Nicholas F. Centino's Author-Curated Razabilly Playlist

A hybrid of country music and rhythm and blues, 1950s rockabilly is loud, raucous, and rebellious. Rockabilly music, recognized as one of the earliest iterations of what we now know as rock and roll, is responsible for launching the careers of musicians including Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Now, decades after the genre’s midcentury heyday, a vibrant scene for rockabilly musicians and fans thrives in the Latinx metropolis of Los Angeles. While the genre is dominated by white people outside Los Angeles, within greater LA, Latinas, Latinos, and Latinx peoples make up the critical mass of the Rockabilly scene.

Despite the eponymous name, LA’s contemporary Rockabilly scene embraces a broad range of roots music, including not just rockabilly but also jump blues, western swing, and others. While all the tracks cited here are excellent, the following playlist is best thought of as an audio companion to Razabilly: Transforming Sights, Sounds, and History in the Los Angeles Latina/o Rockabilly Scene rather than a “best of” compilation. As such, each track was selected to provide particular insight into the scene and the sensibilities of its Latina/o/x participants.

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“Power of the 45,” pts. 1 and 2
Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys

There is no better way to kick off this playlist than with the ambassador of Southern California roots rock himself: Big Sandy. A fixture of the contemporary international Rockabilly scene for well over thirty years, Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys draw on a broad family tree of musical lineages. Featured on their 2006 album, Turntable Matinee, “Power of the 45” pays homage to those lineages and legacies as enduring capsules of joy and memory shared among friends and family. Pay close attention to the band and artist names dropped as the music fades out at the end of part 2, including, among others, rockabilly legends Sleepy Labeef and pioneers of the Chicano Eastside sound Thee Midniters. Stick around after that and you will be treated to a hidden acoustic rendition of their composition “Spanish Dagger.”

“The Hippy Hippy Shake”
Chan Romero

While Richie Valens is remembered as the quintessential Latino 1950s rocker, he was only one of several Latino rock and roll musicians on the national stage in those formative years. Chan Romero, a Mexican American teenager from Montana, was recruited by Bob Keane to be Richie’s heir after Valens tragically lost his life in 1959. With their growling guitars, relative obscurity, and the cultural resonance of the lead singer, songs by Romero, especially “My Little Ruby” (1960), are tailor made for the Latina/o/x Rockabilly scene of Los Angeles. Released in 1959, Romero’s signature tune, “The Hippy Hippy Shake,” would later be covered by the Beatles in their 1963 performance on the BBC.

“Dance in the Rain”
Luis and the Wildfires

Helmed by Reb Kennedy, Wild Records has been taking the international Rockabilly scene by storm since the 2000s, introducing a global audience to young Los Angeles musicians and performers, many of whom are Latina or Latino. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, Luis Arriaga brings an unbridled energy to his music, providing a sight to behold on stage and a sound to be enveloped by on tracks such as 2010’s “Dance in the Rain.” Speaking to the broad retro tastes embraced in the Los Angeles scene, the Arriaga turns to a hypnotic post-rockabilly sound to craft an organized chaos.

“La Plaga”
Los Teen Tops

As demographics continue to shift in contemporary Los Angeles, migrants bring legacies of popular music from their nations of origin. A cover of “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “La Plaga” (1959), by Los Teens Tops, typifies an archive of 1950s rockabilly tunes interpreted by Latin American artists in the 1960s. This soundscape formed a familiar musical terrain that appealed to first- and second-generation immigrant youth from Mexico and Central America discovering the Rockabilly scene in the 1990s and 2000s.

“‘Til the Well Runs Dry”
Wynona Carr

With a big brash sound, “Till the Well Runs Dry” is a vocal- and horn-driven number that begs listeners to dance. Given decades of solidarity and interethnic cultural exchange, it is little surprise that African American jump blues from the 1940s and 1950s dominates the playlists of many DJs in the Los Angeles Latina/o Rockabilly scene. In the 1950s Carr was signed to Specialty Records, a Los Angeles–based record label that launched the careers of musical icons including Little Richard and Sam Cooke.

“Boy with the Angel Eyes”
Vicky Tafoya and The Big Beat

Drawing on the soulful legacy of Chicano lowrider oldies, “Boy with the Angel Eyes,” like other, similar songs, is a sharp departure from the hiccupping, guitar-driven sounds of rockabilly. Nevertheless, that cultural and emotional connection keeps the Inland Empire’s Vicky Tafoya ever-present in the Los Angeles scene. Often adorned in zoot suit slacks and crowned with an elaborate 1940s hairstyle, Tafoya draws on rich elements of Chicanx cultural memory in her performances, covering fan favorites such as “Angel Baby” alongside her original material.

“How Low Do You Feel?”
Ray Campi

Substitute teacher by day, rock star by night, Ray Campi enjoyed a career that represents the longevity of the rockabilly revival in Los Angeles. An original 1950s performer, Campi was rediscovered by Ronny Weiser (Rollin’ Rock Records) in the 1970s and continued to perform rockabilly until his passing in March 2021. With its foot-stomping call-and-response structure and taunting guitar riffs, “How Low Do You Feel” (1979) is a classic of the Rollin’ Rock era of Los Angeles rockabilly.

“Rosa Maria”
Moonlight Cruisers

Epitomizing the Latina/o/x transformation of the Los Angeles Rockabilly scene in the early 2000s, the Moonlight Cruisers, Pachuco Jose y Los Diamantes, and other such bands peppered their performances with straight-ahead cumbia tunes. Cumbia, a working-class musical genre originating in Columbia and expanding to other parts of Latin America, is simply the go-to party music for many Latinas/os in the Los Angeles area. Listen closely, however, and you will hear the distinctly rockabillyesque picking of Al Martinez behind the lyrical delivery.

“Parachute”
Thee Lakesiders

Representative of possible new and divergent directions that retro-Chicanx music can take in (post-) COVID-era Los Angeles, Thee Lakesiders’ “Parachute” (2018) is a melancholic rumination invoking intense feelings of loss and yearning. The duo’s pachuco/a aesthetics synchronize with their self-conscious interpellation of cultural memory and resistance in the postindustrial landscape of LA. Available as a 45 rpm disc, their latest work, “Can’t Fool Me Twice/Show Me Love,” was released in May 2021.

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Stephanie Sauer on Evoking the Royal Chicano Air Force

How do you write a history of a group that has been written out of history? Employing a creative mix of real and fictive events, objects, and people that subverts assumptions about the archiving and display of historical artifacts, Stephanie Sauer's innovative new book The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force both documents and evokes an arts collective that played a significant role in the Chicano movement.

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The RCAF started as the elusive Rebel Chicano Art Front that, through an understandable mix-up with the Royal Canadian Air Force, became the Royal Chicano Air Force, a group renowned for its fleet of adobe airplanes, its ongoing subversive performance stance, and its key role as poster makers for the United Farm Workers Union during the height of the Chicano civil rights movement. Reimagining herself as a fictional archaeologist named 'La Stef', Stephanie Sauer documents the plight of the RCAF, suspending historical realities and leaping through epochs and between conversations with various historical figures, both dead and alive, to offer readers an intimate experience of RCAF history.

A cofounding editor of A Bolha Editora, a bookshop and publisher in Rio de Janeiro, and executive editor of Copilot Press, Stephanie Sauer is an interdisciplinary text-based artist and visiting lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute. We talked to her about her approach to this project and how institutions should embed experiential learning, i.e.: "embodied knowledge," into pedagogical approaches.

What informed your approach to how you presented this archive, which is described in the introduction as your “deeply personal, biased, and shared witnessing”? 

Before I conceived of what is now The Accidental Archives, I spent a year writing what I had been expected to write. That is, I wrote a history of the Royal Chicano Air Force as I encountered it in the 21st Century. It was a story one would expect to read. It was a story I had read many times before. I was in Chicago then, a microcosm of a United States obsessed with its divisions, and found myself answering to the expectations of readers who wanted me to translate Chicanismo for them, to act as a type of mediator whose task it was to create a didactic, easily digestible history. This way of writing bored me, and I found it deeply problematic. I saw myself as facilitator to a kind of colonial fantasy that pitted me as an objective, rational (read: white, anthropological) narrator of an RCAF documentary. I didn’t want to perpetuate such ideas of otherness, so I threw out that entire manuscript and started fresh from three scraps, the very first notes I’d written.

Inaugural Flight of LaRuca 2012. With permission of use of Los Files © Juanishi V. Orosco.
Courtesy of Juanishi V. Orosco.

What Dr. Diaz noted in her introduction as “deeply personal, biased, and shared witnessing” is, for me, the richest way to present any history. Rooted in feminist practices of testimonio, embodied knowledge, “disruptive excess,” and collective witnessing, I found it vital to foreground the multiplicity of voices and their contradictions, the tactile ephemera, and the biases. Otherwise, when one tries to smooth over these elements in favor of a clean, linear narrative, the tremendous violence of silencing distorts the humanity of those making history. It is this type of silencing that alienates us from our own power to impart change. I wanted to offer an alternative. I wanted to upend the so-called logic of traditional, Western, male-centered historiography and imagine what a new kind of archive might include. 

Journal of the History of Sexuality :: With Her Machete in Her Hand

With Her Machete in Her Hand
by Catrióna Rueda Esquibel
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With Her Machete in Her Hand
reviewed in Journal of the History of Sexuality
Volume 20, Number 2, May 2011
Reviewed by Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz

Arriving at the University of California, Riverside, the first member of my extended family to go to college, I read everything my professors recommended. Such experts, however, did not assign any texts that spoke directly to me and my experiences as a young woman of working-class Mexican descent who had begun to question her sexuality. Always the precocious and studious type, I associated with mostly senior activist Chicana/o students who educated me outside the classroom by suggesting reading materials. I could hardly wait to begin reading three books on Chicana/Latina sexuality that a friend had recommended: The Sexuality of Latinas (1989), edited by Norma Alarcón, Cherríe Moraga, and Ana Castillo; The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), A. Castillo's first novel; and the foundational text This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. I devoured such texts because they validated my experiences and empowered me as a Chicana lesbian. As a professor and specialist in queer Chicana/o literature and culture, I continue to search the field for texts to offer to my students and incorporate into my work.

In With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians, part of the Chicana Matters series, Catrióna Rueda Esquibel has done the arduous and necessary research to bring it all together. This text will be essential in the field of Chicana/o studies in general and Chicana/o feminist and queer literature in particular. Scholars in fields like gender studies and English literature would also benefit from incorporating this book into their literary canons.

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American Book Review :: Golondrina, why did you leave me?

Golondrina, why did you leave me?
by Bárbara Renaud González
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American Book Review
Volume 32, Number 3, March/April 2011

Stuck in Murky Eddies
by Diana López

When, I wonder, will Mexican American men be portrayed as strong and assertive without the brutal aspects of machismo? When will we read about Mexican American mothers who are not silenced victims? When will the settings of these stories move out of run-down houses, barns, and chicken coops? So many have crossed the border and successfully achieved the American Dream with all it promotes: education, jobs with benefits, comfy houses with flea-free dogs. Yet the literature seems stuck in the murky eddies of the Rio Grande.

Golondrina, why did you leave me? by Bárbara Renaud González is a good example. There are powerful passages and poignant scenes in González's novel; however, she, like many other contemporary writers, continues to rely on such stereotypes and the cheating patrón, the broken-down laborer, the long-suffering matriarch.

Golondrina is the story of Amada García. Married to an abusive man, Amada leaves Mexico, and her young daughter, and crosses the border to Texas where she marries again. Her second husband, Lázaro, is not so violent, but he is poor, embittered, and burdened with a terrible sense of disenfranchisement. In a quest for work and for a better home, he and Amada move to different towns in the Southwest. Meanwhile, they have children and struggle to raise them.

• Download the full review from American Book Review (.pdf) »