Think Mexican

Tuba’s ‘Thunk Thunk’ in High Demand Amongst Mexican Partygoers in Los Angeles

Before he came to Southern California in 2002, Fidel Bernabe played trumpet in a small town in Mexico and believed himself to be very talented.

Los Angeles had many bandas — Mexican brass bands that play dance music at parties and nightclubs — that worked year-round. Surely there must be a band that could use his gifts, he thought.

But once here, he found competition intense. Bernabe rarely found two nights of trumpeting work and had to take a day job in a sewing factory.

“You come to get out of the hole,” he said. “You think you’re going to grab money in piles. You get here and you realize it’s not as easy as you imagined.”

Then, by accident, Bernabe found the tuba. He saw a deal for one in L.A. and bought it for his brother, a tuba player in Chicago. When his brother couldn’t pay, Bernabe kept the instrument and decided to learn it on his own. For more than a year, he practiced for hours after his sewing job.

Tubas were in growing demand. By 2007, he was playing five gigs a week — sometimes two a night. He found all that he’d imagined in America. He quit his job, got married, had three kids and supported them with his tuba.

“The tuba has radically changed my life,” he said.

Bernabe is part of what he and other banda musicians are calling Southern California’s “tuba revolution.” The mania for the instrument arrived from Mexico several years ago and is fueled by the large number of house parties that occur here every weekend. Immigrants who once were too poor to hold such parties in their homeland now view a tuba-equipped banda as a sign of having arrived.

Tuba players say partygoers now throw wadded dollar bills into their instruments — sometimes so many that they clog the pipes.

“We have millions of people in Southern California of Mexican origin,” said Jesse Tucker, a banda tuba player in Pomona. “They all throw parties. They all have quinceaneras; they all get married. And every group can use a tuba.”