NOTHING MORE AMERICAN THAN MULTI-CULTI:

Ramirez, fourteen, a San Antonio eighth grader with jet-black hair that goes past his shoulder blades, played "Stocky Polka" and "Picame Tarantula" on his light orange Gabbanelli accordion. He selected those songs because they're two of his favorites--something about their chords touches his heart, he says. It's the same feeling he had the first time he heard a strange sound coming from the radio, when he was about nine years old. His parents told him it was an accordion. Later, at a San Antonio music festival, he not only heard it again but also saw the instrument making that sound. He returned home and tried to make his own. "I grabbed a little paper," Ramirez remembers. "Drew the buttons, trying to simulate the accordion."

When Christmas came and he got an iPad, he started playing an accordion game. That's when his parents knew their son was serious about playing the instrument that's been a part of Texas's culture for more than 170 years. They soon gave him an accordion and signed him up for lessons, and he's scarcely stopped practicing since. This year was Ramirez's third time competing in the Big Squeeze, which is organized by the nonprofit Texas Folklife. Roughly 35 young musicians from across the state--and from Louisiana, in the cajun and zydeco categories--participated this year. Now in its fifteenth year, the event aims to help preserve and promote Texas's traditional cultural practices. 

That includes playing the accordion, which German settlers brought to Texas and northern Mexico in the mid-1800s. Texas Mexicans soon adopted the instrument and made it their own, blending German polkas and waltzes with Mexican music to create the style that would later become known as conjunto. The instrument's versatility was key to its appeal. "Poor rural Tejanos took to it quickly since it could mimic several instruments simultaneously and it was cheaper to pay one acordeonista than an orquesta," writes Carlos Guerra in the book Puro Conjunto. By the early 1900s, the accordion was widespread on both sides of the border.

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