by Sandra Beckmeier

At Los Camales Restaurant, covered in pottery, the smell of rotisserie, surrounded in a pith of sound, Austin activist Marcelo Tafoya talked at length about the days when he broadcasted live from the small cafe on E. 7th Street. A cultural critic, missionary, and well-known promoter of Tejano music, Tafoya has owned, collaborated or produced a number of popular radio shows. After 38 years of working primarily in electronic and print media, he's now in the driver's seat as interim-manager at community radio KOOP, with a program called Austin Presenta giving an outlet to all kinds of music otherwise not covered in the area.

According to the founder of the new Tejano Music Museum, the project will include an exhibit space, a research center, and an 18-wheeler hauling a touring exhibit including a facet of audial and visual references to the legends of Tejano music. The research center opened in February at 2211 Hidalgo and displays a massive collection of biographies, 350,000 albums and over 175,000 singles, video and print photography. The University of Texas approached Tafoya and asked him to donate his collection. He refused.

"This vision I have is so important because we're losing our culture," Tafoya said. "We're losing our heritage. There are a lot of musicians who did a lot for our culture and they're being forgotten, as if they don't exist. My whole idea is I don't want to forget where all this came from and right now our industry is very young, comparatively. A lot of our artists are still alive, a lot of information is still out there, and I don't want to lose it. Our kids are slowly moving away from their culture. I want to create something permanent to bring them back in. Tejano music is very vital, and now we're to the point where we're going to be the largest minority. We have to wake up and see the prominence we can offer."

Tafoya started the first Spanish radio program in central Texas. He also started the first Spanish-speaking television program. During his TV show he had to literally draw a picture of the radio with a switch that read AM/FM so people could hear. Having owned five radio stations at one time, Tafoya describes the choices he made while choosing what is played on the radio as, "You play what you get. You were starving to get whatever you could. A lot of people will say, 'I work on ratings, Billboard magazine,' but to me that isn't an influence. I would rather go to a local record shop and find out what is selling and play that. Back then we were the hit-makers, the ones creating artists, and we were sincere."

Tafoya started in radio after traveling to Mexico twice, once as a director of an orphanage, later as a papal volunteer. When he returned the radio station in Georgetown was just opening, still wiring in fact, so Tafoya went in to apply for a program. "I was going to buy a show, so I signed a five-year contract for a 30-minute slot on Monday, Wednesday and Friday," he explained. "The church and the group I was working with were going to help me pay for it. The first week they came up with ten dollars, then the second the same, and after that I said, 'Look, I can't be paying for this out of my pocket.' So I went back to my station manager and said I need to get out of my contract and he refused. I said, 'Under those conditions I want one hour a day, Monday through Friday for the same price,' so he said okay.

"I started playing music from Mexico with guys like Little Joe, Roy Montelongo, Shorty Ortiz and the Corvettes, Rudy T. Gonzales and the Reno Bops. Tex-Mex sang the way we felt. I ended up doing a radio show at KAJZ, a radio program at KUT, and KUGN, and then a television show on KTBC, Channel 7, which I did for ten years. Later on I got an opportunity to buy a station in Lubbock, so I went. I also bought the two stations in Lampasas, Texas, and later in the year I had to sell them because I wasn't making any money. I was losing it. I found out the gentleman was selling the station where I started in Georgetown. I operated it for about six months and then he decided not to relinquish ownership.

"So then, you know, you try to improve yourself. I had already paid for everything so I borrowed some money to move and that's when the S&Ls crashed and I went down with them. All these other banks that I had paid a lot of money to couldn't lend me any money because they were next on the chopping blocks. I finally ended up filing for bankruptcy as a corporation and I got out of it. So that's radio and me. I've never worked for somebody else; this is the first time, well kind of the first time since I first started in radio."

Developing a research center from the ground up is no small undertaking, either. Cataloging his collection of over 350,000 albums and over 175,000 singles may take volunteers some time. Preservation comes first, and volunteers are helping him clean and re-record all the records onto CD so they can be used.

Certainly Marcelo Tafoya could write a book about the history of Tejano as a popular music. Historically, Tafoya says, what began with an accordion, guitar, and several people playing a treble guitar, the music was influenced a great deal by the Germans when they brought over the accordion, especially through Mexico up the valley. The Spaniards brought the guitar, and after a while musicians would play together at the diaz y sies (sweet sixteen) parties, weddings, and beer joints.

At one time orchestras were playing traditional music from Mexico, so the younger players were listening to people like Glen Miller, Guy Lombardo, and learning how to play saxophone. "They would start singing their own songs interpreting the songs of Mexico," Tafoya explained. "When this started to grow bigger is how the Laonda Tejana (new wave) got started. But the accordion was always big time and associated with the beer joints. Out of one orchestra, 21 orchestras came out. It really showed it didn't just sit there idle.

"Most of us know the rise of so-called Tejano music started with Selena. She opened doors for women," Tafoya said. "When Selena came on the scene, and so quickly died, her death kind of like pushed forward Tejano music to the brink, including the Japanese, Europe, and Anglo markets who all wanted to know what is this thing called 'Tejano' and why are people so engrossed and wanting to do something for this young lady who died. That's when they really realized we have a world culture within ourselves.

"Anything the world has created we have within ourselves. Classical music, Baroque, Spanish, Rock, Jazz, Conjunto, Blues, International Contemporary, Latin Hip-Hop, you name it we have it. When she died and everybody started asking questions the industry just cut the cord because it couldn't keep up with the demand. We were lacking as a community because we didn't follow up. We were lacking in the tremendous catapult she gave us. We lost out on that economically, but in reality we gained.

"Also there are a lot of women who never got credit for opening the door for Selena like Patsy Torres, Shelly Lares, and Elsa Garcia, who has paid her dues, and she's been at it for a long time. The music world is a world of itself, a man's world," he said. "But men are going to have to slowly accept that women have a lot to offer. The irony is that the people who buy the most music are women.

"I had no idea of the power of radio. I had no idea even the listenership would be there. My mother used to listen to radio early in the morning and that's the way we used to wake up. We were Tex-Mex and we didn't speak Spanish correctly, yet it was an important part of our lives, but at that time there wasn't such a thing as a full time radio station. You constantly had to go down the dial to catch Spanish radio, two hours in the morning, two hours somewhere else, then two hours again here in the evening."

In 1993 Tafoya started Musica, a newspaper that would serve the Chicano community, providing a regular platform for artists and local happenings. He also jumpstarted a radical magazine called Echo which deals with community problems, and comes out specifically whenever there is an issue to address.

"I publish 10,000 copies and they go like mad. I send it out of town and distribute in Detroit, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Denver, everywhere. I have friends in radio who I send it to in big bundles, and they put it out for me."

Presently Tafoya is the interim manager for KOOP radio. "I'm there until the new board decides who they want to stay as the new manager. The final decision hasn't been made. We do a lot of good for the community and there is a lot of diverse programming so I'm interested in doing service, which I've done all my life," he explained.