, the stories of heroes and outlaws. His favorite (and one that he sings to regular acclaim) is Los Cadetes de Linares’ classic “Dos Amigos,” the story of two friends, Jose and Martin, who decide to rob a train. The listener is left to decide whether Jose’s fortune — he is caught, but then escapes — is because of his mother’s prayers or his own dumb luck.

This music, too, survives through a bit of fortune to complement the hard work of patriarchs like Jose Trujillo, Uncle Lauro, and others. But for how long? “It’s hard work to make the new generation pay attention to norteño music,” Jose Sr. admits. “They like rock, but there’s no music in there!” He points to Joaquin’s accordion in the corner. “There’s music in that Gabanelli over there. People like our music because we preserve the old style. We play for special people who know what that music is.”

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