Contrabando y Traicion. Los Tigres del Norte. 1974. Discos Fama.
A small and tan box radio sat atop my mother’s refrigerator in the small kitchen that sat on the western side of the house she shared with my father. It was the one object in that kitchen from which all domestic energy on that houseside discreetly emanated, a sort of low frequency buzz field that held either our direct or ambient attention. Anyone living inside that house was affected by this strange totem in intensely different ways, but I can only speak for myself when I share the memory of how it acted as a kind of lymph for my rapidly emerging pre-teen sexuality, becoming a more integral part of my childhood than the crucifix, its counter totem in that grossly supernatural household. I was radicalized by American radio in the nineteen seventies—a late century, late millennial epoch in which American cultural history summoned from its own unsettling past a Dionysian energy that culminated in a unifying national renaissance we’re likely never to experience again. Our house was ...