In 2002, I was a graduate student at UCLA in Latin American studies when I heard a Mexican CD released by a white guy that changed my life.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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My professors were teaching students to question any American who claimed to love Mexicans and our culture while making a mint off of us, which is why I was slightly confused the day one of them said he was going to play a song from a label called Arhoolie Records, which was owned by “one of the coolest gringos ever.”
Serpentine maracas and a rumba-tinged piano made way for a defiant trumpet solo that blared equal parts menace and verve. “Carnal póngase abusado / Ya los tiempos han cambiado” (Buddy, get hip / The times have changed), roared Chicano legend Lalo Guerrero in the opening lines of “Los Chucos Suaves” (The cool pachucos). It was just one of 21 scintillating tracks off Pachuco Boogie, a compilation of long-buried treasures that I eagerly bought a few days later.
The album revealed a world of music—Chicano swing and jump blues from the 1940s and ’50s—that I never knew existed. I was so blown away by this find that I soon went to libraries across Orange County to check out anything and everything that had Arhoolie’s logo, a silhouette of a guitar with “Arhoolie” spelled out in a retro serif font.
I discovered rock ’n’ roll pioneers like Big Mama Thornton, dug through Delta blues, and delighted in hearing the raspy thunderbolt that is the voice and music of zydeco king Clifton Chenier. I learned about Tejana queen Lydia Mendoza and Los Madrugadores, who, during the Great Depression, played live every morning (their name translates as “the early risers”) on Southern California radio in between urging immigrants to stand up for their rights.
I also got turned on to new efforts by Bay Area Mexican American folk group Los Cenzontles and Tex-Mex king Flaco Jiménez, the latter of whom starred in the 1976 documentary Chulas Fronteras (Beautiful Borders). Whatever the genre, the language, or the era, the common thread in every Arhoolie effort was honest music accompanied by meticulously researched and wonderfully written liner notes alongside vivid photographs and illustrations.
Every time I listened to yet another stunner, my mind returned to my UCLA professor’s words: Who was that cool gringo?
That would be Chris Strachwitz. He was a German immigrant whose family arrived in the States after World War II, and he combined a newcomer’s zeal for his adopted homeland with a detective’s curiosity about its culture. He also had great taste, championing amazing artists for decades with his El Cerrito, California–based record label. Strachwitz followed in the tradition of other legendary song collectors like John and Alan Lomax, English folklorist Cecil J. Sharp, and Vicente T. Mendoza, Mexico’s premier corrido expert. But Strachwitz’s Arhoolie was no mere audio ossuary. His genius was in knowing that gathering music wasn’t enough—the world needed to listen to it, too.
“I get so much pleasure out of [collecting music], I hope somebody else can enjoy at least a bit of it,” he told the public radio show American Routes in a 2000 interview.
Strachwitz, who sold Arhoolie to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 2016, spent his last years deservedly basking in the love and respect of musicians across the United States. His death this year on May 5—Cinco de Mayo—at 91 elicited well-deserved obits around the country (although none, alas, from my day job employer, the Los Angeles Times).
They all touched on the broad strokes of Strachwitz’s life, peppered with the inevitable anecdotes one gets thanks to a career spent traveling down back roads and crashing parties in the search for lively ones. But I don’t think any of those write-ups fully acknowledged how important California was in forming Strachwitz’s worldview.
After all, he fell in love with Mexican music by listening to XERB, the border-blaster radio station that broadcast from Rosarito and whose powerful signal reached all the way to Santa Barbara, where Strachwitz lived while attending a private high school. He began to record artists in Los Angeles in the early 1950s while attending Pomona College because he was frustrated that record stores didn’t carry R&B artists like Big Jay McNeely. He took his passion to Berkeley, where he settled in the 1950s and used his apartment to record bluesmen, bluegrass artists, and other bards.
Though an antiquarian, Strachwitz had enough hipness to know to ask for the publishing rights to Country Joe McDonald’s anti-draft single “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-to-Die Rag,” which he recorded in 1965. Strachwitz’s good sense paid off handsomely after the song became one of the highlights of the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival and its subsequent documentary. With that money, Strachwitz was able to buy a building in El Cerrito that became Arhoolie’s headquarters, library, studios, and storefront, a place I’ve sadly yet to visit.
Nor was I able to attend a public memorial for him held on September 17 at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley. I made up for that snub by digitally visiting my alma mater. In 2001, UCLA began to digitize Arhoolie’s collection of Mexican American recordings—almost 160,000 in total. In explaining his decision to digitize in 2005, Strachwitz told the L.A. Times that he didn’t want his treasures to suffer the same fate as similar archives that are “simply [put] into a dark hole someplace and they’ll never be heard again.”
As of 2019, the Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings had reached over 140,000 recordings, the largest archive of its kind in the world. Anyone can play about the first minute and a half of each recording—now that is a cool gringo.
Vaya con Diós, Chris, and auf wiedersehen. May you be hoofin’ it up in the afterlife, recording the Cajun fais do-do in the sky.•
Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. In 2025, Arellano was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning ¡Ask a Mexican!, a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and he was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Arellano is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
