Revising tradition
Son jarocho style at heart of Las Cafeteras sound
Musician Hector Paul Flores has been to the Midwest and Mexico and Asia. He’s heard “La Bamba” everywhere.
“I’ve been in Vietnam, I’ve been in Thailand, and I’ve seen cover bands singing ‘La Bamba,’” Flores said. “The joy in that song became a universal thing. White listeners across America had no idea what Richie Valens, a 17year-old who had to change his name to get on the radio, was singing but they felt the radical joy in the song.”
A Mexican folk song from the son jarcho style of Veracruz and possibly hundreds of years old, “La Bamba” represents tradition and reinvention. You can hear that in Valens’ 1958 hit, in Alvaro Hernández Ortiz’s version from 1930s, and Los Lobos’ chart-topping 1987 update. With his own band, Las Cafeteras, Flores offered a new take in “La Bamba Rebelde,” which has a couple of million YouTube and Spotify streams.
Las Cafeteras have made a career out of loving tradition while always moving forward. Flores and the rest of the band — Leah Gallegos, Jose Cano, Denise Carlos, David Flores and Daniel French — connected in the early 2000s at protests and college classes in Los Angeles. Everyone seemed to have the same three passions: activism, justice and son jarocho.
“I met Cano at a protest against budget cuts of the Cal State University program and Daniel at a protest trying to protect that largest urban farm in the United States,” Flores said. “Along the way, at different events and protests, we would hear son jarocho music, this very poetic, political, rustic and traditional style of music. We all fell in love with it.”
For nearly a decade, the band worked on mastering the style.
“We would go down to Veracruz, we would write teachers down there to come up and teach classes, and we played all the time,” he said. “We did cafes, we did lunches, we did birthday parties, we even did a couple funerals.”
Las Cafeteras honed its craft and spread joy through albums, EPs, singles and international tours. The members didn’t set out to jam politics into their art. But that tends to happen when you mix Spanish and English lyrics, son jarocho and hiphop, covers of “La Bamba,” reworkings of “This Land is Your Land” and originals with titles such as “If I Was
President.”
“We don’t call ourselves a political band but we have a song called ‘Mujer Soy’ or ‘I Am Woman’ about Denise’s experiences working as a therapist, working with women suffering from domestic violence,” he said. “That’s her experience. It’s not us trying to be political. We write about our experiences and who we are.”
Before their themes drag them down — and there are personal and dark themes connected to violence and the struggles of undocumented immigrants — Flores says the smiles, kindness and dance grooves in the music bring them back up.
“We are singing about our stories, our parents, our lives growing up in East L.A., but we’re not mad about it,” he said. “Our perspective is, ‘We’re still here, we made it, we’re still dancing.’ And as long as we can still dance, we are free.”