By Brian D’Ambrosio
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 says. “Even outside the house, you could hear it coming through the screens.”
Nuñez, 53, 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, Texas, before eventually returning north.
Her upbringing was steeped in the sounds of the borderlands — rancheras, polkas, valses, cumbias — music that was less about performance than participation. At family gatherings, there were no DJs, only live bands.
“You’d go to a wedding or a quinceañera, and there would always be live music,” she said. “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. Nuñez recalls her mom singing horn lines from songs by the band Chicago in her 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 says. “Just listening.”
Nuñez began taking piano lessons at about age 5. She learned quickly, though not always conventionally. She would play 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 at a casual jam session in the early 2000s. Someone didn’t show, and a bass was handed to her.
“That’s when I realized, this is the instrument I always wanted to play.”
The bass, often overlooked, became something essential for Nuñez — 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 said. “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.
Within a semester, she was performing in an orchestra. Within a few years, she had reshaped her life.
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 reflects that blend of backgrounds and influences. Multi-instrumentalist Jordan Wax, raised in Missouri, brings a foundation in Ozark fiddling. Karina Wilson, from Glorieta, N.M., carries deep ties to northern New Mexico’s musical traditions. Guitarist Santiago Romero, from Agua Fría, N.M., learned his craft among community musicians before working as a mariachi across Las Cruces, El Paso, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
Holding the music together is Nuñez’s steady and resonant bass, which is not an instrument typically associated with glamour. 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 says 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. In that sense, Nuñez is not simply playing music of the Southwest. She is carrying it—steady, grounded, and deeply alive—forward.
