Voz de Pueblo Chicano: Sustainability, Teaching, and Intangible Cultural Transfer in Conjunto Music

With a quick and violent spring thunderstorm flooding the streets and intersections on the west side of San Antonio, I was late to arrive at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center (GCAC) in May 2010 for the second annual conjunto bajo sexto (twelve-string Mexican bass) workshop. But the weather delayed the whole workshop, so I had the opportunity to observe the button accordion workshop already in progress. It was led by Joel Guzman, a legendary and progressive conjunto accordionist and Grammy award winner of international renown. Guzman cheerily taught the basics to a crop of beginners and seemed to be as engaged in his teaching as it was possible to be despite the simplicity of the material and the distraction of water dripping from several leaks in the Guadalupe Theater ceiling into buckets and garbage cans. The accordion workshop students sat in a circle getting individualized advice on technique from Guzman, who calibrated his advice to the varying level of each player. He taught some simply how to hold the accordion and demonstrated elaborate runs and tunes to others. When several drenched latecomers arrived without accordions of their own, workshop organizer Juan Tejeda ran out into the rain and returned with accordions protected in plastic bags to distribute to the students to use. Despite the intensity of the storm and the star power of the workshop leader, the feel in the room was welcoming, instructive, communal, and fun. It was also productive- most people left the workshop able to play a basic polka, the core of conjunto music. When Max Baca arrived for the bajo sexto workshop, he was surprised that two people (me and a retired machinist and former conjunto radio disc jockey who did his own instrument repairs) had weathered the storm and stayed in the leaking theater to learn the fundamentals. Like Guzman, Baca is not just an accomplished professional musician but also a star. He founded and fronts a band called Los Texmaniacs, which won a Grammy award for "Best Tejano Album," has performed around the world at various festivals and military bases, and has been chosen (or perhaps designated) by the Smithsonian Latino Center as the example of conjunto music for the "Smithsonian Folkways 7rac/zaowes/Traditions series of Latino music albums" (Borders y Bailes). To my surprise, Baca was nonplussed at the low attendance in the workshop and proved to be thoroughly involved in teaching bajo sexto fundamentals for several hours. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a comparable situation in which the top players in the world such as Guzman and Baca offered instruction in the fundamentals of their music at very low expense and without the slightest indication of boredom, attitude, or self-interest. They were straightforwardly interested in teaching. Baca organized his workshop to teach everything from basic accompaniment for a polka to more elaborate and difficult techniques for boleros. He taught elaborate runs of notes (adornos), bajo sexto set up, varieties of technique and style, and told stories about his own experiences playing and touring around the country and world with his own band and with the biggest players in conjunto music. Eating Tex-Mex food never being far behind music making in Texas, Baca even graciously bought us lunch down the street from the theater. He also took us along to what is a conjunto music pilgrimage site in San Antonio, the Macias family bajo sexto workshop. There the Macias family has created and continued to build the most legendary instruments for both conjunto and norteno music for three generations (Burr; Hernandez 128; Young 131-34). The Macias family has also long handmade what are considered the finest bajo strings. Although handmade in a labor-intensive process, these strings are in fact not much more expensive than the commercially available sets. I watched George Macias, the grandson of founder Martin Macias, make the strings one at a time on a machine built by his father. …