Tear Down the Wall

The border-busting banda sound of Dallas' Las Palmas de Durango.
Michael Hoinski | March 07, 2008 | Books and the Culture

It was a frigid Saturday night just before Christmas, and there was a fiesta going on at Plaza de las Americas. Inside an abandoned retail space rented out for parties in the otherwise vacant South Dallas strip mall, abuelos y padres, hermanos y tios, primos y ninos, y mas otros celebrated Karina’s quinceañera, the traditional coming-of-age 15th-birthday party for Hispanic girls ...

The bailadores were moving in time to the music of Las Palmas de Durango, a seven-piece group that plays modern takes on banda, a century-old, marching-band style of music native to the northwestern Mexican states whence most of Las Palmas’ members migrated to Texas. Banda is an obscure style—at least relative to more popular north-of-the-border Mexican genres like mariachi, conjunto, and Tejano—distinguished by its dearth of strings and accordion in favor of a rapid-fire combination of horns and drums. Las Palmas updates the genre by using it as a platform to rail against increasing border security ...

We don’t come here because we like this ground. Many of us come hoping for the day we can return. As long as there is misery in our hometowns ... we will have no choice but to keep coming, even if it means we get deported or thrown in prison.

In other words, F-you, George Bush, for signing the Secure Fence Act of 2006, in effect green-lighting a 700-mile, 15-foot-high fence between Mexico and the U.S., making it that much harder for the undocumented to infiltrate the land of opportunity ...

http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2713