Narciso Martínez: The Hurricane of the Valley

In nineteen thirty-five, a farmworker named Narciso Martínez walked into a recording session with his accordion and his playing partner, a bajo sexto guitarist named Santiago Almeida, and laid down the first commercial recordings of what would become known as conjunto music. The records were released on the Bluebird label. They featured polkas and schottisches rendered in a style that owed something to the German and Czech brass bands that had settled in South Texas during the previous century, but filtered now through the sensibility of the Mexican and Mexican American working people of the lower Rio Grande Valley.

Martínez was born in Reynosa in nineteen eleven. His family moved to La Paloma, Texas, near Brownsville, when he was an infant, and he grew up in the farmworker communities of the Valley. He called himself El Huracán del Valle, the Hurricane of the Valley. His style on the accordion was driving and inventive, emphasizing the melody line while Almeida's bajo sexto held the rhythm below. He eliminated the bajo bass lines that earlier players had used as accompaniment, stripping the sound down to something leaner and harder.

The accordion had come to South Texas with European settlers. The polka had come with them too. What Martínez and Almeida did in those sessions was marry those instruments and rhythms to the ranchero tradition of northern Mexico, creating something that belonged entirely to the border.

Conjunto became the soundtrack of the Valley, played at dances in the fields during breaks from harvest, at quinceañeras and weddings, at cantinas and church halls. Valerio Longoria added vocals to the form in the nineteen forties. The tradition he and Martínez built ran through every major Tejano artist who followed. In nineteen eighty-three, Narciso Martínez received the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He died in San Benito, Texas, in nineteen ninety-two.