Bracero Social club

BY JOE PAYNE

It was an oddly clear night between historic rainstorms when the Bracero Social Club filled the outdoor stage at The Olde Alehouse in Los Osos. The air was crisp, and the crowd wore layers, but the band started with a warm twang of guitars met by organ and drums.

The five-piece band played a familiar Freddy Fender tune as visitors sipped beers and waited on orders from the kitchen. Inside, heads turned toward the patio and stage anytime the back door opened, and the driving music filled the restaurant. A handful of visitors abandoned the warm indoor setting and braved the cold, enticed outside by the energetic sounds.

The group played with a honed edge, diving headfirst into a Joy Division song and then taking an unexpected turn to Vicente Fernandez. Heads continued to turn in the direction of the stage along with smiles and cheers. I wondered, what were these guys going to do next? “I always say music is a working man’s therapy,” said Mario Jiminez, the lead singer/songwriter and guitarist for the Bracero Social Club in a later interview.

When Jiminez and his band mates aren’t working their regular day jobs, they make time to get together to practice and perform regular gigs. As the weather warmed this year, the number of gigs increased and the audiences have grown. The group has played at many familiar haunts in San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles, Atascadero, Los Osos, and the Five Cities.

Bracero Social Club members include Jiminez along with guitarist and singer Sabastian Luna, bassist Mat Pinto, drummer Joe Baltazar, and keyboard/ accordionist Jason Lee Downing. They all hail from different parts of California, stretching from the San Joaquin Valley to Los Angeles as well as homegrown on the Central Coast in SLO County, but each shares a similar yet unique lived experience of musicianship. “There was a cultural connection between us all because we’re all of Mexican descent, but we always feel somewhere in the middle between two cultures in California. We’ve really connected that way,” he said. “There’s a saying, ‘ni de aquí, ni de allá,’ you’re ‘neither here nor there,’ you’re somewhere in the middle, not being accepted in the full Mexican culture and not being accepted in the full American culture.”

For Jiminez, that mix of cultures is illustrated in the pages of his life, recalling his teenage years blasting punk rock music through headphones at his agriculture industry job. The name Bracero Social Club is a shout out to this shared heritage among the members and their family connections to Mexico, agricultural work in California, and passion for music–both American and British wave punk rock and the rancheras and chicano rock sung in Spanish. “It’s an identity crisis to a certain extent, but being placed in the middle, you’re at a great vantage point to see a lot of great influences and you’re exposed to a lot more,” he said. “We’re in a comfort zone when we talk about how we grew up and those influences.”

With some originals by Jiminez under their belts and some recordings in progress, Bracero Social Club is a SLO-area band to watch. SLO LIFE

Information about upcoming gigs can be found on the band’s Facebook and Instagram pages @bracerossocialclub.