Mexican Troubador Sings for Change

Singer-songwriter Fernando Delgadillo was used to playing for small crowds in Mexico City, the enormous metropolis where fluffy pop music monopolizes the record industry. But an audience of two? Isn’t that taking intimacy too far, even for this bohemian troubadour who attributes his artistic survival to never having had a recording contract?

No, it didn’t matter to Delgadillo when only two fans showed up five years ago to hear him play at a club on the capital’s artsy south side. The owner, on the other hand, wanted to cancel the show.

“‘Cancel? How can we cancel if they came to see me?’” the singer of protest songs recalls protesting. “And so I sort of sat down with the two of them, and the truth is, I had a great time. And so did they.”

Delgadillo, who makes his U.S. debut tonight at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, says he never saw those fans again. But other people started coming to his concerts, referred by friends who raved about getting a private performance from this prolific, singing poet. Now, the others were hoping to get lucky and be the only ones to show up for a performance.

Those early fans wanted a private audience, he says, because they had so many favorite songs to request. By 1999, 3,000 followers were calling out song after song during a Delgadillo performance at a much larger venue. The recording of the concert, distributed on two CDs by Discos Pueblo, sizzles with lively interaction between the singer and his excited fans, who can be heard enthusiastically singing along to his lengthy lyrics like a happy class recital.

“I had underestimated the power of word-of-mouth,” says Delgadillo, who’s been making music for 17 years. “When people hear you and are convinced, they try to convince others. And that is basically what has happened to me.”

Delgadillo is a prime exponent of the New Song movement in Mexico, known as Nueva Trova. The movement is no longer new, of course, since it arose during the era of social unrest in Latin America during the 1960s. Its major exponents, such as Cuba’s Silvio Rodriguez and Chile’s Inti-Illimani, expressed both rebelliousness and hope in acoustic music that fused smart, contemporary lyrics with folkloric forms.

Delgadillo, who wasn’t born until 1965, has defiantly carried the torch in Mexico for a genre that became increasingly marginalized as young people gave up on changing the world and turned to living la vida loca.

From the start, skeptics warned him people wouldn’t buy songs with so many lyrics--tanta letra. But he kept writing them. Songs about his country’s corruption and its rich ancient culture, occasionally using pre-Hispanic indigenous instruments. Stories about serious relationships and fanciful tales spun from everyday life, such as the one about a popcorn fight in a movie theater.

He calls his work Cancion Informal, “informal song,” because it doesn’t lend itself to formal categories. Few compositions qualify strictly as protest songs, but they all are grounded in a restless search for change and honesty.

In 1995, five years before Mexican voters ousted the country’s quasi-dictatorial ruling party, Delgadillo wrote a bold indictment of corruption called “Evoluciones.” The song exposes the apathy and inertia of citizens who become uselessly invested in the way things are: “There’s so much to change and nobody begins/ Many are afraid to start/ They feel that somebody’s just waiting for them to get out of line/ and take their place on the way to nowhere.”

English versions of some of Delgadillo’s lyrics will be projected during tonight’s performance. The songs were translated so those who don’t speak Spanish can appreciate their meaning, though often the grace, rhythm and nuance of the original are lost.

“I want the museum to become a forum for artists who don’t have a place to present themselves but who have a lot to say,” says Gregorio Luke, the museum’s director.

Serious Mexican artists are in particular need of more places to promote their work. The Mexican entertainment industry tends to favor pop artists based on looks or hooks, says Luke.

“There are no options within that system, so in Mexico we have seen a virtual exile of the truly talented,” Luke says. “That’s why there is so much merit to people like Fernando Delgadillo, who have created their own market on the margins of the record industry.”

Delgadillo is the oldest of five children whose parents owned Mexican-food restaurants. They taught Fernandito to be frugal and save his money, traits that would help during lean years as an artist.

They never wanted him to be a musician, and Fernando never wanted to be anything else. When he dropped out of college, he recalls, they were upset and put him to work behind the counter of one of the family eateries. Delgadillo, barely out of his teens, brought his guitar to work and wrote songs during the lull before lunch. He first started playing with a group named Huancayo, specializing in Andean folk music and pro-Socialist protest songs. But his urge to write and sing his own material led him to a solo career.

Six feet, three inches tall and wearing boots, the singer towered above most fellow Mexicans, looking increasingly like James Taylor as he went bald on the top but kept his hair long on the sides. He cut a striking figure in his barrio of Ciudad Satelite, a northern suburb not known as an artist enclave, performing occasionally with a band of like-minded bohemians.

They hung banners across neighborhood streets to advertise their concerts, and Delgadillo sold homemade cassettes of his music to fans after the shows. Much of that early material appeared later on his first recorded CD, “Con cierto aire a ti” (1992), also on the independent Discos Puebla.

Six years and four CDs later, Delgadillo performed before a capacity audience of 3,200 at the Teatro Metropolitan. According to his Web site (www.fdelgadillo.com.mx), he became the first singer-songwriter to sell out the venue without major label support. Last year, he sold out two nights at the same venue for the premiere of his seventh and latest studio recording, “Campo de Suenos,” or Field of Dreams.

Delgadillo, who’s married to a psychologist and has three children, keeps his family budget simple. He figures each new CD brings in enough money to keep him going for a year and a half. “The truth is that I started writing songs because I like writing songs,” Delgadillo says. “All the rest of it, whatever happens with what I like to do, those are mere consequences.”

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Fernando Delgadillo plays tonight at the Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach, at 8 p.m. $25, general admission; $20, members and students. (562) 437-1689.