In the long memory of the Southwest, music does not begin on a stage. It rises from kitchens, from packed dirt dance floors, from weddings that stretch deep into the night, where the sound of an accordion carries across generations and the rhythm of boots on wood becomes its own kind of history. For Tanya Nuñez, that sound was not something discovered — it was something lived.
“I don’t ever remember sitting in a car where there wasn’t music,” she said. “Even outside the house, you could hear it coming through the screens.”
Nuñez was born in Las Cruces, rooted in a family whose history in the region stretches back centuries — back, as she tells it, to the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when her ancestors were displaced to El Paso before eventually returning north. That sense of movement, of return, of belonging to a place that exists both in geography and memory, runs through everything she does.
Her upbringing was steeped in the sounds of the borderlands — rancheras, polkas, valses, cumbias — music that was less performance than participation. At family gatherings, there were no DJs, only live bands. Music was constant, and so was dance.
“You’d go to a wedding or a quinceañera, and there would always be live music,” she recalls. “Always a dance.”
But her musical inheritance was not limited to tradition alone. From her younger aunts came the pulse of soul and funk, from her mother a love of rock and roll — horn lines from Chicago sung effortlessly in the kitchen. Voices, rhythms, and melodies overlapped in a kind of informal education, one that trained her ear long before she ever touched an instrument.
“I think I had been in training for a long time already,” she said. “Just listening.”
That training began to take shape when she was a child, placed in piano lessons at five or six. She learned quickly, though not always conventionally — playing by ear, absorbing patterns rather than reading them. Still, it would be years before she found the instrument that truly defined her.
That moment came unexpectedly, sometime in the early 2000s, at a casual jam session. Someone didn’t show. A bass was handed to her.
“And that’s when I realized,” she says, “this is the instrument I always wanted to play.”
The bass, often overlooked, became for Nuñez something essential—a conduit for groove, for feel, for connection. Where others might chase melody or spotlight, she was drawn to something deeper, more foundational.
“My ears would go to the music before the lyrics,” she explains. “And when I started playing bass, I realized I can make people feel something right away. I can see them moving. That’s the groove. That’s what we do.”
What followed was not a straight path but, as she describes it, a river, one that carried her toward formal study almost by accident. A conversation with a professor at the University of New Mexico led to an unexpected turn: from electric bass to upright, from casual playing to orchestral training.
Within a semester, she was performing in an orchestra. Within a few years, she had reshaped her life.
“I went home with a lot of fear and excitement,” she said. “But I try not to fight those moments. I just follow them.”
Today, Nuñez stands at the center of Lone Piñon, a group devoted to the musical traditions of New Mexico and the broader Southwest. Formed in 2014, the band has become a vital force in reviving the region’s orquesta típica sound — music shaped by centuries of cultural exchange among Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, and Anglo communities.
Their instrumentation — fiddle, accordion, guitar, vihuela, upright bass — echoes that lineage. Their approach, however, is as much about stewardship as it is performance.
“We want to honor and respect the roots of New Mexican music,” Nuñez says. “All of its complexities, all of its histories.”
The group itself reflects that blend of backgrounds and influences. Multi-instrumentalist Jordan Wax, raised in Missouri, brings a foundation in Ozark fiddling. Karina Wilson, from Glorieta, carries deep ties to northern New Mexico’s musical traditions. Guitarist Santiago Romero, from Agua Fría, learned his craft among community musicians before working as a mariachi across Las Cruces, El Paso, and Ciudad Juárez.
Together, they form something both cohesive and fluid, a band grounded in place, yet open to evolution.
At the center of it all is Nuñez’s bass, steady and resonant, holding the music together.
“The joy people see from us,” she says, “it’s real. It comes from trust.”
That trust was tested, and ultimately affirmed, in the making of their latest recording, “Hot Carne Seca,” set for release May 26 on Jalopy Records. Rather than record close to home, the band chose to travel to Louisiana, working with engineer Joel Savoy at Studio SavoyFaire in Eunice.
It was, by any practical measure, a risk.
“We didn’t even know the studio,” Nuñez admits. “We didn’t know how it would go. It didn’t make financial sense. But enough things pointed in that direction that we said. ‘Let’s try.’”
The decision required faith, particularly from members stepping into the unknown. Yet it also reflected the ethos that defines Lone Piñon: openness, curiosity, and a willingness to follow instinct over certainty.
“It could have gone badly,” she said. “But that’s part of trust.”
That same trust extends beyond the studio into the band’s daily life. Rehearsals double as shared meals, always the same dish, always the same ritual. Individual pursuits are not just accepted but encouraged. Balance, both collective and personal, is treated as essential.
“It’s about respecting each other’s lives,” Nuñez explains. “That’s what keeps the music healthy.”
For her, that balance includes a deep connection to her Indigenous heritage. Each year, she returns to El Paso for her Pueblo’s feast days, a time of ceremony, of grounding, of reconnection.
“The sound of the drum is really important to us,” she said. “Feeling the ground under your feet. Connecting to ancestors.”
That connection — to land, to lineage, to sound — runs through everything she plays. It is there in the low resonance of her bass, in the rhythms that seem to echo older patterns, older movements.
And it is there, too, in the quiet persistence of her path.
The bass, she notes, is not an instrument typically associated with glamour. It does not demand attention. It anchors it.
Yet in Nuñez’s hands, it becomes something more — a bridge between past and present, between individual and community, between the seen and the felt.
“People don’t always know what it is,” she said with a laugh. “But when they hear it, they feel it.”
Perhaps that is the point. In a region where music has long been a shared language rather than a spectacle, feeling has always mattered more than recognition.
And in that sense, Tanya Nuñez is not simply playing music of the Southwest. She is carrying it — steady, grounded, and deeply alive — forward.
For story ideas and suggestions, Brian D’Ambrosio may be reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com
