The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-class Music

by Manuel H. Peña

Around 1930, a highly popular and distinctive type of accordion music, commonly known as conjunto , emerged among Texas-Mexicans. Manuel Peña'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, Peña 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 Martínez (El Huracán del Valle), Santiago Jiménez (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. Peña 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 Peña'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.

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read parts of this book as novel research, to learn more about popular music on the border during the 1930s. The author presents a thesis about the development of the conjunto form post-World War II. I suppose I am not the intended audience (or not of the proper era) because I accepted his thesis quite quickly and found his arguments repetitive, sometimes verging on circular. The main text felt very "padded." Still, it's an interesting read and Peña has done great work preserving the stories of musical legends in their own simple words. I enjoyed reading the interview excerpts in Spanish and English.