UC Santa Barbara

Since the turn of the twenty first century, the Los Angeles Rockabilly scene has been dominated by Chicana/os and Latina/os; a very unlikely and untraditional community of producers and consumers. Through their claiming of space, style, and music, Chicana/o and Latina/o working class youth of greater Los Angeles have embraced and refashioned the cultural sensibilities of Rockabilly, a form of 1950s rock & roll, into what I term "Raza Rockabilly," or simply "Razabilly."

My research project analyzes how Chicana/os and Latina/os have appropriated and re-imagined the Rockabilly scene resulting in a racialization of the social spaces and practices associated with it. I investigate this process by conducting ethnography of the Chicana/o Latina/o Rockabilly scene in the greater Los Angeles area. My methods largely rely upon participant-observation at local sites in Los Angeles and the annual Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender, as well as life history interviews with current and past members of the scene. I discovered that as Raza youth are denied access to their own communities' histories through culturally insensitive and irrelevant school curriculum, and as historic barrios themselves are being threatened by gentrification, Chicanas/os and Latinas/os have taken it upon themselves to reclaim their history and assert their claims to space and community through the cultural innovations of "Razabilly."

In Chapter I, I provide a cultural history of the international Rockabilly scene since its revival in Great Britain. As a hybrid cultural text, the genre of music known as Rockabilly music combined elements of Black rhythm & blues and white country music in the 1950s. By the 1970s Rockabilly enthusiasts in the United Kingdom developed a scene based on a re-imagined vision of 1950s America. Introduced to the United States in the 1980s, and again in the late 1990s, the Rockabilly scene gained a strong foothold in the Los Angeles area, where Chicana/os and Latina/os now dominate.

Chapter II explores the sites crucial to the Raza Rockabilly scene in greater Los Angeles. Rudolpho's, a Mexican restaurant, and Razabilly, an internet forum, were instrumental in providing young working class Chicana/o and Latina/o Rockabilly fans of the early 2000s with the space necessary to transform the sights and sounds of rockabilly to meet their own desires. This chapter also explores how the great recession has impacted contemporary sites of leisure, The Rumble Bar and Rhythm and Booze.

In Chapter III, I examine Rockabilly style, a conspicuous sigh known for its working class 1950s aesthetics. Unique to Raza Rockabilly is the self-conscious attempt to invoke a sense of historical or cultural memory tied to the atomic era, a memory that is embodied by a participant in the Rockabilly scene and subject to diverse readings by the spectator. As personal and intimate as self-fashioning one's own body can be, it relies largely on employing broader networks and commercial interest that are integral components in the production and consumption of the Rockabilly scene. Through their business Tarantula Clothing Company, David Contreras and Esther Vasquez engage in multiple codes of dress to design, produce, and sell garments reflecting the sensibilities of Raza Rockabilly.

Chapter IV examines the Rockabilly musical canon, as performed, expanded, and contracted within the Los Angeles Raza Rockabilly scene allow musicians, deejays, dancers, and enthusiasts in the scene to "show their roots" by embodying these genealogies. As embodied forms of memory, music does not so much anchor one to a historical past, rather it creates a present filled with significance and fulfillment often not met elsewhere, especially not at work. By sharing these moments, the scene itself becomes an intentional community made up of Chicanas/os and Latinas/os from across greater Los Angeles temporarily convened to engage in leisure together. Through music, cultural producers and consumers a like stake claims to a dignity and history often unrecognized and dishonored in the institutional historical record.