#8: Oldies

El Smokey

Tejanos like that Tejano music. The Californians go nuts for their banda. South Texas are mostly 80s head bangers. In LA and H-Town, there’s a Latino gangsta rap scene. How do you unite ECHs with such diverse musical taste?

Throw on some oldies, ese’.

“Have you ever tried/reaching out to the other side? I may be climbing on rainbows/but baby here it goes.”

For some reason, Smokey Robinson’s “Crusin’” or Stacy Lattisaw’s “Love On A Two-Way Street” can united ECHs better than any LULAC voter registration drive. No matter when your folks came North (if they ever did), Sam Cooke will relax ECHs as they iron clothes, wash their cars, and chill out in the backyard with the grill. Some sociologists believe maybe it’s because during the 1950s we started to see the development of the first large, Mexican-American middle class, and that when ECHs listen to oldies, it reminds the ECHs’ collective memory of that hopefulness. Or maybe, as poet Diana Marie Delgado argues, it’s a chance for those emotionally, exterior tough ECH males to open up via the lyrics of “Baby, I’m For Real.” Who knows. We do know that you haven’t felt true love unless you’ve seen 150 ECHs slow dancing at an Albuquerque casino to Gladys Knight.

The king of Oldies show is still Art Laboe’s “Killer Oldies” out of Southern California. (You can catch it Sunday evenings at killeroldies.com) For isolated ECHs living in New York, Florida or New England, it’s a great chance to kick back and think of home. That is, until ECHs hear the “shout outs” from girlfriends and children to men on lock down in various prisons. It gets the ECH thinking: that maybe…after all this education, after all that upward mobility, after all the reaching up, maybe, We’re On The Outside Looking In. Oh, How it Hurts.

But We Can Make It If We Try. Together.