Customer Reviews

Musica Tejana: The Cultural Economy of Artistic Transformation (University of Houston Series in Mexican American Studies, Sponsored by the Cente)

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If you grew up in South Texas, as I did, then musica Tejana was as pervasive as country and western or rock and roll. In the 1960s you could hear Sunny Ozuna and the Sunliners or Little Joe and the Latinaires. Sunny made it in Top 40 with "Talk to Me" and then returned to his Tejano roots. Little Joe would become La Familia and shape a generation of musicians with songs like "La nubes" and become associated with the rise of Jose Angel Gutierrez and La Raza Unida political movement. Manual Pena gives you the history of various genres of musica Tejana from conjuntos to the late superstar Selena. No other book has managed to cover so much territory and still offer such a coherent view of music and culture.

Pena's book is full of a lot of good and well researched information. My biggest problem with the book is that it's so terribly dense. I'm of the mind that you can be informative and compelling in your scholarly writing but yet still be accessible to many types of people-- not just other academics.

It's important for people to see themselves in history in order to feel as if their history matters. Music can be, after all, one of the most democratic forms of expression and therefore is an excellent method by which to connect to people.

Pena's book doesn't reach out to would-be students of Mexican American music-- it sits in a stuffy university office and waits for the students to come to it.