Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-163) and index.Preface. Aligning my coordinates — Introduction. “Vamonos pa’l Chuco!” — “Pachuco boogie” : culture, music, and history of Chuco — “Electrify me!” : the first wave of Chuco punk — “Rascuache” : the “second generation” finds its sound — “This is forever” : indelible Chuco — Conclusion. “El Paso is in every one of us!””Chuco Punk argues that El Paso represents a punk mecca as essential to the culture, economy, and politics of the 1990s as was Seattle. Tara López dives into the music scene that gave rise to bands like The Mars Volta, Sparta, and At the Drive-In. These national acts cannot be separated, López argues, from the primarily working-class communities of color of El Paso who created a “musical world” that let loose potent creativity and expression. Nor can they be separated from El Paso’s own history as a borderland, as a site of segregation, and as a city with a long lineage of cultural and musical resistance–thus, López takes readers from pachuco culture of the 1930s to the Grammy Award-winning Mars Volta’s Wax Simulacra.” Despite their differences, both nonetheless represent “youths at the margins who pushed back against such [cultural] erasure and continued to reaffirm the identity of El Paso as ‘El Chuco.'””–“An immersive study of the influential and predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene in El Paso, Texas”–