Spanish Sung Here : Recording: In increasing numbers, big-name artists from Mexico and South America troop to Valley studios in search of a better product.

Just about anywhere she goes in Mexico, the platinum blond, voluptuous pop singer Marisela is mobbed by adoring fans. “Even with no makeup and with shades, they start following me, looking to see where I go and asking for my autograph,” says the 24-year-old singer of hits such as “Tu y Yo” (“You and I”).

“I like it that they know who I am, but there are times when you don’t feel like being recognized,” she adds somewhat wistfully. “Sometimes, you wish you could just go about your business.”

In a small, nondescript building not far from the Van Nuys federal building, Marisela’s wish comes true. Walking amid pawnshops and the sounds of nearby auto body repair work, heading into the Santa Fe Recording Studios, the Latina superstar hardly elicits a turn of the head.

“It’s not that people don’t know who she is here too,” explains Marisela’s record producer, Enrique Elizondo. “Maybe it’s just that they wouldn’t expect to see her in Van Nuys.”

Yet Marisela is among a growing number of top Latino performers whose albums are produced in the San Fernando Valley. On any given day, alert fans could catch the likes of El Tiempo, Los Caminantes, Pandora, Los Dinnos, Gloria Trevi, Paloma, Los Bukis or Los Bondadosos making their way into recording studios in Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Burbank or Glendale.

Some of the musicians fly in from homes in Mexico or South America, holing up in hotel rooms and eating at odd hours at all-night restaurants until their albums are completed. Others, like Marisela, who lives in Los Angeles, and Los Caminantes, a five-member Mexican group now living in San Bernardino, have a considerably shorter trip and an easier time of it.

But in either case, record producers say that Valley recording studios are winning out over recording studios in the artists’ own countries--and some of the glitzier and better-known studios in Hollywood--for a number of reasons.

For one, Mexican recording studios may cost less--in recording fees and money saved on air fare and lodging--but they have a hard time competing with the state-of-the-art equipment here. Hollywood studios may offer the same availability of top studio musicians and skilled sound engineers, but not the sense of security that artists such as Marisela say they get from the hit-making reputations of record producers like Elizondo, who has been working in the Latino music industry for 27 years. Sergio Andrade, a top producer and talent agent in Mexico, now brings all of his artists to record at Milagro Studios in Glendale.

“Sure, it’s more expensive to record here, but you end up with a much better product,” Andrade says. “In the end, that’s what you’re looking for.”

There also are a variety of recording facilities--which may not have been as big a factor 10 years ago.

“Back in 1980, we were one of two studios in the Valley really doing a lot of the superstar acts from Mexico, Chile and Argentina that were flying in here and using our engineers and musicians,” recalls Brad Schmidt, who ran a recording studio in North Hollywood for eight years. Now, says Schmidt, who since has acted as a talent agent for such singers as Tiffany and Marisela, “just about everyone has become aware of the Latino market. They’re all competing for that business.”

Considering the size of that market, most would be foolish not to. In countries such as Mexico, Brazil and Chile, albums of popular artists regularly sell more than 1 million copies, record companies report. Abel DeLuna, president of Luna Records in Los Angeles, which produces the albums of several well-known Latino artists at the George Tobin Studios in North Hollywood, says each of the 14 albums that Los Caminantes (The Walkers) has released since 1982 has gone gold in Mexico.

“There is no other country that sells the amount of records in the Latino market that Mexico does,” Elizondo says. “That’s because there’s a big difference between 70 million people who speak Spanish and the number of people who speak Spanish here.”

But as any producer of Latino music well knows, love of music doesn’t stop at the U.S. border. Record sales of Latino artists in this country are big business as well. Some Latino artists may have become familiar to record purchasers when they lived in their native countries; other artists become known through the numerous U.S. radio stations that now cater exclusively to the Hispanic population.

Just as American music is broken down into such categories as rock, jazz, pop and soul, Latino music is similarly categorized by styles that enjoy varying degrees of popularity. There are rancheras , ballads that are typified by such singers as Ana Gabriel and Vincente Fernandes. Tropicales, recordings in a South American style, are easily recognizable by their salsa rhythms and rumba beats. There are contemporaneos , or pop music recordings, and cumbias typical of the villages from the provinces throughout Mexico. There is nortenos, a hugely popular style described by one producer as the Latino equivalent of country-Western music that is often sung by “fat guys with mustaches wearing uniforms.”

“There are hundreds of bands that are starving,” says Bryan Stott, a British sound engineer who worked with Julio Iglesias on several of his first albums and now works with Latino artists in Glendale. “Only the lucky ones get to make an album.”

There also is a relatively new style of music that onlookers speculate has been influenced greatly by American performers like Madonna. Although U.S. audiences may be used to a certain degree of raunchiness onstage, in a largely Catholic country like Mexico, the antics of a singer like Gloria Trevi, who records in Glendale, can still be unsettling.

“You have to imagine the impact in a country like Mexico. Here she was, singing on the floor and grabbing her crotch. . . ,” says Andrade, who is Trevi’s manager. Radio stations were flooded with angry calls, he says, and the major television station in Mexico warned Trevi that she could perform on the air only “if she cooled it.”

Statistics on Latinos’ record-buying habits in this country are hard to come by, but advertising groups that target Spanish-speaking populations say the buying potential is considerable. “First, all you have to do is look at the census figures, which show a strong increase since 1980,” says Dennis McCann of the Carranza Group, a Los Angeles-based advertising group involved with the Hispanic television industry.

Nationally, he says, there are now 25 million Latinos, 4.5 million of whom live in the Los Angeles area. “You’re talking about 28% of the state’s population, and most of us add at least another 10% for the undocumented aliens who went uncounted. That’s hard to ignore.”

Elizondo says he wouldn’t even need statistics to persuade him. “To give you an idea of how big the music is here, they used to give Latin dances at the L.A. Convention Center, and 20,000 or 30,000 people would show up and pay $25 a head. That’s a lot of money to pay, and they’d fill it up.”

Concerts by Latino artists also draw large crowds throughout Southern California. Organizers say they expect that will be no different when Los Caminantes perform Saturday night at the Sports Arena. According to a Luna Records spokesman, the group has been chosen three times by Billboard magazine as the best group in Mexican regionals.

Ironically, while huge record sales are often the culmination of a dream for many American musicians, for Latino artists it is often only the beginning. Despite the financial success that comes from a top-selling album, producers and talent agents say the real money comes in performances back home.

“The business is really in the shows,” says Andrade, “but in order to get asked to perform, you first have to be well-known. You do that through albums. A lot of times, the record sales barely cover the cost of production, but the shows are usually well-paid.”

In Mexico, he says, well-known artists perform primarily in stadiums or gymnasiums that hold up to 30,000 people and at palenques , open-air town squares that allow huge numbers of people to attend. The latter, Andrade says, are often considered the best gig of all.

“They are cock fights,” Andrade explains. Well-known musicians are asked to play at the events. In addition to poorer people, they also attract “thousands of people who are wealthy and come to place bets.”

“If you can play there, you’re lucky,” he says. “An artist there can make a lot of money.”