From Pachuco boogie to Latin jazz: Mexican Americans, popular music, and urban culture in Los Angeles, 1940--1965.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the diverse communities, contradictory identities, cross-cultural productions, and inter-racial improvisations of Mexican Americans, using music as a barometer of assimilation. Comparing the Chicano pachuco and African American zoot suiter subcultures of the war years uncovers distinctly Mexican American styles that influenced Anglo conceptions of cool, from the drape shape to the cholo look. During the big band era, Chicano jitterbug dancers and swing musicians adapted African American styles to speak to their own sensibilities, a process that eventually produced pachuco boogie woogie music. These kinds of cultural exchanges expanded and intensified as Mexican Americans consumed and performed rhythm and blues and rock and roll, as well as Latin styles like rumba, bolero, Latin jazz, mambo, and cha cha cha. Using race, space, and class as analytical lenses, the study documents how Mexican Americans became possessively invested in whiteness, embracing varied genres of black music while distancing themselves from actual black people. Chicanos walked the color line, their racial indeterminacy giving them slight but significant advantages over African Americans, yet they still faced racial discrimination, police harassment, and exoticization as dark others. At the same time, Mexican Americans were prominent participants in successive music scenes, each with democratic spaces of multicultural urban civility. The resultant public culture challenged the prevailing conservative climate of residential segregation and social regulation. Finally, Los Angeles Chicanos exhibited class fluidity and instability despite the formation of an incipient Mexican American middle class in the suburbs east of East Los Angeles. Drawing from primary documents, archived oral histories, and extensive personal interviews, the work introduces new voices into, and builds bridges between, Urban, Cultural, and Latino/a Studies; Music, United States, and Chicano/a History. While earlier Chicano histories of the era focused on the role of ethnic leadership, this study focuses on popular culture and everyday people. By revealing previously hidden histories and unacknowledged affinities, the dissertation demonstrates not only how Chicanos and Latinos changed the racial geography and cultural values of a segregated city, but ultimately, how they transformed the feelings, the flavor, and the face of American culture during the postwar period.