Chuy Negrete, with guitar and harmonica recounts the Mexican and Mexican-American experience through storytelling, poetic song and corridos (running verse ballads) and slides as he traces the history of Mexican-Latino experiences from pre-Columbian times to the present.

An engaging teller of tales and master narrator of the Mexican experience through song and ballads, Dr. Negrete has been called "the Chicano Woody Guthrie" by oral historian and radio personality Studs Terkel.

The son of migrant farmworkers who later settled in Chicago, Negrete went on to become one of the nation's foremost musicologists and interpreters of Mexican and Chicano music.

As the founder and director of the Mexican Cultural Institute, Dr. Negrete has lectured, performed and taught in numerous universities across the nation.  Aside from his doctoral degree from the University California-Berkeley, Dr. Negrete earned degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Chicago State University with specialties in educational anthropology and ethnomusicology or the comparative study of music of different cultures. He's also a Smithsonian and Bannerman Fellow for his work in reaching, studying and living among the indigenous immigrant non-Spanish speaking populations in México. 

Born in San Luis Potosi, México, Dr. Negrete spent his early childhood in Texas as the son of migrant workers but moved with his family and grew up in the steel-mill culture of South Chicago.