ONE OF THE FOUNDING MEMBERS OF LOS LOBOS, GUITAR-STRING PIONEER

FRANCISCO GONZÁLEZ •1954-2022

In 1975, KCET aired a halfhour concert featuring a hot new local band. As an opening shot of the downtown skyline segued into a slice-oflife montage of East Los Angeles, a twinkling harp played over a lilting voice as the group performed a song in the son jarocho tradition of the Mexican state of Veracruz.

“We feel it's our obligation to spread our culture to the other people who don't know about it,” said the musician, 22-year-old Francisco González, in a voiceover. The camera rested on him and his pals jamming on a hill that overlooked the Eastside. “We want to make a true Chicano music that draws from our past, that is in line with the past, the present and hopefully the future.”

That band was Los Lobos. The concert, filmed at East Los Angeles College, is available in its entirety on Youtube and remains a joyous tour de force. The imposing, long-haired, Fu Manchusporting González sparkles as the group's lead singer, emcee and jokester. He alternates between harp and mandolin, and ends the show with a quip that became the slogan of Los Lobos: “Just another band from East L.A. Rifa, total.”

González would leave the group within a year, just before they went on to become the most famous Chicano rock group of them all. But the East L.A. native nevertheless became a musical icon of his own. He became an apostle for son jarocho, fostering relations between jaraneros in the United States and Mexico. He released solo albums, and performed in venues as varied as colleges and prisons. His handmade strings for Mexico's family of guitars — the sonorous requinto, the high-toned jarana, the deepbottomed guitarrón, the warm bajo sexto, and others — were lifelines for musicians with no other options in the United States for their instruments.

In Mexico, old-timers said that González's handiwork made instruments resonate with a sound they hadn't heard in decades.

“He would always say, ‘We are gardeners of the seeds of our culture. We plant our seeds patiently, and we nurture the plants of our culture,'” said Yolanda Broyles-gonzález, his wife of 38 years and chair of the Department of Social Transformation Studies at Kansas State University.

The two met after González performed in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1980 while he served as musical director for Teatro Campesino and she was in the audience. “For him, the culture of the people needed to circulate freely and not with dollar signs attached to it.”

“He was our own Chicano conservatory,” said his son, also named Francisco. “He gave us tools to resist discrimination and injustice and to stand and fight for ourselves, but also to love.”

González died March 30 of cancer. He was 68.

The youngest of seven children born to immigrants, González grew up in a musically inclined family where everyone played an instrument, and his father was a trained singer. Known in his childhood as Frank, he met future Lobos members Conrad Lozano and David Hidalgo through the rock band circuit that circled around their alma mater, Garfield High.

But when González first began to play son jarocho, which he learned about through listening to his sister's records, “it was like in ‘The Wizard of Oz' when it goes from black-and-white to color. I wasn't in Kansas anymore,” he told the biographer of Los Lobos in 2015.

González soon connected with his neighbor Cesar Rosas, and the two cofounded Los Lobos in 1973, bringing in Lozano, Hidalgo and Louie Perez. “We got together to learn some songs to play for our mothers, to show them we appreciated the music of our culture,” González said in his opening monologue for the 1975 KCET special.

The performance concluded with a version of the song that would become a smash hit for the group more than a decade later: the son jarocho standard “La Bamba.”

By then, González was long gone from the band, more interested in sticking with Mexican regional music instead of the fusion between those genres and Americans sounds that his former bandmates wanted to explore.

“We loved him, man,” Rosas said. “We were blessed that we had him.”

After his stint with Teatro Campesino, which lasted from 1980 to 1984, González settled in Santa Barbara, where Yolanda was a professor.

González — frustrated that he couldn't find good enough strings for his Mexican instruments — opened Guadalupe Custom Strings in Goleta in 1990, which continues to operate under different ownership in East Los Angeles.

“It was the first time anyone pretty much in this country set to create high-quality strings based on intimate knowledge of Mexican music,” said Gabriel Tenorio, a guitarist who went on to become a partner in Guadalupe Strings Company and now operates his own workshop. “It wasn't some Italian company doing it in the world they knew. He was doing it in our world.”

He and other Chicano musicians from across the Southwest who performed son jarocho and mariachi would make pilgrimages to González during the 1990s. Tenorio remembered being astounded at how González's strings would last for an entire tour, as opposed to just a night like his competitors.