Tejano is the Spanish word for "Texan," and Tejano music contains all the flavors of the borderland between the United States and Mexico. Like those who live at the border of two cultures, the music is never quite one thing or the other but is constantly combining elements of both, creating a new and growing culture of its own.

Tejano music has its roots in a music called conjunto (Spanish for "together") that evolved in the early 1900s when immigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia found their way to new homes in south Texas. They brought with them the music of their homelands, energetic polka rhythms played on accordions. This music combined with Spanish lyrics and the complex bass of the bajo sexto, a twelve-string Mexican guitar, to create a fusion of styles that appealed to people of many cultures. Famous 1930s conjunto musician Narciso Martinez (1911–1992) was...