New Freddy Fender exhibit paints full picture of Tejano artist’s career and hurdles

The hometown of Baldemar Huerta, better known by his stage name, Freddy Fender, will soon honor the trailblazing Tejano musician in a first-of-its-kind exhibit at the San Benito Cultural Heritage Museum.

“Freddy Fender: Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Baldemar Huerta,” is the first to ever work with the artist’s estate. Running from Sept. 26 to Nov. 9, the exhibit will work to emphasize and display Fender’s generational impact as an artist across genres.

Featuring Fender’s music, memorabilia and his multiple appearances on TV and film, the historians curating the exhibit hope to highlight the artist’s legacy in a way never seen – or heard – before. 

Veronique Medrano, a musician and archivist whose own work has been greatly influenced by Fender, is one of those historians. She joined the Standard to talk about what visitors can expect when visiting the exhibit. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: Now, Freddy Fender’s face used to literally loom over the city. I remember driving down toward town from Austin and seeing his image on a huge water tower. I trust he’s still there.

To start, how would you describe Fender to someone who’s never heard his music?

Veronique Medrano: I would definitely describe it as soulful and powerful Tex-Mex country.

An artist’s portrait of the young Freddy Fender seen in the exhibit. Courtesy of Veronique Medrano

When you were growing up, how did you get into Freddy Fender?

I got into Freddy Fender right in the beginnings of my Tejano career, funnily enough, because I am just a bilingual artist. And so as someone who is a bilingual artist, you kind of try to gravitate to other bilingual artists. And it’s literally right in my backyard. Brownsville and San Benito are like just sisters, right next to each other.

And so given that, as I was kind of embarking on a bilingual acceptance of my songwriting and my musicality and my artwork, I stumbled upon Freddy Fender and his history and his career. And my God, I think I was barely getting into high school or like ending middle school.

So he was such a big part of the Rio Grande Valley. And so to be able to kind of like accept that and really dig into it in my own musical career is really how it all started.

You know, it’s interesting. He had some hits, not just in the U.S. He had success in Mexico and South America, too. I think he, in a sense, translated Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel” once upon a time – back when he was known as “El Bebop Kid,” right?

Yeah. And he actually was not just “El Bebop Kid.” He also went by “Eddie con los Shades.” He went by his given name, Baldemar Huerta.

So, yeah, he did a cover of “Don’t Be Cruel” by Elvis Presley in Mexico and South America. And it was pushed out there by Falcon Records, and it went No. 1.

We’ve talked in the past about how institutions, though, like the Country Music Hall of Fame, haven’t really given Latino artists like Fender the credit they deserve. How might this exhibit remedy that?

It’s really just clarifying every bit of his history and leaving no stone unturned.

I think when we talk about history, many times, all of us, even myself, can sometimes get at like just the surface level of an artist or a person’s true depth. And that leaves a lot of anecdotal conversations and hearsay and all of these different things … Like it just kind of leaves you in a gray area.

This exhibit doesn’t do that. It leaves no gray area for the impact of his career. We’re really digging in and educating people on just how far and how wide his musical background went and his history impacted.

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It wasn’t just music, either. Sometimes he’d appear on television, too, right?

Yeah, he would. Not just television – even film.

You know, one of the films that he came out in, it kind of was this local success. It was called “She Came to the Valley,” and he played Pancho Villa. And that made No. 1 on the box office, locally.

And then that tape got sent to Robert Redford. And that is what convinced Robert Redford to extend an invitation for an audition for him to come out in “The Milagro Beanfield War.”

Wow, that is amazing. Now, while he has been celebrated, especially in recent years, I think a lot that’s left out of that story – and this may be what you’re alluding to – is how much he had to endure to really achieve his success. How does the exhibit get at that part of the story?

I will say, you know, what we get at with this exhibit is really centering it on how much adversity he went through within the music industry: Changing his name and bringing to light the fact that he had to change his name so many times in an industry that maybe wasn’t as kind and as accepting of a Mexicano, a person who was a migrant, who did do migrant work and came from deep South Texas, an area that has constantly been vilified. And then overcame those odds over and over and over again.

He was the underdog. Nobody expected, after his original 1964 release of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” for him to come back 10 years later. Especially for the time – once you’re arrested for two “herbal cigarettes.”

You know, other people didn’t get the strictness that he had to deal with. He wasn’t allowed to perform for that whole time because of the extent of his parole. In today’s time, that would be seen as unconscionable, because that is his work. But he still kept working.

And so those things that he had to endure and overcome, he did it through music. He overcame them with art. And that’s how we show the true strength of him as a person and him as an artist.

Courtesy of Veronique Medrano

I understand that in putting together this exhibit, you worked with Fender’s widow, Evangeline Huerta. Has she had a chance to see the exhibit?

We’ve been talking for the last two years, actually. Funny enough, she listened to the Texas Standard interview, and that’s how we finally got together.

Is that right?

I’m not joking. Somebody sent her the interview about the Hall of Fame petition that we did together. And, you know, she came around and was like, “hey, let’s talk.”

And to answer your question, she hasn’t seen the exhibit yet, but she is going to. We worked together with her, with the artifacts. These are artifacts that are from their private collection. But what we show is only a fraction of what will come out in the future.

Tell us about some of the artifacts and items that will be on display.

So we have his gold plaques that were presented to him when he hit his huge record sales for “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” – the album, not just the song – from both here in the States and in Canada.

We do have the outfit that he wore for the last few years of his life, but it was the outfit that he wore when he got his induction in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We have performance outfits and never-before-seen photos and just documents from his life.

“Freddy Fender: Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Baldemar Huerta,” runs from Sept. 26 to Nov. 9 at the San Benito Cultural Heritage Museum in San Benito, Texas.

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