Description
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