Punk Roots in East L.A.

Words by Cesar Reyes

Latino new wave art at Zero Zero Gallery

Several years ago my brother and I began using the word “roots” to describe an aspect of music that we either heard or felt was missing in contemporary rock music. Essentially this component represented something “punk” in the sound. It has less to do with any purely musical components (ie. notes, chords, tempo etc.)  than with exploration, earnestness and honesty in the songwriting. Punk in these instances was too rigid of a term; we were looking for a term with more weight, one that was open for interpretation.

I was born and raised in Eastern Los Angeles. My father was born in Mexico and my mother was born in Guatemala. My physical roots span across North and Central America. Around the age of 14, punk rock music came into my life. Mine and my brother’s lives quickly became consumed by it. The music sounded ferociously sincere and free. The sound, the aesthetic, and the lifestyle struck a chord that has stayed with me my whole life, and it informs the way I approach all aspects of my life. It couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I felt angry and very sensitive, and the music made me feel less alone.

In my early teen years I began a deep dive into locating as much punk rock music and affiliated material that I could find. Around this time I found a VHS tape for rent at the Warehouse music store called The Decline of Western Civilization. It contained live performances by Black Flag, The Germs, Circle Jerks, Alice Bag Band, and Fear, just to name a few. By this point I was really into most of these bands, and it was great to be able to see what these people looked like. These were pre-internet times. I remember the appearance of the Germs guitarist and the singer Alice Bag standing out to me. I thought they looked like people in my extended family. I would come to find out years later after reading Alice Bag’s autobiography that she and her family lived on the same street in East LA as my dad’s family. She also went to Garfield high school like my dad and several of his sisters. It was great to see in these pioneering early days people with intersecting identities expressing themselves freely in this scene and paving the way for future exploratory artists of color. 

Woman at The Vex nightclub

I have been working as professional library staff for about 16 years, but my first library job was as a library page at the Whittier Public Library. There I met my first (of what turned out to be many) cool, weirdo librarians. His name was Dean Rowan and he was very unassuming. He looked straight-laced and, for lack of a better term, nerdy. There I learned my first life lesson about punk and how it relates to that “roots” term. Punk is not about how you look. Dean told me stories about seeing Devo, Blondie, and the Germs for $2, and he introduced me to other wild and free musicians like John Zorn and Ornette Coleman. It was pretty much right then and there that I knew the library was the place for me. Little did I know just how much punk rock and the library would come to intersect.

In 2007 I began working at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Library Special Collections. There I met contemporaries who had grown up listening to punk rock. They came from various parts of the U.S. and it was interesting to hear about how it was to grow up punk in Chicago or Boston. At the same time I began noticing punk and punk-related materials trickling into the library as part of the collection. Around this time an archivist named Megan Fraser recruited me to join the UCLA Punk Collective which was a group of UCLA library staff who all had interests in collecting punk materials. The collecting started with books, zines, and ephemeral materials. There were materials from the early punk years in LA like Raymond Pettibon zines, and a full run of Slash magazine and more contemporary materials like flyers for punk rock shows from local LA clubs like Al’s Bar and the Jabberjaw. Many of which I attended! The collections have even begun to include personal friends of mine who perform in punk bands that tour around the world. It has been really funny and cool to see my early teenage obsession and my professional and personal life collide in this way.

Seeds From a Hybrid Generation

Alice Bag.  Credit: Melanie Lissen

A particular point of pride in what I’ve seen in punk collecting across various institutions in California has been the amount of Latinxs who appear in these collections. The aforementioned badass Alice Bag who proudly represents East LA and her people can be found across several institutions collecting punk including UCLA. The University of California Santa Barbara has the Self Help Graphics and Art Archives collection, which was a cultural arts center and studio located in East LA, where I attended several punk shows in the 90s. There have even been exhibits dedicated to the early Chicano punk bands like The Plugz, The Zeros, and Nervous Gender. Latinx representation has always existed in punk and it continues in strong numbers especially in East LA. My hope is that the importance of collecting materials from this era continues to grow and help shed more light on all the important artists working within this genre not just in LA, but all over the world.

Cesar Reyes currently works as a bibliographic analyst at Cal Poly Pomona University library and lives in Pasadena with his wife and two cats. He yells and plays guitar in the Library/Archives punk rock band RED ROT.