Conjunto: The Sound Born in San Antonio

In the later nineteenth century, two worlds collided in San Antonio and made music. German and Czech immigrants who came to Central Texas in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties brought the accordion and the polka. Mexican American families in the city and on the ranches of South Texas had their own musical traditions rooted in corrido, huapango, and the vocal styles of the borderlands. When those traditions met in the dancehalls and plazas of Bexar County, something new came out. People called it conjunto.

The instrument at the center of the sound was the diatonic button accordion, which Tejano musicians adapted to play their own repertoire. Paired with the bajo sexto, a twelve-string guitar tuned in a way unlike any other, the conjunto ensemble became the sound of working-class Texas-Mexican life by the early twentieth century. The music was played at quinceañeras, at Saturday-night dances in fields and backyards, at cantinas along the railroad lines.

Narciso Martínez, from the lower Rio Grande Valley, is often called the Father of Conjunto Music for the recordings he made in the nineteen thirties and forties that defined what the genre could be. San Antonio's radio stations and record labels helped broadcast that sound statewide and eventually nationally. The city became the commercial capital of the genre, and it remains central to conjunto's living tradition.

Today San Antonio hosts the Tejano Conjunto Festival each spring, held in Rosedale Park on the city's West Side. It draws thousands of musicians and listeners from across South Texas, the borderlands, and beyond. The sound has changed since the dances in the caliche-dust fields, but the accordion is still there, and the bajo sexto, and the feet on the floor.