Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture

6 Bridge over Troubled Borders: The Transnational Appeal of Chicano Popular Music

Bridge over Troubled Borders The Transnational Appeal of Chicano Popular Music El Vez has seven compact disks, several 45-rpm singles, and a book contract offer, and he is the subject of an in-progress independent film.1 He has “r-o-c-ked across the U.S.A. and all over Europe” and is referred to as a “modern multicultural hybrid of Americana and Mexicano” and as a “Cross-Cultural Caped Crusader singing for Truth, Justice and the Mexican American way.” Rolling Stone magazine considers him to be “more than an Elvis Impersonator. . . . He is an Elvis translator, a goodwill ambassador of Latin Culture” in the United States and Europe. He is the long-lost Chicano punk rock hero who has found his way home to Graciasland, Aztlán, USA; the Pocho Elvis, one who can’t speak Spanish but “loves la, la, la raza,” the Revolutionary Latin Lover who makes alienated Hispanics proud to be MexAmerican. He is the thin brown duke who makes explicit the connection among Elvis Presley, David Bowie, César Chávez, and Ché Guevara in Las Vegas–inspired espect áculos (spectacles). Undulating in a skin-tight red vinyl jumpsuit that provocatively hugs the contours of his well-toned body, or strutting in his gold lamé charro suit, El Vez embodies the seemingly contradictory desires of a subject politicized by the Chicano movement, irreverent 1970s punk, and 1980s New Wave aesthetics. Part strip-tease, part Chicana/o studies, part Labor History, and part History of Popular Music course, El Vez’s stage shows incite women to howl and young men (gay and straight) to growl, with a minimum of six “rip-away” costume changes per show. Not only does he shake his money maker in honor of James Brown (El Vez’s “I’m Brown and I’m Proud” won first prize in the music video category of the 1998 International San Francisco Film Festival); he and the Memphis Mariachis 6 181 (his band) rev up their frenzied multicultural and multiracial audience to get down for the UFW and the Zapatistas’ cause in Chiapas. He carries the namesake of his London-based fan club—“El Groover”—and he is regularly referred to as “the thinking man’s Elvis,” one who follows his Chicano movement and British punk roots and routes “back to a place we’ve never been.” He is an exuberant Chicano sex symbol savior, a rock ’n’ roll superstar persona created in the late 1980s by the musical genius Robert Lopez. Despite having little formal musical training, Lopez is a virtual walking encyclopedia of rock and punk rock of the 1970s, the alternative popular music of the 1980s and 1990s, and Elvis Presley’s extensive gospel, rockabilly, and ballad repertoire. Who else could turn “Suspicious Minds” into “Immigration Time” and make it clear that it is Mexican immigrants who are “Taking Care of Business” in the transnational economy ? Who else could fuse Adam and the Ants and Santana with Rod Stewart’s “Maggie Mae” or turn the international hit of the British band Oasis “Champagne Super Nova” into “Souped-up Chévy Nova” and im182 | Bridge over Troubled Borders Robert Lopez, a member of one of the first L.A. punk bands, the Zeros, at Larchmont Hall, Los Angeles, July 8, 1977. The Zeros were also an all-Chicano group. The Weirdos also performed that day. This show was produced by Slash Magazine. Photograph by Jenny Lens. (Reprinted with permission .) prove on the original? In many ways, this multifaceted performance artist —whose father worked as master of ceremonies for the jai-alai games in Tijuana—is a child of “our extended Borderland culture: the frontera culture stretching from the shanty barrios of Tijuana/San Diego to the rich surf and turf of Santa Barbara (dominated by the megaspace of Los Angeles in the middle).”2 Significantly, Lopez grew up in Chula Vista, California , then a predominately Anglo middle-class suburb of San Diego. Performing in the punk bands the Zeros and Catholic Discipline during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the teenaged Lopez actively participated in the development of oppositional punk music in Los Angeles. Lopez, like many other disaffected Chicano youth (myself included) who were experiencing alienation from both the dominant and Chicano culture, was drawn to this scene because it was a site where identities outside ethnic stereotypes could be embodied. By the mid-1980s, Lopez was...