Unbound by Tradition

It’s the Mexican holiday of Dia de los Muertos, and a few hundred people are watching a series of Latino bands at Self-Help Graphics, an East Los Angeles arts center on Cesar Chavez Avenue.

Those in the audience who aren’t in costume for the occasion--which pays homage to the spirits of the dead--are wearing their hair in long ponytails and braids and sporting other symbols of indigenous and Latin American culture, from jewelry and traditional guayabera summer shirts to embroidered peasant blouses.

A similar scene could be found in almost any southern Mexico town on this night, with one main exception: the brand of music.

The evening’s bands--Blues Experiment, Quetzal, Aztlan Underground and Ozomatli, among others--are mostly singing in English and playing music that is as influenced by punk and ska as by mariachi and salsa.

They are part of an underground Los Angeles scene of about a dozen core bands and another dozen on the fringes. It has been created by a generation of fans and artists whose cultural and musical sensibilities haven’t been expressed by other movements--not Latin America-oriented rock en espan~ol, mainstream U.S. rock or the popular Mexican sounds of banda and mariachi.

The songs represent an urban blend of traditional and modern, retro and futuristic: turntable scratching and conga beats, animated folk-sones jarochos alternating with rock and soul, manic, punk-tinged ska and blues. The themes often speak of frustration and heartbreak in a city many young Chicanos call “Lost Angeles.”

“We may be wearing guayaberas, but we’re also wearing Doc Martens and nose rings,” says 25-year-old Flavio Morales, host and co-founder of “Illegal Interns,” an hourlong television program devoted to contemporary Chicano music and culture that airs Wednesdays at midnight on the independent Channel 38. “The fact that we were born here makes our use of the imagery, sounds and symbols of Mexico 100% American.”

There have been other bands in this progressive tradition over the years, notably the Plugz and Los Illegals in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. But few recognizably Latino musicians have been able to survive the record industry’s marketing machinery, which many musicians say attempts to fit groups into existing slots, such as “Latin” or “alternative.” The industry has never been able to make sense of a group that can be categorized as both.

This discouraging history hasn’t been lost on the leaders of this new Chicano underground. Indeed, many of them feel that most of their talented predecessors had to compromise their music and identity to conform to record company stereotypes about Latinos and their viability in the mainstream marketplace.

Not wanting to make futile compromises, these new bands operate for the most part outside the parameters of the industry. They play at downtown art galleries, the old city jail north of downtown or restaurants and cafes in Little Tokyo. They produce their own records from money scrounged from fund-raisers. It’s a living for some of the musicians, while others keep their day jobs.

The bands appeal to hip, young Latinos who appreciate the subtleties of the Chicano cultural subtext in their music. It’s a sensibility shaped by negatives--the feeling that they are neither Mexican nor mainstream American.

“These bands speak to the soul of our Chicano community,” says Consuelo Flores, a writer and performance artist who has been following the scene for years. “They have an intelligent and relevant message that transcends race and gender boundaries. It’s a message of perseverance, community involvement, inclusion and hope.”

Though the scene is largely defined by its grass-roots support and its independence from the industry rat race, it has already caused at least one high-profile record label to take notice.

Ozomatli--a bilingual band with salsa, hip-hop and jazz overtones that regularly draws as many as 1,000 fans to its shows--has been signed to Almo Sounds, the label started by A&M; Records founders Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert and whose roster includes the hit rock group Garbage. An album is due in late spring.

Lysa Flores, one of the scene’s few female lead vocalists, signed with Geffen Records as musical director of the soundtrack for the recent movie “Star Maps,” which featured her track “Beg, Borrow and Steal.”

“When Ozomatli plays ‘Como Vez,’ I’m singing right along with them,” said Andy Olyphant, director of West Coast artists & repertoire at Almo Sounds. Olyphant believes the band’s music has appeal across racial lines. “They’re all about the rhythm, all about the groove.”

But the bands are determined not to let this growing interest cause a loss of independence.

Gabriel Tenorio, guitarist for the band Quetzal, seems to speak for most of the musicians when he says he’s not likely to compromise his style to get the attention of the record industry.

“For us, it’s not about trying to make a fast buck,” says Tenorio, whose group is recording an independent album with the production help of former Oingo Boingo member John Avila. “It’s about trying to become the best musicians we can. I ask myself, ‘Do I want to play good music, or do I want to play just three chords and be a pop star?’ ”

It’s early evening, and five of the members of Blues Experiment are sitting in the Bell Gardens living room of lead guitarist Robert Tovar. The room is cluttered with an assortment of instruments, including a conga drum, two guitars and an electric bass.

Joshua Duron is lying stomach-down on the floor, tapping out a tune on a little hand-held electric keyboard. The band, with two members squeezed into a love seat, breaks into a straight blues song, and lead singer Gus Sabina starts singing from his perch on a stool, softly at first, then building to a steady, soulful high.

A couple of songs later, the band breaks into an impromptu jam session. Everything in sight becomes an instrument; one musician jangles a set of keys, the back of a guitar becomes a makeshift drum for Sabina, and Tovar picks up a pot from the kitchen and starts banging on it with a spoon.

Anything-goes jam sessions are a habit for Blues Experiment and other bands, such as Ozomatli, that trace their roots to the Peace and Justice Center, which was born from a political strike against the Los Angeles Conservation Corps.

A group of mostly twentysomething Chicanos, former employees of the U.S. Conservation Corps, took over the downtown building late in 1995 in protest over low wages and the firing of a popular director. They ended up living in the building and founding their own community center.

In fact, politics is integral to the music of many of the Chicano scene’s musicians, particularly those who hang out in a Highland Park Chicano community center called Regeneracion.

Yaotl Orozco, 30-year-old singer and lyricist for Aztlan Underground, describes a Southern California upbringing in which he felt that he didn’t belong in his native country.

“Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, which was mixed white and Chicano, I’d hear things like ‘stupid wetback’ all the time,” Orozco says. “So I always felt, growing up, that I was in someone else’s country and I shouldn’t be here. I’d even get mad at my parents for speaking Spanish.”

For Orozco and his bandmates, music is an outlet for anger and frustration, as well as a way of coming to terms with past injustices and finding hope for a better future.

But not all are as tied to the idea of music as a means of expressing political ideology. For Lysa Flores, who because of her less obvious political inclinations seems at times to be on the periphery of the scene, just existing as a Chicana is enough of a political statement.

“ ‘Chicano Alternativo’ is simply music coming from a Chicano perspective,” Flores says. “Every song we sing is political because we’re trying to break down stereotypes.”

In a region that’s nearly 50% Latino, the Chicano impact on mainstream popular music in Los Angeles County has been minimal. So few successful Chicano pop-rock groups have come from the area that you can count them on one hand. Yes, there was Ritchie Valens. Yes, there is Los Lobos. And yes, there was Tierra (with the 1980 national Top 40 hit “Together”).

There are other Chicanos who are currently enjoying large-scale mainstream success, such as alternative group Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval, Cypress Hill’s B-Real and Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha. But few outside of East L.A. view them as Latinos, and that in itself may hold the key to their success (with the possible exception of De la Rocha).

That’s because once a musician decides to call himself or herself a Chicano and focus on issues of relevance to the Chicano community, he or she is generally considered too “ethnic” or too “Latin” for any mainstream record company.

The reception these musicians get from labels’ Latin divisions is equally chilly, because if the music’s not in Spanish, the divisions aren’t equipped to market it.

The dilemma is reflected in the musicians’ problematic relationship with radio in Los Angeles.

Though 28% of modern-rock powerhouse KROQ’s listeners are Latino, according to Arbitron, the station has no Latino air personalities and plays few if any of the local Chicano rock or alternative bands. In the past year, only a couple of the Chicano bands have even made it onto “Music From Your Own Backyard With Zeke,” which regularly plays unsigned bands from around the city.

According to Mark Torres, host and producer of the Latin rock radio show “Travel Tips for Aztlan,” which airs Saturdays at 10 p.m. on KPFK-FM (90.7), the absence of Chicano bands on KROQ isn’t due to a dearth of talented groups. He currently receives about 50 demo tapes a month from unsigned Latino groups, as well as from groups on independent labels.

“Right now, it’s not like we’re doing anything with that,” says Lisa Worden, music director at KROQ, when asked whether the station has plans to play any new alternative Chicano rock bands. “We recognize that there’s a market out there, and we might do something in the future.”

For many of the twentysomething musicians in the Chicano underground, playing traditional Mexican instruments is a way of reconnecting with a mestizo or indigenous past they feel cut off from.

It’s also symbolic of the concerns many of the musicians share, which include community development and cultural exchanges with other indigenous groups--such as a mid-summer encounter a group of the L.A. musicians had last year with the Zapatista rebel movement in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

The desire to connect with their roots shows up in the names the bands have chosen: Quetzal is a Nahuatl word meaning “precious feather,” as well as the word for “bird”; Ozomatli is the Aztec god of dance; Aztlan is the mythical homeland of the Mexica people.

Martha Gonzalez, 25-year-old singer and conga player for Quetzal, explains, “There’s an ancient pueblo verse that says, ‘If you lose your memory, you lose your destiny.’ You need to have a past in order to have a future. It’s very important to be responsible for who you are and where you came from.”

“Using the instruments and the music that your family left behind now that you’re in America is as radical as you can get,” says Juan Carlos Whyte, co-producer of “Sociedad = Suciedad,” a Chicano rock and punk compilation album that just came out on Big Daddy Records, featuring tracks by Ozomatli, Blues Experiment, Aztlan Underground, Quinto Sol and Ollin.

On the night of the Dia de los Muertos event, Gonzalez, a small woman with a powerful voice, holds the audience--already exhausted after a rousing set by Blues Experiment--in rapt attention with her rendition of “Chicano Skies,” a soulful rock song. She looks a bit tired herself, but puts herself into the song with an energy she seems to be pulling from the audience, which dances and claps along.

Her band, Quetzal, has been spending a lot of time in the recording studio these days, working on its first album.

The self-produced CD will join a small library of local Chicano rock, including the two most important compilations of the music to come out in over a decade: “Sociedad = Suciedad” and the new “Chicano Alternativo: Barrios Artistas,” produced by Eddie Ayala with the help of Fishbone’s Norwood Fisher, and including Lysa Flores, Rice and Beans, Cactus Flower and Announcing Predictions.

“Sociedad” is also one of the most important musical documentations of the politically charged atmosphere of 1990s Los Angeles. “We were all playing political benefits during the uprising in Chiapas, and when Prop. 187 passed, we decided to put the compilation out to record a period of history,” says Robert Lopez, guitarist for the group Ollin and co-owner of Luna Sol Cafe, which hosts performances by local Chicano poets and musicians. To save money, the album was recorded in one of the co-producers’ apartments.

Rod Larios, a.k.a. singer-songwriter Nikki Rod, founded his own independent label as well in recent years. Under the banner of F.O. Records, he has just released a compilation called “Propaganda: East Los Underground,” which features hard-core Chicano punk bands such as Teenage Rage, JABOM and Thrill Seven Zen, among others.

These albums, along with “Ay Califas!,” a new historical anthology of ‘70s and ‘80s Chicano rock compiled by musician and producer Ruben Guevara that Rhino Records will release this week, are among the few historical overviews of the scene’s existence.

Whether the record industry--often referred to as “Hollywood” by the musicians--comes knocking on their door or not, most of the bands in the scene say they’ll continue playing, because for them making music is about more than just selling albums or even creative expression. More often than not, it’s about cultural survival.

“It all comes back to dignity,” says Quetzal’s Gonzalez. “It’s about what comes out of your heart, without having to mold it to fit into some square in Hollywood.”