Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968 (review)

In Mexican American Mojo, historian Anthony Macías looks at the urban cultural politics of a generation of Mexican Americans between 1935 and 1968 in Los Angeles. Building on the work of Latin American studies scholar, George Sanchez, and African American studies scholar Robin Kelley, and a host of others, the book is a documentary history of mixed ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles with intimate portraits of the cultural expressions of the residents of Lincoln Heights, Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles proper, City Terrace, Watts, and Compton, among others. Macías focuses on the ascetics of Chicano youth over time and what their culture tells us about identity politics and assimilation. The Generation came of age with largely African American and some Jewish, Filipino, and Japanese neighbors, classmates, mentors, band members, and dancers. Macías employs the West African word mojo, or supernatural power, to describe among other aspects, how Mexican Americans struggled against discrimination in LA and influenced popular culture in the city with their “innovative styles.” (3) The book is important because of its generational approach to Mexican American culture, a geographical approach that moves beyond East L.A, and an alternative approach to Chicano musicology that incorporates jazz.

The book contains an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter one is musical analysis of the Mexican generation it discusses throughout the book, looking at the musical and dance fads during the depression, like modern jazz and the jitterbug. Chapter two looks at the emergence of the African American zoot suit and the Mexican American variation—the pachuca and pachuco style. The discussion centers on Mexican American urban identity and notions of cool in the era of WWII. Chapter 3 looks at the black and brown cultural collaborations in mixed LA neighborhoods and throughout the city, begun in the previous chapters, but with a focus on Mexican American consumers and producers of jazz, jump blues, pachuco boogie, and finally the start of R & B music. Chapter 4 looks at the Mexican American participation in the doo wop and rock and roll crazes of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The final chapter delves into the importance of LA in the Latin music scene of the 1950s looking at Mexican American contributions to the rumbas, boleros, Latin Jazz, mambos, and cha cha chás. Macías makes use of oral histories and traditional written archival materials. Oral histories provide a detailed account of the personal lives of previously unknown Mexican American contributors to the history of jazz, such as Anthony Ortega, Gil Bernal, Paul Lopez, and Eddie Cano, to name a few, and the spaces where they learned and produced jazz music.

The author’s essential question is, what did it mean to become a Mexican American in Los Angeles between 1935 and 1968? Macías argues that it did not mean adopting middle-class white values or rejecting one’s working class roots. Instead Mexican American youth in LA created an expressive culture that combined urban American—particularly African American—and Mexican elements, one rooted in the style politics of zoot suitors, pachucos and pachucas, and cholos and cholas, that contributed to the development of a cool “counterculture with a street edge and a tough, working-class masculinity and femininity.” (1–2) As one of the oral histories reveals, “We’re Americans for the draft, but Mexicans for getting jobs.” (106)

Macías does a convincing job of proving his point, though he is very repetitive at times in doing so. He is also bit nationalistic in advancing the argument that Mexicans created LA’s casual cool style: he asserts that it’s a about time Chicanos get credit for creating popular clothing styles such as the distinctively North American infatuation with jeans, t-shirts, and leather jackets that has gone global.

The most important part of the book in this scholar’s opinion...