The Center for Punk Arts

As previously discussed, American punk and hardcore is a convergence culture with a tremendous Hispanic underbelly, which includes the contributions, at the very least, of members from the Zeros (pictured above), the Brat (known as the “Brown Blondie”), Los Illegals, the Plugz, Go-Go’s, Los Lobos, the Gears, the Plimsouls, the Eyes, Nervous Gender, the Odd Squad, The Rent, Catholic Discipline, Adolescents, Overkill, Mad Society, the Detonators, Detox, China White, Black Flag, the Offenders, Verbal Abuse, the Faction, No Mercy, Beowulf, MDC, Naked Raygun, Heart Attack, Agnostic Front, the Bags, and Saccharine Trust. Yet, some ambiguity and ambivalence in terms of race relations also saturate the scene. For instance, in the fanzine Outcry, published in 1980, Greg Ginn describes Black Flag’s early singer Ron Reyes (aka Chavo Pederast) as half Mexican, half black, while in the documentary Decline of Western Civilization Ron tells the camera that he is from Puerto Rico, yet no one mentions that drummer Robo (Robert Valverde) is from Cali, Columbia. In 1984, the Olympic auditorium, which hosted massive hardcore shows, arranged an international punk show to coincide with the Olympic games, featuring the Dead Kennedys, BGK (Belgium), Raw Power (Italy), but also the much overlooked Mexican hardcore band Solution Mortal.

Yet, around the same time period, a supposedly “Mariachi band” opened for Public Image Limited at the Olympic, which led to spit and trash being thrown on stage. This band was actually Los Lobos, who had been pressed into opening for the band by the other local band on the bill, the Plugz, led by Tito Larriva, a highly regarded LA punk (just note the way the band is introduced on a New Wave Theater clip by Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks), who later formed the Cruzados and Tito and Tarantula. Author and gig goer Don Snowden, in the intro to Make the Music Go Bang, zeroed in on the Plugz’s cover of “Rumble” by Link Wray at that gig, attesting that is was nearly sublime, a “totally, utterly” crushing version. Louis/Louie Perez, guitarist and singer for Los Lobos, has illustrated his own impressions of the overall gig in his essay “Weird Hair Pendejolandia,” featured in the same book:

I guess [Tito] convinced somebody that a bunch of unsuspecting Mexican folklies might be a laugh playing to a hall full of purple mohawks. We survived about ten minutes through a tidal wave of spit and 8,500 middle fingers before taking a break for it when the serious projectiles started to fly. The friends we brought along were near tears by the time we came off stage. But, once our hearts stopped pounding and the adrenaline subsided, we knew we were on to something… (qtd. in Snowden 112: 1997)

What the band drew from the ruckus was much more than a heightened, anxious, physical reaction to the loathing and spiteful energy in the room. It was transformational, a kind of rites of passage that marked them as new participants in an edgy era that somehow bridged two worlds, even when each side exhibited ethnocentric tendencies, which at times was very difficult to navigate, but well worth it. As Perez explains it:

I guess to some Chicanos we were doing it all wrong, we as Mexican-Americans had our own rebellion our own concerns about equality and racial attitudes, but as musicians we had discovered a way to bring down walls and erase those imaginary boundaries that divide…there was a comraderie and sharing of experience that I have yet to feel again…I’ll look back smiling at those Hollywood nights where, for a brief period of time, we stood shoulder to shoulder forming a bridge between East (which Perez deems sacred and safe, full of stucco churches, tortillerias, backyard parties, and the sounds of Sunday mariachis) and West [L.A.] (qtd. in Snowden 113: 1997).

In a folkloric sense, these moments represent a liminal time, betwixt and between, when the old binary dividers dissolved or blurred, when rules, conventions, and social mores were temporarily suspended, and new possibilities emerged, however briefly. Looking back, one might consider what group presented a more punk rock performance, given the context of punk, in which rule breaking is supposed to be a priority. At the very least, the rule breaking meant briefly blurring borders and identities, culminating in what Snowden has dubbed a “Eastward drift” that might have began when the Plugz moved their label Fatima Records to a 7th. Street loft. However, some backlash was inevitable, including, as Snowden suggests, bands like the Brat and others being “barrio-ized by clubs into playing East LA” clubs solely , except when “bands like X used their power and had them open gigs” (152: 1997). Hence, border crossing was never easy, without repercussion, or free from the punk community testing its own core values.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, the intersections between Hispanic and punk culture were manifest in multiple ways, even as Really Red outlined the mistreatment and suffering of Hispanics at the hands of notoriously brutal police in songs like “Teaching You the Fear”:

One Chicano, with his hands cuffed behind his back
Beat him bout the head, let him know where he’s at (he’s in Texas!)
Take one Chicano, with his hands cuffed behind his back
Toss him in the bayou, watch him sink like a rat
Teaching you the fear!

Two of the most legendary, well-admired, rooted, and fervent Texas clubs of the era, Tacoland (Ram Ayala) in San Antonio, and Rauls (Joseph Gonzales and Roy “Raul” Gomez) in Austin, were owned by Hispanics. Though Rauls closed in 1981, after being sold to Steve Hayden, Tacoland operated until 2005, when Ayala and his doorman were gunned down by an intruder [See a Black Flag flyer from Rauls below]. Both of these clubs were key centers, helping to germinate the nascent local punk scenes while also serving as temporary stops for innumerable touring acts, marking central Texas as a multicultural punk hotbed.

Hispanic artists have also served as indelible contributors to the style and overall history of punk gig flyers and posters, ranging from the work of Jaime Hernandez, who later penned the celebrated comic Love and Rockets, to Victor Gastelum (see flyer below), who drew many such flyers for Sluglord productions and later worked for Greg Ginn (Black Flag) at SST, to Ric Cruz, an Austin native who made many of the Huns posters, and finally the irreverant Frank Kozik, whose mother is Spanish. When asked about his art by Austin Chronicle in 1997, Kozik revealed the intense dichotomy that viewers experience:

“Some people think it’s the greatest fucking pop art deconstructionist cultural trip in the world, ” says Kozik frankly — Frank is always frank. “Other people say it’s pure fucking bullshit.”

Kozik began working for Club Foot in the mid-1980s, first producing DIY Xerox flyers for the likes of the Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid, which included lead singer and poster artist David Yow, later of Jesus Lizard. Such artists adeptly mixed graphic arts traditions with fluency and fecundity, not just for the sake of producing well-crafted art or exhibiting technical prowess but also for the sheer utility of getting people to shows. As Sluglord producer David Swinson told me in Spring 2008, Gastelum’s “flyer art was responsible for drawing large audiences. In fact, other promoters tried to do the same thing. His work was so special that people would save the flyers for years. I was in Baltimore recently, visiting a record store and found copies of his old fliers on the wall of the bookstore.”

If not for these Hispanic artists, crucial venues, bands, and punk history (and lore) would have been at a loss. In addition, these artists de-stabilize the various and rampant one-dimensional, crude, fixed, racist stereotypes of Hispanics as low wage, low tech workers/grunts and shiftless barrio-dwelling “invisible minorities,” which were not projected just by the discourse of mainstream communities but the punk community as well, as demonstrated by the lyric “I’m a Chollo” by the ‘comic punk band’ the Dickies, who were signed to A&M at the time it was released(1980).

I’m a chollo what can i do
I threw my life away now i’m a chollo…

I used to be a surferman
Bought me an impala and i sold my van
Got a pair of khakis and a penectan
Now i’m a full fledged mexican

Well i’m a chollo man
not a bit of puerto rican
i’m a chollo man

I changed my name to paco
Went to the store and got a taco
It made me feel real macho
Now all my friends are kavacho

Hence, the work of Hispanic bands and artists interrogate , offset, and even neutralize these belittling and jingoistic punk lyrics and worldviews.

Suicidal Tendencies, one of the first hardcore bands to be aired on MTV, were a prominent presence on the Repo Man (released in 1984, produced by former Monkees member Mike Nesmith) soundtrack, alongside the Plugz and Circle Jerks. They also played Alaska and were featured on an episode of Miami Vice. One of the issues confronting Suicidal included questions concerning whether or not the band fostered a gang or gang-like following, which possibly later emulated in a parallel trend: the fan base of bands like Sublime. Mired in elements of race, power, and turf, the issue symbolizes both subcultural and mainstream unease with the emergence of marginal and outsider groups within punk rock itself, especially as punk rock shifted from Hollywood’s small, insular scene into the wider suburbs, where the growing youth movements could not escape or neutralize their own contradictory response to “rising above.”

Examining the Black Flag lyric “Rise Above,” one might question whether white youth, seeking transgression through commodity culture, believed the line “we’re born with a chance…I am gonna have my chance…we are tired of your abuse, try and stop us it’s no use, ” applied to young Hispanic punks from East L.A. or beyond. Daniel Traber has noted how Craig Lee of the Bags described the Canterbury (the “Chelsea Hotel of the West,” managed by a Rastafarian minister, and home to punk luminaries such as Geza X, Don Bolles, and Black Randy, and the drummer of the Weirdos, not to mention the Extremes, the Deadbeats, and the Plungers too), as full of black pimps and drugs, overcrowded East Asian immigrants and dealers, and Chicano families. He played in the band with Hispanic singer Alice Bag and guitarist Pat Bag (Patricia Rainone), who actually left East L.A. to live at the Canterbury too. Using the rundown locale as a kind of lyrical staging ground, a way to demarcate native space against the burgeoning lore of foreign British punk, the band wrote “We Don’t Need the English,” which rails against the “boring songs of anarchy,” the British code of dress, and even figuratively bans the British from the Canterbury (note: The Sex Pistols, who penned “Anarchy in the UK,” did not play Los Angeles, but they did play San Francisco in 1978, and guitarist Steve Cook did help engineer some songs by the Avengers). However, when discussing the strident song — rife with protest and blatant localism — Alice Bag provided cultural, historical, and even psycho-geographical context to the website Agony Shorthand:

When I saw the Weirdos for the first time, that was what did it for me. They were instantly the greatest band in the world and no one could convince me otherwise. So yes, I felt that Los Angeles had the greatest band in the world, so that naturally meant we were the best. That’s where “We Don’t Need The English” on the “Yes L.A.” comp came from, the confidence that we were not a pale imitation of some other, better scene somewhere else, but that we had our own distinct sound and style which was the equal of any other punk scene. You have to understand that what people think of as the early L.A. scene literally consisted of no more than 50-100 misfits who all congregated within a one-mile radius of the Masque and Canterbury Apartments. In a city as sprawling as Los Angeles, ours was highly concentrated and very tight-knit community. We all knew each other. We did pretty much nothing aside from party, work on our bands, art, writing, fashion…my Canterbury roommate Sheila and I worked at an Arby’s Roast Beef for about two weeks before we got fired but that was as serious as we got about employment. (2005)

As Traber notes in his essay “White Minority,” the Canterbury revealed disquieting fault lines between “the Others,” ethnic residents, and the seekers of transgression through practice — whites (though some Hispanic punks too) — who could never really relinquish their relationship to real power and privilege, except through bursts of violence, which some punk residents endured. This violence, both real and metaphorical, both transgressive and transformational, was very mediated and complex: punks often left home because of violence, molestation and abuse; some fled and sought places that many would consider distressing — “no man’s land” and marginal, run-down, edgy neighborhoods. Some exhibited nuanced tendencies of people smoldering with pain and self-hate, with a deep and vexing psychological dimension. In an article called “Violence Girl,” her web site maintained by her husband, Alice Bag candidly explores how these multiple forces collided in her, instigating a kind of personal punk metamorphosis:

“All the violence that I’d stuffed down inside of me for years came screaming out … all anger I felt towards people who had treated me like an idiot as a young girl because I was the daughter of Mexican parents and spoke broken English, all the times I’d ben picked on by peers because I was over-weight and wore glasses, all the impotent rage that I had towards my father beating my mother just exploded.”

The sense of multiplying, disheartening Otherness — the sense of gender exclusion and disparity, the sense of domestic violence and family bonds, the anguish of an imperfect body in a country manifesting plastic perfection, the immigrant dream meeting prejudice heads-on … all of these became distilled into the punk body, the site of negation and negotiation. The world Alice Bag encountered was the one still run by those characters inhabiting the discursive space of songs by the punk band X in songs like “Los Angeles,” in which the woman, the main character, flees the urban milieu, disgusted by the niggers, Jews, Mexicans, and the idle rich. The same city that white families had built suburbs as a bulwark against, the same one they abandoned a decade earlier for miles of freeways and mallification, was being re-colonized (reverse white flight) by the white punks. Those unwillingly to occupy the fringes and wade through the slums were the middle class targets of bands, like the Avengers, who sung “White Niggers,” focusing on those moribund sheep working routine jobs, no longer rebelling as they try to get ahead in the blank, American, whitewashed dream.

The vitriol stemming from such a disconnect with the empty, unsatisfying, suburbanized ethos of America was in part the center of the pithy, puncturing performances by the likes of Alice Bag, for she notes on her blog section, Diary of a Bad Housewife: “I realize now that I could never in a million years be the type of singer who could deliver a controlled performance. My performances were chaotic, aggressive and therapeutic. In the many years since my days in the L.A. punk scene, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many young people and I’m convinced that being Latina and being a woman with a proto-hardcore attitude are the two things that left the biggest impression on others” (2007). Hence, Chicana and punk identities seemingly blended into a twin engine of desire and resistance.

In Make the Music Go Bang, Fred “Phast Freddie” Patterson pictures the demise of the Canterbury in these loose terms: “The hipsters left when the vice and the lice became too much too handle” (27: 1997). Traber notes that the punks eventually left the Canterbury, but adds, not without experiencing some negotiated, temporary outsiderness and reinforing many assumptions about people of color, thus normalizing the stereotypes even in punk discourse. He continues:
The only viable alternative for white kids uninterested in the American dream is to reject the privilege of their skin color by emulating the lifestyle of marginalized subjects – safe from outside control to the extent that they can remain hidden from and ignored by the larger society like other “oppressed” social groups… The very interest in a life typified as “tough” is indicative of punks accepting the stereotype of virility attached to certain racial (most commonly African-American) and lower class identities … (28, 43).

Support for this insight might be embodied by an interview with the Fuck-Ups from 1983, whose song “White Boy’ (“White boy, have some pride/White boy fight, and white boy kill”), situates its sense of contested space in the Mission District of San Francisco, where the singer Bob Noxious lived in a storefront. He tells Maximum Rock’n’Roll that he could walk out of his front door and see a “hundred Mexicans and Chicanos.” He maintains the song simply coveys the notion, “I’m white, and that’s just the way I feel…about being a minority in your own area, where you live and shit like that.” When editor and interviewer Tim Yohannen presses him about the fact that “you are coming in with this arrogant “White Boy” and throwing it in their faces,” Bob responds that, “racism is already there.” Yohannen also notes, “It seems like there there’s a ‘gang mentality’ that involves the Fuck-Ups.” Bob insists that “It’s not a gang,” though he realizes that people do wear the name on jackets, but they do not jump people at gigs, though after punk shows, or on the streets, “we do often scrap,” but it’s a reality that’s there when punks venture out on the street: “Punk has always been treated violently, and always will be.” Yet, Yohannen seems to believe this is the result of the band “marching into ghetto territory…causing some kind of collision. (Sept. #8)

One may find imagining the first wave punk bands as “tough” a bit problematic, though the description certainly may be true of emerging hardcore acts, with their flared-nostril, vitriolic, incendiary, and choleric attacks on bourgeois music, which at least one punk historian, David Jones, attributes to the stylized template of the Bags. So, as I have argued previously: hardcore is rooted in the black American experience via the Bad Brains; moreover, hardcore may also be equally housed in the Hispanic experience as well.

This occurred during an era when some punks were warned not to venture beyond the parking lot of the Vex, a punk club associated with the band Los Illegals, who released the bilingual single “El Lay,” which received little notoriety outside of East L.A. (and goes unoticed by Jon Savage, who lists the first two Zeros singles in his classic punk tome “England’s Dreaming”). On one hand, punk clubs were often restricted to marginal locales, ghettos and barrios in some cases, but also the genre was ghettoized, since the only West Coast punk band signed to a major label was the Dickies, and briefly, Los Illegals. In addition, the ideas communicated by the bands, and their fans, were equally ghettoized, since they, at least on the surface, revered resistance and a sense of belonging “outside of society” (Patti Smith), in which shared practice become the folklore of rebellion. Yet, as Ruben Guevara explained in 1980, “Most of the kids playing locally aren’t punks. That’s a joke. If you want to talk about punks, you’ve got to talk about East LA, because the real, true punks…the real outcasts, the people with something to bitch about aren’t middle class white kids” (qtd. in Lipsitz 84).

The Vex is a case well worth examining, for as Craig Lee, writing in his cornerstone piece of punk history Hardcore California, puts it, “The Vex, a new club in East L.A., opened and fast became, along with the Starwood, the cat’s meow in punkarama. At the Vex, a strange and untimely Chicano punk scene formed, combining hardcore beachpunk (Undertakers, Stains) and plop pop (Los Illegals, the Brat)” (56: 1992).

A history of the club was published in Los Angeles Magazine in 2003 by Josh Kun, which provided a key positioning of the club in the biography of West Coast punk, filling a gap created by earlier, almost entirely Anglo accounts:

From March to November 1980, the Vex was an oasis for Eastside punk bands who were tired of hustling for gigs on the Westside. The punk scene was no different than L.A. itself. The L.A. River was a line. Cross it, and the rules changed. On the Eastside, the Chicanos were their own mayors. But travel over the 6th Street Bridge to the Westside, and you were always reminded just whose city this really was.”

These are the same dividers that Perez mentioned earlier in the article, unmasking the racial divide, the us and them bifurcation drawn by not-so-invisible means, that constrained the city even as music was burgeoning and punk identities were experiencing what Habell-Pallan dubs “translocality,” the ever-shifting sense of self in an unstable, flux-ridden era, in which Hispanic punks had to forge a third way: not strictly punk, not Hispanic garage rock even, but a new hybrid, as Willie Herron from Los Illegals attests in the article: “I always felt that our scene was invisible and unrecognized … We had to remain in the shadows. We couldn’t be ourselves and represent the East L.A. we knew. We couldn’t be white punkers, and we didn’t want to be white punkers. We were trying to come up with our sound.”

The all ages club hosted by longtime Chicano artists Gronk and Jerry Dreva regularly welcomed Los Illegals, the Brat, Plugz, and the Fender Buddies, establishing an East L.A. scebe that Kun argues was “West Coast punk’s first multicultural utopia. The Vex’s floorboards bent under the pressure of art hipsters mingling with punks, Chicanos in leather pants mingling with white kids in Mohawks, and Boyle Heights sharing the pit with Hollywood.” Even more importantly, the music provided a soundtrack to a frenetic and empowering sense of communitas — community building — that reverberated well beyond the PA system’s outer limits:

“The debut of the Vex marked yet another moment when East L.A. artists–facing legacies of exclusion and stereotypes that have trailed L.A. Mexicanos since East L.A. started to blossom at the beginning of the last century–took history into their own hands and threw their tag on the walls of a city that had consistently tried to keep them in their place … the Vex wasn’t just a space that recognized community; it was a space that made community possible by giving it a place to be proud of. And in the Vex’s case, community meant more than just Chicanos from East L.A. It meant kids who believed in punk as a cultural roller coaster that anyone could ride without ever feeling like they didn’t belong. At the Vex, the city left its borders at the door. If you showed up, you weren’t just pledging allegiance to a new vision of punk, you were pledging allegiance to a new vision of L.A.”

This new L.A., centered in a time zone within the core idealism of punk, was also described to me in 2002 by El Vez (Robert Lopez, see photo below, from mid-2000s), formerly of the Zeros and Catholic Discipline:

“That was the nice thing about being in that period, because it didn’t break down into girl bands, guy bands, and Chicano bands. We’ve felt a part of the scene, the music scene, punk rock in whatever forms it was, like deadbeats, or weird things, or non-guitar bands like the Screamers. You just felt part of a movement of the scene, rather than saying we’re Chicanos and we feel this way, or those are girls, and they feel this way. You felt like part of, yeah, this is all music that we like, this is all music that is different than what we hear on the radio or see on TV. So it wasn’t broken down into…Well, being Chicano wasn’t even a focal point or focus of the band, it was like, we’re another band. I think people maybe pointed at the fact that we were younger than anyone else. It was a kind of nice thing, because it didn’t matter that we were Latinos, it was just that we were a band. It gave us a whole part of the scene, rather than having to feel we’re ‘this.’”

As Brian Qualls from the African American punk band the Warriors describes the vibe in the article, there was a “Vex spirit,” which Kun translates in the larger sense of, “punk was another word for unity.” This mattered in a scene that soon splintered and stratified itself, but it also fills in where Craig Lee missed an opportunity to explore the other shades of punk, or provides some cultural space that filmmaker Penelope Spheeris completely overlooks in Decline of Western Civilization.

The club moved a few more times, re-opening under new owners and operators after a mayhem-filled, disastrous Black Flag gig at the original location, and its demise later on was seemingly sealed by rumors suggesting that a punk was shot in the head by a Chicano on the premise. Not long after, the club found itself short of money and soon closed its door after a “legendary” hardcore punk performance featuring the Circle Jerks and Adolescents playing a benefit for Flipside magazine.

Such fecund, fostering scenes, regardless of spaces, are difficult to maintain. On the East Cost during the late 1980s, Norm Arenas, who later founded the zine Antimatter and played in seminal bands, including “Krisna-core” genre leader 108 and popular Texas is the Reason, who bridged alternative rock with punk in the 1990s, was an active participant in the CBGBs scene. As an eyewitness to racial tension demarcated in the notorious Bowery scene of the country’s biggest city, in which diversity and fusion was supposedly an everyday reality of life, he described the irony to me on the phone this way:

In NYC … mid to late 1980s, everybody and their brother had an anti-racist song, everybody was talking about unity, SHARP was on TV, you know, blasting the skinheads on Geraldo … A lot of people had questionable politics when it came to race. For example, it was acceptable for skinheads at the time, and pretty much everybody in NY was a skinhead at one point, in the 1980s … to say that they were “white pride” not “white power” and not quite understand or maybe understand too well what they were saying. Because I did realize that a lot of people I knew in the 1980s who said they were white pride and not white power did actually shift into white power. Even the people who were vehemently anti-racist didn’t really go out of their way to meet many non-white people and there was a little bit of a fallacy in the whole thing that was not lost on me. When I went to shows and looked around me and you know, sang along to every youth crew song about racism, it did not fall on deaf ears that I was the only non-white kid in the house. (Laughs) Eventually, there were other people who I would see that I was really looking up to. When I first saw Absolution, when Chaka and Freddy Alva put out the New Breed compilation in the late 1980s — a compilation with all the new hardcore bands in New York at the time — I remember thinking how cool it was that a black kid and a Hispanic kid came and put out this tape. Those things actually did affect me. (2007)

Despite punk and hardcore’s promises to be an interrogation of former ills and ideologies, to foment an oppositional culture that de-stabilized notions of Otherness and marginality, to collapse and blur the distinctions in race, genres, and gender that had been handed-down by the parent, teacher, and society-fueled master narrative of U.S. culture, punk and hardcore often got mired down in these same narratives, unable to free itself from same notions that had originally spurred punk rockers to pick up ramshackle guitars and aim for the truth. Or, even if punk did fullfill this promise, setting up temporary free zones, then it is still a box within a wider world, where conventiome hold sway, as demonstrated by my exchange with Alejandro Escovedo (see photo below), of the Nuns, at a Houston bar, originally printed in Thirsty Ear magazine:

TE: It’s interesting that between the Zeros, the Plugz, the Offs, Weirdos, and other punk bands in late 1970’s San Francisco that there was a blend between the anglo and Chicano rockers.

Escovedo: People are always amazed that there is this rock cross cultural thing that happens, but in places like California, or even Austin, Chicanos play with white guys who play with Asian guys. It seems pretty natural to me.

TE: But because there is still so much weirdness and hostility between races, rock’n'roll seems a special place where people come together and get along.

Escovedo: But it’s always been like that, look at the whole roots of rock and blues. I really don’t get any of that shit from anybody inside music, but I do from people outside of it. I mean we go through shit when we tour, like down in the South.

Richard Buckner: Like last night in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Escovedo: Yeah, it was like a police state there. Personally I do have a sense of fear, and I don’t feel comfortable. (2000)
This feeling of anxiety lives on even when rock’n'roll, and punk by extension, carves out a different notion of communitas. Or, again, to reinforce the earlier lyric by the band Really Red, America is still teaching the fear.

Part II

In the essay “Soy Punkera, Y Que?” by Habell-Pallan, found in her book Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture, the lineage of punk rock itself may be explicity linked to Hispanics via the Michigan band ? and the Mysterians, the first band dubbed punk rock by the writer Dave Marsh of Creem. Greg Shaw too, of Bomp Records fame, named the same band as part of the original punk rock cluster including the Seeds, Count Five, and the Troggs. However, many would also argue that punk’s genesis is much more diffuse, including Herman’s Hermits (“I’m Henry the VIII, I Am”: a predecessor to the Ramones style), glam and pub rock, the Detroit bombast of the MC5 and Stooges, Big Star, Flamin Groovies, and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (see Time-Life’s Sounds of the Seventies: Punk and New Wave, with liner notes by Ira Robbins), to the heavy psych rock of the 13th Floor Elevators and Moving Sidewalks. According to Habell-Pallan, another vestige of punk’s ongoing links to Hispanic culture, largely unnoticed in Anglo communities, is:

First, the DIY (Do-It-Youself) sensibility at the core of punk musical subcultures found resonance with the pratice of rasquache, a Chicana/o cultural practice of ‘making do’ with limited resources; in fact, Chicana/o youth had historically been at the forefront of formulating stylized statements via the fashion and youth subculture , beginning with the Pachucos and continuing with Chicano Mods in the 1960s. Second, punk’s critique of the status quo, of poverty, of sexuaity, of class inequality, of war, spoke directly to working-class East Los Angeles Youth. (150)

Habell-Pallan depicts a world of culturally hybrid punks in East LA, like Alice Bag, who had one foot in Anglo punk sensibilities and one foot in Chicana lifestyle as a proto-feminist punk singer for the Bags who also was a template for the hardcore approach to punk due to her intense, vitriolic performances, which shattered gendered assumptions about women in music (recall: this is the time of Emmylou Harris and Heart). Habbel locates her performances and attitude during a period in which Chicana identities, roles, and politics were being questioned, thus punk further stimulated these discourses, especially when they involved issues ranging from prejudice encountered at the hands of whites, or family violence that took a deep toll, or female passivity and victimization that was often associated with so-called feminism of the day (158). Instead, Alice Bag chose “shock-level” approaches that mixed art, music, and identity politics.

Other pop culture moments reveal the meeting points between punk and Hispanic culture in L.A. For instance, in an ironic set of events, when Cheech and Chong filmed a Battle of the Bands concert segment for their movie Up in Smoke at the Roxy, the most politically-charged band of the era, the Dils, proto-communists brothers from a military family, were one of the bands featured, while members of X were in the audience. The Germs auditioned, but were denied after started a food fight in front of a live audience. Whether or not Guevara is focusing his criticism on such acts is unknown, but the collision on film between Hispanic comedy/“theatre” (since heavily criticized) and white rebel culture is noteworthy.

In far flung Alaska, the fanzine writer F. Harlan from the zine Warning declared that, “Rumours claim that Suicidal Tendencies are a gang, which is far from the truth. Suicidal Tendencies is a band! And just like any other band they have fans, which just like any other fans will show their support by dressing and displaying your name very proudly and in the neighborhood these guys come from to have something to believe in makes a lot of things more positive.” The signifying “vato” paraphernalia – bandanas across foreheads, caps with visors bent up (typical seen in skate scenes too), homemade skull T-shirts, definable “Suicidal” scripts on stickers and flyers, fuzzy upper lips, flannel jackets buttoned on the top only, white shirts tucked into ironed Dickies pants or Ben Davis jeans, and Vans skate shoes or Zig Zag shoes – were captured by photographer Glenn Friedman, who also produced their first record. Note, Don Snowden has even suggested that the signifying style of hardcore punk in general, as represented by “the odyssey of bandanas from hardcore beach punk boots” were “adopted as a totem of outsider affiliation with latinos and black street gangs” (9: 1997). Hence, the demarcation of Suicidal gear as representing gang culture while “white” style simply reflects fan culture becomes suspect and unstable when seeing all hardcore dress in this framework — a series of nuanced affiliations that crossed cultural boundaries.

Some of the art that emblazoned the T-shirts on the first Suicidal Tendencies album cover, shot by Freidman, were designs by the skater Jay Adams and Ric Clayton, but singer Mike Muir also notes the participatory nature of their fan base: “…most of the individual’s did their own [shirts]. There’s some that aren’t really good and spelled wrong…but we did that [showed them] because you don’t have to be an artists do it. … anybody can do it” (Flipside #40). Hence, part of the band’s magnetism is due to this ethos, especially in neighborhoods that were predominately working class. Again, Muir testifies to this issue: “I think it’s more accessible as far as punk rock, going out and buying a leather jacket that costs 200 bucks, boots and chains…It’s not a pose for us. That’s the way I have dressed ever since I was a little kid.” Hence, he notes the cultural currency of the look, how it rings with authenticity, and suggests that such a style actually interrogates punk’s commodity bound bourgeois culture.

In effect highlighting punk’s ambivalence towards Hispanic participation, Suicidal Tendencies won Best/Worst band of 1982 in the annual Flipside awards, exemplifying the polarizing attitudes of the punk community. One irate reader in the issue that announced those outcomes took a very different approach than Harlan, noting that gang affiliation does not have to be concrete, but implied or signified, to have a negative consequences in the very real power struggles of a neighborhood or scene:
On Rodney on the KROQ, Mike Muir states that he’s not in a gang and that the reason he dresses like a fucking cholo is because he’s dressed that way since he was a kid…But that’s not the important part. He proceeded to encourage kids to go to their gigs in Izod shirts! Mr. Muir don’t you ever stop and look at your crowd? I suggest that you do sometime and see what your wonderful great “following,” the “Suicidal Boys,” do to the kids that go and see you (especially little kids and girls). Look at how they beat the shit out of them because they are not Suicidal Boys or don’t dress suicidal. …They trash halls, crash gates, destroy other people’s cars, spray paint “Suicidal Boys” all over walls, and do other various “creative” things. Do you CONDONE this crap? If not, why don’t you speak out against it?”

Explaining that his own brother is in a gang, he is offended because Suicidal aligns themselves with a culture of violence – a very visible, physically coercive, and oppressive gang mentality. Suicidal was banned from L.A. for awhile due to their following, members did tattoo themselves and were sentenced to jail time for crimes, violence did wreck shows, and original drummer Amery Smith was recognized as a member of the A13 gang.

Yet, the lyrics from their song “Join the Army,” from the album of the same name, note the potential violence but also stress the trans-racial, cross-genre, and border jumping (calling on London) potential of a rock’n’roll crue as a gang alternative:

Dressed down, homeboyz, minority-join the Army
It’s the size of your heart, not the length of your hair
Don’t make no difference to me, the color that you be
Black, white or brown, it’s all the same to me
I’ll fight it with the band, right down till the end
Ask anyone I’ve met, this ain’t no idle threat
Don’t flap no fit and it won’t come to this
Bust as for me, I’m down with the Army.

The music might represent hope, self-defense, and eagerness to unify across race lines, but white youth did feel like outsiders when seeing Suicidal in neighborhoods that were decidedly Hispanic, which Scott Mitchell suggests. As a punk fan and avid journal writer who has posted historic reflections from the hardcore era on his web site Weirdtronix: Relics from 70s/80s So. Cal Punk, he wrote this entry after seeing the band in Southeastern L.A.:

According to the local punk rumor mill, PUNX was alleged to be more of a gang than a music production business. When you added PUNX spooky reputation to the gang infested Pico Rivera neighborhood where the T-Bird stood, it gave the shows there kind of a sinister, dangerous feeling. The audience that night was packed with S.T.’s gang-like followers, since Pico Rivera was pretty much home turf to the whole Suicidal crew. Between the involvement of the PUNX people, the Pico Rivera locale, and the presence of Suicidal Tendencies and their fans, the evening definitely had a kind of punk/gang type feeling. (2003)

This was not the only area that seemed gang territory, for Mark H, vocalist for Agression, once identified the beach in Oxnard as the “the only mellow place … the rest is full of Mexican gangs and stuff ” to Flipside (#40).

By 1985, a year before the Join the Army album arrived, the college educated Mike Muir (Cyko Miko) framed the race and gang issue in Task magazine as white anxiety in relation to minority cultures participating in what has been routinely miscategorized, racialized as a mostly white, middle class rebellion, noting that jealousy, racism, and fear of low income rock’n’rollers was likely at the heart of the debate, and Suicidal Tendencies were one of the bands able to interrogate and question the hierarchal social order that was prevalent even within resistance culture of the time:
The simple answer is, you see five people and they have got mohawks and leather jackets, they’re individuals. You see five people with Pendletons (flannel shirts), khakis and bandanas and they’re gang members, you know? …we rented out halls and we put on our own shows. Basically…where we came from it’s a minority, lower-income place so you got the people with the hand-drawn shirts like on the album cover and stuff and mostly minorities and stuff. So we went out and put on shows and we got a big following…People started going to shows…going, “Who are these people?…Yeah, they got a real big following, we’ll put them on opening up the show.” So, we opened up the show with five bands, we brought in more than the other bands put together. We did it again…same thing. So we went from opening up to headlining. Now…there’s these bands that’ve been bands for four years and they’re going, “Yeah, you got a show opening up for Suicidal Tendencies…Those guys! Fuckin’ wetbacks!”…In L.A. you do a show and you’ve got 16-18 year old white kids from the Valley, upper-middle class, and you go to our shows and then you see black people. You don’t see no black people at regular shows, you don’t see no Mexicans at regular shows, you don’t see any minorities and stuff. You go to our shows and it’s mostly minorities. (Greg C)

One also needs to place the discourse about punk gangs into a wider framework, since a costellation of such gangs existed, not all necessarily bound to ethnicity. The album Youth Report, a punk compilation from the early 1980s, announces in the liner notes that, “Half of TSOL compromised one of the gnarliest skinhead gangs ever and somehow managed to rise above the violence.” An overview of that era and personalities has been published online at http://greaserama.com by one of the participants, Shaggy AKA PunkRod Todd, who dubbed the gangs, Cliques with Names, since the gangs often evolved and revolved around bands. Here is a partial overview that he outlines, which paints a richer, and darker, picture of the scene that is often found in so-called punk histories:

…T/C- ‘THE CONNECTED’… were a very diverse group … very into dressing ‘non-trendy’ and took a lot of cholo style mixed with the punk- most of them were also skaters… their main bands I remember were the OZIEHAIRS, and a little later- Twisted Roots. These kids were always everywhere and were always getting their pictures taken (this was a big thing- to see yourself in a ‘zine, paper, the news, or a ‘fer use’…

H.B.’s, which simply meant Huntington Beach. These guys followed TSOL and were usually middle class to rich beach kids who had a real pack mentality, prone to chicken shit style ‘jumps’, and generally regarded by the older and Hollywood/LA folks as tourist assholes fucking things up for everyone.

Mike Muir had THE MERCENARIES … It was decided STB and a few other cliques would unite under the mercenary banner to take care of the HB problem. After this loose ‘mercenary confederation’ was formed it just wasn’t the same for the beach punks up in Hollywood. At its peak there were a SHITLOAD of mercenaries. Mercenaries were identified by a pachuco cross drawn on the upper cheek with a sharpie or eye liner.

Mercenary bands were: CIRCLE ONE, SUICIDAL TENDENCIES, CRANKSHAFT, etc. A sizeable chunk of mercenaries morphed into the massive SUICIDAL BOYS / V13 cliques.

Another noticeable and notable punker gang at this time … was L.A.D.S. This stood for Los Angeles Death Squad. I can remember seeing ‘punk death squad’ painted in the alleys in the neighborhood between the Starwood and Okidog …These initial LADS were stylish and charismatic dudes who were always out and got their pictures taken a lot. I remember seeing Alex and Louie, decked out at Okidogs, in matching LA Death Squad jackets ( Eisenhower type jackets as cholos would wear, with iron-on ‘olde english’ style lettering), black Dickies, creepers and/or winos.

Death Squad also had arm bands with the skull and crossbones. Many also wore punk staples- leather jacket and engineer’s boots with LOTS of chains, spurs, bandanas, and the all-important leather key ring thing. Death Squad were, I must grudgingly admit, the SNAPPIEST DRESSERS of the bunch. A few STB/MCP’s became LADS.

MCP (Mid-City Punx) were my clique- consisting of kids from Highland Park, Downtown, Echo Park, Atwater, Glendale, Hollywood, East LA and Monterey Park/ Montebello. We were close with Circle One people, Mike and Jim Muir, THE CHIEFS and lots of other Hollywood people, lots of East LA folks- like the STAINS. (2006)
When looking back into the era of First Wave punk, similar fan culture dynamics were present, though not hinged to ethnic stereotypes. For instance, early Clash fan Mardi candidly admits that:

as a teenage boy their tough-guy, outlaw image was something to aspire to. The Clash, far more than the Sex Pistols or the Damned, were a gang. And, more to the point, they made us – their hormonally challenged disciples – feel like we were also part of the same gang. They were, they argued, the same as us and everything about them portrayed an us-against-them attitude. It comes as no surprise to hear, more than 25 years later, Simonon still talking about his ‘network of friends.’ (2004)

Paul Simonon, now a well-regarded painter, sang the dub-esque Clash song “Guns of Brixton,” which appeared not long after two articles were published about the neighborhood — “Police and Thieves on the Streets of Brixton” by David Dodd and “Brixton and Crime” by Melanie Philip, in which she notes the neighborhood men “males . . . engage in ‘character contests’ to acquire a reputation and secure an identity.” Oronoff has argued that Brixton itself was a psycho-geographic wellspring: “From the streets of Brixton, the Clash acquired a series of powerfully felt experiences that bestow upon its music a sense of authenticity,” and since white youth began to suffer the same marginal status (25% unemployment in the late 1970s), the Clash felt they should provide an energy to them just as reggae had communicated to black youth.

As Strummer once said, the Clash played punk reggae. To gauge how this song transcends Brixton and melts across race lines, one should note that a stanza for this resides in the beginning of the Strummer biography “Let the Fury Have the Hour,” written by Antonino D Ambrosia, which also features an article by Not4Prophet, who testifies that he was a young Puerto Rican “looking for the perfect beat with nothing to eat but the sounds that emanated from the street.” Not long after witnessing racist rock clubs and enduring indifferent record store clerks, he discovered Sandinista by the Clash, but more importantly, the lyric he chooses a stanza from “Guns of Brixton” to lead off his article. Thirty years later, the song still signifies something powerful about street life. It’s also important to note that the other bands he mentions all have black and Hispanic members, like Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, and Fishbone. Is he a fan, or an extended Clash gangster: a rebel yeller made in a mold, fashioned from the gristle of the Clash’s mesh of confusing street politics equated with urban concrete jungles and a mash-up of musical styles?

Mike Davis, an economist whose outlook is shaped by urban sociology, Marxism, and labor history, links the pivotal point of gangs in LA. in the early 1980s to broader issues endemic to the “algorithms of a supernova city undergoing restructuring” — the struggles of the powerful, less powerful, and powerless, all tied to concerns over land development and use, including low income neighborhoods being adapted by, or resisting forces of, the spatial economy, whose players included international financiers, city hall, homeowner-based slow growth movements, and gangs. As the old Eastside “rust belt” type manufacturing centers dried up, including companies that once offered salaried jobs in the steel, rubber, auto, and electrical sectors, young blacks and Chicano upward mobility was nearly shuttered at the same time that their parents found it difficult to find new work too.
As Davis observes, South Central suffered 45% unemployment, and 5,000 Hispanic and Black youth tried to apply to the longshore union. The gang topography of the city was quickly parceled and radically redrawn by micro gangs” including desperate Cambodians and 18th street homeboys. Thus under the din of skyscrapers being built and the shadows of long neon-lined minimalls sprouting, such “gangs,” perhaps even the Suicidals, represent “a logic of social formation in a post-liberal context where gangs of all kinds, from the Reagan administration on down, set the tone.” Gangs were an American response to tumultuous times, as they always had been (1989).

Though gig violence actualy led groups like the Crowd to stop actively paying shows, they did not necesarily frame the events in race tensions. As guitarist Jim Kaa revealed to me in early 2008, “The scene in LA always had a strong Latin/Mexican/Asian presence, though HB (Huntington Beach) was very white. It was never any problem in the early days, 1978 -1980 and while the 80’s brought a great deal of violence to the scene, it did not seem gang or ethic based, more punks versus hippies/authority thing. It seemed the 90’s spawned the serious skinhead/gang/race violence.” Yet, in 1988 Maximum Rock n Roll interview Frank Agnew of the Adolescents, another band that seemed withdrew from live shows around’ 82 and ‘83, were also disturbed by the violent aspect of the punk scene: “It started become more of a gang-oriented thing than being related to music.” By the time of the interview, things began to reverse, as he outlines, “Gang violence is the big thing on Herraldo Rivera now. They’e just into their own thing and starting to separate themelves from the music.” Later in the piece, Steve Soto adds, “…these gangs are horrible and destructive. It’s like taking away the kid’s identity, you become part of a unit.” At the end, he looks back, trying to grapple with the history of violnce that gripped Los Angeles youth culture: “The same thig happened with violence and punk. It really didn’t start happening until there was an article in the LA Weekly on ‘Violence and Punk.’ And all of a sudden guys that were like football layers shaved their heads and went to shows to beat up people…The same thing with the kids who see the whole thing with gangs and colors in the papers and they want to be in a gang” (Thomaso: 1988).

Overall, the band seems to argue that the media is to blame in both circumstances, in large part, due to the transparent way they foment and sensationalize punk violence. Magazines such as Rolling Stone and Penthouse, whose article “End of the World?” portrayed the LA hardcore as “anarchic, sociopathic rock’n'roll noise for an anarchic, sociopathic subculture (1981: 48), together with primetime shows like Quincy and 21 Jump Street, normalize such discourse within the media and commercial television by “criminalizing” punk characters. Moreover, such discourse acted as a recruiting tool, enlisting more aggressive, unstable, or marginalized readers to live out their fantasies, thus fullfilling the original argument of such discourse. In short, the media created the dilemna, bolstered by a desire to profit from, and likely discredit, youth it deemed problematic and anti-authoritative.

In recent years, Hispanics have been on the forefront of punk, including hardcore punk bands Los Crudos/Limp Wrist, Union 13, Youth Against, and Huasipungo, the post-punk mutations of At the Drive-In/Mars Volta, the pop punk of Scared of Chaka, Spokane’s infamous garage roar gone glam the Makers, jokester super-band Manic Hispanic featuring an amalgam of punk personalities like Steve Soto (Adolescents) and Gabby (Cadillac Tramps). Also, Chicago produced Arma Contra Arma and Youth Against, El Paso produced Wednesday, while LA produced Kontra Attaque. Even when one large city in Texas, like Houston, is dissected, one can see the legacy of Hispanics in punk, including the Magnetic Four, Fenix TX, Flaming Hellcats, Vatos Locos, and many more.

Gina Miller-Rodriguez, Magnetic Four.

Meanwhile national bands have thrived, like Ruido, Mas Ke Ruido, No Church on Sunday, Golpe De Estado, FISHHEAD, Thee Looters, No Mind Asylum, Peace Pill, Butt Acne, Plain Agony, Eske, Sin Orden, Ultratumbados, and The Tumors. Meanwhile, Mexican punk and hardcore bands from the last thirty years include no less than Sendero, Amichi Della Terra, Atoxxxico, Descontrol, Disolucion Social, Herejia, Histeria, Masacre 68, M.E.L.I. , Sedicion, SS-20, Tortura Auditiva, Decadencia, Resistencia Entre El Poder, Asfixia, Anti-Gobierno, Heregia, Collectivo Kaotico, Ciudad Humeante, Especimen, and Xenofobia.

Just like queer punks and Afropunks, Hispanic punks constantly negotiate their status with culture at large — we are, we are not normal, we are, or are not first class citizens, we are, or are not legitimate. Some white punks end up in a similar cycle, even as many dedicated leftists neglect punk youth culture, especially minority-rich youth punk culture, not realizing that this phenomena truly empowered a generation of fused cultures, making punk the natural extension of previous radical responses to social instability. As punk entered the 1990s, bands like Los Crudos (who later morphed into the queer straight-edge band Limp Wrist) emerged, redefining the dynamics of the both the genre and the accompanying subculture scene. Vocalist and filmmaker Martin Sorrondeguy’s roots arc back into the 1980s, when his New York punk cousins provided him with the experience of listening to the Clash and the Sex Pistols at their house.

Bridging the gap between queer and Hispanic subcultures, his work in Los Crudos and Limp Wrist arced back and re-created a space and opportunity for Chicanos and queers to rediscover their own cultural antecedents within punk. As mainstream hip hop became more overtly de-fanged, suburban, occupied, and corporate (at an early age, Martin Sorrenguy was a break dancer featured on Donahue alongside Kurtis Blow singing “The Breaks”), queercore/homocore emerged and Riot Grrls too from the corporate, false-consciousness, bland hippie/rawk conceits of grunge.

That’s partly why there’s a huge Chicano punk movement in LA right now, as well-noted author John Robb from the bands Membranes and Gold Blade told me during a 2006 interview:
David: You recently described the powerful presence of punk rock among Chicanos in L.A. (“cool looking Mexican punk rockers with immaculate quiffs are getting excited over pale faced early eighties bands like Discharge, the Skeptix, Drongos From Europe”), and I have always felt that their presence in the crucial early years of punk (The Plugz, the Zeros) often go unnoticed, just like the presence of African Americans and gays (for instance, Bob Mould here, and some say Gene October in England, so on). Do you think that these communities have always offered a unique perspective on punk, providing a sense of true outsiderness and insight?

Spot on. Maybe they are the true definition of punk rock, outsider music for outsider communities, our outsiderness seems like a luxury compared to people pushed to the fringes of society. On the other hand, maybe they just liked the music and happed to be Mexican/gay/black etc. Modern punk is really a feat, seeing the way that it has reached all corners of the globe (I got a great CD here from an anarchist band in Nepal — Raikatori) from China to Malaysian skinheads! I’m not sure if it’s that unnoticed. Punk is one place where these issues are debated endlessly. Few other pop cultures even raise the debate. Pick up punk fanzine and some one will be talking about people’s rights etc. You’re right, some of the greatest punk rock has been made by the fringe of culture. The original Mexican punk bands in LA, Bad Brains in DC (one of the most influential bands of all time) to the gay and lesbian bands. It’s all in the mix. On the other hand, some of the greatest punk bands were made by really dumb white blokes who could barely play guitars and probably thought writing poems was a bit girly! That’s the beauty of rock’n’ roll: you just think you got it nailed down, and it wriggles away again!

Lastly, all of this context must also be understand as a conversation with history and not for a kind of truth that can’t abide by other viewpoints and inquiry. For instance, when I pressed Victor Gastelum, flyer artist (Adolescents, Agent Orange, included below, and many others) whose finely-crafted works on paper helped sell out shows at Fenders Ballroom during the mid to late 1980s and other venues, about race and issues in punk, he answered, rather straight-forward, that being punk rock meant carving an “fellaheen” (used by Jack Kerouac, as suggested by Beth Lagaron, to mean “ basic primitive”) identity within Latino culture too, thus bonds between the marginalized were trans-racial:

I think we can all name a few bands that we felt should’ve gotten more attention (Detox, LB/White Cross, VA), I think that it was just the brakes. I got into punk because it was inclusive, for better or for worst, it’s where I belonged. Nobody ever told me about any ideals that needed to be lived up to…I don’t think race was any more or less an issue in the punk scene than in the rest of society. My experience was that we were all young and maybe more open minded to getting along. Back then it was a minority of people that decided to get into this thing so if you saw somebody in the street or school that was a punker you kind of sympathized with them. Deciding to get into this music at that time could mean losing friends, getting threatened, being harassed and so on. It was like you were already an outsider among “your people,” so you knew that didn’t have anything to do with getting along or having things in common.

Perhaps it is this same currency of outsiderness that appealed to Therese Covurbias, who according to George Lipsitz, grew up speaking English and had to learn to speak Spanish in school but later used the band as a mean of confronting both the tensions of a Catholic high school and the tensions of a destructive U.S. intervention in Central America, as if the personal and political helped one navigate the multiple entanglements between anger, spirit, and resistance. Yet, she also felt that she wasn’t a walking advertisement for Chicano culture, telling Dave Zimmer of BAM that “Everything I write has some Chicano consciousness to because that’s what I am…you have to represent your ethnic background and sometimes I think you don’t really have to.”

Returning to Gastelum (see image below), I believe punk represented a subcultural mode by which the Brat, Detox, and in particular, Los Illegals, could forge, as Lipsitz asserts, a Latino perspective allied with the infectious punk rock poetics and politics, however ill-defined and contradictory. One metaphor might be the sense of “bilingual,” not in the strict sense of spoken language, but in the sense of speaking between cultures, interrogating both, provided a relationship with and against both sides of culture. This let such bands connect with “the disaffected outside their own community, and attempted to create a community within the discursive space of popular music that did not exist anyway else in Los Angeles (87).

To poach and adapt Stuart Hall, I suggest that the Latin punk bands reveal an “impure and hybrid form” that reveals the interdependency of both sides to render a visible and viable “outsider” meaning, which examines unstable, permeable cultural borders and mores (Anglo/Latino, rich/poor, punk/straight). Though such an ambivalence might often be felt rather than pronounced, its very nature reveals how cultural forms of both communities can be taken apart, examined, re-tooled and transformed, conscious or unconsciously, revealing how each form is not simple, not without built-in possibility of adaptation. In addition, living between cultures exposes the sometimes arbitrary sense of genre, community/subculture, and power of each. Such in-between or cross-cultural dynamics explore a sense of being caught, in which the dialectic — one side is always trying to exclude and absorb the other in a pull and push metaphor – becomes a ductile anchor of sorts. To finish, I will let Walt Whitman illustrate this hunger: Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing — seeking the spheres, to connect them; Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;/Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.