Paula Mejía on the Enduring Influence of Johnny Canales

Transcript

J. B. Sauceda (voice-over): Hey, and welcome to another episode of Viva Tejano, a Texas Monthly podcast about tejano music, told by the people who make it and live it. I’m your host, J. B. Sauceda.

We’ve recorded this episode just for you and the other Texas Monthly Audio subscribers, and if you’ve enjoyed listening to Viva Tejano, I think you’ll love this sneak preview of another project coming later this year.

My guest on this episode is Paula Mejía. Paula is a freelance writer based in L.A. and a Texas Monthly alum, and I invited her on to talk about her feature story in the December issue of Texas Monthly, “El Legendario Johnny.” In it, she tells the story of Johnny Canales and the golden age of nineties tejano—but most of all, she makes the case that Johnny is an unsung hero in a movement that helped create the massive boom in regional Mexican music that we’re enjoying today.

It’s an idea you’ve heard a few guests mention already on Viva Tejano, and I think Paula makes the argument indisputable.

Here’s my conversation with Paula Mejía.

J. B. Sauceda: I’d love to just know, How did you end up in the position of writing this for the magazine? 

Paula Mejía: Yeah, so it would probably be helpful for me to start out with, I used to work at Texas Monthly. I was the culture editor for several years, managing the print and online sections for arts and culture in Texas. So I have been—and I wrote a lot for the magazine when I was at Texas Monthly as well. So I now live in Los Angeles. I still cover a lot of Latin music and culture at large in my daily life. And Aaron Parsley, who has my previous job as culture editor, actually reached out to me and said, “Hey, we have this really interesting potential story.” I had some history with tejano music and the subject matter as a writer. So when Aaron reached out to me and we started talking about this idea, I was really interested. And so that’s how it happened. So I wish I could say I came up with the idea myself, but I did not.

J. B. Sauceda: Tejano music specifically is kind of like this secret handshake, that people have this sort of relationship with one another, that when you identify and realize, like, “Oh, they’re someone who likes tejano; I got to add them to my little Cingular Wireless circle of friends that are on speed dial.” So for you, did you have a preexisting relationship with the music, or was it really mostly through the discovery as a journalist and editor of culture?

Paula Mejía: It was more as a journalist, actually. So I didn’t really grow up listening to tejano music, even though I grew up for the most part in Texas. So my parents immigrated from Bogotá, Colombia, in the late 1980s. I was born in New York City, and then eventually we moved—my brother was born, and then we moved to Texas. I lived in the Valley with my family. We lived in McAllen, and we lived in Corpus—funnily enough where Johnny lived; Selena, of course. And then we moved to Houston when I was ten, and that’s where I had my formative years. And after that, I lived all over the place. And it is interesting that sometimes distance will make you look more critically and incisively at the place you’re from. And that really happened with me. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties, I would say, that I started really thinking more about tejano music, this incredibly rich lineage, and understanding how deeply impactful it was for so many people, not only in the fact that there’s just so many bangers and it’s really fun to dance to and it’s really fun to listen to, but just how bound up it is with identity and the way we see ourselves or the way that people see themselves, I should say, because that wasn’t my experience, necessarily.

So yeah, it is something that’s been an interest of mine over the years as a journalist. But no, I mean, when I was a kid, I think I had that immigrant kid rejection of, like, “I don’t want to listen to my parents’ music.” So I was really into pop music. I loved Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, and that whole “rock en español” thing was happening. So I was obsessed with Shakira. Oh my goodness, before she had her English crossover, like, Dónde Están los Ladrones?—that album is formative. So I was interested in that. And then later, I got into punk rock and other stuff, and it wasn’t until I was an adult, really, that I started pulling it back and being like, “Okay, all the salsa that my parents were listening to, and all the Latin jazz, is really cool, and all the cumbias and the merengues, and I want to understand this more and understand how it fits with my own culture and history.” So it was really when I became a journalist and I was thinking about culture and the ways that we are impacted by that growing up and the way it shapes our lives that I started going more into tejano as well, and its role within Texas.

J. B. Sauceda: I’ve really grappled a lot with this sort of frustration, almost, that tejano music has been sort of locked up and only largely enjoyed by people who identify as Tejano. And I’ve not yet understood why it’s had such a hard time breaking through, yet here we are today, and this música mexicana, or—when I grew up, in Target, it was “Regional Mexican,” was the section—now is pervasive and it’s all over the place. It’s streaming, it’s people who don’t speak Spanish are listening to it, just dancing to it on TikTok. And so I’m trying to tie that back and understand why that’s the case. And this is where I think the intersection with the article is really interesting. You seem to make a case that Johnny was really the kindling and the fire starter of all of this. And so how did you come to that realization?

Paula Mejía: Yeah, so the reporting really helped me with that because, and specifically when I was working on the story, Johnny’s widow, Nora, and their daughters—Seleste Miroslava—were incredibly welcoming of me. They took me around Corpus. I spent some time with them at home and places that were important to their family and Johnny. And so that really helped me pull back the curtain on who he was. And we ended up going to Robstown, the small town where he grew up. And so I got a much deeper understanding of the circumstances that have led him to become “You got it, take it away” Johnny. Right. And I think something that came up often in the conversations that I had, not just with Nora but with other sources, was that Johnny didn’t just have tejano musicians on his show. It was really like, if he believed in you and he thought you had something and you were working hard, sure, come on the show. It could be cumbia, conjunto, norteños, banda. It was really diffuse in that way. And I thought that that was so fascinating, because I think that in decades past, there was more of a desire for people to really stay in their lane. And now we don’t see that anymore because, take Peso Pluma or Grupo Frontera—they are melding so many genres and so many traditions and so many ideas in their music.

And I think that there’s a really clear through line, at least to me with Johnny’s show, of just how diffuse the genres were and how they were converging on the show and how diffuse our listening habits are now, especially among younger listeners. And so that was very striking as I was going through the reporting and as I was talking to more people, and I said, “I really think there’s something here.”

J. B. Sauceda: When I was trying to research for his obituary, I wanted to nail down, Where did the show largely originate? Was it Corpus; was it McAllen? Was it Brownsville? Depending upon who I asked, I got different answers. And then just some of the details about age—not age necessarily, but upbringing and where he spent time, et cetera, was a little fuzzy. Was he a really private person? Why do you think that there’s just—for as big of an impact as this guy is and how well-known he was, why was it so hard for me to find information readily available?

Paula Mejía: Yeah, I had a similar issue when I was working on the feature. I think there’s a couple of things. I think one of them is that Johnny wasn’t—to me, he doesn’t strike me as someone who was thinking, like, “I have to document everything. I have to really cement my legacy.” I don’t think that’s what it was about for him. I think it was really about the artistry, and I think it was about the people that were on the show. I mean, there’s not a ton out there on YouTube. You can see clips, but full shows, there’s not a lot. I think if you want that, you have to go to the source, or you have to order some physical DVDs off eBay, or something like that.

But I was really struck when I would watch these clips, because the camera would linger over the audience, and not in a “come on down, the price is right” kind of way. But these were just regular people enjoying the music, enjoying the show, and I think that’s what it was about for him. I think it was about this communal gathering, and the way that music brings people together, and the artistry that was involved, because he was a musician too, and that was something that I wish I could have had more space to delve into, was his own music career, because he had a really interesting lineage as a touring musician and playing with different bands, and they released some really cool songs. 

[Johnny Canales singing “El Corrido de Augustine Ramirez”]

Paula Mejía: And so I think him having that grounding as an artist, he knew how grueling it would be, and he knew how important a platform like this would be for other artists. And so I think that the reason why there’s not as much biographical information out there about him or more in-depth information about that is because he was so wholly focused on, “Well, let’s get these people on the show. Let’s do this.” And he was always thinking about the show and how he was going to help artists get to the next phase of their career, give them a really critical platform on there as well. I think Johnny was really important to this ecosystem because he gave people a chance who maybe had not been on the radio. You didn’t even have to have a record deal to be on his show, which is massive. I mean, we’re talking about the mid-1980s, we’re not talking about now. TikTok is one thing, but if your only mediums are TV and the radio back in the eighties, I mean it’s massive to be on The Johnny Canales Show. So that’s how it became so important to the ecosystem. And I think because he was so focused on fleshing his show out and having the artists really have a platform for their artistry, I think his own story fell by the wayside in that way.

J. B. Sauceda: Do you get the impression in talking to Nora and the family—you referenced Johnny wanting to get the show back off the ground multiple times, and even until his final years was still talking about it in those terms, but was there a frustration from him, or her? Did they feel slighted at all? Did they feel like they missed an opportunity. or what was their general sentiment about the state of the show after its sort of heyday in the nineties?

Paula Mejía: I didn’t get that sense from his family. I think they were just making do with a difficult situation because his health wasn’t great for a long time. I mean, he had a stroke and then had a quadruple bypass, so I think I get the sense that a lot of this was just day-to-day and they were just making do with what they could. And I don’t think that they felt slighted by anything. I do think that since his passing, his family has been making a concerted effort to—as evidenced by the story and the documentary that is being made about his life—that they do want more people to know just how impactful he was and to know more about his life and what he brought to tejano and so many other genres.

J. B. Sauceda: Have you gotten the impression that—I mean, I’ve talked about Grupo Frontera a lot, and Peso Pluma as well, but do you get the impression that any of the more modern-day artists that fall into those buckets see themselves as benefiting from what started back then? Border music and sort of regional or música mexicana. Do they see a direct line? Do you get the impression that the modern artists kind of see a road that’s been paved by Johnny and the artists that were featured on that show, or do they see it as wholly separate?

Paula Mejía: I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t spoken with the Grupo Frontera guys specifically about this, but I think they have to have been aware, just because growing up in the Valley in the early nineties, late nineties, you’re going to be—I think it’s just something that’s in the water. If you’re hearing tejano on the radio, if you’re going to carne asadas and someone is playing this absolute jam from an old-school Tejano or something that was cropping up around then, of course you’re surrounded by it. So it’s going to influence you in some capacity. Whether that’s conscious or not, I can’t really say for each individual artist, but I do think what’s fascinating about música mexicana right now is that these artists are pulling from so many different genres in this kind of indiscriminate way and making something really interesting that is clearly resonating with people. That’s why it’s so massive. But I don’t know that they’re going back and saying, like, “Well, let’s take this little riff from hip-hop. Let’s take this little bajo sexto from this tejano song.”

[Peso Pluma singing “La Patrulla”]

Paula Mejía: I think it’s just the different ways that people have grown up with music and how that’s imbued into the way that they perform. I think that’s how that comes through. I don’t know that they name-check Johnny specifically as the source, but as someone who was one of the only hosts having people on his show performing these songs, I think that there has to be a through line there, just because he was the person putting people on. I mean, Selena’s the most famous example. I think she was thirteen when she went on the show for the first time, and I’m fairly certain that was the first TV show that she had been on, and she ended up becoming massive, of course. And over the years, as she became this huge superstar, she still made a point to stop by Johnny’s show, and everyone knows the cow-print outfits. And it’s something that if you even have a passing interest in tejano, or even if Selena’s your entry point, at some point you’re going to come across the stuff that she did on Johnny’s show. And so he just keeps coming up again and again and again. And so even if he’s not the guy that people name-check, he’s in the consciousness, if that makes sense.

J. B. Sauceda: What were some of the more surprising things that you learned, maybe, that didn’t make it into the article? Was there anything that was sort of on the fringes of the story or the narrative that came about, either about the production or him or anything like that that stuck out to you? I mean, it strikes me as a pretty amazing opportunity to get to spend so much time with his widow and family.

Paula Mejía: So I wish that I could have gone more in-depth about the story of Johnny and Nora’s life together, because she became such a massive part of the show. They met and they had this wedding at Johnnyland, which was, he had this outdoor stage just outside of Corpus where he would bring different bands to play, and you could bring a picnic chair and get a beer and hang out and listen to some great music. But Johnny and Nora had their wedding at Johnnyland, and they invited the public to come. And there were tons of people that showed up from way far afield, not just Texas. And I think that that speaks to just how they viewed this as very much, again, this communal space for people to come and have fun. But she became such an integral part of the show. She was helping interview people backstage. She was helping him get the show going, especially when his health wasn’t great and they were starting to do things online. And more of their family—they’re really close. And I think that that says a lot about his personality and just how he was as a dad, as a figure in the community. And actually something else that I wish I could have gone into more is, everywhere I went with Nora and her daughters, someone stopped us and they were like, “Oh my God, I loved Johnny. He was wonderful. I’m so sorry for your loss,” because this was shortly after he had passed. This was two months after. There was this—when we went to Robstown, where Johnny grew up, we went to Robstown City Hall, and the woman who was working at city hall, she got a little emotional talking to us, and she was like, “Look, I used to watch the show with my grandmother, and she’s not with us anymore, but I have these really formative memories of watching Johnny’s show with my grandma.” And the way that it just impacted people in this really personal way, and seeing that play out and how appreciative and just mournful people were that he had passed, was really moving for me to see. So that was another aspect that I wish I could have gone into more, is just how everywhere we went, there was someone else who was like, “I miss him. He seemed wonderful. I have such strong memories of watching the show with my family.”

J. B. Sauceda: I’m curious—as somebody who had a hint of who Johnny Canales was, you had sort of a sense of it, having grown up around it, but not necessarily as someone of the community per se. How did you think about tackling the story in a way? Was respecting the community important? Was it just kind of telling it as you saw it important? What was your thinking and approach?

Paula Mejía: Yeah, I mean, that was paramount to me, was respecting the community, and I interviewed way more people than ended up being in the story. I ended up filing a much longer draft than the one you see online and in print, and my gracious editor helped me shape it. But I interviewed maybe thirty people for this story. And how many ended up being in here? Maybe fifteen or so. And so I really needed to sit down and just storyboard and say, “Okay, what are the pieces here? What are the most important things that I want to talk about, and what are the most crucial aspects of the interviews that I gleaned?” It was really important for me to understand the impact of the show through the people who performed on it, worked on it, who saw it, because I am just the vessel here. I didn’t grow up watching the show. I didn’t really grow up listening to tejano music when my family and I moved to Corpus. I was six years old, and Selena had passed away. Like, my first memory of Selena was seeing the Mirador de la Flor statue on the seawall. So I kind of came into this movement in a very different way, and it was important for me to really ground this in insights and experiences from people who had a very deep tie to the community and to Johnny and to this music.

And after that, it became a process of imbuing those insights with trying to unpack just more about who Johnny was as a person. And I thought that that was really important to show too, because in everything that I had seen out there about him, I didn’t have a sense of what he was like as a person. And I think that’s something that I was lucky enough to spend time with his family over two full days. And they told me so many stories about him and just how funny he was. I think that’s something that doesn’t get talked about too, is just the man was a jokester, and apparently he was like that in real life. And I think with artists, it’s always interesting to know, Is their stage persona very different than the person they are in real life? And everyone I spoke to was like, “No, Johnny was like that all the time. You just couldn’t turn off the ‘you got it, take it away’ Johnny from Johnny at home.” So that aspect is something that, given my experience—because I’ve done a lot of these long-form, magazine-type profiles—that’s something that I really thought that I could bring to the table that I hadn’t seen out there, was, What was Johnny like as a person, and how did that factor into the impact he had on different people?

J. B. Sauceda: I’m curious about what your feedback has been thus far. Do you feel like people have had a generally positive response to it and have felt like it’s fair, or does anybody feel like you left something out?

Paula Mejía: I absolutely left stuff out. There’s no way you could do this story in an exhaustive way, just because everyone you speak to is going to have a different take on the show and tejano music. I mean, one of the things that kept coming up over and over again in my conversations with people—sometimes I would ask this question, and sometimes it would come up organically. It was, like, “Is tejano, quote, ‘dead,’ or not?” And everyone has a very different opinion on that. And so as I was going through the story, that was one of the big question marks of, How do we address this? Because it is something that comes up all the time, even unprompted. God, I forgot about this until you mentioned it just now, but when I was reporting this story, I was taking an Uber back to my hotel in the Valley when I was reporting, and the guy who was my Uber driver and I had a 45-minute-long conversation about tejano music, and he was very much a purist of, like, “Oh, the stuff coming out right now is cool, but it’s not the same, and here’s why.” And this was completely unprompted. And so I think that that’s something that early on I had to come to terms with, of, this is not necessarily going to be a complete story, and how can it be? Right? But also, I think that when you do these types of stories, I think they’re meant to be conversation starters. I think that my greatest hope would be if someone reads the story and they decide to move the ball forward in some way, and they’re like, “Okay, maybe there’s something.” I do that a lot in my own reporting, where I’ll get really interested in something, and there’s something that’s kind of ancillary to the story or that maybe they touched on, but not a lot. And I’m like, “Ooh, okay.” There’s a thread you can pull out, and you can start to do a little more. And I think that’s how you start to move conversations. And the feedback I’ve gotten so far has been largely positive. I mean, several of the sources have reached out to me and said, “Hey, I love the story.” And that, to me, is really gratifying, because I’m like, “Okay, I’m glad that your experience was reflected in a way that you feel excited about and that you’re sharing the story with people. That’s great.”

When I was starting to do this story, I knew that because I don’t have as deep a connection to it from my childhood and growing up listening to this music, I was not going to write it from that place. So the place where I felt that I could add the most value was in doing this portrait of this person unpacking what they were like, how he impacted the people around him, different aspects of his personality that people might not know. I mean, one of my favorite little anecdotes that made it into the story—I was happy about it—was that Johnny’s favorite beer was Michelob Ultra, because he could say “otra,” like, “another one,” and his family knew, like, “Hey, can you grab me a beer from the fridge?” It’s so tender. I love that detail. And that’s the kind of stuff that comes from, you really got to sit with a subject, and you really got to talk to so many people around them to get those details—because something I see a lot in profile writing these days, and especially with big celebrities that have large teams around them, their time is very limited, but access is very limited too. And so a lot of times you’ll just get thirty minutes with someone, and how deep can you get in thirty minutes? Not very. But when you are able to spend time with the subject or the people around them, this is the stuff that just emerges organically, that you can have your questions, but then it just becomes conversational, and that’s when these stories emerge, and that’s when you really start to get a sense of, “Okay, this is what this person was like.” And that’s what I always try and do. I always try and get to that point where it’s not a volley back and forth of, I am asking you a question, you’re answering—we’re having a conversation, and you’re organically remembering stories about this person, and that ends up illustrating more than a cut-and-dried question ever could.

J. B. Sauceda: What do you feel like you got out of working on this story? Is it the nostalgia of getting to dive into something that was around all the time, or what have been your takeaways? What have been the things that will stay with you?

Paula Mejía: Oh, what a great question. I will say, I have found that my favorite types of stories to work on are stories like this, where you go deep into someone’s life when you talk to people who knew them—or know them, if they’re still around—and you understand their mentality, you understand what motivated them and why they did the work that they did, what were the circumstances that drove them to do this. And he came from very humble beginnings, and he had this incredibly clear idea that he had something to offer the world. And it seems like it was really challenging for him to pull off in some ways, especially the bilingual aspect, which I know that you’ve talked about with other guests on the show, that it was this kind of loose Spanglish in the way that people talk and the way that people talked with their families and behind closed doors—it was really difficult for him to convince network executives, like, “This is important.”

And so I think that being so attuned to the ways that people in your community are communicating with each other and putting that into your show, I mean, that’s massive. That has really stayed with me, because if you speak Spanish, how you speak Spanish, if your family chooses not to, it’s very fraught. I mean, still for Latinos that grew up in Texas and beyond—and I have my own hang-ups with that too. I think everyone does in some capacity if you’re the child of immigrants, if you’re an immigrant yourself. So that was really striking to me that Johnny went, “It has to be this way.” And of course, he was right, because people saw themselves in that it was something that felt like it was directly speaking to their experience and how they move through the world. And so I have really appreciated having a much deeper understanding of what motivated Johnny to really fight for that aspect of his show, and just how impactful it was to everyone who’s watching it.

J. B. Sauceda (voice-over): All right, that was my conversation with Paula Mejía. Thanks to Paula for joining me, and thanks to all of y’all for listening to the show. Adios.