Anthony wrote: > My first ever LP was a CCR album.
In August 1968, my parents sent my 10-year old brother to Mexico City so that he could attend middle school. At the time, I was 8 and we were living in Churumuco, Michoacán, Mexico, a small, isolated, and impoverished little town (less than 5,000 people altogether). The original town had been flooded in 1963 to build a damn and supply Mexico City with electricity. The town was rebuilt on a hill nearby. (David Barkin remembers this, because he was at the time in Lazaro Cardenas' entourage at the Comisión del Balsas.) My parents were nervous about my brother, because they'd heard about the hippy movement spreading into the country and, more immediately scarier, the student protests then at their peak. My brother was registered into a school that, at the time, belonged to the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), also founded by Lazaro Cardenas with the aim of educating the engineers and technical cadres to advance Mexico's industrialization. Along with Chapingo, the IPN and the UNAM were at the time Mexico's largest national higher education centers, and middle school students were very involved in the protests. The classes didn't really start until after the October 2 killings, so when my brother joined the prevo 6, the movement had already been crushed. To prevent young middle students from taking part in future mass protests, the government severed prevos and secundarias from their mother institutions (IPN and UNAM) and placed under the control of the ministry of education. So my brother's was the latest IPN generation at that middle school, which then changed its name to Escuela Tecnológica Industrial 120. I also went to that school later on, in 1970. All my teachers said that, regardless of the administrative change, the school was still IPN in spirit. The teachers were very dedicated, really imbued with a sense of patriotic duty. They were the shock troops of Mexico's import substitution industrialization. That mystique got lost in the next few decades. Anyway, the story I wanted to share is that, in December 1968, my brother came to stay with the family for the holidays. At the time, there was no Internet, otherwise I guess he would have been on the computer all day long IMing his pals in Mexico City. However, there was radio, AM stations in particular. The few existing FM stations were located in big cities and the signal didn't get far. We were about 250 miles west of Mexico City along a straight line, with 2-3 mountain ranges in between, so there was no chance we'd get the signal. But the signal from the AM stations was good enough, but only at night. (In our town, after 11pm, the electricity supply plant would get shut off, except on Saturdays, when it stayed on until midnight.) So, that December of 1968, my brother would train my father's battery radio to tune Radio 590, La Pantera (I wonder if the name of this radio station had anything to do with admiration for the Black Panthers, since even in 1970, when I moved to Mexico City, I remember seeing lots of stickers asking at the ETI 120 demanding freedom for Black Panthers -- and also for Angela Davis). Well, my brother's band was... CCR! I had no idea what the lyrics said, but Proud Mary, Born in the Bayou, and Fortunate Song were pretty catchy. And, even though my retrospect may be actually skewing my memory, I kind of remembering sensing a bit of a connection with those free-love infected hippies whose photos we saw in the weekly tabloid Alarma! (something like a National Enquirer specialized on bloody crimes and scandals). The nearby radio stations (from Apatzingan or Ario de Rosales) played only norteñas y rancheras. And when we stayed up late to listen to the radio, it was to listen to a comedy show on the XEW (which later metastasized as Televisa). Once in a while, some young people studying in Morelia or Mexico City would bring some rock in Spanish. Nothing in English. Aside from live pireguas (Purepecha songs from the Indians in the vicinity), which didn't get played on the radio, this was the first time ever I listened to songs in a different language. Again, until my brother tuned Radio 590 and brought CCR, Carlos Santana, the Doors, etc. into our town. Early in the spring, I got John Fogerty's latest at a Starbucks. I played it a couple of times at home and my 3 year old son fell for it. He loves 2 pieces in particular: The Credence Song, which he re-baptized as the "Choo Choo Song," and "It Ain't Right," which my he calls "Mousine." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
