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Hear the voice of a people

By Letisia Marquez & Cynthia Lee
UCLA Today and UCLA Today Staff Writer

Roughly 22,000 songs that are part of the
largest collection of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular recordings in existence are literally at your fingertips if you are sitting at a UCLA computer.

Just click into the collection’s bilingual Web site, select a song and turn up the volume to hear these audio treasures from the Arhoolie Foundation’s Strachwitz Frontera Collec-
tion, a recording archive of such depth and breadth that it’s been deemed irreplaceable.

Anyone in the UCLA domain has full access to thousands and thousands of these recordings, made in Mexico and the United States from 1905 to 1990, including the earliest versions of the popular narrative ballads called corridos. They represent “a rich poetic and musical tradition that preserves the voice of common people,” said Guil­lermo Hernandez, project director for the archive and former director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

“Corridos are part of a most significant historic and artistic heritage,” said Hernandez, a professor of Spanish and Portu­guese, who has used the collection in teaching and research.

These early ballads that lionized folk heroes and addressed topics of the day are only part of what has been preserved for public access, thanks to funding by Los Tigres Del Norte. The award-winning Mexican norteño band donated $500,000 to the project and established a fund at the Chicano Studies Research Center to support research, acquisition, documentation and dissemination of authentic traditional and folk music traditions in Spanish. In 2001, the center, in collaboration with the UCLA Music Library and the Arhoolie Foundation, began the work of digitizing the Frontera Collection.

Also in the audio archive are other early forms of Mexican and Mexican-American music, including canciones, boleras, rancheras and sones, as well as many kinds of instrumental music. You’ll even find spoken-word performances, patriotic speeches and vernacular comedy skits. Many of the recordings are one-of-a-kind, all that remains after record companies have disappeared, or lost or melted their metal masters.

“We’re getting a lot of hits. People are listening to the music for a variety of reasons,” said Stephen Davison, head of the UCLA Digital Library Program. At the University of Texas, for example, a graduate student is looking for historical references in the spoken word portion of the collection for his dissertation.

The Frontera collection itself consists of approximately 15,000 78 rpm records, 17,000 45 rpm discs and 2,500 33 rpm LP albums. Digitization of the 78 rpm discs is nearly complete, Davison said.

While those with non-UCLA computers can access only 50 seconds of each song, available at digital.library.ucla.edu/frontera, because of copyright issues, anyone using a UCLA computer can hear the entire song.