A (Mexican) Native American Rock Band: Redbone, Racial Legibility, and Native-Chicanx Intimacy

Abstract

A (Mexican) Native American Rock Band:Redbone, Racial Legibility, and Native-Chicanx Intimacy Jedediah Kuhn (bio) Redbone is one of the most successful Native American bands in the history of rock 'n' roll. They emerged onto the U.S. music scene in 1970 with music that spoke directly to the burgeoning Red Power movement.1 Hits such as "Come and Get Your Love" and "The Witch-Queen of New Orleans" topped the charts in the United States, Canada, and Europe and still receive regular airplay today.2 Brothers Patrick (Pat) and Candido (Lolly) Vegas founded the band and served as its core members. In his memoir, Come and Get Your Love: A Celebratory Ode to Redbone (1939-Present), Pat Vegas traces his and Lolly's ascent to rock stardom. Vegas also reveals something perhaps unexpected in the memoir of a Native American musician: in addition to being Native, Pat Vegas is Mexican American. In fact, several of the band's members are both Native and Mexican American, and Vegas's memoir as well as the band's music, albums, and performances point to continual intimacies between Native Americans and Mexican Americans.3 Pat Vegas's Mexican American heritage as well as that of Redbone's other band members rub against both popular and scholarly notions of "authentic" Native American and Indigenous identity and presents a new vantage point from which to think about Native American-Chicanx relationality. Whereas scholars have examined the numerous overlaps between these groups in the nineteenth century and earlier, work examining the twentieth century often focuses on one group or the other. Further, in the few places where scholars do examine relations between these groups, they focus on analyzing the Chicano Movement's claim of Indigenous status, a claim many scholars, especially those [End Page 11] working under the rubric of critical Latinx indigeneities and critical ethnic studies, have problematized as perpetuating the marginalization of Indigenous peoples on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Indeed, in the interest of supporting Indigenous rights in the United States and Mexico, this study agrees with this emerging scholarship that it is important not to conflate Indigenous status—which pertains to a political category designating the first peoples within settler states—and Indigenous descent in the way that the Chicano Movement has done in the past. What this study problematizes, however, is the collapsing of all discussion of Native-Chicanx relationality into the question of the Chicano Movement's (mis)uses of indigeneity. Instead, this essay turns to intimacy as a framework to rethink Native American-Chicanx relations. I argue that the case of Redbone reveals glimpses of a long, continual history of intimacy between Native Americans and Mexican Americans as well as the oppressive demands for authenticity that delimit Native American identity and render such intimacies illegible. This study explores traces of intimacy between Native Americans and Chicanxs through an analysis of a sampling of cultural texts produced by Redbone and Pat Vegas during the band's 1970s heyday, including music, lyrics, performances, and visual representation on album covers as well as Pat Vegas's 2017 self-published memoir Come and Get Your Love: A Celebratory Ode to Redbone (1939-Present). Vegas's memoir moves chronologically, tracing his and Lolly's early years and family life, their time as backing musicians in Los Angeles, and their rise (and fall) as members of Redbone. The memoir emphasizes these early years, covering the post-1970s period, including Lolly's passing in 2010, in one brief chapter. The final portion of the book includes appendices written by friends and former band members, such as Pete DePoe and Butch Rillera, and argues explicitly for the band's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Scholars have long turned to popular culture, popular music in particular, as a critical site where marginalized groups articulate difference to resist the dominant national culture's attempts to assimilate them.4 Redbone is particularly appropriate for this study because, as a prominent Native American band emerging at the height of the Red Power movement, they can easily be read as articulating Native American resistance to U.S. oppression; however, they also gesture to something more...