POP MUSIC REVIEW : Little Joe Plays With Lotsa Heart : A day after his Farm Aid performance, Hernandez and his Familia have a Santa Ana crowd dancing to rollicking Tex-Mex, country and R&B; tunes.

There aren’t many artists who find themselves performing to a Texas stadium crowd and national cable audience one day and in a Santa Ana Elks Lodge the next.

But Little Joe Hernandez seemed entirely comfortable with both his Farm Aid V appearance Saturday and his dance show here on Sunday. The Tejano legend may enjoy the larger venues--and the Grammy award that his long career recently afforded him--but his heart clearly is still in playing community-level celebrations.

It’s fitting that he and Willie Nelson performed together at Farm Aid (the two plan to record an album together this year), for Hernandez is practically the Latino Willie, as beloved to the fans in his home state as Nelson is. Hernandez, though, was once far more a musical outlaw than Willie has ever been. His fiery, politicized border music of the early ‘70s was driven by the often violent repression that Texas Latinos then faced.

Hernandez’s music since has been more concerned with perpetuating and celebrating his hybrid culture, as he does in one of his signature tunes: “I’m a Redneck ‘Meskin’ Boy.” Although they were performing minus their usual steel guitarist, Hernandez and his biracial group, La Familia, remained assertive Sunday in their mating of rancheras and Tex-Mex styles, hard-core country music and R&B.;

In their two-hour performance (which included some fine singing from guest Jean La Grand), the gray-bearded singer with the black hat and the five-piece band kept the crowd of more than 700 dancing with Tex-Mex stomps, ballads, waltzes and hot salsa numbers. Like Nelson’s Family Band, Hernandez’s La Familia indeed does play with familial unity.

Through effective use of electronics, the band was able to achieve the sound of a larger group, miraculously without sacrificing any of its human warmth. Keyboardist Rat Silva may be without peer when it comes to getting an authentic accordion sound and dynamic out of a synthesizer, and his horn patches are equally effective. They were used to fill in the playing of trumpeter Lonnie LaLanne, who used a digital harmonizer to create the impression of a full horn section.

Singing in both Spanish and English, Hernandez was an expressive wonder, not too big on nuance perhaps, but with an overpowering, emotionally unfettered delivery full of both romance and wicked wildcat yowls.

The set opened with Nelson and Waylon Jennings’ “Good Hearted Woman” and ranged through the cry-real-tears outpour of the ballad “Prieta Linda”; the equally emotion-wracked “Acabare de Matar” (“Finish Killing Me”); the Tex-Mex funk of “Isabelle”; “Margarita”; and a new song, “California,” and a graceful version of the Ernest Tubb standard “Waltz Across Texas.”

The show wound down with Hernandez’s own signature numbers, “Redneck ‘Meskin’ Boy” and his classic “Las Nubes” (“The Clouds”), an early allegorical song about Latinos’ loss of cultural identity.

Hernandez devotes himself to a variety of community service projects, ranging from AIDS awareness programs to the “Don’t Mess With Texas” anti-litter campaign. His West Coast mini-tour, which concludes Wednesday with a performance at the El Mariachi restaurant in Orange, was organized to facilitate a show tonight for the National Migrant Education Conference at the Anaheim Marriott.