Stretching from the years during the Second World War when young couples jitterbugged across the dance floor at the Zenda Ballroom, through the early 1950s when honking tenor saxophones could be heard at the Angelus Hall, to the Spanish-language cosmopolitanism of the late 1950s and 1960s, Mexican American Mojo is a lively account of Mexican American urban culture in wartime and postwar Los Angeles as seen through the evolution of dance styles, nightlife, and, above all, popular music. Revealing the links between a vibrant Chicano music culture and postwar social and geographic mobility, Anthony Macias shows how by participating in jazz, the zoot suit phenomenon, car culture, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and Latin music, Mexican Americans not only rejected second-class citizenship and demeaning stereotypes, but also transformed Los Angeles.

Macias conducted numerous interviews for Mexican American Mojo, and the voices of little-known artists and fans fill its pages. In addition, more famous musicians such as Ritchie Valens and Lalo Guerrero are considered anew in relation to their contemporaries and the city. Macias examines language, fashion, and subcultures to trace the history of hip and cool in Los Angeles as well as the Chicano influence on urban culture. He argues that a grass-roots "multicultural urban civility" that challenged the attempted containment of Mexican Americans and African Americans emerged in the neighborhoods, schools, nightclubs, dance halls, and auditoriums of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. So take a little trip with Macias, via streetcar or freeway, to a time when Los Angeles had advanced public high school music programs, segregated musicians' union locals, a highbrow municipal Bureau of Music, independent R & B labels, and robust rock and roll and Latin music scenes.

A study of the creation of jazz, swing, and R & B music within the multicultural, multiethnic terrain of Los Angeles

About the Author

Anthony Macias is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Reviews
"Mexican American Mojo is a timely and engaging work that thoroughly demonstrates the development of popular Mexican American culture in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. Anthony Macias has written an illuminating and remarkable study that belongs in the library of anyone interested in Mexican American culture."-Raul A. Fernandez, author of From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz
"I am especially excited by the interviews Anthony Macias conducted, which make central perspectives long missing from scholarship on jazz, swing, and R & B. Macias's method of looking at Los Angeles's social geography of race and ethnicity 'through a prism of popular music' will be of great interest to those interested in the histories of popular music, Mexican America, and Los Angeles."-Sherrie Tucker, author of Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s



Book Information
ISBN 9780822343226
Author Anthony Macias
Format Paperback
Page Count 408
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 599g