When I was a kid and dividing time between Tennessee and Texas, there was a lot I loved about Tennessee. The woods up there are prettier than ours, for one thing. There are seasons. I miss that.
But my god would I get homesick up there. It never failed. And what I missed most, aside from the stable family situation my grandparents had down here, was Tex-Mex culture.
I'd hear a Flaco record, or see the gatefold of ZZ Top's Leo's feast on Tres Hombres, and man, I'd literally start to cry. Literally. I’d weep.
Or act out in other ways.
One day, when I was about eight, my mom left me in our VW van out in front of a convenience store in a salt-and-pepper neighborhood in Nashville. We had a tape deck in the car, and I was in there jamming out to a homemade tape of Flaco and his daddy Santiago Sr. We had that album courtesy of my stepfather Chip Phillips, a San Antonian who missed his hometown even more than I missed Houston.
So anyway I got so charged up on this little one-white-tot fandango I was having there in the van while mama was in the store I threw my little fist in the air. The black guy on the pay phone in front of the convenience store — I remember him in an army coat, about the right age to be a Vietnam vet — took in this scene: little white boy alone in a hippy wagon, jamming out to conjunto, and apparently throwing him a Black Power fist…And just laughed, shook his head, and also raised his fist.
Anyway, here is what I was probably jamming out to. Thanks to @Chris Strachwitz for recording it.
And thanks to all my Mexican American friends for making this state so wonderfully vibrant, culturally rich, and economically more dynamic than old-timey Tenna-fucking-see.
Just the other week I was in a La Michoacana grocery down in Bay City in Matagorda County. I kind of see that town as the gateway to South Texas — it’s a full 60 percent Hispanic now. So I was in there and had to hit the men’s room, and while I was in there, what did I hear but someone in the hallway outside singing…
Ya no quiero que me beses ni besarte
Ni mirarte ni siquiera oir tu voz
Por que supe que tenias otro amante
Y en Laredo ya tenias otros dos
Te gusta mucho el baile
Y bailas al compas
Te vas hasta Laredo
Y quieres mas y mas
And so I left the restroom while that voice was still singing this eighty year old song about a bad woman from the borderlands, expecting the singer to be an old man reminiscing about the hits of his youth.
Nope, it was a masked kid of about 17 pushing a broom in a Michoacana in Bay City Texas, keeping the old songs alive in a way I can’t imagine in my own Anglo culture. And reminding me why I can never leave this state.
I love this story. The best of Texas.
Totally get this