Joe Cuba, lord of Latin Boogaloo, died last Sunday at the age of 78. While he was a “Nuyorican” jazz musician, he was also an influence on car culture in the Seventies – especially in the lowrider scene. To test my theory, I played “Bang Bang” this morning as I was writing this post for my wife and asked her if she ever heard the song before.

Now, my wife is a Latina, born and raised in San Francisco. While she’s full-blown Latin, she doesn’t like the stereotypes and always pushes me off when I ask her about all the custom vans and lowriders that were painted in the rented garage below her house and the smooth characters who hung out there in the mid-Seventies.

I tell you this because, as soon as I played this song, she suddenly started talking about how her uncles would plop her into the front seat of a lowrider out on the street in front of the house and hit the switches for her when she was a kid. “It was like a rollercoaster!” she said. And then she confessed that some of her uncles’ girlfriends would let her wear these black bracelets that would wrap up around the middle finger – “…that’s what the cholas would wear…” – and all this was a forbidden lifestyle, according to her doting mother, but just a song-on-the-record-player away for a reinita growing up in the city thirty years ago.

As a journalist, I love it when music can do this kind of thing. And I think Joe Cuba would be proud of his influence long after he’s gone. More of his story and music (here).