By virtue of their adopted locale and a shared predilection, Burns and Convertino have spent decades exploring arid locales, real or metaphorical, where neither Spanish nor English but Spanglish is the likely tongue. They’d already played in the southwestern-noir, boundary-defying indie-rock bands Giant Sand, led by the singer-songwriter Howe Gelb, and Friends of Dean Martinez, which was more of a collective, devoted to instrumental music such as lounge and surf. When in 1995, they formed the band Spoke, which they redubbed Calexico after switching record labels, they were living in Tucson, Arizona, a mere 60 miles from the Mexican border. South-north mixes seem to come naturally to Burns and Convertino. Mestizaje occurs in small and large ways, involving people and things, not just at the physical Mexico-US border but everywhere that south of the border meets and mingles with the north of the border. The Spanish word mestizaje refers to mixing ethnic and cultural groups in Mexico. At porous borders, such as that between Mexico and the southern US, mixing happens every day automatically. Physical borders translate or mistranslate into cultural boundaries, liminal zones where, if possible, materials of different kinds from different sources blend and blur.Īt hard borders, such as the former Berlin Wall, mixing doesn’t happen except by accident, subterfuge, or sheer determination.
It’s a sure bet that when the multi-instrumentalist and singer Joey Burns and drummer and percussionist John Convertino named their band Calexico, they thought about borders. Calexico, California, is a town on the US border with Mexico.
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