Ricky Martin as the Nirvana of the Latin music world? Martin doesn't embody any of the innovation or edge of Kurt Cobain's punk-pop aesthetic, but like Nirvana, the Puerto Rican singer benefits from a critical mass generated by a national music underground. Similar to the period before Nirvana's rise to stardom, a diverse movement of bands and record labels comprising Latin American immigrants and Chicanos is toiling outside the mainstream, recording and performing within an alternative, grassroots music scene.

A mix of rock, reggae, ska, punk, metal, funk, salsa, and hip hop, most of these groups sing in Spanish, a language familiar to a cool 25 million people in the United States, not to mention the seething masses banging on and seeping through the great barricade between Mexico and the Untied States.This Latin music revolution also parallels punk in that the groups tend to be anti-corporate, unpatriotic, and intensely radical.

Los Mocosos

For these artists, who face the legal restrictions placed on immigrants in the United States, discrimination is as common as urban pollution. San Francisco-based immigration rights lawyer John Melrod knows firsthand the difficult lives of musicians caught in the crossfire of the immigration wars in California. It was through his work as a lawyer that Melrod concluded a record label promoting rock music in Spanish could fill a niche.

"In the course of representing refugees and immigrants, I came in contact with the early Rock en Español bands, whose music was characterized by human rights and the plight of people coming into the US," says Melrod. "I started listening to some of these bands—Orixa, Maria Fatal, and Ley de Hielo— and really identified with the passion and the message of the music."

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Members of Orixa, who play a hybrid of punk, metal, and Caribbean rhythms, approached Melrod to find someone to shop them to a major label. After playing the tape to an industry insider, Melrod was told Orixa would never get signed by a major, and he realized he would have to start his own label if this music was to be released. After researching local music scenes in L.A. and San Francisco, he convinced partners to create an independent label that would give voice to artists locked out of the mainstream. In November 1995, Melrod's Aztlan Records was born.

Viva Malapache

Other independent labels have formed as well. Son del Barrio, also based in San Francisco, shares resources with Aztlan, putting out CDs by Quetzal and Los Otros. In New York, Grita! Records has been at the forefront, releasing Rock en Español and ska groups such as Viva Malpache! and Todos Tus Muertos. In L.A. the hip-hop group, Aztlan Underground, composed of former punk rockers, created their own record label, Xican@ Records and Film. Inspired by their punk antecedent, which built up an independent network of labels and clubs during the '80s, these Latin record labels take the DIY ethic to heart, releasing gritty music from cities with large Latino populations: New York, Miami, Chicago, L.A., Albuquerque, and San Francisco.

All this activity is part of an international continuum known as Rock en Español, which coalesced in the '80s and created a musical identity simultaneously Latino and modern. The alternative movement made it possible for rock groups to break out of having to cover and imitate their English-singing equivalents. Like guitar feedback echoing through pirated radio signals, hemispheric rock can no longer be defined solely by the pop music industrial complex of L.A. or New York.

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Diverse as the trade winds, much of the Rock en Español movement comes from Mexico and Argentina, with groups like Caifenes, Maldita Vecindad, Café Tacuba, and Soda Stereo leading the charge. Rock en Español has evolved beyond the constraints of rock, becoming more comfortable in its own musical idioms. With musicians traveling back and forth between places like L.A. and Mexico City, and MTV Latino mixing US pop music, electronica, and Latin pop groups, musical borders between countries and genres are as unstable, malleable, and ultimately as impossible to control as the physical line between Mexico and the US.

During the '90s, radical Mexican punk and metal bands have built scenes in L.A. In San Francisco's Latino Mission District, groups experiment with hip hop, funk, and Latin rhythms. Chicano Cool, led by the L.A.-based group Quetzal, performs music that's distinctly Chicano: that is, it's bilingual and political, and it mixes rock with Mexican-flavored folk music.

Major labels have not ignored this phenomenon entirely. As Yvette Doss, editor of the L.A.-based Chicano culture and music magazine Frontera, notes, "There are Latin arms of the major US labels, and they are focusing their efforts on finding bands from Latin America and selling those CDs in Latin America. They do well in the US, but those labels haven't spent time or money developing local US bands, with the exception of Pastilla [a band that was first signed by Aztlan, but now is represented by BMG Latin]."

Like the immigrants and mixed-blood types who find their feet planted in different worlds, bands from the United States who sing in Spanish can't get attention from either Latin-oriented majors or US-based A&R folks, which makes indie labels that much more important. "Currently you've got some record labels that have put out albums by US-based bands that are trying to promote them to an immigrant audience and bilingual audience," says Doss. "They are meeting with some difficulties because there are so few outlets to reach Latinos, such as [independent] magazines. These don't come out as often as they would want to because the advertising isn't there. There are really not a lot of outlets to let people know about new releases."

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It's a chicken and egg thing. "If the labels had more money to advertise," Doss adds, "the magazines could chronicle them. The labels are having trouble marketing to a broader audience, but on a grassroots level, things are still positive. That's where you see the hope for this scene growing." Like the punk days of old, labels such as Aztlan have learned by doing, and they survive the struggle out of a passion for the music. It appears the hard work may pay off. Like it or not, Ricky Martin's instant mainstream success has the programmers of culture rethinking their audience. Recently two major rock stations in L.A. and New York asked for Aztlan's entire catalog for a major meeting about programming Latin rock alongside commercial groups—about the possibility of sending Los Mocosos out over the same airwaves as Van Halen.

The breakthrough for Aztlan is coming in the form of music called Chicano Groove, a term coined by Billboard's Latin music editor. Bands like Ozomatli (on Almo Sounds, the label representing Garbage) and Los Mocosos, Aztlan's signature group, are politically militant and bilingual, playing a combination of sounds unique to California's barrios: hip hop, funk, R&B, salsa, cumbia, and rock. But the commercial barrier is not the fuck-off-and-die attitude of punks with pierced cheeks and purple hair (common fare on MTV these days—have you seen Cher lately?). For groups like Los Mocosos that at one time deliberately alienated the mainstream, the barrier is language itself, and cultural ignorance.

"As an independent label in a developing genre, it has been a difficult struggle," comments Melrod. "[Aztlan] and Grita! were really the pioneers as indies signing artists. For better or for worse, the major labels have promotional dollars. In this case, we welcome the competition... I just hope that it doesn't become overcommercialized. [Our music] has an underground edge that comes from musicians from the street. There is always the danger, when the mainstream comes in, that it will lose some of its content and edge."

There's a chance, with the major media at least, that this fascination with our newly discovered Latin brothers and sisters won't last. Such trends have come and gone (remember another Ricky named Ricardo?), and the last thing we need is a nation of Ricky Martin clones defining airplay and what is Latin. As for grassroots labels like Aztlan and Grita!, their position in relation to pop culture's center has shifted. "Before Ricky Martin we were just a niche," Melrod reflects. "Now we are an alternative."

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