![]() ![]() “El Muro” is one of two politically charged canciones written for Las Palmas by Dallas songwriter Ramon Melendez, whose songs have been recorded by the likes of Los Tigres del Norte. That’s why we picked these kinds of songs.” “They crossed the border or have friends who did, or family members. ![]() “Everybody went through it one way or another,” said Jose Vitela, Las Palmas’ musical director. In January the Dallas Morning News named “The Illegal Immigrant” its 2007 Texan of the Year. Love ’em or hate ’em, their influence is undeniable. There are those who have come to appreciate hardworking, family-minded laborers, and others who perceive only cultural threat and resource strain. Immigration policy has polarized Americans, regardless of their proximity to the border. Arranged in front of a fireplace, its bricks bearing a poster of narcocorrido singer Lupillo Rivera, their instruments awaited a post-interview, pre- quinceañera practice session. ![]() “Cheap labor.”īefore the quinceañera, members of Las Palmas, all in their 20s, had gathered in the living room of the Grand Prairie house that Ramirez, 42, built when he wasn’t otherwise occupied with his full-time job as an air-conditioning electrician. “The worst thing is …” Juan Ramirez said of the wall, before changing his mind: “The best thing is they got Mexicans doing it.” Beat. In other words, F-you, George Bush, for signing the Secure Fence Act of 2006, in effect green-lighting a 700-mile, 15-foot-high fence between Mexico and the U.S., making it that much harder for the undocumented to infiltrate the land of opportunity. As long as there is misery in our hometowns … we will have no choice but to keep coming, even if it means we get deported or thrown in prison. Many of us come hoping for the day we can return. We don’t come here because we like this ground. Juan Ramirez, the band’s manager, stood stage left, compulsively checking his cell phone. Just the same, we’ll scale wired fences as we would a wall, even if it reached the clouds. Like the majority of men at Karina’s quinceañera, they wore cowboy hats, incredibly pointy cowboy boots, and gaudy belt buckles. There was Jose Vitela, father of Gutierez’s child, also on sax Eric Garcia on sax, trumpet, and trombone Servando Nunez on drums Rolando Fuentes on a bass drum with an upturned cymbal that he clobbered with its handheld match and rounding it out, a stand-in manufacturing a tuba sound with a keyboard. Magdaleno’s and Gutierez’s compañeros sported the vaquero look. Now it’s called the Wall of Shame because it affects my Mexican countrymen, a bitter joke for man, an offense to God, because He wanted us all to live as brothers. Las mujeres bonitas wore identical getups: black, short-shorted jumpsuits, black stockings, and black high heels that matched their long black hair. Laura Magdaleno delivered the lyrics in Spanish while shimmying alongside her saxophone-playing sidekick, Maggie Gutierez. … As if a wall could fix their faults, as if that could straighten all their sins. They knocked down a wall in Berlin, and now they want to build another in their country, begins their signature song, “El Muro” (“The Wall”). Las Palmas updates the genre by using it as a platform to rail against increasing border security. Banda is an obscure style-at least relative to more popular north-of-the-border Mexican genres like mariachi, conjunto, and Tejano-distinguished by its dearth of strings and accordion in favor of a rapid-fire combination of horns and drums. The bailadores were moving in time to the music of Las Palmas de Durango, a seven-piece group that plays modern takes on banda, a century-old, marching-band style of music native to the northwestern Mexican states whence most of Las Palmas’ members migrated to Texas. Some danced arm in arm in a circle like a giant spinning wheel, the men dipping their female partners in the elaborate move at the heart of the dance called la quebradita. Others wrangled the little ones chasing balloons around the venue. Some of Karina’s 200-plus guests sat at tables littered with cans of Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Modelo Especial. It was going on midnight, and teenage boys outfitted in white-and-pink tuxedo combos whispered in the ears of their female counterparts, who had abandoned their pink gowns for jeans and T-shirts emblazoned with “Quince Años de Karina” in homage to the jovencita wearing the tiara. Inside an abandoned retail space rented out for parties in the otherwise vacant South Dallas strip mall, abuelos y padres, hermanos y tios, primos y ninos, y mas otros celebrated Karina’s quinceañera, the traditional coming-of-age 15th-birthday party for Hispanic girls. ![]() It was a frigid Saturday night just before Christmas, and there was a fiesta going on at Plaza de las Americas. ![]()
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