Eduardo "Lalo" Guerrero Jr. (1916 - 2005) is known as the father of Chicano music. His career began in the 1930s and continued on until his death in 2005, contributing along the way to most of the new developments in Mexican-American music in the southwestern United States.

Early in his career, Guerrero composed romantic songs that became successful on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. He recorded big-band swing and music in tropical dance styles. During and after World War II his music played a central role in the Latino youth culture of the Los Angeles area. He recorded a series of hit Spanishlanguage parodies of Anglo-American hit songs, and he wrote and sang topical corrido ballads until very late in his life. And for many Latin Americans, Guerrero remains best known as a children's musician, recording with his group Las Ardillitas, the Little Squirrels. Arizona mariachi musician José Ronstadt told the Arizona Daily Star that Guerrero "was really an incredible man…. To me the most interesting phenomenon about Lalo Guerrero was that different generations knew Lalo through his different expressions of music."

Collected Bottles for Bootleggers

Born on December 24, 1916, in Tucson, Arizona, Guerrero was one of 11 surviving children in his family; many others died in infancy. "It seemed like almost every year there was another little white coffin in the living room," Guerrero wrote in his autobiography, My Life and Music. Guerrero almost died himself when he contracted smallpox, which left him scarred and vulnerable to taunts from neighborhood children. Guerrero's father, like many other Mexican immigrants in Tucson, had been drawn to the United States by work available on the expanding railroad system. Guerrero was given the nickname Lalo and was also known as Eddie after he began to learn English at a Catholic school. The Barrio Viejo neighborhood of Tucson where he grew up was poor but buzzing with activity, and Guerrero earned money by selling fruit or newspapers, and by collecting empty bottles that he could sell to bootleggers for a nickel apiece during the Prohibition era.

Guerrero's mother Concepción, who enjoyed singing Mexican popular songs, taught him to play the guitar. He also received strong musical influences from American movies, trying to emulate the crooner Rudy Vallee and watching the Al Jolson movie The Jazz Singer, the first sound film, over and over again. He began to perform at student assemblies, and a teacher introduced him to classical music. "When it came to music, I was like a funnel," he wrote in his autobiography. "I'd take everything in. I didn't care where it came from or whether it was in English or Spanish. I liked Burl Ives's ballads and Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. I learned American songs from the movies and Mexican songs from Mamá's records and both from the radio." He began to dream of making music a career.

With two high school friends, Guerrero formed a trio called Eddie, Manny, and Rudy, which performed in English on Tucson radio station KGAR, and another, El Trio Salaz y Guerrero, that sang in Spanish on Tucson's KVOA. In 1934 the family went to live for a while in Mexico City, accepting a U.S. government offer of a $200 payment to Mexican Americans who agreed to be repatriated. Guerrero brought with him a song he had already written; Canción Mexicana (Mexican Song). A piece written in praise of Mexican music, it quoted melodies from around Mexico, and it later caught on among Mexican vocalists and was recorded by stars including Lucha Reyes and Lola Beltrán. Decades later it was still well known as a kind of unofficial anthem, but Guerrero was never credited as the writer or paid proper royalties. Even so, of the hundreds of songs he composed, he later named "Canción Mexicana" as his favorite.

Mexican audiences did not take to the performances of Guerrero himself, however; they termed him "pocho," or Americanized. Guerrero returned to Tucson and formed another vocal group, Las Carlistas, that did well enough to try its luck in Los Angeles and even performed at the 1939 New York World's Fair. They backed cowboy star Gene Autry in his film Boots and Saddles, and Guerrero, discovered walking down a street by Vocalion records talent agent Manuel Acuña, soon made his first solo recordings.

Zuit Suit and Romantic Style

Guerrero married his first wife, Margaret Marmion, in 1939, and the couple raised two children. During World War II Guerrero worked in an aircraft factory, receiving draft deferments because of his military work and his six-month-old son. Guerrero entertained U.S. troops in nightclubs, leading bands that played swing and newly popular Cuban dance styles. During the "zoot suit" anti-Latin riots of 1942, he was chased by a group of U.S. Marines but eluded them by taking refuge in a darkened movie theater. He was drafted in 1945, shortly before two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and ended the war.

In Los Angeles after the war, Guerrero was signed to make more recordings by Acuña, who had moved to the new independent Imperial label. Forming bands called Lalo y Sus Cincos Lobos (Lalo and His Five Wolves) and El Trio Imperial, Guerrero at first recorded mariachi music. But he soon became aware of the hip "caló" slang that flourished among Latino young people in Los Angeles, mixing Spanish, English, and words that had not previously been part of either language. A quick learner of language and music ever since his childhood, when he watched Mexican street musicians improvise lyrics on the spot and tried to imitate them, Guerrero quickly turned out new songs designed to take advantage of the new Latino youth culture, drawing on the hard-edged boogie and rhythm-and-blues styles that preceded the emergence of rock and roll. He enjoyed hits with such songs as "Los Chucos Suaves" (Cool Cats), "Chicas Patas Boogie" (The Chicanos' Boogie), and "Marijuana Boogie," recording with his Cincos Lobos and several times with black Los Angeles musicians as well. Several of these songs were featured in the play and film Zoot Suit in the late 1970s, and it was only at that point that Guerrero acquired an actual zoot suit of his own.

As Anglo-American pop made a transition from swing and jazz dance styles to vocal romantic ballads, Guerrero did the same, recording "Pecadora" (The Sinner) with an orchestra for Imperial in 1948. The song became a major hit in the Latin American market, generating a packed homecoming dance with Guerrero as headliner at Wetmore's Ballroom in Tucson, and spreading his name as far afield as Texas, where he had previously been little known. Guerrero toured the Southwest nonstop over the next several years, writing new material in a romantic style. One of his songs, "Nunca Jamás" (Never Again), was originally written as a response to domestic abuse; with its lyrics sanitized, it became a Mexican pop standard that was recorded by such vocal stars as Javier Solis and José Feliciano.

Guerrero and two Anglo-American partners formed a new label, Discos Real, around 1955 in Los Angeles, and that year he spotted a group of Mexican-American youngsters on the street, trying to sing Spanish lyrics to one of the top English pop hits of the day, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett." Inspired, Guerrero composed and recorded a parody with Spanish lyrics about an immigrant named Pancho Lopez, born in Chihuahua in 1903. The song became a hit, not only in the Southwest but all over Latin America; in Mexico it even served as the basis for a film (once again with no royalties paid to Guerrero). Hollywood recording executive Al Sherman suggested that Guerrero record the song in English, promising that he could sell one million copies. "Writing a parody is harder than most people think - especially if the parody is in a different language than the original," Guerrero wrote in his autobiography. "You have to be completely bilingual and bicultural…. To be funny, it has to be different but recognizable." Guerrero was successful in translating his parody into English, and Sherman very nearly made good on his promise, as Guerrero's first English-language hit reached gold-record status with sales of over 500,000 copies. Threatened with a lawsuit by Walt Disney (the copyright holder of the original song), Guerrero settled for a 50-50 split of the considerable profits.

Recorded Satirical Parodies

"Pancho Lopez," which used the word "wetback," was later criticized as derogatory toward Mexican Americans, but Guerrero sometimes added a degree of social commentary to the parodies he continued to write, and record buyers snapped them up. Elvis Presley's "It's Now or Never" (itself a parody of an Italian popular song, "O Sole Mio") became the Spanish-English "No Hay Tortillas" (There Are No Tortillas, There's Only Bread); "Tacos for Two" parodied the pop standard "Cocktails for Two"; and in the 1970s Guerrero turned the country hit "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" into "Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Busboys," noting that "jobs ain't easy to find, and they're harder to hold." Guerrero's most beloved parody, however, was "Pancho Claus," which imagined a Mexican cousin of Santa Claus.

That song was popular among children, and so were the recordings Guerrero made with his group Las Ardillitas, a trio (Pánfilo, Anacleto, and Demetrio) of electronically speeded-up voices that resembled those of the Englishlanguage novelty act the Chipmunks. Guerrero, in fact, was sued by the originators of the Chipmunks, but he argued that he had devised the idea independently, after his producer accidentally left a speaker on while fast-forwarding a tape. The squeaking sound reminded Guerrero of the speech of Martians in science-fiction films, and the first Ardillitas song was in fact entitled "El Marciano" (The Martian). The suit was dropped, and Guerrero, once again working with Manuel Acuña, succeeded in distributing the Ardillitas records all over Latin America. About 20 Las Ardillitas records were made in all, and some were reissued on compact disc.

Beginning in his Discos Real days, Guerrero had been an adept talent spotter, and in the 1960s he ran a successful nightclub, Lalo's, in Los Angeles. He sold the club in 1972 and moved to the Palm Springs, California, area with his second wife, Lidia. In his autobiography Guerrero called this his "so-called retirement," for he remained busy and productive as a musician. In his later years, Guerrero often used the Mexican-American corrido form, a storytelling ballad, to comment on current events. His "La Tragedia del 29 de Agosto" depicted the death of a Los Angeles Times reporter during a 1970 antiwar demonstration, and Guerrero wrote a corrido honoring Mexican-American farm labor activist Cesar Chavez. His song "La Mosca" was used in California's battle against the Mediterranean fruit fly in the late 1980s. In 1985 Guerrero joined the Mexican-American rock group Los Lobos on their children's album Papa's Dream.

Guerrero received several major awards, including a National Medal of the Arts that brought him to the White House to meet President Bill Clinton in 1995. His autobiography, Lalo: My Life and Music, appeared in 2002, and at its end he announced that he was not through making music yet. He performed for school groups and other organizations until shortly before his death on March 17, 2005, in Palm Springs, California.

Books

Contemporary Musicians, vol. 55, Gale, 2006.

Guerrero, Lalo, with Sherilyn Meece Mentes, Lalo: My Life and Music, University of Arizona Press, 2002.

Periodicals

Arizona Daily Star, December 23, 1996; March 18, 2005; April 21, 2005.

Fresno Bee, March 29, 2003.

New York Times, March 19, 2005.

Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), January 1, 2005.

Variety, March 28, 2005.

Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.