Instead of tagging, the 14 Kilate de Oro members spend their after-school hours practicing steps or working to pay for pricey snakeskin gear. Ramirez and his friends like the fact that the music they’re dancing to is old-"songs our parents knew as kids, but with different rhythms.” They’re proud of their Mexican cowboy gear emblazoned with the regions of their ancestors and the name of their club. They’re wearing African clothes now themselves.” “I thought the black kids would make fun of me, but they didn’t. until the girls started going for guys who looked like that.”Įven then, Ramirez worried before he adopted the style.
“I thought I’d never go cowboy,” he said, ". The 40-member 14 Kilate de Oro (14 Karat Gold), started by a group of friends at University High in West Los Angeles, has males and females, adults and teen-agers.Ĭlub President Eric Ramirez, 17, a University High senior, admits that he used to be a tagger and gang banger who thought that the quebradores at his school were hicks. Some clubs are all-male, some all-female. The under-21 crowd, and many adults, do their dancing at flyer-advertised parties called pachangons, held in rented halls or private homes and organized by banda clubs that may have as many as 300 members. There’s only one problem: It’s hard on the knees.”ī anda has become as popular around area high schools as in clubs such as La Sierra, Leonardo’s in Sun Valley and La Zona Rosa in North Hollywood. I learned a step that looks like the Russian kazatzka by watching Billy Ray Cyrus. “Everybody tries to do something different that looks good,” Rodriguez said. Too much salsa-style wiggling can get a couple disqualified, although judges favor acrobatic lifts and sombreros spinning like Hula-Hoops. The upper body remains fairly rigid as dancers kick their heels fore, aft and around in circles, occasionally dipping their partners backward into a quebradita (break). La quebradita, less overtly erotic than other recent Latin dance crazes, looks something like the Texas two-step combined with the fast and furious footwork of a Highland fling. Rodriguez, dressed banda -style in jeans, cowboy hat, boots and hand-tooled belt with dangling leather cuerda (cattle whip), is a good enough quebradora (dancer) to consider competing for tonight’s top prize of $700. “Banda Mobil and other groups followed, and boom! People started dancing in parks, watching others: adults, girls, boys, guys just dancing by themselves.” The banda craze has been big for about two years, according to the people who run La Sierra. La Sierra regular Tony Rodriguez, 28, of Van Nuys by way of Durango, Mexico, traces the current banda craze to a popular recording five years ago by Mexican singer Antonio Aguilar. Sometimes, for reasons of cost and convenience, bass guitar substitutes for the tuba’s oom-pah, while keyboard fills in for clarinet.
Now banda musicians play the past repertoire and have taken it to the popular songs of today,” he said. Folk musicians used that instrument group not only for marches, but also to interpret traditional Mexican music and the popular music of their time. “It dates back to the military band sound that arose when Europeans first came to Mexico. A typical banda (band) would have seven to 17 musicians playing mostly trumpet, trombone, clarinet, tuba and percussion. It’s distinguished by having no string instruments. “The music comes from the rich tradition of the Mexican state of Sinaloa,” said Everto Ruiz, a Cal State Northridge professor of Chicano studies. The dance of the day is la quebradita, and the sound that drives it is banda. So irresistible that one dancer is being paged in Spanish over the loudspeaker because his wife is in labor. It’s Friday night at La Sierra in Panorama City, and 300 dancers are stomping and kicking to a tune that takes a moment to recognize: “Under the Boardwalk,” with Spanish lyrics and an irresistible beat.