Writing Archive

INSOMNIA & DEPRESSION Pt. 2
Accordion Cries, Tejano Tears, and Polka Tangents

Sandra Cisneros writes in her fiction about hearing papá sing along to música Mexicana while shaving in the morning, and how the resonance of rancheras belted out loud with shamelessly full-throated passion sounded like men crying. These tones of deepest world-weariness seemed contradictory coming from he who symbolized the three “F”s of Mexican manhood for the household: feo, fuerte y formal — plain, firm, and reserved.

I remember my grandfather as the avatar of los tres eFes. I only saw him cry once, and that was when I so upset my grandmother that her high-blood pressure flared up terribly and she had to go to the hospital. He told me in Spanish (what else?) that he could not live without her, and I felt like he had lifted the veil of unfailing strength to show me the raw, bleeding heart of human sacrifice. It was scary, what would turn out to be preparation for his death.

But grandpa had raised me, without really knowing it, on the weepy tang of unmanly tears, hinted at with the howling, screaming gritos that came from his radio every single day, contrapuntal primal howls emanating from his tinny transistor in the Ortiz Shoe Store, when a wheezing, pumping, never-ending accordion and plump, heart-plucked bass from a bajo sexto would draw me into the melancholy metaphysics of machismo.

el Grito. The scream of existential crisis, the outcry in the wilderness, the eruption of vocal vulnerability. The simultaneous yowl of birth, death, denial, and just about every trope of Chicano/Latino tragedy: “la chingada,” conquest, motherless-ness, betrayal, and all that melodramatic stuff that trills our “R”s with sexy fate and animates us with a quasi-mystical excuse for seasonal over-emotionalism. A veritable piñata of pain.

Grandpa’s vintage Coke machine filled my stomach with sugary mush, while his radio fed my heart with gritos and grown-up stuff.

EL éXITO DE LA SEMANA: Late Friday afternoons, showering in the concrete stall that was our bathroom behind grandpa’s shop, feeling steam against my face and drafts from cracks in the wall, with mournful eighth and sixteenth notes rolling through a polka interpreted by Mexican men who wanted me to join in and cry just a little, and then to fall asleep with the warm glow of gas-oven heaters against my hard-water-softened face, and grandpa’s radio somewhere in the next room softly murmuring baseball scores in Spanglish.

These experiences brought me into contradictory insights about the nature of existential pain and the power to overcome by embracing it. Nothing in my experience from those times symbolized the contradictions of life like the sound of an invulnerable man crying out loud in disgrace — what would normally be “sin vergüenza” transcended and pulled me into the fighting stance of a polka embrace.

Surely, one of the most vigorous and affecting gritos I ever heard as a kid came from Esteban “Steve” Jordan, also known as “el Parche” and “el Wizard,” or “The Jimi Hendrix of the Accordion.” Every shriek sounds a knot in my soul where hard times and sweet delights entwine.

And Steve Jordan was out there. He wore a patch from losing eyesight as an infant, his hair was a shock of wild pomp, and his playing could only be inspired by Faustian talents. When I met him in ’90s SanAnto, he seemed a mix of Charlie Parker (troubled but recovering) and John Coltrane (hard-bop genius who could take a pop standard and turn it inside out). Getting to see him for free weekly made me feel like the city was stealing from his musical gifts, as hardly anyone showed up for the performance pyrotechnics.

Using odd echo effects and delicate phrasing of every wickedly ripping note, Jordan still plays in SanAnto weekly, which makes me want to rip out of Chicago this coming week so I can jaw with this musical hero next weekend and maybe share his memories of Bay Area Latin rhythms and acid rock that animate his music as much as waltzes and corridos.

For now, the over-affected, moody, feeling-sorry-for-oneself voice of Tex-Mex conjunto gusto reminds me of commonplaces from my border upbringing, a place of in-between-ness and becoming for my identity, psyche, heart, and soul. And the music keeps me company, with advice and lore from so many machos ready to bear it all, like the tequila-soaked tears of a clown, over heartache:

“ahora que me hallo solo y triste y abandonado
solo tomando calmaré my padecer
¿de que le sirve para el hombre ser honrado
y darle todo el corazón a una mujer?
y cuando acuerda su cariño le han robado
y lo an dejado con su pena padecer…
¡entre mas tomo mas me acuerdo de tu amor!”
“Por tu cariño”

Funny, how all of that can get summed up in one highly stylized yelp. My grandmother’s unaffected response to this sort of showy, manly sorrow? Simply: “Life is suffering.” But more on that later.

Listen to Jordan’s music yourself at the highlighted link.

(You can hear several songs by Jordan here, but it will start off with “La Llorona Loca,” loosely translated as “The Crazy, Crying Woman.)