El Paso Matters – ‘Chuco Punk’ by Tara López amplifies El Paso’s punk rebellion, border identity

Whether or not you love punk rock, borderland author Tara López believes music is a way to express your individual feelings and also connect with others around whom you might find a sense of belonging.

“That sense of shared experience so often and most poignantly expressed in music culture that transcends space and time,” López said in a talk last year as part of the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

López said she merged two passions – her love of history and her love of music – in her latest book, “Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso.” Through first-hand accounts and stories, the book delves into the punk scene in the region, capturing how punk music became a force for cultural resistance and unity along the border. López documents the bands, promoters, organizers – and the moms who supported it all. 

The book looks back to the 1940s Pachuco movement and the beginnings of the underground scene in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. But it focuses heavily on the 1990s and the impact the increased militarization of the border and the implementation of the free trade agreement had on the region.

She also examines the role of women in those times – recording their struggles against suppression in the workforce and beyond.

The punk music culture, she said, was a “weapon of resistance” during times of change. 

López draws on more than 70 interviews with punks, as well as zines, flyers, photos and other punk memorabilia, to highlight the bands that defined the culture.

“We do create culture, we’re not just passive recipients of culture,” she told KTEP’s Words on a Wire in November 2024. “We’re not just consuming punk rock, we’re making punk rock. We’re skateboarders, painters, singers … ” 

“Chuco Punk,” released in June by the University of Texas Press American Music Series, is the El Paso Matters Book Club’s latest selection. The book recently received the Al Lowman Memorial Prize, awarded annually by the Texas State Historical Association to the best book on local history in the state.

Born in Las Cruces and raised in Albuquerque, López is now an assistant professor of Latinx and ethnic studies at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota. Her first book, “The Winter of Discontent: Myth, Memory and History,” released in 2014, focused on women and trade unions such as those in El Paso’s garment industry.

READ MORE: ‘Chuco Punk’ delves into rich, rebellious history of El Paso’s punk scene

López will participate in Chuco Punk Fest, an El Paso Matters Book Club event at Old Sheepdog Brewery featuring books, bands and beer, on June 28. 

Stay tuned for details on the festival, but for now, check out this excerpt from the book and follow along with our reading schedule below.

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Excerpted from “Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso” by Tara Martin López:

Before At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta, one of Omar Rodríguez-López’s main local bands in El Paso was Jerk. Rodríguez-López’s friend Ernesto Ybarra wanted to put his newly minted label Yucky Bus to work, so Ybarra’s band, VBF, and Jerk released a split tape in December of 1993 called To Make Money. 

To celebrate the collaboration, they wanted to have a release party. Sergio “Surge” Mendoza, Ybarra’s bandmate, had the perfect house in the Lower Valley region of El Paso to host this massive backyard show. Along with VBF and Jerk, they booked several other local punk bands for this February 1994 show, including Pragmatic, Jim Jone$ and the KoolAid Kids, Wad, and Debaser. The first fifty punx who paid four bucks to get in got a free copy of the VBF/Jerk cassette tape along with the local Walk Among the Dead fanzine. They could also pick up nachos and burritos from Surge’s mom, Isabel Valenzuela Mendoza, who was selling them from her kitchen. Soon the cassettes and comic books sold out as the crowd grew from fifty to hundreds of restless punx milling outback, anticipating the onslaught of passionate noise about to explode in the Lower Valley. 

Once Lower Valley standouts VBF started playing, two different mosh and skankin’ pits developed, revolving like two intense hurricanes against the passive weather map that was Surge’s backyard. “You’d see these little dirt clouds coming up from the pits,” Surge remembers. 

They earned $900 from the show, but according to Surge, after the bands finished playing, two El Paso Police Department helicopters and twenty cop cars descended on the house. Isabel knew that the money from the show would be lost to the cops, so she pushed a panel aside in their roof and hid the earnings there. 

Thanks to Surge, Ernesto, Omar, and Isabel’s creativity and planning, VBF had enough money to fix their tour van and take their sound on the road. The ferocity and creativity of the Chuco punx was already evident from this one awesome DIY punk show. It’s also an ideal entry point into the rich, dynamic, and powerful story of Chuco punk, a unique history that is intimately intertwined with the broader history of cultural resistance in El Paso.

Published with permission from the University of Texas Press © 2024.

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