Oral History

Diego 26

Musician for a very popular Mexican Band. Has been a Musician for 16 years and has been on the road non stop for the past 7 years.

When I first started traveling with my old band I would be surprise when our local Chicago band would get called to go play in Maine, Seattle, and other states, like damn Mexicans live everywhere. Now that I play in band known in the United States and Mexico I don’t really get surprise when we get on road and go to towns we never heard off. When we started it was just for fun and figure we play in Chicago and travel every once in a while if the money was right. Luckily we had some friends who were signed and gave them our information and they liked us. From then on we been traveling just about every weekend in the United States however when we go to Mexico we play just about everyday.

But isn’t Mexico suppose to be poor and its people shouldn’t have money to go to dances everyday?

That is what we taught at first and it’s weird because we also draw the larger crowds in Mexico. You know how in Mexico every town, village have there own time for the celebrations of their town? Well it seems like we play at one every night. You would think people would think twice about spending money on a concert but it sure doesn’t seem like it. Then there are also places were I feel they overcharge but we have nothing to do with the tickets, the promoters call us and we just show up. I know there is a recession going on but here in Mexico you can say there already use to the poor life so I don’t think it going to be a big problem over here especially in the small towns and villages only in the big cities like the capital and Guadalajara and so on.

Getting back to when you said you were surprised about going to weird states and towns n realizing there were Mexicans everywhere, do you believe there will be some kind of amnesty for the illegal living in the United States..

I really don’t know. I tell you this because even our drummer and trombone player are illegal and when we travel between the countries we have to find a way to bring them back illegally which is usually crossing the border with fake papers and paying somebody off. If we know we are coming back to the Mexico quickly we just call one of our back up drummers in Chicago to help us out that weekend and leave our drummer behind. Since we have three trombones we really don’t need a back up will just play with two. When we first started traveling they did have permission to go back and forth thanks to our label but now it seems impossible to get it so we have to take care of that on our own. I do hope with Obama being a minority he think about the illegal and gets something good going for us but I don’t see that happening soon with the way the economy is I think that is the number one thing to fix right now.