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Like the land it comes from, Tejano is hot.
For years, playing to the huge crowds at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo has been a pinnacle of success for a country music artist or band. Now, Tejano music is taking its place alongside country in that spotlight, a sign of the music's rising popularity.
Tejano night at the recent Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, held at the Houston Astrodome, drew the largest crowd yet in the three years since the rodeo began including Tejano night. The crowd, just shy of 61,000 people, is thought to be the largest crowd ever to attend a Tejano music concert.
But this is hardly a one-shot phenomena:
* In San Antonio, considered the heart of the burgeoning Tejano music industry, the Tejano Music Awards program is moving into the spacious Alamodome this year after consistently selling out the 15,000-seat Hemisfair Arena. San Antonio is home to the major Tejano record labels and most of the big Tejano acts are based there.
8 In Dallas, KICK-FM 107.9 is a new 100,000-watt, all-Tejano radio station. The all-Tejano station in San Antonio is that town's number one radio station
* In Austin, the Arista Nashville record label has created Arista/Texas, a new label that will sign and promote Tejano artists.
Tejano is hot in colder climes, too. In places like Wisconsin and Illinois, Pontiac and East Lansing, Mich., and Toledo, Ohio, where large numbers of Hispanics have migrated, Tejano acts easily sell out clubs seating a thousand people, said Tom Davey, partner in the Fort Worth booking agency, Entertainment Consultants Inc.
"Those are places where people drifted up from the Southwest maybe a generation ago, and they've held onto their culture well," said Davey, whose agency books Tejano acts including Johnny Bustamante & the L.A. Band, Selena, Steve Diaz, and the band Mazz. "There's a lot of little enclaves of people that relate extremely well to this kind of music."
Tejano is a spicy mix that's grown out of the fertile musical ground of Texas. Much like the foods you'll find around South and Central Texas in cities like Austin and San Antonio, Tejano combines ingredients and influences ranging from the American West to Mexico to the Germans who settled...