Tejano Tableau (feat. Jews and Austrians)

It looks staged but it is not. It’s a shot of people who are waiting to go on stage. The showplace is a small town parade in southeastern Texas called Fiestas Patrias Mexicanas in the dusty remnants of a train station outpost town called Bryan. About 25,000 people visit the parade and festival each year but for Texas standards, this is small. The city of Bryan’s website states that it is one of the few towns along the railway that has escaped becoming a ghost town and though 78,000 people live in Bryan, I beg to differ. I live here now.

This photo looks exotic to me even though I took it and I live here. Perhaps because it has so many markers of Texas: the dry, barren landscape, the trucks, which outnumber cars everywhere you look in this town.  The church in the background, straight from scene in Tarantino’s Kill Bill film series. One imagines a shootout after the husband takes the bride or in lieu of this, a shotgun wedding. Then there’s the cowboy hat that looks like a prop but is in fact incredibly practical in this climate. So practical, that men when they stand will fold their arms tight around their chests in order to stay under the shadow of that wide-brimmed, sun-shielding exemplar of headwear. The jeans? They are Wranglers and its not ironic, it’s real.

I took my camera to this Fiesta on this day in order to record a scene that might look prototypically Texan. And yet many of these people come in buses and big trucks pulling horse trailers from México. Of course the national boundary between the US and México can’t divide the organic unity of the Tejano influence which extends from Nuevo León, Coahuila and Zacatecas, as well as Nueva Galicia in Northern México all the way into New Spain, also known as the American Southwest, including the state of Texas. The Tejano culture is stoic, cowboy, tragic, loyal, patriotic and long-suffering. And it contains a whole lot of Jewish influence due to the proportion of conversos, crypto-Jews, and Sefarditas with names like Israel, Solomón and Isaac who came to these parts of México with the colonizers and the explorers after being pushed out of Spain and Europe. Thus the popular statement that, “la gente de Monterrey son muy Judíos” – the people of Monterrey are very Jewish. Could it be that the still popular ritual quinceañera, the introduction of a young girl to society at the age of 13, with all the associated traditions and customs, is a Mexican (and Mexican American) bat mitzvah?

The woman in the photo was dressed in that same sort of quinceañera dress, I call it the fashion equivalent of the Zuckerbäckerstil because she looks like she belongs on the top of a cake and because it reminds me of the comedy that the baroque-loving Habsburgs once owned these parts of México. But a few moments after this photo was taken, I spotted her on top of a horse with two of her sisters, also in frilly, pastel-colored dresses. And here she holds the hand of her caballero and the two are in love enough that they allow me to take their picture. And the band plays its Mexican polka/waltz variations with military brass instruments, both Norteño and Tejano music and blends that sound with Spanish and Mexican oral and music traditions. Did Maxmilian I himself aid in bringing those sounds in the Second Mexican Republic?

It was so hot that day: 104° F/ 40° C. So hot and bright that every photo I took with my iPhone came out blue. I struggled with my desire to get out of the sun and the heat and run home to the air-conditioned shelter of my home that September day. So much of this culture – the one that came here first and learned to adapt to this climate and life – still remains so underground in Texas. Or it is known somehow but not with all the deepest layers of this life world, embodied perhaps by the flat and compact, unleavened bread eaten by the Tejanos not just for Pesach but for all year round: the flour tortilla. One must be intrepid to endure the heat and look behind the artifice. Except for this photo as an artifact, I didn’t come any closer to uncovering what depths lie behind the flour tortilla. But I can imagine how truly familiar what I find will be.