Covid-19's Impact on Texas-Mexican Musical Community in the Midwest
As COVID-19 lockdowns went into effect across the United States in the spring of 2020, one of many industries disrupted was the live music industry. Tours and festivals were postponed or canceled and many performance venues, forced to close their doors, did not recover from the lost revenue. Performers and fans alike had to adapt to experiencing live music through streaming services, performers separated from audiences and audience members separated from one another, inhibiting the communal spirit that often marks the live musical experience. These socioeconomic and communal impacts of the pandemic have been deeply felt by the Tejano music industry, both in its native Texas and in Tejano diasporic communities in places such as the Midwest. This article focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on Tejano musical communities in the Midwest, where Texas-Mexican music has historically played a key role in Tejano placemaking and community cohesion and sustainability.
On March 5th, 2020, as the novel coronavirus was in the earliest stages of community spread in the United States, the Texas Talent Musicians Association (TTMA), the organization behind the annual Tejano Music Awards FanFair festival, announced that the 2020 festival would go on as planned from March 12th-15th in San Antonio’s Market Square. By March 11th, the same day that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, around 30 acts scheduled to perform or appear at Fan Fair had canceled their appearances due to COVID concerns. The festival still began on March 12th as planned, but on March 13th, the same day the U.S. government declared a national emergency, San Antonio city officials declared a health emergency that prohibited gatherings of over 500 people, forcing TTMA to cancel the remainder of the festival. In 2021, the event, which typically draws crowds of over 100,000 people from across the U.S. each year, was postponed from March to July of that year, and finally returned to its regular March dates in 2022. One of the largest celebrations of Tejano music, a TexasMexican regional style that traces its origins to the early 1900s, these disruptions were a major economic setback for vendors and others who rely on the festival for a significant portion of their annual income, as well as a cultural loss for Tejana/os across the nation who flock to the festival each year to celebrate through music a shared sense of identity and community.
Searches for “coronavirus” and “COVID” on the Tejano-focused entertainment news website Tejano Nation further detail losses experienced within the Tejano music industry over the course of the pandemic. These include many canceled or postponed concerts, tours, festivals, and awards shows due to coronavirus concerns and public health orders, as well as in some cases performers testing positive for COVID-19. The website has also reported on multiple hospitalizations of Tejano musicians due to COVID infections, and, sadly, on numerous deaths from COVID or COVID-related complications. The first of twelve such notices, posted to Tejano Nation on July 3rd, 2020, reported the passing of Joe Gonzalez, lead vocalist of El Dorado Band and veteran of multiple other San Antonio-based groups. Most recently, on January 22nd, 2022, the site reported the passing of Chris Gonzalez, founder, vocalist, and guitarist of the San Antonio band Grupo Cielo, who was only 38 years old at the time of his passing. These reports demonstrate the enormous economic and human cost of the pandemic within Tejano communities.
More locally, Tejano communities and the Tejano music industry in the Midwest have also been deeply impacted by the pandemic in a variety of ways. Though the happenings of the industry in the Midwest rarely make it onto Texas-centric Tejano Nation, in my own ongoing research on Texas-Mexican music in the Midwest numerous interviewees have spoken about the impact of COVID on the community and, in multiple cases, their own experiences of COVID infections. While I am not aware of any musicians active before the start of the pandemic who have since died of COVID, infections have been common. For instance, a vocalist from Northwest Ohio noted that the symptoms of her COVID infection was both severe and long-lasting. Though her infection has now passed, the severity of her illness has left her unable to sing for extended periods of time, which significantly delayed completion of several songs she was in the process of recording prior to her infection. Before the pandemic, she had been building a name for herself through the release of a string of well received digital singles. This momentum was brought to a halt by her illness, which is a major setback in an industry with a short attention span, especially for a Midwestern artist trying to both build a local following and break into the market in Texas.
Beyond the prevalence of infections, many of the COVIDrelated disruptions in Midwest Tejano music mirror those in Texas. For example, on March 13th, 2020, the same day that the City of San Antonio banned gatherings of over 500 people and TTMA was forced to cancel the remainder of FanFair, Governor Gretchen Whitmer banned gatherings of over 250 people and, on March 17th, further restricted gatherings to 50 people or fewer. As in Texas, this inevitably led Tejano promoters and bands to cancel or postpone concerts, tours, and festivals. Likewise, the few remaining Tejano clubs in the Midwest, such as the Blue Diamond in Southwest Detroit, which hosts live bands every Saturday, were hard hit by COVID lockdowns and have struggled to return to pre-pandemic attendance levels. Producer and promoter Rudy Peña attributes this partially to the fact that these venues tend to attract older crowds and many older people have been reluctant to resume certain activities out of ongoing COVID concerns. Peña notes that the dances he promotes have also not returned to pre-pandemic attendance levels. While he is certain that this shift is in part COVID-related, he is uncertain if it is also related to moving his events from Saginaw, Michigan, where he says pre-pandemic dances were packed, to Flint, where attendance has been more limited.
Compared to Texas, though, disruptions caused by COVID present unique challenges for the Tejano music industry and Tejano communities in the Midwest. Whereas the industry in Texas has remained vibrant into the 21st Century, economic shifts and changing migration patterns have led to a precipitous decline in musical activity in the Midwest since the 1990s. Thus, the economic and cultural impacts of the pandemic have only exacerbated existing challenges to the sustainability of Tejano musical community in the Midwest. In Saginaw, for instance, the annual Midwest Tejano Music Festival, organized by Louie Garcia of Midwest Tejano Radio, was canceled in 2020 due to COVID concerns and has yet to resume. In 2019, the sixth year of the festival, a crowd of around 200 gathered at the Huntington Event Park in downtown Saginaw to dance to acts from Saginaw, Lansing, and Adrian, Michigan, as well as a homecoming performance from Miguel Hernandez, a Detroit native who relocated to Texas to be closer to the heart of the Tejano industry. The loss of events such as the Midwest Tejano Music Festival are significant because, unlike many Tejano dances held in clubs or rented halls across the Midwest that tend to draw older crowds, festivals, many of which are free to attend, tend to draw more mixed crowds. These events are one of increasingly few opportunities for younger generations of Tejanos in the Midwest, many of whom have largely assimilated into the dominant culture, to be exposed to the cultural traditions that have historically held Midwestern Tejano communities together. Though it is too early to understand the long-term impacts of the pandemic on the economic and cultural vitality of these communities, they will no doubt be significant.