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.”

Read more at the LA Times

Listen to LA Times reporter Sam Quiñones discuss this article at KPCC

Related: Tamborazo in the USA

Image: Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times

It’s been more than 20 years since CARA: Chicano Art Resistance and Affirmation exposed a new generation to the work of Chicano artists.

More recently, Cheech Marin has helped organize exhibitions on Chicano Art throughout the United States. Check out CHICANO, an online exhibit of Marin’s Chicano Art collection.

Two new exhibits look at the influence of Chicano Art on Los Angeles. Read more on the exhibits and the collaborative projects they’re a part of below.

UCLA to Host Two Exhibitions on the History of Chicano Art in Los Angeles

In the fall of 2011, the Fowler Museum at UCLA will present two exhibitions that explore the diverse contributions of Chicano artists to Los Angeles’ artistic development in the 1970s: “Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo” (Sept. 25–Feb. 26, 2012) and “Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement” (Oct. 16–Feb. 26, 2012).

The exhibitions are part of a collaboration with UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) called “L.A. Xicano” and are also part of the Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time,” a collaboration among more than 60 cultural institutions that tells the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene.

“These two exhibitions give a palpable sense of the expansive cultural presence of the Chicano community that emerged at the end of the 1960s,” said Chon Noriega, director of the CSRC and one of the curators of the “L.A. Xicano” project. “One is struck by the aesthetic range of the artwork, informed by both a bicultural sensibility and a critical engagement with art history, and unified by the artists’ ongoing commitment to art-based community making.”

Read more at UCLA Newsroom

For more information, visit the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

Images: Leonard Castellanos’ ‘RIFA’ (1972) / Oscar Castillo’s ‘La Mexicana Market’ (c. 1970s)

In August 1942 the murder of a young Mexican-American man ignited a firestorm in the City of the Angels. In no time at all, ethnic and racial tensions that had been building up over the years boiled over. Police fanned out across the city in a dragnet that netted 600 Mexican Americans. Among those accused of murder was a young “zoot-suiter” named Hank Leyvas — the poster boy for an entire generation of rebellious Mexican kids who refused to play by the old rules. As he and sixteen other boys headed to trial, the mood of the city turned violent. The deck was stacked against the defendants, and a verdict of guilty would spark a series of brutal riots. The convictions were ultimately overturned, but the city and its inhabitants would be forever changed.

Tensions between servicemen and civilians were on the rise as thousands of military men on leave poured into Los Angeles, seeing the city as a playground for booze, women, and fights. While many civilians tolerated them because of the war effort, others did not. Particularly in the segregated, ethnic enclaves of Los Angeles, unruly servicemen met stiff opposition from young men and women who refused to defer to the presumed prerogatives of white privilege. While white military men and civilian youth of all colors clashed in the streets, confrontations occurred most frequently between white servicemen and Mexican Americans, because they were the largest minority group in Los Angeles. 

Read more at PBS