The Struggle in Black and Brown: African American and Mexican American Relations during the Civil Rights Era

8. Brown-Eyed Soul: Popular Music and Cultural Politics in Los Angeles

EIGHT Brown-Eyed Soul Popular Music and Cultural Politics in Los Angeles LUIS ALVAREZ AND DANIEL WIDENER In May of 1970 the East Los Angeles–based band El Chicano hit number 28 on the Billboard Top 100 pop music chart with their song “Viva Tirado.” Exhibiting El Chicano’s eclectic mix of rock and jazz, the tune was the first ever to attain positions in every category of the Billboard chart except country and western. It may seem odd that a band that had recently changed their name from the generic sounding “vips” to El Chicano —a reflection of the Chicana/o Movement’s radical critique of racism, poverty, and political neglect in the United States— appealed to such a diverse American audience. Despite “Viva Tirado’s” popularity, there was some confusion over who El Chicano was and how their music should be classified. When on tour in New York, for instance, band member Bobby Espinosa remembers, “[T]hey didn’t know where to book us. We ended up playing a show at the Apollo Theater with the O’Jays, Jerry Butler, the Last Poets, all these black groups. They didn’t know what we were. They’d say, ‘What are you guys, Indians? What’s a Chicano?’”1 Closer inspection of “Viva Tirado” however, helps explain why El Chicano achieved such crossover appeal and ended up playing gigs alongside African American artists. ALVAREZ AND WIDENER 212 “Viva Tirado” was originally written by Gerald Wilson, a black trumpeter, composer, and jazzman, who was born in Mississippi , grew up in Chicago, and practiced his trade as part of the big band scene in World War II era Los Angeles. Wilson’s original “Viva Tirado” paid homage to a Mexican matador named Jose Ramon Tirado, a salute inspired by Wilson’s affection for the Mexican music and culture he became enthralled with after moving to Southern California. The history of “Viva Tirado ” thus helps reveal the interracial and polycultural past of El Chicano, Gerald Wilson, and post–World War II Los Angeles.2 Using “Viva Tirado” as a starting point, this chapter examines how the popular music of El Chicano and other artists that were part of the brown-eyed soul scene of the 1960s and early 1970s illuminates the contours of African American–Chicana/o cultural identity and politics in Los Angeles. We argue that brown-eyed soul, which included a wide-range of Mexican American and African American artists who combined elements of rock, soul, jazz, r&b, country western, Mexican, and Caribbean rhythms, grew from the city’s interracial past to challenge the segregated and culturally nationalist streams of the era’s ethnic politics. Brown-eyed soul, and the many social relationships that grew from the music and the night club, house party, and concert scenes where it was played, served as a cultural terrain where African Americans and Chicanas/os experimented with social and political relationships that were not always possible in other arenas of struggle or cultural expression. Moreover, the brown-eyed soul scene provides important clues as to how the often overlooked interracial cultural and political energy of the civil rights movement continued to shape Los Angeles long after the 1960s. As much as it was embedded in the political tumult of the sixties and early seventies, brown-eyed soul drew from and contributed to a much longer legacy of black-brown relations in Los Angeles and California. As a vibrant site of African American and Chicana/o cultural BROWN-EYED SOUL 213 and political collaboration, brown-eyed soul disrupts urban, race, and social movement historiographies that too often frame race relations in a black-white binary or in how single ethnic or racialized groups engaged the white majority. Unlike the assimilationist or conflict models employed by so many academics and policymakers who sought to address race relations in the sixties and seventies, these musicians built upon the rich history of Los Angeles’s diverse urban landscape by articulating cultural and political identities that were at root about cultivating relationships across, between, and among racialized groups rather than simply carving out space to exist alongside one another . Moreover, brown-eyed soul reveals as much about World War II and contemporary Los Angeles as it does the civil rights years. The multiethnic character of the music underscores that the Chicana/o and black civil rights movements share many political and cultural connections with both...