The traditional tensions between the Northern ( Norteño) and Southern ( Sureño) Chicano communities in California and the considerable distance between Southern California and the Bay Area means that the scenes stay separate despite their shared passion for the same music.įor generations, oldies remained a well-kept secret within the Chicano community, leaking across ethnic and cultural lines via local radio shows, the twelve volume East Side Story LP/CD series, and innumerable legit and less-than-legit bootleg CD compilations. Today, both Tommy and Ruben are considered veteranos of the oldies scene, one in the North and the other in the South, and each playing a critical role in supporting and influencing the next generation of Chicano record collectors. I don’t remember what song was playing but I knew right there, that was the sound for me.”(2) He pulled up in front of the school, and as we piled in, the oldies streaming from his eight-track tape player filled my head. He was a laid-back vato from East Side Clover who drove a 1954 Bel-Air dropped to the ground. “I remember being picked up from junior high school by a friend’s uncle. More than three hundred miles to the south, Ruben Molina had his oldies epiphany at about the same time: “Ever since I heard that sound, I wanted to collect anything that had those oohs and aahs in it.” He wasn’t the only one. “My parents used to always have parties at the house-I must’ve been, like, twelve years old, and a lot of the music they played was like Smokey Robinson and the Miracles,” says Tommy Siqueiro, Soulero Sal’s mentor and a San Jose local. Once, he says, a thirteen-year-old girl called in to request “Fork in the Road,” the little-known B-side to the Miracles’ hit “Tracks of My Tears.” “When they ask for a song, they know what year it came out, who recorded it,” says Johnny Morris, a Los Angeles DJ on KGFJ. Of course, not every Chicano is an expert in rare soul music, but it’s fair to say that the average Chicano from the barrios of Los Angeles, the Bay Area, or any number of smaller California and Southwest communities has a deeper knowledge of and greater appreciation for soul music than the average citizen, with or without papers.

Some of the most impressive soul music collections are in the hands of Chicanos. He lives in the predominantly Hispanic agricultural community of Salinas, and since graduating from high school just months ago, he’s been working at McDonald’s to support his record habit. When we met in October of 2010, Sal proudly confirmed that his 45 collection was exactly forty-five records deep. He’s still working on getting that lowrider, but he’s got all the other bases covered.

“If you’re a Chicano, you’re supposed to listen to oldies, have a lowrider, just dress like I’m dressed right now with the Pendleton, your brim hat, your Winos with your pantelon all creased up.” Soulero Sal is the youngest, at eighteen, of the informal Northern California network of Chicano soul music collectors. Swirling in and out of laughter and conversation at a family BBQ, lovingly dedicated by a wife over the radio for her incarcerated man, or drifting out of a slow-rolling, shimmering lowrider, oldies are the unofficial soundtrack to the Chicano experience.

“The car attracted the girls and the music got them in the mood,” writes Ruben Molina in The Old Barrio Guide to Low Rider Music, “so the neighborhood record collector was just as important as the neighborhood grease monkey.”(1) But you don’t have to have a lowrider to appreciate these songs. For more than fifty years, lowriders, neighborhood record collectors, and local DJs have collectively cataloged an unfathomably deep canon of R&B, doo-wop, and harmony soul, collectively known as oldies. Chicano lowriders in search of the perfect musical mood to enhance their slow procession look to the past and present for a certain sound and feel: desperate and delicate harmonies proclaiming love, hate, or reconciliation set to dramatic arrangements and a tough R&B rhythm track.

Low rider song show