Un Homenaje: CCG Collection Pays Tribute to Houston’s Chicano Music Pioneers

We all love it, to see all the work put together on the Library of Congress’s website is truly satisfying knowing that this story will be in the Library of Congress’s archives for others to learn from.
Isaac Rodriguez, Project Director, 2025

Sonidos de Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene, a digital collection of documentary field research created through the Community Collections Grants (CCG) program, is now live on the Library’s website. From 2022 to 2023, a research team in the Gulf Coast city of Houston produced a collection of primary source materials, consisting principally of digital audio and video recordings of life history interviews with hometown Chicano musical pioneers. Last week, I caught up with Isaac Rodriguez, the director and driving force behind the project, and asked him for his reactions to the presentation as well as his reflections on the efforts that resulted in the collection. Isaac’s comments at the head of this blog, and in the text below, are a gratifying reminder of the impact the Center’s collaborative work has when we assist communities in conducting documentary fieldwork in their own backyards. (Note: My 2023 blog, Cultural Legacies of Houston’s Chicano Music Scene, is an extended interview with Isaac in which he describes the aims and scope of the research fieldwork at the project’s inception). 

The interviews that Isaac and the team have conducted trace intricate personal and professional arcs with performers who recall decades-long experiences of growing up in the rich musical soundscape of Houston and, for some, continuing to work in the field into the present day. They reflect on playing in family and neighborhood bands as youth and moving into careers as band members, band leaders and headliners in and around the southwest over the course of time. Several reminisce about performing as opening acts for Tejano stars like Selena and established Anglo musicians such as Hank Williams and David Allan Coe. The interviewees name names of legendary and now-vanished Houston music halls, clubs, cantinas and other venues where they gathered with neighbors to listen to music, dance, and develop a sense of community. This history is what Isaac refers to when he notes: “We just wanted to document as much of these stories as we could, the opportunity to not only tell the story of Chicano music in Houston but to give these guys their flowers, in a sense. There was no big going away party or last gig for them, they just slowly stopped playing this music that they had put so much blood, sweat and tears into. A lot of the participants said no one ever cane knocking at the door until this project, and receiving the grant from the LOC allowed us the time and provided us with the resources to make it happen.“

“Musical influences” is a bit mild to describe the wildly eclectic assortment of musical styles that the performers recall hearing, imbibing and performing, ranging from mariachi and conjunto alongside country, blues, soul, hard rock, disco, punk, and metal. Joe Borrego, now in his seventies, recalls picking up the guitar at the age of eleven, learning to play the accordion a year or two later, and then forming a conjunto with his brother and a neighbor in the early 1960s in west Texas. The group’s first paid gig as Los Tres Alegres (The Three Merry Ones) netted fourteen-year-old Joe and his bandmates the grand total of twenty-five dollars!

Borrego’s interview with Roberto Rodriguez III is rich in other details about a working musician’s life and musical development, such as his incorporation of a steel guitar into the Houston-based conjuntos he performed with as an adult in the 1970s. Borrego attributes the inclusion of the instrument to his love of the country music that he heard during his childhood. He also has a fascinating comparison of Italian and German made accordions. While the Italian manufactured Santa Marsala appealed to some musicians because it was “flashy,” Borrego and other accordionists who tried playing it soon returned to the German-made Hohner, the tried and true staple of conjunto and polka musicians. According to Borrego, the Italian make was much bigger and heavier and not as easy to manipulate as its German counterpart; these were key factors in players’ preference for the Hohner. (Listening to the interview, I was reminded of my stint as a stage manager for the Raices Musicales concert tours in the early 1990s. Conjunto legend Santiago Jiminez, Jr. would invariably extol, and at length, the many virtues of his red Hohner accordion during his set.)

On the topic of musical styles, another terrific interview is Nestor Aguilar’s conversation with fellow musician and project member, Nick Gaitan. The two men recall among other bands, the Flamin’ Hellcats, a legendary Chicano group that formed in the early 1990’s. The band “funneled sounds and influences from ska, punk, rock, and swing with a Latino kick,” as a local music review describes the group’s music. The reviewer leaves out the rockabilly aspect of the band, but Gaitan corrects the record by noting that band members themselves playfully call their music “vato-billy.” (Vato in Chicano slang is equivalent to “dudes” or “homies.”) The interview also touches on the group’s self-representation in performances as Chicano artists, which speaks to the continuing impact of Chicanismo for musicians and the wider community. Chicanismo emerged as a cultural and political philosophy among Mexican Americans during the civil rights era and emphasized pride in roots culture and history, a sense of shared identity, and resistance to oppression. Aguilar goes on to talk about his evolution from starting as crew member for Los Skarnales to becoming a musician in the band, another genre-bending Houston group that mixes ska (as the name implies), cumbia, reggae, and rock. Los Skarnales can be viewed in performance at the 2024 Supernova International Ska Festival in Hampton Virginia.

These interviews are only two of the highlights of the online presentation about the always-evolving Chicano music scene in Houston’s past and its present. The launch of the website  is a great way for audiences to acquaint themselves with the work of the Sonidos team’s efforts to pay tribute (un homenaje) to their musical forebears. To that point, the interview with Joe Borrego, a sixty-year veteran of the music scene in Houston, highlights perfectly the impetus for Isaac Rodriguez’s years of work that culminated in his 2022 CCG award. As he notes: “When I started my research fifteen years ago there was nowhere for me to go to find out about Chicano music in Houston, except directly to the musicians who created the music themselves. It took years of work and research alone just to find them as some had been retired from music for 40 years, while others were still performing. All the miles I put in back then were all for the love of my people and culture. I’m satisfied now that if any other person comes along in the future, curious about the history of Chicano music in Houston, that these stories will now only be a click away.”

The Sonidos de Houston website and the others that have been published to date are among several exciting CCG initiatives the AFC is undertaking. We are now preparing to welcome Isaac Rodriguez and Nick Gaitan to DC in September for the second CCG symposium and an evening concert, respectively. Isaac will be one of ten awardees who will share their experiences with audiences at the Library symposium, tentatively scheduled to take place on September 24^th and 25^th,^, 2025. Please keep checking the Library’s Events page for the final schedule of panel presentations. The Nick Gaitan Band will perform an evening of Tejas roots music on Wednesday, September 24^th, in the Coolidge Auditorium. The concert is free, but tickets are required, and there may be special restrictions. Check the website for additional information, including ticketing requirements.