Lalo Guerrero: His heart's still in Tucson

The legendary singer's first love inspired him.

Reknowned musician Lalo Guerrero, whose has performed all over the world for more than 60 years, relaxes in the yard of a relative's home on central Phoenix, on Aug. 18, 2000.
MIKE RYNEARSON

DANIEL GONZALEZ
The Arizona Republic

It's been years since Lalo Guerrero visited the Tucson neighborhood where he grew up, and on a recent driving tour, he is having trouble remembering all the streets clearly.
But there is one place he has no trouble finding.
It's on Meyer Street in the heart of Barrio Viejo, Tucson's oldest Mexican-American neighborhood, just a few doors from Guerrero's boyhood home.
"I want you to stop right here," Guerrero says, his mood turning melancholy. "That's where Emma lived. My first love."
He is pointing at white row houses with little blue windows. It was outside one of those windows that Guerrero used to serenade Emma at 2 a.m. with his guitar.
There is no historical marker here, but there should be, because it was here that the career of the man known as the Father of Chicano Music was born.
For more than six decades, Eduardo "Lalo" Guerrero has been singing songs about his beloved Mexican-American culture, weaving two worlds into one while serving as a sort of bicultural musical ambassador.
On Sept. 6, Guerrero was one of six Latinos honored at the Arizona Biltmore by the human services agency Valle del Sol.
The 83-year-old singer and composer, who has penned more than 200 songs and continues to perform with all the zest of a teen-ager, was the eighth person inducted into the agency's Profiles of Success Hall of Fame.
Guerrero was the first musician to fuse American swing with traditional Mexican music, and, long before Ricky Martin, Guerrero pioneered the art of singing in both English and Spanish.
'True Chicano legend'
His career has endured changing times through his ability to write, sing and perform in an array of styles - corridos, swing, boleros, rancheras, rock, mariachi, even comic parody, best captured in his song "Pancho Lopez," sung to the tune of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett."
His ballad, "Cancion Mexicana," written when Guerrero was 21, is a classic in Mexico. First recorded in 1941 by the legendary Mexican singer Lucha Reyes, it is a tribute to the beauty and emotion of Mexican music, something Guerrero captured to the point of perfection.
"If you go to a mariachi festival or a holiday festival and ask for the most authentic Mexican song, this is the song they would sing for you," says Leticia Quezada, head of the Mexican Cultural Institute in Los Angeles. "I was born in
Mexico, and I grew up never knowing that this song was written by an American.
"Guerrero is a true Chicano legend," Quezada adds. "He is someone who has been able to create a fusion of traditional Mexican music and turn it into an expression of the Chicano experience, the Mexican-American experience in the U.S.'"
The award was only the latest in a long string of accomplishments for Guerrero, capped in 1996 when President Clinton presented him with the National Medal of the Arts during a ceremony at the White House. Fellow recipients included playwright Edward Albee, actor-director Robert Redford and the Boys Choir of Harlem.
In 1980, the Smithsonian Institution declared him a "National Folk Treasure."
In 1996, "Papa's Dream," a collection of 13 folk songs recorded by Guerrero and Los Lobos, was nominated for a Grammy as Best Musical Album for Children. Guerrero wrote the lyrics to several songs on the album, an adventure to Mexico on a blimp narrated by Guerrero as the lovable bilingual grandfather "Papa Lalo.'"
Bienvenido a Barrio Viejo
Guerrero was born in Tucson's Barrio Viejo on Christmas Eve 1916, yet he remains a bit of an enigma in his home state, perhaps because he left Arizona when he was 20 to seek his fortune in Los Angeles.
"I know he was born in Arizona, but we consider him ours," Quezada says.
Maybe so, but Guerrero still considers Arizona home and visits often. He lives in Cathedral City, Calif., near Palm Springs, with his second wife, Lidia.
His official biography says Guerrero was one of 24 children, but Guerrero says the number is an exaggeration. It was more like 18, with eight children surviving to adulthood, he says. A sister, Connie, still lives in Tucson, and a brother, Ruben, lives in north-central Phoenix.
Guerrero's father was from La Paz, Baja California, his mother from Santa Ana, Son. Fleeing violence during the Mexican Revolution, they moved to Tucson in 1911. Guerrero says his mother, Concepcion, gave him his talent.
"She played the guitar, sang and danced beautifully," Guerrero recalls. "If she had been born during a different era, she would have been in show biz."
Tucson, the home of one of the oldest Mexican-American communities in the United States, has produced many talented musicians, among them Linda Ronstadt, whom Guerrero sang to when she was a little girl.
"That was the breeding ground for Mexican-American music, Big Band music, and Lalo came out of that tradition," says Arturo Rosales, an Arizona State University history professor.
Ten years ago, Guerrero honored his old neighborhood in the song "Barrio Viejo." It is a haunting piece of music that ends with these lines:
Let us die together.
Let them bury me in your soil.
And we'll be two corpses
Surrounded by a thousand memories.
During a recent visit to Tucson, Guerrero takes time to point out some of the places from his youth in Barrio Viejo.
After years of neglect, Barrio Viejo has been rediscovered by developers, the same way a new generation of listeners has found Guerrero's music. Many of the old adobe houses are under renovation and repainted with bright colors typically found in Mexico.
At the corner of Simpson and Convent streets, Guerrero is surprised to find someone living in the house where he was born.
Guerrero sweeps past the towering St. Augustine Cathedral, where he was baptized, confirmed, received his first Communion and where, he says, "I'll probably get the last rites."
Next, he pauses at Teatro Carmen, where a marker in front identifies the building as the first theater in Tucson. Then it's on to the house on Meyer Street where Guerrero grew up, where he says he spent the best years of his life.
"Everyone knew each other; everybody cared about each other. None of this violence stuff," he says.
The house has a long, sloping roof and is easily the biggest on the block.
"We were like big shots," Guerrero boasts. "My dad worked for the railroad, and he did quite well."
Still, Guerrero says, his family was poor compared with whites living across the railroad tracks on the other side of town.
Memories of a first love
Before the tour of Barrio Viejo is over, Guerrero insists on one last stop. Emma's old home.
When Guerrero was 5 or 6, a smallpox epidemic swept through town. The disease left his skin covered with pockmarks.
Neighborhood children called him cacaro, "crater face," and other names.
"Girls wouldn't have anything to do with me," Guerrero says. "Not Emma. She was the first girl that was good to me, who inspired me and who kissed me.
"I give her the credit for pulling me out of the prison I was in. She made me believe in me again. She gave me the courage and the inspiration and the strength to try to become somebody.
"I owe her a lot."
Inside the car, Guerrero begins to sing very softly in Spanish.
"Do you know, my life, why I cry?
Because I love you. Because I adore you.
Do you know why I'll never forget you?
Because you were my first love."
Event sparks Guerrero's call for Latinos to vote
He and five other Hispanics are honored for their strong, committed contributions to improving Arizona.
As part of his acceptance speech, Lalo Guerrero was going to sing "Barrio Viejo," his homage to the old Tucson neighborhood where he grew up.
Instead, Guerrero, one of six Latinos honored Sept. 6 for their contributions to Arizona, decided to regale the largest crowd ever assembled at the Arizona Biltmore with one of his political protest songs, all the while strumming away on his guitar:
"Wake up, Chicanos/wake up, let's get involved/wake up, you sleeping giant/we'll get our problems solved."
It was a fitting choice, considering the keynote speech delivered earlier by Ray Suarez during the 3 1/2-hour awards luncheon, sponsored by Valle del Sol, a Phoenix-based human-services agency.
Suarez, a senior correspondent for "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" on PBS and among the most influential Latino journalists in America, gave a rousing talk exhorting Latinos to do just that - get involved.
Whether running for a seat on the school board, organizing a block watch or volunteering to head the ushers at church, Suarez said, these are the activities that help groom the leaders of tomorrow.
"All these bits of civic connection work the muscles" of community development and are "where leaders are developed and born," Suarez said.
For his musical career spanning more than six decades, Guerrero, known as the Father of Chicano Music, received the event's Hall of Fame award. Guerrero has written hundreds of songs about his beloved Mexican-American culture among them songs like the one he performed at the awards ceremony, titled "The Battle Cry of the Chicano," which continues, "No more manana syndrome/we have the antidote/we're going to get the hell out/and register and vote."