Around 1930, a highly popular and distinctive type of accordion music, commonly known as conjunto, emerged among Texas-Mexicans. Manuel Pena's The Texas-Mexican Con;unto is the first comprehensive study of this unique folk style. The author's exhaustive fieldwork and personal interviews with performers, disc jockeys, dance promoters, recording company owners, and conjunto music lovers provide the crucial connection between an analysis of the music itself and the richness of the culture from which it sprang.

Using an approach that integrates musicological, historical, and sociological methods of analysis, Pena traces the development of the conjunto from its tentative beginnings to its preeminence as a full-blown style by the early 1960s. Biographical sketches of such major early performers as Narciso Martinez (El Huracan del Valle), Santiago Jimenez (El Flaco), Pedro Ayala, Valerio Longoria, Tony de la Rosa, and Paulino Bernal, along with detailed transcriptions of representative compositions, illustrate the various phases of conjunto evolution.

Pena also probes the vital connection between conjunto's emergence as a powerful symbolic expression and the transformation of Texas-Mexican society from a pre-industrial folk group to a community with increasingly divergent socioeconomic classes and ideologies. Of concern throughout the study is the interplay between ethnicity, class, and culture, and Pena's use of methods and theories from a variety of scholarly disciplines enables him to tell the story of conjunto in a manner both engaging and enlightening. This important study will be of interest to all students of Mexican American culture, ethnomusicology, and folklore.

About the Author
Manuel Pena (1942-2019) was a professor of music and Chicano studies at California State University in Fresno.

Reviews
This book does a magnificent job of tracing the history of conjunto music and musicians, and does much more.... Pena presents a highly convincing explanation for conjunto music as an act of working-class self-affirmation and opposition to the upwardly aspirant middle class with its self-consciously Americanized orquesta music.... Fascinating and well-researched. * American Anthropologist *



Book Information
ISBN 9780292780804
Author Manuel Pena
Format Paperback
Page Count 234
Imprint University of Texas Press
Publisher University of Texas Press
Weight(grams) 454g