Haley Buls

HON 240
Professor Berríos-Miranda
10/30/18
The Cities of American Sabor: Los Angeles and New York
Listening to the sounds of the Rock and Roll hit with a cha-cha-cha rhythm, “Louie

Louie” by The Kingsmen, or the Latin dance hit “Mambo Gozon” by Tito Puente that helped

bring mambo to international acclaim, one can hear the myriad ways that Latin music has shaped

fUS popular culture. Latin American musicians have and continue to produce the textural

landscape of US music, through instrumentation, genres, and innovations in rhythm. In American

Sabor: Latinos and Latinas in US Popular Music, authors Marisol Berrios-Miranda, Shannon

Dudley, and Michelle Habell-Pallan celebrate and trace the history of Latin American influence

through five cities, representing distinct regional sounds and contexts: New York, Los Angeles,

Miami, San Antonia, and San Francisco. Of these, New York and Los Angeles were two cities

that were hugely influential in shaping US popular music. Through an exploration of the genres

and musicians, I will argue that Los Angeles and New York produced distinct contributions to

US popular music based on their socio-cultural and geographic context.

The Los Angeles scene produced pachuco and an Eastside sound distinct to the Mexican-

American working class living there and the geographical sprawl. The pachuco counterculture of

the 1930s and 40s was borne out of the Mexican-American working class. Fighting alienation by

US anglo society and forming a regional identity specific to their experience, Angelos

participated in the musical and cultural pachuco movement. The name was formed out of the

geographical and cultural landscape of peoples migrating from Mexico to Los Angles through El

Paso, called “chuco”, who self-identified as ‘para chuco’ (Berrios-Miranda, et al., 77). This
counterculture produced music mixing jazz elements of the time with Latin styles, such as Don

Tosti’s “Pachuco boogie” in 1948. Laced with a boogie texture laid down by the piano and

saxophone, Tosti raps in calo, a hybrid Spanish-English, about the pachuco experience in Los

Angeles. Pachuco exemplifies one of the many culturally salient cornerstones of the Chicano

scene in Los Angeles, a scene in which the socio-political context Chicanos lived in influenced

fashion, culture, musical styles, interracial mixing, and the expression of identity that produced

musical styles from pachuco in the 1930s and 40s to an Eastside sound and Chicano rock in the

1950s and 1960s. Youth living in the urban sprawl of the Eastside and listening to rock and roll

on the highway formed a rich Chicano sound that hit the mainstream and shaped American rock

music. Ritchie Valenzuela rock and roll hit “La Bamba” in 1958 mixed Mexican folk music roots

with the rock sound of the time, and was a breakthrough in English-speaking radio. Fast-forward

to 1974, Pat and Lolly Vasquez released their own hit “Come and Get Your Love” featured the

Chicano-accented chant. This sampling of songs demonstrates the breadth the Chicano rock and

the Eastside sound of L.A. brought to the mainstream, either in instrumentations like the electric

organ, percussions like the congas or bongos, mariachi and Chicano falsettos and vocal styles, or

in English-spoken and Spanish-spoken rock and roll.

The New York scene produced genres such as the mambo and cha cha cha that reached

international acclaim wide spread influence out of the context of Puerto Rican and Nuyoricans

and their connection to the Caribbean. In the 1940s, at the same that Chicano youth were

donning zoot suits and experimenting with their own style, Nuyoricans were producing hugely

popular mambo and cha cha cha dance hall music that “defined the popularity of ‘Latin music’ in

the mainstream” (Berrios-Miranda, et al., 45). Puerto Ricans with a connection between the

mainland and the island brought Afro-Caribbean dance genres in US popular music, mixing jazz
elements with precussion and form, such as a call-and-response coro from the Cuban son, and

claves, congas, bongos, and the signature guiro that produces the cha cha cha rhythm (Berrios-

Miranda, 51). One artist that exemplifies the Latin dance scene of New York at this time is Tito

Puente, and his song “Mambo Gozon” released in 1958. The song features a call and response

between male and female vocalists, an introduction typical of the Cuban son, along with

innovations like dramatic breaks to highlight the percussion of the timbales. The New York

scene popularized dance hall mambo such as Tito Puente’s work in the first half of the century

while laying down the foundation of complex polyrhythms in US popular music that would

shape R&B, rock and roll, and the birth of Salsa in New York in the 1970s. This polyrhythm

arose from Afro-Cuban roots, in which Latin bands played a “repeated rhythmic/melodic

pattern... called montuno”, and the clave and tumbao rhythms (Berrios-Miranda, et al., 57). It is

this sound that is clearly recognizable in myriad genres, such as the cha cha cha in isolation at

the beginning of the Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil” in 1968, and the groove of R&B

and disco.

These genres, styles, and forms arose from the regional and socio-cultural contexts of

these massively influential sites of Latin American music, Los Angeles and New York. The

pachuco and Chicano movement of Los Angeles produced rock and roll and vocal styles and the

Nuyoricans influenced the polyrhythmic and Latin style of mainstream music for decades to

come in the United States. The roots of US popular music in these cities is shaped by the

communities that lived them, illuminating the importance of communities in forging a style and

sound. Though these cities are hubs of activity and record labels, the future is ripe for

communities of different locations or outside of the United States to engage with and shape their

own style and US music.