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On today’s show we travel back in time with Dr. Julia Palacios, a scholar of Mexican music from the 50s and 60s. She joins host Carlos Dȧvalos to talk about the influence of US rock and roll on Mexican culture between 1955-1965.

They talk about the bracero program that sent Mexican workers to the US, a program that started during WWII and continued until 1965. It was this labor program that helped ignite a cultural revolution in Mexican music. As Mexican workers returned to the country, they brought with them rock and roll, clothes, dance styles, and more. At the same time, the affluence of the post-war boom in the US was desirable to Mexicans, and they were eager for American movies, music, and other forms of consumption. 

Palacios describes how commercial television and radio also helped bring rock and roll music in English to Mexican audiences. The big bands at the time mainly played calypso, mambo, cha cha cha and other Caribbean rhythms, but they started incorporating rock and roll rhythms because of the genre’s growing popularity. Many bands simply translated from English directly into Spanish.

We hear several examples of this cultural transformation starting with Little Richard’s hit, “Good Golly Miss Molly” which was translated three years later as “La Plaga” by Los Teen Tops. Palacios explains the music industry’s awareness of rock and roll as a lucrative business, and how rock and roll eventually declined in the late 60s as the student movement came to see it as a symbol of US imperialism.

Listen to the full playlist of Mexican rock and roll alongside each song’s US counterpart. 

Julia Palacios is a sociologist and historian specializing in pop culture and popular music. She was a professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City from 1983 to 2023. She has been a media anchor and producer for national radio and television since 1990. In 2003, she founded Ibero 90.9 (the radio station at the Universidad Iberoamericana) and has been an anchor there since. 

Featured image of the album cover of Los Locos del Ritmo.

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