Every now and then I have to hand it to TikTok and YouTube because it will promote old songs I like in ways that my kids can appreciate. Just the other day, one of my daughters was singing the chorus to "Mexican Radio" and I was both delighted and puzzled. My daughters usually turn their noses up at my music, but if they encounter it on their own, they dig it.
"Mexican Radio" was a rarity, a weird underground song that somehow managed to hit the mainstream in the benighted 80s, an era of conformity without an internet safety valve. When I first heard it, I thought it was a joke, with the keyboards reminiscent of a ranchera accordion sound and the spliced in dialogue from a Spanish-language broadcast. Since then, I have found the song's deeper meaning.
At base, it's a song about the unknowability of other cultures. Mexico is not far from LA, and you can pick up its radio stations, but they sound like broadcasts from another planet if you don't know Spanish. You are confronted with the uncanny feeling that the world is a big place and that what you know of it is actually pretty small. Anyone who has traveled abroad by themselves knows this sensation. You find yourself in a whole other world where people literally do not speak your language. It's disorienting in the extreme, a "riddle" as the song goes.
There are a lot of headlines about social studies education being under attack, but I have witnessed a more silent strike in education against learning foreign languages. Schools and universities across the country are closing their language programs, and students seem less interested in learning about them. That's a shame for so many reasons, not least because if language shapes our reality, learning new a language allows you to live in a different reality. The alternative is to be like the song's narrator, intrigued, but unable to comprehend the world next door.
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