L.A.’s a Sleeping Giant for New Yorker

Normally, publicist Josh Norek has to do a lot of explaining about the bands he represents from the world of rock en espanol. In New York, where he’s lived and worked all his life, most people have never heard of Mexico’s Jaguares or Argentina’s Santos Inocentes. His clients never get airplay on Spanish radio in the Big Apple, where salsa is king. And the average Latino on the street? Forget about it. New Yorkers wouldn’t know Jaguares’ idolized lead singer, Saul Hernandez, from Pepe LePew.

Norek finally got fed up with the frigid climate and moved his one-man operation to Los Angeles last month, settling into a two-bedroom apartment in an Art Deco building in the Wilshire District, near the Conga Room. You can imagine his excitement to discover that the leasing agent in his new building is a big Jaguares fan. In fact, she had tickets to see the band that very weekend.

“Wow, I love Los Angeles!” thought Norek, who offered to pay his rent in CDs.

Norek’s move to Eley, as roqueros spell L.A., is not big news in the entertainment world. Still, it’s one more indication that, here in the USA, the City of Angels is truly the heart of rock en espanol.

I visited Norek in his new digs last week. A toasty afternoon sun bathed his fourth-floor flat, neatly organized and decorated with the enigmatic image of Mexican singer Julieta Venegas and other stars of this still-struggling scene. Other posters serve as souvenirs of the Latin Alternative Music Conference, an event Norek has coordinated for the past two years in New York. One bedroom serves as his office, furnished in Ikea light. The tools of his trade: a computer, a phone and a fax.

Technically, the former law student could do his job from Anywhere, USA. But being here gives him access to key players in the field who are also increasingly calling L.A. home. Norek works closely with two of the major managers in the Latin alternative business: Marusa Reyes, who represents Jaguares, and Tomas Cookman, who represents Fabulosos Cadillacs and is Norek’s co-organizer in the annual New York conference.

Now they’re all neighbors in Eley. They meet face to face, which brightens the brainstorming.

At some point, roqueros are bound to become a critical mass in the Southland.

While Norek was settling in, Colombia’s alternative music superstar Juanes was in town recording his second solo album with Gustavo Santaolalla, the pioneering rock producer from Argentina who has also set up shop here, with a studio in Echo Park. Heading east toward West Covina, the staff of La Banda Elastica, a leading magazine of the alternative music scene, is celebrating its 10th anniversary of consistent publication here.

There are so many rock en espanol fans in the region that the Ritmo Latino music retail chain has four stores specializing in the genre. Called Ritmo Rock, they’re located in Van Nuys, Wilmington, Santa Ana and Huntington Park.

L.A. offers Norek another personal advantage--he can walk to the Conga Room, which he did after my visit. He went there not as a publicist this time, but as just another struggling musician. Norek belongs to a quirky multiethnic group called Hip Hop Hoodios, a play on “hood” and the Spanish word for Jews, judios. The band, a Jewish-Latino melange with songs such as “Havana Nagila,” is scheduled to perform at the club March 31.

Norek expresses discomfort about his dual roles, worried about a potential conflict of interest, which he can’t quite define. He seems overly fastidious about keeping the publicist and the performer separate. When it comes to his own band, he even prefers to go by his Latino alter-ego, Josue Noriega.

Relax already. It’s all about music.

How this Jewish kid from Albany, N.Y., got swept up in Latin music is a story in itself. He got his first taste of it during a stay in South America seven years ago. “It just blew me away, it was just so much more innovative than anything I was hearing in the States,” says Norek.

He had dropped out in his sophomore year and headed to Buenos Aires in 1995, drawn by his love of Latin America. The 19-year-old got a job there with Warner Music, “marketing Alanis Morissette and Hootie & the Blowfish to poor unsuspecting Argentines.”

Once he discovered the vibrant Spanish rock scene in Argentina, he was hooked. He came home with a missionary zeal to convert the uninitiated.

“All my friends at Cornell were like, ‘What happened to you?’”

Norek, who graduated in 1997 with a degree in communications, couldn’t listen to music in English anymore. And he couldn’t understand why others didn’t share his enthusiasm for this innovative Latin genre.

“It got me passionate about my goals,” he says. “I was determined to help people overcome their stereotypes about what Latin music is, to get them to realize that there’s much more to this music than banda or salsa or Ricky Martin.”

His love for Latin rock is matched only by his revulsion for Latin pop. He considers Enrique Iglesias the antichrist. He calls Spanish radio a travesty.

“Hearing Latin pop radio is what motivates me every day,” he says of his zeal to push alternative Latin music. “Because like, this radio stinks.”

Still, it stinks less to him in L.A. At least here you can catch the occasional cut by Jaguares or Mana on the air.

“You’d never in a million years hear Jaguares on the radio in New York,” Norek laments.

So what are young Latino rock fans in L.A. tuning to?

KROQ, Norek says. The rock station’s audience is more than one-third Latino, according to audience survey data. “Get them to start spinning a track by a Molotov or a Puya, and a lot could happen,” he says. “L.A. is a sleeping giant.”

In the end, Norek’s move was a matter of demographics. Mexicans, the majority of Latinos in L.A., have always been big rock fans, going back to the ‘50s when Spanish versions of rock hits were the craze south of the border.

“When Mexicans immigrate here, they bring their rock traditions with them to this country,” says Norek, one of our most recent immigrants. “I really feel like I’m home.”

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Agustin Gurza is a Times staff writer.