Until a few years ago, Chavez hadn't heard Led Zeppelin. ![]() The diverse musical backgrounds of the band have shaped XIXA's sound, and nowhere is that more apparent than the rhythm section. They experimented with lineups as a cover band at the very beginning, but once the current lineup was formed, it stuck and the band slowly built up a cache of original songs. "When we got back, we knew we didn't want to get jobs and thought that learning to play this kind of music, getting a band together to play parties and restaurants, could be a way to do that," says Sullivan. Lopez had picked up a chicha compilation at Barbés, a Brooklyn club, on the way abroad and he and Sullivan couldn't stop listening to it. They've been playing together for four years, though most of that time they played under the name Chicha Dust.Ĭhicha Dust got its start in 2011, when Lopez and Sullivan were touring France. XIXA, a six-piece chicha rock outfit, consists of Brain Lopez and Gabriel Sullivan on guitars and vocals, Jason Urman on keyboard, Geoffrey Hidalgo on bass, Efren Cruz Chavez on timbales and percussion and Winston Watson on drums. It's also, for those who have spent the last several years backing other bands, a chance to do things on their own terms. It's the culmination of years spent playing music and developing an aesthetic. It is a testament to the tastes of six professional musicians with an eye for incidentals. ![]() The walls are lined with beautiful guitars, and every detail, from the paint job to the décor to the burlap sacks hung from the ceiling, suggests a carefully designed space. Liquor store after liquor store - nothing.XIXA's studio on north Stone Avenue stands in stark contrast to the dirt lots and auto shops that surround it. I dug up my Kennedy books and quickly put them away - why read about recipes I could go enjoy down the street? Then, I went on a search for Choco Tacos.įirst, my local Northgate Gonzalez and Superior Grocers markets - sold out, while rows of Mexican iced treats like ice cream, paletas and bolis (freezies) sat untouched. The hubbub over Kennedy and Choco Taco inspired me to seek out both. Nothing’s more authentically Mexican than a mishmash - and if you don’t believe that, you must think that Bohemia beer is named after an Aztec emperor. Evolution, not stasis, is why Mexican food remains one of the most vibrant cuisines in the world. Tradition is important - but so is making and embracing our own traditions, letting other cultures learn from us and vice versa. The Choco Taco functions better as a metaphor, anyway. That combo plate to me was always Mexican, because that was the scene whenever I bought some from the neighborhood ice cream truck or paletero, whether I was a kid or an adult. Kennedy has her place in the history of Mexican food in the U.S., but future generations won’t remember her kindly, just like they don’t remember Bertha Haffner-Ginger, Erna Fergusson and other gabachas who made a career out of hawking “authentic” Mexican recipes to Americans decades before.īut Choco Tacos represent happiness, summertime and family. Maybe they and their readers needed someone to teach them how special and varied Mexican food was.īut my parents’ generation - who, to this day, come back from the motherland lugging suitcases stuffed with local cheeses, edible seeds, chiles and candies - never needed any pinche lessons. But that was classic Kennedy, whom the food media loved to portray as a foul-mouthed mix of Indiana Jones and Miss Marple. ![]() Her treatment of Mexican food as a museum piece was paternalistic at best and racist at worst. Tellingly, Kennedy’s first book named only one place in Los Angeles - El Mercadito in Boyle Heights - where her readers might source Mexican ingredients, while listing 11 in Manhattan. Reading “The Cuisines of Mexico” today, it’s painfully obvious that Kennedy never bothered to visit the home kitchens of Mexican immigrants in Southern California, where she would’ve found more than a few of the recipes - albóndigas, pipian, pozole, buñuelos and calabacitas, to name the most obvious - that she claimed didn’t properly exist in el Norte. Kennedy had bought into the lies of Mexican elites, who then and now laughed off Mexican Americans as pochos - not the real thing. I had a problem with her lambasting people like me. I never had a problem with Kennedy - a white woman - telling the world about the glories of Mexican food.
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