This post in the Homegrown Plus series features Nick Gaitan, musician, music historian, band leader, and proud exponent of Houston’s vibrant Chicano music scene. Like others in the series, the blog links to a concert video of Nick’s band in performance in the Coolidge Auditorium in Fall 2025, a video interview recorded with him prior to the concert and links to Latino/a educational resources held in the AFC. The group is composed of Nicholas Valdez (vocals, accordion), Charlie San Miguel (drums), Luis Gonzalez (bajo sexto, guitar), Nick Gaitan (vocals, stand up bass). The band’s self-described “Tejas [Texas] Roots Music” sound is a cover term for a repertoire that encompasses conjunto, cumbia, Louisiana swamp pop, country, and rhythm and blues. These stellar musicians slip seamlessly from one musical style to another during the course of performance and bring the sound of Texas and the wider Gulf Coast region to the Washington, DC, audience. In the interview, Nick Gaitan reflects on his documentation work for Sonidos de Houston, a Community Collections Grant project and his upbringing in the multi-cultural, polyphonic environment of his native Houston and its long-lasting influences on his personal and professional development.
Un Homenaje: CCG Collection Pays Tribute to Houston's Chicano Music Pioneers
The AFC has launched the website, Sonidos De Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene, a fieldwork collecting project conducted through a Community Collections Grant. The blog describes the collections content, which features interviews of Houston's Chicano music pioneers conducted by community members, several of whom are musicians themselves . The blog includes audio clips and photographs and reactions to the collections and the website’s launch from an interview conducted with the Principal Investigator, Isaac Rodriguez.
The research guides from the American Folklife Center help researchers navigate the AFC collections by geographic region or by topic. One of our most recent guides, Latinx and Latin American Collections: Resources in the American Folklife Center, provides quick access to our Latinx and Latin American resources during National Hispanic Heritage Month.
As African American History Month concludes in 2020, the AFC is proud to announce the culmination of the Civil Rights History Project (CRHP) with the online release of the last batch of the 145 video interviews recorded with veteran activists for the collection. All the interviews are available on the Civil Rights History Project page, at …
At AFC, we’re excited about the Library’s new Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, Juan Felipe Herrera. He’s a fascinating person and a great poet, and he has a deep interest in folk culture. All this led him to join an AFC workshop, and to perform the result during his inaugural reading this September. We’d like …
On September 25th, the American Folklife Center and the Library of Congress’s Hispanic Division brought together eight scholars and activists for a day-long symposium titled Organizing Across the Boundaries: Strategies and Coalitions in the Struggle for Civil Rights and Social Justice. It was the last event for this fiscal year in our public programs series, …
