Mexican music fills campuses with history, laughs
By Kristin Whitney and Shannon Harrison

    With a guitar on his lap and a German harmonica wrapped around his neck, Dr. Jesus Negrete, a leading interpreter of Mexican-American folk music, sang corridos to illustrate the history of Mexican progression into the United States as part of RetroFest and Hispanic Heritage Month.
    Beginning with the Mexican Revolution, he told of revolutionary fighters Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa and Miguel Hidalgo.
    “We were American before the name America existed,” Dr. Negrete told audiences on all four campuses last week.
    Zapata was heard telling followers that the struggles and hardships endured by the people in the farm fields of Zacatecas and Michoacan were devastating and soul draining.
He later would say, “It is better to live struggling on your feet than to live on your knees.”
    Dr. Negrete sang in one of his corridos about the heartbreaks that Mexican women experienced and the way they adapted to the responsibility of becoming dependent on themselves.
    “They buried their husbands, buried their sons, picked up their kids, picked up their guns and rode into history,” he said in a corrido that featured several widows singing in its chorus.
    The Mexican workers then traveled north to get jobs in the United States around the 1920s, Dr. Negrete said.
    “They came by the thousands to places like Dallas and Fort Worth to pick cotton,” he said. “White people didn’t like to do it; black people didn’t either, and Mexicans felt the same way.”
    One of the characters in his corridos exclaims, “I can’t wait until these white people invent polyester.”
    Discouraged by low wages, many traveled as far north as Chicago and Pennsylvania to work in the steel mills. Many also worked in the automobile factories in Detroit, he said.
“We made about $1 for work,” he said. “Not $1 an hour, but $1 a day.”
    Mexican people of the era celebrated their heritage with large festivals and were known for having large families.
In another of his corridos, Dr. Negrete sang of the Mexican’s reliability on welfare.
“The lady at the welfare office would say ‘oh no, it’s another one of those Mexicans with those large families,’” he sang.
Later the Mexican character would respond, “Well, at least, we can have so many babies.”
School children of the times lived through segregation, much like the African-Americans. Dr. Negrete told of how the children’s names were Americanized and how the history taught to them in school was not truly “their history.”
“Once, on Sept. 16, an American history teacher told me George Washington was my father, but I didn’t believe her,” he said. “If he’s my father, then why isn’t he Chicano?”
Alfred Davila helped Hispanics to become more involved in the AFL-CIO labor unions.
“Don’t listen to those bosses; don’t listen to their lies;we don’t have a chance unless we organize,” Davila told Mexicans.
“Black, red, brown, white—all people must unite,” he concluded.
Dr. Negrete’s mission is to educate people about Mexican-American culture so people can evolve and learn from their mistakes.
“You have to strengthen historical identity to make history instead of repeating it,” he said.
vDr. Negrete is the founder of the Mexican Cultural Institute in Chicago, which is dedicated to the study of Mexican-American musicology.
“Musicology is the search for a research of how music impacts society and how society impacts music,” Negrete said.
He has performed and lectured nationally and internationally for more than a quarter century. Negrete was one of two performers chosen to represent the United States at the International Festival of Youth in Cuba and is the subject of Chuy Negrete: Repertoire of a Folksinger, produced by KTEX in El Paso.
He earned a master’s degree from Chicago State University and his undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, both in bilingual education.