Beatle Without Borders

It was a warm fall evening in 1997, and on the patio of the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, mariachi trumpets were blasting. The occasion was a family reunion, and it was in all ways a typical Mexican fiesta--except for the presence of a handful of guests who stood out among the Old World elders and Mexican American kids. Huddled together at a table were George Harrison and some of his friends, including Indian sitar legend Ravi Shankar, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra and session drummer extraordinaire Jim Keltner.

But the rock ‘n’ roll royalty was not the center of attention that evening. Harrison’s in-laws, Maria Louise and Esiquiel Arias, as matriarch and patriarch, had the spotlight. Harrison was there because of their daughter, Olivia Arias, whom he’d married in 1978, thereby gaining a huge Mexican American extended family in Los Angeles.

The former Beatle has been eulogized since his death last month for his cross-cultural collaborations, for popularizing the sitar in Western pop, for serving as a bridge between East and West. But perhaps his most fundamental cross-cultural endeavor was in his personal life.

Harrison married into a typical working-class Mexican American family from Hawthorne. Like millions of others, Esiquiel Arias immigrated in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. He settled in Los Angeles, finding work on the railroads downtown and living in a rundown labor camp then known as La Seccion de Santa Fe. The Arias family eventually moved up, buying a house in Hawthorne, where Olivia and her siblings grew up.

Harrison met his future wife at A&M; Records in Hollywood, where she worked, while he was in the U.S. promoting an upcoming tour with Shankar. On the surface, they made a strange pair, but their relationship made sense. The working-class Arias family are a sort-of American version of those famously working-class people of Liverpool. Harrison, the son of a bus driver, grew up in an English version of East L.A.

On the night I met George and Olivia at the Wilshire Ebell, the live music was performed by one of the world’s great mariachi bands, Los Camperos de Nati Cano.

Later, Harrison talked to me with great enthusiasm about Jorge Negrete, one of the great crooners from the golden era of mariachi music. He said that he wanted to use an image from an old Negrete album on the cover of one of his own future projects.

It was one of those uniquely L.A. moments--a sort of postmodern version of the first contact between Old and New Worlds 500 years ago.

The in-between space where cultures meet unself-consciously is exhilirating. I grew up in a family where cultural pastiche was the norm. My father is Mexican American and my mother an immigrant from El Salvador who arrived in L.A. with a crew of other young, single women from Central America seeking an American future. Many of her friends found American husbands. At their reunions, we danced to a blend of merengue and rock; we ate tamales and Swedish meatballs.

But in my formative years in L.A.--around the time that Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” played constantly on the AM radio of my dad’s red Volkswagen beetle--the pieces of Southern California’s cultural mosaic were not fitting together so easily. To this day, in many ways, they still do not. All too often, cultural mixing is both conscious and aimed at profit. In the process of buying and selling the traditions of an ethnic or spiritual group, profound cultural meanings may be lost--for both buyer and seller. In the end, we’re left with that postmodern conundrum: a world of symbols detached from their original significance. It is a world in which we can wear each other’s clothes, dance to each other’s music--yet still remain trapped in an outmoded colonial hierarchy.

It is still easier for a white, middle-class Angeleno to commune with the mystical East than to really get to know the Salvadoran nanny or the Korean merchant. Sure, L.A.’s elites take salsa lessons and eat kimchi--but how much closer does that really get them to the cultures of the immigrant workers that serve them?

By all accounts, Harrison was no mere cultural tourist--his spiritual border-crossing was a lifelong commitment. And he backed it up with actions, like the Concert for Bangladesh, widely credited as the birth of rock philanthropy.

Harrison crossed borders with gusto. And so it was altogether fitting that Harrison, on a mission promoting the music of Shankar, arrived at A&M; Studios in Hollywood and met the striking Olivia Arias. From Liverpool to Hawthorne, via India. In his art and life, Harrison blended his disparate worlds seamlessly, and by doing so helped make the world a smaller, more loving place. Descanse en paz, Jorge.

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Ruben Martinez, an associate editor at Pacific News Service, is Loeb Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of “Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail.”