(Mexican) American Bandstand Keeps Hopping

“LATV Live” has the look of a television show taken over by a band of Latino college kids with an unruly enthusiasm for music and esoteric tastes.

Instead of sharing their favorite music videos with their roommates, this kinetic crew of twentysomethings gets to play at being veejays in prime time on KJLA, a full-power station that reaches almost 3 million households in Southern California over the air (Channel 57), via satellite and on most area cable systems.

These veejays love the camera, you can tell. The women look sexy, the men act cool or try to. But they all look like people you might have met in L.A., the young, bilingual Latinos you see everywhere--except on television.

Yet there they are, rotating one-hour time slots as hosts of L.A.’s only locally produced music video broadcast. They work mostly in English, sometimes stumble over their Spanish and confess to being nervous about interviewing visiting celebrities. And rightfully so: Their fledgling show has drawn the top names in Latin pop and rock en espanol, from Juanes to Jaguares.

“It’s a show that amazes me,” says New York-based publicist Josh Norek, who represents such Latin alternative acts as Mexico’s Julieta Venegas, who also appeared in person on “LATV.” “They’re really one of the only stations that regularly plays this music. For all of the acts I work with, ‘LATV’ is their only U.S. television appearance.”

“LATV” is the moniker for a block of local programs produced at KJLA studios in West Los Angeles. But this is no piddling public access outlet; it’s a 5-million-watt operation with annual revenues of almost $5 million, mostly from religious shows, infomercials and shopping programs. The live Latin talent takes over from 8 to 10 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays, with a “best of” on Thursday.

Despite its cachet, the show still has the edgy spontaneity of something that seems vaguely underground. The set has the air of a downtown artists’ loft, industrial brick and concrete turned trendy on the cheap. The hosts interview guests on modern, brightly colored couches, while the rambunctious audience, many of its members too young to drive themselves to the studios, sits on bleachers, cheering like students at a high school pep rally.

“With ‘LATV,’ the secret is the interaction: You have the audience, you have the veejays, and once in a while they mess up, so they’re real people,” says Marcela Cuenze, a Los Angeles publicist and longtime rock en espanol fan. “It doesn’t seem Hollywood.... It’s more like ‘Wayne’s World.’”

Adding to the show’s unconventional mystique is the quirky selection of music videos, ranging from the narco-corridos of Lupillo Rivera to the empty-calorie pop of Paulina Rubio to the cholo-cum-cumbia sound of El Gran Silencio. While the show increasingly airs the mainstream music of such artists as Enrique Iglesias, it prides itself on featuring new, noncommercial music that can’t be heard anywhere else.

“LATV” is part of a deliberate strategy to reach a large and largely ignored market: L.A.’s bilingual youth who love Latin music but can’t always relate to the all-Spanish format of traditional Latin radio and television.

“Central to what we do is that we let the people of L.A. see themselves in the show,” says Danny Crowe, KJLA’s vice president of programming and a pioneer in Latin rock radio. “Our audience is a bilingual audience, and it’s a young audience. It’s the next generation.”

The station’s owner and president is Walter Ulloa, the Mexican American media entrepreneur who is also chairman and chief executive of Entravision Communication of Santa Monica, a Latino media conglomerate with 55 radio stations and 23 Univision network television affiliates in Latino markets throughout the country.

So although “LATV” may relish its role as the scrappy David fighting the Goliath of Spanish-language programming, it’s actually all in the family. When deejays from the L.A. pop-rock Spanish radio station Super Estrella (97.5 FM and 103.1 FM) visited the set of “LATV Live” earlier this month to help celebrate the show’s one-year anniversary, most viewers were unaware they were watching media synergy in action: Ulloa owns the radio station too.

Despite the corporate connections, KJLA has had to muscle its way into L.A. households, legally forcing cable companies to make room on their lineups for the scrappy newcomer, founded in 1990. The push paid off, as the station has more than tripled its cable penetration in the last three years, says Francis Wilkinson, general manager at KJLA, which can now be seen from Santa Maria to Santa Ana and from Brentwood to Barstow.

“It’s kind of the age-old story of a smaller, minority- owned station having to fight to get its due rights in the marketplace,” says Wilkinson.

Of course, KJLA’s cable expansion means many more potential viewers for its music shows, which also include the weekly “Rok-a-Mole” (rhymes with “guacamole”), a pure rock en espanol show hosted on Friday nights by Josh Kun.

“LATV’s” live, party-like feel is carefully planned, a sort of scripted spontaneity. Comedian and actor Paul Saucido, one of the original veejays, at first tried too hard to perform for the camera. But he and the other novice veejays got the same direction: Just act as if you’re playing your favorite videos for your friends.

“What we’re all doing is sharing the music,” says Flavio Morales, “LATV’s” mellow and affable program director. “So be as normal and casual and charming as you are in real life.”

“LATV’s” appeal also rests in the raw, raving excitement the hosts express for the music they play. The veejays, like their audience, were raised in bicultural musical environments, listening to Depeche Mode with their friends and to Los Panchos with their parents. Veejay Patricia Lopez, who is 6 feet, 1 inch tall, uses the e-mail nickname “patylonglegs,” grew up listening to the Cure but went crazy when she discovered rock en espanol one night not long ago at JC Fandango, a Latino nightclub in Anaheim.

“It was literally like taking blinders off,” says Lopez. “I had no idea this music existed.... And it’s the best thing in the world.”

For Saucido, whose parents listened to both Eydie Gorme and Jimi Hendrix, “LATV” is a way of aiming at a crossover audience in reverse, exposing multiethnic audiences to Latin sounds.

“It’s almost a re-acculturation,” says Saucido, who sports spiky hair, a goatee and trendy, tinted glasses. “I want to get those other cats who love good music, whether Anglo, black, Latino or Asian.... If they can follow the host, and if the music is good, they’ll watch the show.”

Lopez and Saucido were the station’s first music veejays, hosting the seminal show “Puro Pop,” which aired once a week from a tiny studio in Tarzana. At one point, “LATV” featured a slew of other locally produced shows, one for salsa, another for tejano music and even a Spanish version of “Candid Camera” shot in Huntington Park.

Today, the lineup and the music have been consolidated into “LATV Live,” which has become a potpourri of Latin styles. Although the veejays are encouraged to express their individuality on the air, they don’t get to choose the music that’s played.

Those decisions are made by Morales, the round-faced program director who started his career as an intern at a public access station in East L.A., where he was born and raised. Morales is best known as co-host of “Illegal Interns,” a long-running music and talk show now off the air. Morales proudly mentions that he interviewed members of the Nortec Collective before the acclaimed experimental Tijuana group was even signed to a label.

At “LATV,” he says, his musical tastes have expanded. The station plays a wide spectrum of music because it needs to reach a broader audience, especially if it’s to continue to gain advertisers like KFC, Juanita’s Menudo and Universal Pictures. Most of the veejays seem to relish their dual roles as pitchmen for circuses and fast food, realizing that advertisers pay their fees, modest as they are.

But will fans of progressive Latin music have the patience for the more commercial pop mixed in with their “LATV”?

“They’ll keep watching,” assures Morales, “because there’s nothing else out there for them.”