If someone asks you to picture the classic rockabilly look, you might imagine the T-Birds from Grease. Sure, but where do you think those guys got their style? In his new book Razabilly, Nicholas F. Centino writes:
As early as World War II, Chicano boys were cuffing their blue jeans, rolling cigarette packs into their t-shirt sleeves, and slicking back their hair in exaggerated pompadours with ducktails — a look that would be adopted as the white working-class tough guy a decade later in the 1950s.
The Beach Boys were initially named the Pendletones in honor of Pendleton shirts, another style that white youth of the '50s and '60s copped from Latina/o kids.
Razabilly isn't a brief about the erasure of BIPOC communities in the whitewashing of the 1950s in popular culture, but Centino cites the role of Latina/o music and culture in mid-century history by way of reminding any unaware readers what many of today's Latinx rockabilly fans know well: the rock and roll era was never just about Black and white, but about every shade of American skin.
Even so, it was far from obvious that rockabilly music — one particular style of early rock and roll — would become hugely popular in 21st century L.A. Latinx communities.
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