Manuel Peña Tejano Music Interviews

Manuel Peña (1942-2019) was born in Weslaco, Texas, and experienced farmworker life in Texas as a child. He grew interested in music as a teenager and learned to play guitar from orquesta leader Eugenio Gutiérrez, with whose orquesta he later played. Despite the poverty that surrounded him, Peña graduated from high school and eventually made his way to California, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Fresno State University. Prodded by his peers in the La Raza Studies Program at Fresno State, he contacted the pioneering corridor scholar Américo Paredes at the University of Texas, under whose mentorship eventually earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology.

Peña's work focused not only on corridos and other types of folklore, but on two other types of music that had been familiar to him as he was growing into adulthood: the orquesta tejana and the Texas-Mexican accordion-based conjunto. Peña chose to study the latter for his dissertation, later published as The Texas-Mexican Conjunto. Eventually, he also wrote a book on the orquestas of his youth, The Mexican American Orquesta, as well as Música Tejana, a more general history of Texas-Mexican music.

In his research, Dr. Peña conducted many interviews with musicians and others involved in the Tejano music industry. The interviews in this collection were originally recorded for research purposes only, and are presented here in their raw state, unedited except to remove some irrelevant sections and blank spaces.