San Antonio, Texas, Early Sixties: Young, Mexican, and TikTok Before TikTok
Corpus Christi had its jukeboxes, radio stations, dances, and young Mexican Americans listening to the same new music that was sweeping across the country.
But drive about 140 miles north to San Antonio in the early 1960s and something different was happening.
Mexican-American kids were no longer just listening to the music.
They were beginning to decide what everybody else should listen to.
There was no TikTok. There was no YouTube. There wasn’t even an internet.
There was a radio microphone, a telephone, a stack of 45-rpm records, and three Mexican-American high-school boys sitting behind the controls.
TikTok before TikTok
In 1959, Spanish-language radio station KUKA put three teenagers on the air after school: Gilbert Villarreal, a student at Tech High School, and brothers Manuel and Richard “Ricky” Davila from Brackenridge High School.
Their fathers had taken over KUKA in 1957 and apparently understood something about teenagers long before social-media companies did:
If you want to know what kids want to hear, let kids choose the music.
For two hours after school, the three young DJs spoke English, played national Top 40 records, and mixed them with records made by young San Antonio musicians.
Other teenagers called the station with requests and dedications.
A boy might dedicate a song to his girlfriend at Tech. Someone else wanted a song played for a girl at Lanier. Another caller wanted everybody to know about Saturday night’s dance.
The kids listening were not waiting for some music executive in New York or Los Angeles to tell them what was good.
Their friends were telling them.
KUKA’s young broadcasters helped introduce listeners to Sunny Ozuna and the Sunglows, the Dinos, Vince Cantu and the Rockin’ Dominoes, while playing local groups such as the Royal Jesters and Doug Sahm alongside nationally popular records. The original teenage show continued until Villarreal and Manuel Davila graduated in May 1962, and other young DJs followed them.
Sixty years later we would call some of them influencers.
The radio sent you to the dance
The radio did not end when you turned it off.
The teenage DJs promoted car-club dances and appeared as masters of ceremonies at sock hops at Brackenridge, Tech, Lanier and other San Antonio high schools. Sometimes they brought one of the local bands along.
One of the important gathering places was Patio Andaluz, at Commerce and Colorado on San Antonio’s West Side.
There were no giant video screens, electronic tickets, or $200 seats.
There were teenagers.
Lots of them.
People who attended the dances later remembered the place as packed wall to wall. The Royal Jesters, Sunny and the Sunglows, and Rudy & the Reno Bops were among the groups that played there. The music, the teenagers, the car clubs, and local AM radio fed one another.
A record could be heard on the radio after school, played at the dance Saturday night, and talked about at school Monday morning.
That was going viral in 1962.
The Royal Jesters
The Royal Jesters were San Antonio kids themselves.
Their smooth vocal harmonies drew from American doo-wop and rhythm and blues, but this was not simply Mexican-American teenagers copying somebody else’s music.
They had grown up hearing Mexican music at home. Their audiences knew rancheras, polkas, and cumbias. The Royal Jesters could play those, then move into R&B and vocal harmony.
By the early 1960s, they had local records such as “My Angel of Love,” “Ask Me to Move a Mountain,” and “Love Me.”
They became part of the soundtrack of being young and Mexican American on San Antonio’s West Side.
Years later, Sunny Ozuna remembered the Royal Jesters as a garage band much like his own. Their harmonies were different enough that West Side teenagers immediately took notice.
Nobody had sat down in 1961 and announced:
Today we will invent the San Antonio Sound.
Young musicians simply played what sounded good.
Then came Sunny
Sunny Ozuna was another San Antonio teenager.
He attended Burbank High School and grew up listening to rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and the music around him in Mexican-American San Antonio.
Then in 1963, Sunny and the Sunglows recorded “Talk to Me.”
This time the record did not stop at San Antonio.
It became a national hit and took Sunny Ozuna onto Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. The Texas State Historical Association identifies that success as one of the moments when San Antonio’s emerging West Side Sound received national attention.
Think about what that meant to a Mexican-American teenager watching television in South Texas in 1963.
There was a young Mexican-American singer from San Antonio standing on a national television stage.
He had not changed his name.
He had not come from New York.
He had come from the same streets, schools, and dances they knew.
But another San Antonio was helping create the sound
There is an important part of this history that should not disappear.
Some of what Mexican-American teenagers were hearing came directly from Black San Antonio.
On the city’s East Side stood the Eastwood Country Club, part of the Black entertainment circuit. Its stage brought performers including Fats Domino, B.B. King, the Drifters, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Bobby Bland and Big Joe Turner to San Antonio.
Local musicians watched them, played with them, and learned from them.
Eastwood also became an unusually mixed space for the period. Saxophonist Spot Barnett later remembered Black and white patrons sitting and dancing together there at a time when segregation still shaped much of American life.
Young San Antonio musicians, including Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers, went there, listened, and absorbed what they heard.
Mexican-American musicians were doing the same thing throughout the city.
That helps explain why the San Antonio sound is so difficult to put into one musical box.
It was R&B.
It was rock and roll.
It was doo-wop.
It was conjunto.
It was Mexican music coming from the parents’ radio.
It was Black music coming from the East Side.
It was whatever somebody heard Friday night and tried to reproduce in a garage Saturday afternoon.
By 1965, San Antonio had sent another record across America
Two years after Sunny’s “Talk to Me,” Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers and the Sir Douglas Quintet took another piece of that San Antonio mixture onto the national charts with “She’s About a Mover.”
The West Side Sound was never the music of a single ethnic group. Historians describe it as a mixture created by Tejano, Black, and Anglo musicians exchanging blues, R&B, rock, country, conjunto, and polka influences in the same city.
But Mexican-American teenagers were at the center of the audience that gave much of it life.
They bought the records.
They requested the songs.
They joined the car clubs.
They went to the dances.
And, remarkably, some of them were the teenagers behind the microphone deciding which record would be played next.
San Antonio, 1962
So picture it.
School lets out.
A Mexican-American kid gets home, turns on the radio, and hears another Mexican-American teenager talking through the speaker.
A girl calls with a dedication.
Somebody announces the dance Saturday night.
Then the DJ drops the needle onto a record made by some other Mexican-American kids from San Antonio.
Monday morning, everybody will know the song.
Today, a teenager posts a twenty-second clip, and thousands of other teenagers decide whether a song lives or dies.
In San Antonio in 1962, the technology was different.
The teenagers weren’t.
They had TikTok.
It just came through an AM radio.
