Mexican culture has long been entwined with the American Southwest, enduring shifting borders and politics for centuries. Throughout that history, regional Mexican music dispersed and evolved – from bandas and boleros to those genres closer to home, like conjunto and, of course, Tejano.
Now, it’s a new era of popular Latin music, and these longstanding genres have further evolved and found widespread listenership in the mainstream.
From the corridos tumbados of once-San Antonio resident Peso Pluma to the runaway success of the Rio Grande Valley’s Grupo Frontera and their take on norteño, regional Mexican music is in the midst of a renaissance.
Such is the observation of Cat Cardenas, who highlighted the many genres that can be found under the regional Mexican music umbrella in an interactive article for Texas Highways.
Cardenas joined the Standard to break it all down. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: So give us a bit of an overview for those who might not have looked at this article yet. What all does it cover, and what inspired you to break it all down the way you did?
Cat Cardenas: So this was actually part of a larger package that I worked on with Texas Highways. They were doing a whole issue dedicated to the Rio Grande Valley. And as part of that, I wrote a little bit about conjunto and the history of it in Texas.
And through that, we kind of thought it would be a fun idea to do a little interactive map, kind of explaining all the different relationships and the connections between some of the regional Mexican music genres that are really popular and how they have kind of taken root in Texas and the relationships between them. So that’s kind of what birthed the idea for the interactive.
Well, I really like the way you have a whole trajectory of how these genres evolved or are still evolving. I think even for many Texans, it can be hard to kind of suss out the distinct differences between, say, conjunto and norteño. And then eventually you do get into how Tejano evolved from them.
Did you always have an ear for those differences, or did you learn a bit more from working on this project?
Absolutely I did. It was fun working on this because pretty much everyone that I talked to had different definitions and different criteria when it came to, you know, their specific vision of Tejano, norteño, conjunto … Depending on where you are in the state, you are going to get some slight variations in those things. And that was what made it really fun.
I definitely, growing up in Texas, used to confuse some of the genres, or I wouldn’t have been able to, you know, have the precision to differentiate between them that I feel like I have a little bit more now, since working on this piece.