EMP|SFM Oral History Videos

Category: American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music

Video Title: East LA In The 70s

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Who: Bass player Fred Sanchez, Jesse "Chuy" Varella, Steve Salas, and Rudy Salas talk about identifying themselves and their bands as Chicano.

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Fred Sanchez: The Chicano movement was going full-force at that point, and we just happened to be named El Chicano, so right away we were adopted by that whole thing, and everybody looked at us as, "Oh, these are the guys that are doing this," and we really weren't. I mean, we, all we were, we had our name, that's what we were, but our music was speaking for us.

Jesse Varella: El Chicano was very important, because El Chicano took it to face value. They called themselves Chicano, and that's what we all identified with La Rasa movement, by calling ourselves Chicano, because Chicano in Mexico have always been a derogatory term. Why? Because it's an indigenous term, and the indigenous in Mexico are the lowest, you know, so the deal is that as a result of El Chicano saying, "Hey, we're Chicanos," it was a Chicano movement. It was a pride movement; we're proud of who we are.

Steve Salas: You know, back then, most of the bands were doing kind of the R&B things, and I think one of the reasons, though, was because, you know, at that time, the whole era was trying to fit in as Chicanos, as Mexicans in American society, mainstream, so it's almost as though we weren't afraid but we were reluctant, maybe, to let our cultural influences get in. But you can't stop it, you can't help it; it's going to come out.

So we began to get a little bit more courageous, a little bolder, and began to get more of a self-identification. So as the '70s approached, instead of calling ourselves, you know, the Jaguars, or calling ourselves, you know, the Romancers or something like that, we began to use cultural names like, you know Santana, like Malo, El Chicano Tierra, because by that time we developed enough of an identity and enough strength, you know, and that's how that came about, and as a result of the civil rights movement in the Chicano community.

The song "Barrio Suite" is, has been, you know, critiqued and been talked about as probably the most productive or, I don't know, the best song Tierra's ever recorded, and probably one of the best of the Chicano, that Chicano experience, and depicted the whole attitude and the lifestyle of the Chicano community, including cruising the schools, the demonstrations, anti-war, all the things that we were experiencing in the Chicano community we tried to put into that song. But the funny thing about it is that I began writing that song when I was at Stanford, and I remember at the time it was just rattling around in my head, that if I ever got the opportunity, that this is one of the songs that I would like to kind of, to make sure it got on an album, just to, you know, just to let people know where we stand, you know.

Rudy Salas: We had the honor of doing an album called Ti Su Puede with the United Farm Workers, and we did a couple of songs in there, and we met César Chávez, and he, you know, he came in and supported what we were doing, the whole thing, so César was always a major, well, a hero in our eyes, and someone... He was like our Martin Luther King, you know. And that kind of inspired us to get more involved in the whole Chicano movement, and to kind of direct our music toward that at that time. That's when we start, that's when we started doing our first album for, as Tierra. That was our biggest influence.