Ana Lisa Portillo
El Paso, Texas, United States | Established. Jan 01, 2020
Music
The best kept secret in music
Press
This band has no press
Discography
Still working on that hot first release.
Photos
Bio
Ana Lisa Portillo and David MartÃnez play the familiar melodies they grew up with in the West Texas borderlands. The duo was born in fall 2020, during the darkest days of the pandemic, when El Paso made national news after installing a field hospital at the downtown convention center to care for Covid patients. Amid the grief and isolation, Ana Lisa and David were driven to explore the joyful music that keeps the people of this region connected.
Some of the polkas, pasodobles, and waltzes they perform are more than a hundred years old, but most have never before been heard in a fiddle-guitar duet setting like this. Their repertoire also includes more modern tunes made popular by Little Joe, Lydia Mendoza, Sunny Ozuna, Ray Camacho, and Eddie Dimas. This is music of a unique place where the languages, customs, and politics of Texas, New Mexico, and the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua collide.
Ana Lisa and David met while working together as members of Mariachi Estrella, named the 2014 El Paso Times Best of the Border mariachi. They first performed together as a duo in the 2020 Festival of Texas Fiddling, a completely virtual event due to the pandemic.
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