Every year, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s Tejano Conjunto Festival gives audiences a way to explore the culture of this region through sound. The music carries the bright pull of the button accordion, the depth of the bajo sexto and rhythms shaped by polka, waltz, huapango, bolero and cumbia. Created by Tejanos and carried forward across generations, conjunto welcomes listeners into a historical tradition that is both deeply local and far-reaching.
This year, the festival included an international tribute to Flaco Jiménez, the legendary San Antonio accordionist who became one of conjunto music’s most recognizable ambassadors. For Juan Tejeda, one of the founders of the festival and longtime Chicano Music Program Director at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, the tribute was part of a much larger story: the story of a people, a sound and cultural identity that refuses to disappear.
Tejada is a retired professor of Mexican American Studies and Music, a writer, publisher, activist and conjunto musician. He worked at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center from 1981 to 1998, during the beginning years of the organization. In that time, the center grew into one of the most important Mexican American cultural arts organizations in the country, with programming in music, literature, dance, drama, film and video.
For Tejeda, conjunto music was always about more than performance. It was history, language, family and memory. He learned button accordion as a child from Santiago Jiménez Jr., part of one of San Antonio’s most important conjunto musical families. Though he stepped away from the instrument for a time, he returned to it in college, eventually forming his own band and dedicating much of his life to preserving and promoting the genre.
The Conjunto Festival began in 1981. The next year, Tejeda added the word “Tejano” to the name, grounding the festival clearly in the Texas Mexican people who created the music. He describes conjunto as “a unique American original ensemble and style of music” born from cultural fusion.
Its roots reach back more than a century, when German and other European settlers brought the button accordion into Texas and northern Mexico. Tejanos adopted the instrument and began playing polkas, waltzes and schottisches, eventually pairing the accordion with the Spanish Mexican bajo sexto. Over time, the music absorbed indigenous rhythms, Afro-Caribbean influences, Mexican song forms, Colombian cumbia and American sounds including country, blues, jazz and rock. To hear conjunto is to hear movement across borders, communities and generations. The music is local with a wide historical berth. It is grounded in Texas, but connected to the world.
Tejeda calls it “world music”; it reveals how cultures meet, borrow, transform and create something new. The accordion itself becomes a symbol of that diaspora: a European instrument adopted by Texas Mexicans and reshaped into the voice of an original American sound.
Still, the music’s path into public celebration was not always easy. Tejeda remembers growing up in a time when using Spanish language was punished in schools and Mexican American children were often made to feel ashamed of their own culture. He recalls the stigma attached to conjunto music, which some dismissed as low-class or cantina music. That shame, he says, was not accidental. It reflected a broader history of cultural erasure. The festival was created, in part, to answer that narrative. “One of the reasons that I started the Tejano Conjunto Festival was to counter these negative, stereotypical narratives,” Tejeda said. The goal of the festival was not just to put bands on the stage. It was to present conjunto music in a positive light, educate the public and affirm the cultural contributions of the people who created it.
The educational component has remained at the forefront of the mission. Over the years, the festival has included poster contests, program magazines with scholarly articles, interviews with musicians, student recitals, food, dance and recognition for conjunto pioneers through its Hall of Fame. The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center also began offering formal button accordion and bajo sexto classes in the early 1980s, helping move a largely oral tradition into more structured teaching spaces.
Today, Tejeda sees signs of continuation everywhere. More young people are leaning into conjunto music than ever before, including students in elementary, middle, high school and college programs. More young women are entering a genre that has historically been male-dominated. Community arts organizations and school programs are helping preserve the tradition while simultaneously allowing it to evolve.
For Tejeda, the tribute demonstrates how far conjunto music has traveled while remaining closely tied to the community that shaped it. Tejeda described this year’s festival lineup as one of the most diverse in the festival’s history, with groups from across Texas, California, Michigan, Mexico and beyond. It has become a space where music, dance, language, scholarship and memory come together as cultural affirmation. Exploration often suggests departure but the Tejano Conjunto Festival allows audiences to explore what has been here all along. Listeners encounter conjunto not as background music but living tradition, one that carries the tones of cultural survival, creativity and pride.
The music is grounded in Texas, but connected to the world.