In 1975, KCET aired a half-hour concert featuring a hot new local band. As an opening shot of the downtown skyline segued into a slice-of-life montage of East Los Angeles, a twinkling harp played over a lilting voice as the group performed a song in the son jarocho tradition of the Mexican state of Veracruz.
In Mexico, old-timers said that González’s handiwork made instruments resonate with a sound they hadn’t heard in decades. But when González first began to play son jarocho, which he learned about through listening to his sister’s records, “it was like in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ when it goes from black-and-white to color. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore,” he told the biographer of Los Lobos in 2015.
By then, González was long gone from the band, more interested in sticking with Mexican regional music instead of the fusion between those genres and Americans sounds that his former bandmates wanted to explore.After his stint with Teatro Campesino, which lasted from 1980 to 1984, González settled in Santa Barbara, where Yolanda was a professor.
Soon after, González — frustrated that he couldn’t find good enough strings for his Mexican instruments — opened Guadalupe Custom Strings in Goleta in 1990, which continues to operate under different ownership in East Los Angeles.