Vinyl Frontier: The Record Store That Resurrects Rio Grande Valley’s Lost Grooves
A mural painted by Roy Aguilar on the interior of Pharr Out Records, a record store selling used and new vinyl records and tapes in Pharr, Texas. The record store specializes in a variety of music genres, from rock to Tejano. Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Puente News Collaborative
Two South Texas collectors are helping a new generation rediscover the music that shaped the border — and giving it a permanent home one record at a time.
Editor’s note: This story was co-published with Puente News Collaborative in partnership with palabra. Puente News Collaborative is a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border.
PHARR, Texas – In the middle of the 20th century, the South Texas border region became the epicenter of influential, international musical styles.
Labels like Falcon Records, in the farming community of McAllen, and Rio Grande Music Company, in San Benito, the birthplace of Texas music legend Freddy Fender, put on vinyl genres that mixed musical styles from across Mexico with those of local performers and European immigrants.
There flourished Tejano Conjunto, small groups that prominently feature the button accordion from central Europe and the bajo sexto, a stringed instrument popular in Mexico that provides a bass line. There sprouted the orquestas tejanas, larger groups that incorporate horn sections. And there took root norteño, a blend of genres with a more prominent bass and percussion.
This music scene in far South Texas and Mexico’s state of Tamaulipas, which Mexican and Tejano farmworkers spread across both countries, was immortalized in documentarian Les Blank’s and music preservationist Chris Strachwitz’s 1976 film, “Chulas Fronteras.”
‘There’s this hometime pride, rediscovering of their roots… People want tangible products and music that was made by people just like them.’
Then vinyl records started to fall out of favor. The original recordings of culturally important musicians disappeared into garages and attics.
But in recent years, vinyl has burst back into popularity. That has coincided with an increased interest in regional acts that never hit it big nationally. Driven in part by hip hop fans seeking out obscure soul acts that were sampled by DJs and producers, labels across the U.S. over the last decade have found a market for vinyl repressings of recordings that were only popular in one city or region. That demand has spread to other genres, like country and rock. The distinctive West Side Sound from San Antonio, 200 miles to the north, is reaching a new audience.
But that revival of regional sounds hasn’t reached the Rio Grande Valley, where the border river winds past orchards, onion fields, and suburban-like sprawl before spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. A pair of young residents in the region are trying to change that.
The conjunto records section with a cardboard cut out of norteño music legend Ramón Ayala at Pharr Out Records. Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Puente News Collaborative
Growing up in the Valley in the 2010s, Isaac Herrera and Zach Myers found themselves traveling for hours outside the region to feed their vinyl collecting hobby. Wouldn’t it be cool, they said at the time, to have a local record store focused on the very influential cross-border music that was born in the region where they lived?
In other parts of the state – in San Antonio and even in tiny Kingsville, the ranch town a two-hour drive from the border communities where the genres flourished – longtime record stores promoted Tejano and norteño music, hosting in-store performances and signings for fans.
So Herrera and Myers started hunting in garage and estate sales, buying up entire collections. They’ve uncovered mint pressings of early LPs by superstars like Valley resident Ramón Ayala and 7-inch singles by unknowns like Johnny Jay And The Pompadors, who were influenced by popular ‘60s acts while maintaining a South Texas sound.
In 2023, after years of holding pop-up vinyl sales, the two friends, along with their wives, Jade Herrera and Rebecca Myers, opened Pharr Out Records in a historic building in this city of 80,000.
Pharr Out Records is located in a historic building in the heart of Pharr, Texas. Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Puente News Collaborative
It’s a small, tidy shop with a music- and Valley-themed mural on the wall. Above the crates, universally recognized classics, like Miles Davis’ “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” and holy grails, like the Gun Club’s “Fire of Love,” are displayed alongside pristine, often hard-to-find recordings by stars from the region, like Ayala and Fender.
Peruse the staff picks or ask about the carefully curated conjunto, norteño, and Tejano sections, and the owners’ eyes will light up. They direct customers to obscure groups, like Los Cachorros, or critical darlings who never hit it big, like virtuoso accordionist Esteban Jordan who blended a range of genres, including jazz, into his music. They are acts that Pharr Out’s owners say are as worthy of recognition as Sunny Ozuna, a Mexican-American soul singer emblematic of the orquesta Tejana-influenced West Side Sound whose represses by New York’s Big Crown Records can be found in stores across the country.
“We’ll have everything new,” Herrera said. “We’ll have Taylor Swift and The Weeknd. But the emphasis here is regional music. When somebody comes in and says, ‘Hey man, do you have any Ramón Ayala?’ We jump out of our chairs like, ‘Yeah, let’s talk about it!’”
“We wanted it to be a predominant focus, rather than something in the back, on the side burner,” Myers adds. “We want our name and our brand to be associated with the music and the culture of where we live.”
Co-owners Zach Myers, left, and Isaac Herrera at Pharr Out Records with records by the Tejano and norteño legends Steve Jordan and Ramón Ayala. Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Puente News Collaborative
Some influential Valley musicians became immensely popular. Valley native and musician Gilbert Reyes Jr. said his parents, who traveled to find farm work, saw Ayala’s first band, Los Relámpagos del Norte, in Bakersfield, California, in 1967. Ayala went on to stardom on both sides of the border, and some Tejano acts achieved financial success in the 1980s and ‘90s. But Reyes, who’s now the brand manager for German accordion manufacturer Hohner, said in still-segregated South Texas, those performers were associated with an older generation.
“The kids didn’t want to listen to this music because they were embarrassed that their parents were laborers and worked in the cotton fields or whatever,” Reyes said. “It wasn’t mainstream. When I was going to high school, they wouldn’t let us speak Spanish or listen to Mexican music.”
It may seem counterintuitive, but by having the music in a storefront, it reaches a new audience. It’s there to be discovered, or as is often the case rediscovered, by casual shoppers or general vinyl enthusiasts who come in off the street. Collectors of the styles Pharr Out features make special trips to the store, and the musicians who appear on the records they're selling stop in from time to time.
“It’s nice to have these stores that are a throwback to our entire history,” said Juan Tejeda, a San Antonio cultural arts preservationist who founded the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s Tejano Conjunto Festival more than 40 years ago. “Just like our cultural arts centers, they preserve our history, our language, the arts, and teach them to our community … They’re important repositories and promoters of our culture.”
Having the music for sale on vinyl also gives it a hipness and cultural currency that museums and cultural arts centers don't.
The Tejano records section at Pharr Out Records. Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Puente News Collaborative
Customers at Janie’s Record Shop, a 40-year-old San Antonio institution that often hosts local Tejano acts, “want to see the liner notes, they want to see who the bass player is,” said Roberto Esparza, one of the owners. In the last 15 years, after decades of selling almost exclusively CDs, vinyl records have come back to the point where they now make up most of his sales.
“Having it in their hand, it’s like they have a part of their history,” Esparza said.
“With streaming you just miss all that,” said Rae Cabello, a self-described “record collector who’s obsessed with collecting music from South Texas” and a producer for the Numero Group label. “You’re able to skip. On a record player, you can’t really do that. You’re kind of forced to listen to side A and side B in its entirety.”
Numero is part of that new generation of record labels that re-release vinyl LPs and singles of long-forgotten regional artists, much as Strachwitz’s Arhoolie Records did in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.
Zach Myers with a record from Lydia Mendoza, a music artist who would perform in the Rio Grande Valley, at a collector’s home in Brownsville, Texas. Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Puente News Collaborative
The Valley has changed, too. The four-county, 4,300-square-mile region has grown from a collection of small farming towns to a population center of more than a million. Reyes said the regional culture that his generation once thought was blasé now resonates with younger residents. Conjunto music is taught in high schools. Valley band Grupo Frontera, which mixes a variety of genres and prominently features accordion, has achieved global fame.
“There’s this hometime pride, rediscovering of their roots,” Cabello said. “People want tangible products and music that was made by people just like them.”
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But only a few South Texas and northern Mexican musical pioneers have received the repress treatment – Chalino Sánchez, a balladeer from Mexico’s west coast whose repertoire included norteño, and Ozuna are two notable examples.
This means Pharr Out’s owners sometimes find their role as a repository of historically significant border music at odds with running a business. In the fall of 2024, they came across a collection of unopened vintage Ayala records. They put a $200 price tag on one, joking that it’s the “we don’t want to sell price.”
“This is the kind of stuff that we'd rather just keep with us for a long time,” Herrera said.
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Jason Buch is a freelance reporter based in Texas. A native of Texas, he’s covered the border since 2007, writing about everything from money laundering to alligators in the Rio Grande. @jlbuch
Michael Gonzalez is a freelance photojournalist based in his native region of South Texas along the U.S.-Mexico border. He travels throughout the state covering stories centered on environment, immigration, and the issues that shape life on the border. @michael.gonzlz
Dudley Althaus has reported on Mexico, Latin America, and beyond for more than three decades as a staff newspaper correspondent. Beginning his career at a small newspaper on the Texas-Mexico border, Althaus had an award-winning 22-year stint as Mexico City bureau chief of the Houston Chronicle. After a four-year run as a Mexico correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Althaus covered immigration and border issues as a freelancer based in San Antonio for Hearst Newspapers. He has covered every Mexican presidential election since 1988, when Mexico's troubled transition to democracy began. @dqalthaus