Tejano Music: The Accordion Sound That German Settlers Left Behind

The instrument that defines Tejano conjunto music, the button accordion, did not come from Mexico. It came from Germany and Bohemia, brought to South Texas by the same immigrant wave that settled the Hill Country in the eighteen forties, eighties, and nineties.

German and Czech immigrants introduced the accordion and the polka into the communities of South Texas in the decades following the Civil War. Mexican-American working-class musicians encountered those instruments and those rhythms and did something entirely their own with them. They combined the accordion with the bajo sexto, a twelve-string guitar developed along the border, and with the corrido ballad tradition that documented the lives of ordinary people on the Texas-Mexico borderlands. The result was conjunto, a distinctly South Texas sound that had no exact equivalent anywhere in either Mexico or Germany.

Narciso Martinez, born in nineteen eleven, was recording in San Antonio by the nineteen thirties and is often called the father of conjunto music. Santiago Jimenez Senior extended the tradition into Austin and central Texas. Their recordings document a sound that had been developing in working-class San Antonio and the border communities for decades before it reached a microphone.

The sound ran north from San Antonio into Austin, east toward Houston, and eventually, in the hands of Selena Quintanilla in the nineteen eighties and early nineties, reached the top of the national pop charts.

This happened because a German accordion found its way into a Mexican-American community in South Texas and was transformed into something neither the Germans nor the Mexicans had imagined. That is not an unusual story in American music. It is what American music is.