Selena 
We’re an American Band
How did La Mafia get to be the biggest tejano group in the world? By stretching the boundaries of their music—and crossing borders.
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They listened to Top 40 radio—De la Rosa remains a huge Rod Stewart fan while Lichtenberger was into Led Zeppelin—but the music they learned to play was the Mexican conjunto of their parents. De la Rosa’s father, who died when Oscar was fifteen, owned Henry’s, a popular nightclub on North Main Street, where the jukebox was stocked with tejano legends like Little Joe y La Familia, Sunny and the Sunliners, and the Latin Breed. Oscar and his two older brothers—Leonard (who became La Mafia’s guitarist) and Henry Junior (the eldest, who became La Mafia’s manager)—grew up working and playing inside the bar, with the two younger boys eventually forming Los Mirasoles, which became a house band. Lichtenberger’s dad, who moved the family up from Alice when Mando was eleven, plays the accordion and the bajo sexto; his bass lines can be heard on Freddy Fender’s “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.” Under his tutelage, Mando picked up the accordion and formed his own band, Cielo Azul, which began landing gigs at the Gonzales family’s club. In 1980, while still teenagers, Oscar, Leonard, and Mando merged into La Mafia.
“Since we were ten years old, we’ve been playing those places: beer joints, weddings, quinceañeras,” says Lichtenberger, who projects a scholarly aura, with oval glasses and wide jowls. “That’s the reason we’ve been successful. It’s not just a device, a formula. It’s in our blood. We feel it . . . the music is real.”
In the beginning La Mafia played the role of teen idols, gilding its live shows with glam-rock imagery. The band performed polkas—mostly simple boy-meets-girl tunes en español—but added lights, fog, explosions, and spandex. By the late eighties, joined by drummer Michael Aguilar and keyboardist David de la Garza, they had matured into a skilled musical outfit (De la Garza has been known to sit in with Santana and War), yet they could never sell more than 50,000 albums—a respectable number but one that ensured they would forever remain a regional act. “It would have been real easy to do tejano hit after tejano hit,” Lichtenberger says. “We would have made great money here in Texas, by our standards, but nobody would have known who we are right across the border.”
The band’s steady sales attracted the attention of Sony Discos, who in 1991 signed the group to a seven-album contract. With major-label backing, De la Rosa, Lichtenberger, and company set out purposefully to cross the border, deliberately blurring the lines between Texas and Mexico. In other words, more ballads and pop hooks, less oompah-oompah. Their first two Sony albums—1991’s Estás Tocando Fuego and 1992’s Ahora y Siempre (Now and Forever)—sold almost two million units worldwide and forever changed the face of tejano. “They’re our idols,” says Jesús Juárez, the bass player for an up-and-coming band, Tiro al Blanco (Bullseye), which models itself musically after La Mafia. That would not be so unusual, except that he and his bandmates all live in Mexico and sport a look (red satin shirts and white leather boots) that is unmistakably norteño cowboy. At a show headlined by La Mafia in Monterrey last May, they got their chance to share a stage, adding a new spin to the reverse crossover. Here was a tejano band that was not only reaching Mexican fans but also inspiring Mexican bands to play tejano music. “This is the first time we’ve ever seen them up close like this,” gushed Tiro al Blanco’s twentysomething drummer, Daniel Guard-iola, as they posed for photos together.
For all the adulation that has been heaped upon La Mafia, the band remains a strikingly humble ensemble, spared the destructive egos and appetites that eighteen years on the road can breed. Band members tease one another affectionately, especially the newer ones: percussionist Doria, for his liberal applications of hair gel; bassist Ruiz, for his paralyzing fear on the dance floor; their publicist, Abel Salas, for his poetic aspirations. They are almost never rude when recognized in a restaurant or hotel; indeed, they seem to get a charge from the fact that the autograph seekers are usually the waiters, valets, and housekeepers, not their fellow diners and guests. They are frugal to the point of cheap, content to stay in a Hampton Inn, bunking two to a room, or drive eight hours in a rented van from the Rio Grande Valley to Houston rather than pay for a flight. (The three founding members own all of La Mafia’s trademarks and corporations; the other musicians receive a per diem and salary.) After a concert, they are just as likely to hit the pillow as to party. “I could really go for a Big Red,” De la Garza kept sighing after the Mazatlán show.
Lichtenberger so prefers his behind-the-scenes role (he produces other bands, including rising tejano stars Los Palominos) that he decided to stop touring this year, hiring Lorenzo Banda to fill in on accordion and keyboards. Leonard Gonzales is even more of a cipher. In Mazatlán, while the other guys were getting tugged across the ocean on the back of an inflatable banana, he stayed holed up in the hotel, practicing his guitar. Both seem relieved to let the top billing go to De la Rosa, whose olive face and leather hat are perhaps La Mafia’s most recognizable images.
“CAN I GO UP AND GIVE OSCAR A KISS?” cooed Miss Tabasco during a break in the Señorita Mexico rehearsal. Later, Miss Campeche and Miss Coahuila wrapped their arms around him. “They’re both La Mafia’s girlfriends,” another contestant snickered.
“Not La Mafia’s!” Miss Campeche fired back. “Oscar’s.”
De la Rosa usually plays along in good humor, but he rarely drinks it up. Although he is perceived and promoted as a sex symbol, there is a fragility about him, as if he distrusts the motives behind such fleeting sentiment. He is trim but not chiseled, handsome but not a hunk. His voice is like that too, not particularly powerful or versatile, but warm and expressive, even vulnerable. When he sings, he hoists his chin up high and shuts his eyes. His left hand grips the microphone and his right rests over his heart. Before taking the stage, he makes the sign of a cross. He won’t reveal his age, and he is uncomfortable talking about his private life, including the poorly kept secret that he has two grown sons. He still stings from a painful split with Henry Junior, who managed the band until a financial dispute sent him packing in 1996. Their mother lives with Henry, so De la Rosa doesn’t get to see her as often as he would like. At a Grammy celebration at Houston’s Hard Rock Cafe last year, she was in the audience, and De la Rosa dedicated a song to her, “Vivir.” “To live,” he sang. “I don’t want another thing with you, but to live.” By the end, tears were streaming down his cheeks.
“Not every day is a perfect day for me,” he said later. “I understand what life is about.”
Recently, De la Rosa has been hinting that La Mafia may pull the plug after the new millennium, fulfilling two decades together. “After twenty years, there probably won’t be no more Mafia,” he told fans at a sweltering outdoor show at the fairgrounds in Mercedes in June. “I just hope we make it to the year 2000.” It was unclear whether that was a prophecy or just melodrama and fatigue; he didn’t elaborate and, after the show, refused to discuss it. There has been talk of a solo project for him or an English-language album for the band. A year ago La Mafia even recorded a demo song in En-glish, “Angels and Miracles,” which sounds like a cross between Supertramp and Bryan Adams. But Sony executives so far have shown little interest. “They don’t want to chance it,” says De la Rosa.
For now, the strategy is to keep mining the Spanish-speaking mainstream, adding more stamps to the band’s Latin American passports. “There’s as much work down there as this band can handle,” Lichtenberger says. After Mazatlán, La Mafia spent most of the summer in Mexico—the band is still there now—doing three shows every weekend, from Juárez and Acapulco to Tejupilco and Nezahualcoyotl. On September 1 Sony released Euforia. The album’s cover art shows the band standing on the roof of a skyscraper (the Lyric Centre in downtown Houston), striking a pose that is meant to be both cosmopolitan and geographically ambiguous. The group also recently became pitchmen for juice giant Jumex, shooting a commercial that is being shown on both sides of the Rio Grande. The ad is another bit of hokey choreography, but one that again serves La Mafia’s purposes.
“Qué rico,” De la Rosa exclaims, taking a sip. “Más mango!”
“Mmmm,” mimics his brother. “Con más tamarindo!”
Ruiz chimes in: “Y más durazno (peach)!”
Lichtenberger adds: “Oye, con más guayaba (guava)!”
“Wow,” De le Rosa gasps. “Mas fruta de mi tierra!”
More fruit from my homeland—a place somewhere between Texas and Mexico that exists in the heart and mind, if not on a map.
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