This episode was written and hosted by Cristian Salazar. He is an independent journalist who has worked for the Associated Press and has been published by the Guardian, the Daily Beast and more.

 

RESOURCES

Books used for research in this episode:

La onda grupera: Historia del movimiento grupera by Toni Carrizosa

60 años de rock mexicano Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 by Sr. González González

Mexico Under Siege:Popular Resistance to Presidential Despotism by Ross Gandy and Donald Hodges

Rock impop: El rock mexicano en la radio Top 40 by Hugo Galván

Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture by Eric Zolov

The Oxford History of Mexico edited by Michael C. Meyer and William H. Beezley

The Mexico Reader edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson

Estremécete y Rueda: Loco por el Rock & Roll by Federico Rubli 

Articles used as resources in the episode:

Inside El Chopo: Mexico City's Heavy Metal Heaven (Huck Magazine)

Datos que seguro no conocías de Rigo Tovar (Ultra)How

Today’s Mexican Rock Bands Are Redefining Their Identity (Remezcla)

Piedra Rodante, V. 1, No. 1

Piedra Rodante, V. 1, No. 6

Piedra Rodante Collection

Rigo Tovar y su lado rockero (Monterrey Rock)

Luis de Llano es condenado por daño moral contra Sasha Sokol (Agencia Reforma)

Mexico's 1968 Massacre: What Really Happened? (NPR)

The surprising story of ex-Mexican president Vicente Fox, who started as a Coca-Cola delivery worker and worked his way up to run Coca-Cola Mexico (Business Insider)

Platos Laser: El Festival de Rock y Ruedas en Avándaro, en el olvido (Proceso)

 

TRANSCRIPT

In 1970, the government-run Radio México Internacional, which broadcast from Mexico City, held a contest to find the best new rock band from the state of Jalisco, which is famous for its mariachi music and tequila. A few groups were invited to record a song at the local station, which was broadcast on a shortwave frequency. Among those groups was a band from the capital city of Guadalajara called La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata. 

 

The band was named for the legendary Mexican revolutionary who fought for the rights of the poor against the corrupt Mexican government and the country's wealthy elite. He was gunned down in 1919 in an ambush. Zapata never compromised on his commitment to liberty and land for working people. Today, he remains a symbol of social justice and rebellion in Mexico. 

 

La Revolución chose to record a song called “Nasty Sex.” They sang in English. It featured a blues-rock riff.  If you think that sounds a bit like “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, you’re not wrong. 

 

The German label, Polydor Records, signed La Revolución to a record deal. Their debut album was released in September 1970, and its singles “Nasty Sex” and “La Ciudad Perdida” went into rotation on Mexican radio stations. That was rare at the time when the radio would rather play soft rock and ballads. And Polydor released the song in Europe and South America. It charted in multiple countries.

 

La Revolución getting airplay on Mexican radio was nothing short of a breakthrough. Sure, plenty of English-language rock was being played in Mexico. British and American groups were able to land No. 1 hits in the country. You could hear Tommy James and the Shondells doing “Crimson and Clover” or Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” — even George Harrison went to the top of the charts with his first solo song, “My Sweet Lord.” La Revolución was among a small number of  Mexican rock bands to hit that same high amid tight government control over the media. 

 

But while La Revolucion’s music charted, critics were blunt. Influential Mexican rock magazine Piedra Rodante wrote that “Nasty Sex” was “as popular sounding as you could want” but sounded like Creedence on “a bad night.” 

 

Mexican rock historian Federico Rubli notes that “Nasty Sex” demonstrated for the first time that native rock could be exported abroad successfully.  

 

RUBLI: “La Revolución was very, very, very important because they were the first ones that were able to do this.”

 

They were also among the first, and the few, Mexican rock bands from the era that ever would. A year after La Revolución released its debut album, the largest rock festival of the decade would spark a crackdown by the government on national rock.

 

Over one weekend in September 1971, hundreds of thousands of people gathered about 140 kilometers outside of Mexico City for El Festival Avándaro Rock y Ruedas. It was a homegrown response to Woodstock, complete with all-night dancing, freewheeling marijuana use, and an overall hippie love vibe. 

 

The authoritarian government at the time controlled cultural consumption. And the rebellious spirit of the festivities did nothing short of cause a panic. Officials led a media blitz calling the festival an orgy of sex, drugs and violence. In what would become known as “el avandarazo,” the government waged war against Mexican rock, canceling all concerts, prohibiting radio stations from playing the music, censoring journalists, and threatening to end careers and jail anyone who defied their decrees. Mexican rock had been effectively pushed underground. Groups broke up, fled the country, or adapted by changing their music styles. 

 

La Revolución chose survival. The next time the band’s music was heard widely on the radio in 1976, they no longer played Creedence-style jams sung in English. They played saccharine-sweet tropical-tinged ballads in Spanish. 

 

My name is Cristian Salazar, and you’re listening to Have You Heard This One? A show about the stories from the back pages and hidden corners of music history. I’m an independent journalist. I’ve worked for the Associated Press and have been published by the Guardian, the Daily Beast and other news organizations. I was born in Mexico in 1976 and grew up in Colorado. I  listened to rock artists from Santana and Queen to the Cure and Nine Inch Nails. 

 

When I returned to Mexico in 1994 for my junior year of high school, I was introduced to Mexican rock. The first song I ever heard was shared by a friend on a cassette, an unusual anthem that ends in robust horns called “Piedra” by Caifanes, from their third album, El Silencio. 

 

Produced by Adrian Belew, the guitarist from King Crimson who worked with David Bowie and Talking Heads, the album is a mix of prog rock, Mexican folksong, and gothic undertones. It’s a post punk soundtrack perfect for El Día de los Muertos. 

 

And then there was Cafe Tacuba, who appeared in videos wearing various styles of Mexican clothing, their music a fusion of modern and traditional. Their breakout single was “Maria.” 

 

At the time, family and friends told me that Mexican rock had been largely banned for years. And that these bands were the first to appear on MTV and get played on the radio. I found that strange. But as a teenager, I didn’t know how to find out what happened. For years, I poked around until I learned about the Avándaro Festival and the government’s repression. Until recently, I didn’t know how deeply that history had transformed Mexican culture, changing the direction of music for an entire generation. 

 

There are a few things you need to understand about Mexican history before we go any further. First of all, the Mexican Revolution in 1910 transformed the country and unleashed unprecedented chaos and violence. In 1929, the Partido Nacional Revolucionario came to power and, by 1946, transformed into the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or the PRI. The party controlled the country and coordinated elections until it fell out of power in 2000. 

 

By the 1960s, the PRI’s rule was being met with resistance. As in many Latin American countries, the status quo was being challenged by new left movements. And people in their 20s and 30s were at the forefront. The government, alert to threats to its power, had cause to worry. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was fresh in the minds of the elite. 

 

Students and teachers were gravitating to Communist-leaning ideologies. And armed guerrilla groups had begun to form throughout the country to oppose one-party rule — including an organization of farmers and ranchers in Chihuahua that led an uprising against the Mexican army in September 1965.  

 

The PRI tried to project stability to the world. In 1968, the Mexican government believed welcoming the Olympics would demonstrate that it was a modern, civilized country. Instead, it galvanized a student-led social movement that sought to challenge the status quo. As the movement grew in influence, the government used extreme methods of violent control, including deploying the army with bazookas and high-power weapons at university campuses. 

 

Then, on October 2, ten days before the opening ceremony of the Olympics, thousands of unarmed teachers and students mobilized and marched to protest the games in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas of Mexico City in Tlaltelolco. Two helicopters hovered overhead. Fireworks were set off. Shots were fired into the crowd. Army tanks entered the plaza. To this day, it’s unclear how many people died. The government said it was four dead and 20 wounded. Eyewitnesses say the casualties were in the hundreds, with thousands of students beaten and jailed. Documents revealed years later that a military branch known as the Presidential Guard had posted snipers around the protest to shoot at troops, antagonizing them into firing at the protesters. It was a trauma felt throughout the country. 

 

It was one of the pivotal moments in Mexico’s “Dirty War,” with the government seeking to stamp out subversives through violence and state-sponsored disappearances. The war did not just take place in cities and towns throughout the country. It also took place through culture, as a generation of hippies, or jipitecas, fought the government through symbolic acts of resistance. 

 

They flew banners with leftist Cuban revolutionary Che Guevera. They championed John Lennon of the Beatles. But there was no guarantee of free speech or the right to protest in Mexico. And the government had de facto control over the mass media, from radio stations to television. That means they also controlled the kind of music that made it to the masses. 

 

Rock and roll invaded Mexico in the 1950s, and the first native bands to play the music produced cover songs of English-language music in Spanish. They became known as “refritos.” Here’s Los Teen Tops covering Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” as “El Rock de la Cárcel.” Mexicans loved the sounds and styles of rocanrol. After all, it had a great beat and you could dance to it, as Dick Clark’s American Bandstand audience always used to say. 

 

It wasn’t until the late 60s that a new generation of rockeros set out to produce original songs. They also projected a new, rebellious style: long hair, radical politics, and contempt for the authoritarian elite. Here’s rock historian Federico Rubli again. 

 

RUBLI: “They said, Well, we want to compose our own music, not doing covers and all of that. Now, of course, '67, '68 was at the height of the hippie movement and of the psychedelic era. So all the music they started to compose was in that tradition, in the tradition of acid rock, of psychedelic rock, Interestingly enough, they developed these songs in English because at that time it was thought that the language of rock is English

Bands that emerged during this time included Los Dug Dugs, a psychedelic rock band that had formed in Tijuana and moved to Mexico City in the mid-1960s, where they first made a name for themselves playing Beatles covers. They didn’t record their first album of original English songs until 1971. Here’s the first track, called “Lost In My World.” 

 

There was also Peace and Love, which combined afro latino percussion and blues rock, and was known for its rollickin’ pot anthem, “Mariguana,” which begins with someone apparently choking on smoke. 

 

There was also Three Souls In My Mind, which played a down and dirty blues style and bucked the English trend by singing in their native Spanish. Here’s an early song called “Perro negro y callejero.” 

 

By 1970, radio stations had begun to embrace this new generation of rock, international record companies were signing the bands, and fans turned out to their concerts. This native rock movement gained a name: La Onda Chicana. 

 

If you are familiar with the Chicano movement in the US, you might be a little confused here. While Chicanos championed civil rights and ethnic independence for Mexican-Americans, in Mexico La Onda Chicana grew out of the same spirit of youthful rebellion as the student movement that had been traumatized by the massacre during the march against the Olympics. 

 

In his book Refried Elvis, historian Eric Zolov writes that La Onda challenged the dominance of the Mexican government over cultural production with songs in English and by elevating Zapata and images of revolutionary bandits. 

 

ZOLOV: The vast majority of youth, who were either protesters in ‘68 or sort of come of age in the wake of ‘68, will now find their political voice. The Chicana wave, which was the next Mexico's version of this counter-cultural protest movement, will become that vehicle.

 

La Onda was also an urban movement, sprouting roots in major cities, including the capital, Monterrey and Guadalajara.  Javier Martin del Campo is the musical director and guitarist of La Revolución and still lives in Guadalajara. He recalled the scene for me. 

 

CAMPO: “Eramos como hippies acá y acá le decimos como jipotecas para hacerlo más. Más azteca. Éramos paz y amor, si sabes, si nos empezamos a dejar el cabello largo. Y sin embargo había muchas, había muchas tocadas, o sea, había muchos conciertos, eh?”

 

He says they were hippies. They championed peace and love. They grew their hair long. They played rock shows around the city. 

The contest put on by Radio Mexico Internacional was their big break. They beat out other local bands who were more well-known, including their idols Los Spiders. Their hit single “Nasty Sex” was not raunchy, despite its name. It was about a woman who was sleeping with a “tricky guy.” Some say its themes allude to the complexity of living in a time of sexual liberation. Here’s a line from the chorus. It’s more social commentary than sexual innuendo. 

 

“Hey baby change your manners and go by the way of the sun / Can't you see that this kind of sex is gonna let you down?” 

 

The band was an instant hitmaker for Polydor. By July 1971, “Nasty Sex” and “Ciudad Perdida,” were in the top 10 of the Mexican music charts. That same month, Billboard reported they sold 150,000 copies of “Nasty Sex.” 

 

Even as the rock movement grew in Mexico, there was one thing it lacked: festivals. By 1971, that would change. Valle de Bravo is located in the state of Mexico. Even today, guidebooks describe it as “picturesque.” Lake Avándaro is surrounded by pines and mountains. While tourists may visit the area for the scenery, it was also the location of El Festival de Rock y Ruedas de Avandaro, the most significant rock festival in Mexico in the 1970s.  

 

But it didn’t start out as a rock festival. Instead, the owners of a derelict race car track had wanted to restart their racing business with a concert with two bands and festivities. The idea was to hold it near Mexican Independence Day, celebrated each year on September 16. The organizers quickly turned what was supposed to be a small event into a full-blown music festival to rock the ages. 

 

Organizers included race car driver Eduardo Lopez Negrete and his brother Alfonso Lopez Negrete, as well as McCann Erickson executive Justino Compeán and Telesistema Mexicano producer Luis de Llano Macedo, who was charged with producing a television event. Veteran rock promoter Armando Molina was tapped to find the bands.  Compeán would go on to become the head of the national Mexican soccer league, while the others would continue to work in music or marketing. Macedo, who produced hit Mexican teen pop bands in the 1980s, was accused in court in 2022 by Sasha Sokol, a singer formerly with Timbiriche, of being in a relationship with him when she was 14 and he was 39. He was found guilty by a court of “pain and suffering.” He has said he did nothing wrong.  

 

By the time that promotion of the festival began, most of the major bands of La Onda Chicana were set to perform over two days, from September 11 to the 12th. 

 

The festival organizers ended up trying to promote it as a mashup of rock and auto racing. That’s why they called it a festival of “Rock y Ruedas,” Rock and Wheels. No racing ever actually occurred. 

Radio promoted the festival. All of the country’s major newspapers sent correspondents to cover it. The popular Radio Juventud broadcast it on AM. Coca-Cola was a sponsor. At the time, a man by the name of Vicente Fox was the marketing manager of the soda company in Mexico. In 2000, he would become the first person to defeat the PRI to become president through the conservative Partido Acción Nacional.  

 

The festival was filmed on Super 8. Through the footage, you can see people on foot or in trucks, arriving in the valley along dusty roads. If you’ve been to a big music festival, you know the scene. Unkempt young people dancing. Bands on stage. A flash of a woman going topless. 

 

No one knows how many people actually gathered for the festival. Some say 100,000, others 300,000. The number is likely somewhere in between the two. The few tickets that were sold were quickly gone.

 

Rock historian Rubli was there as a young music journalist. He was 17 years old. He arrived Friday, and there was already a crowd. 

 

RUBLI:  “After having spent the whole festival there, I can say that it was completely peaceful, which is surprising, having 300,000 people. It's very surprising that there was not a single riot or arrest, that nobody got arrested. because, of course, it was the hippie philosophy. It was the peace and love philosophy, and that's what moved everybody to be there.”

 

While the government had authorized the event, they didn’t expect so many young people to gather at one time. They started to get worried that they couldn’t control the event. 

 

Perhaps the apex of the fear came around midnight on Saturday when the band Peace and Love took the stage. Radio Juventud cut the transmission during their set after lead singer Ricardo Ochoa said a curse word. At one point, the band began singing their English-language anthem called “We Got The Power.” 

 

Thousands of young people began singing in unison. Then the band decided to sing the lyrics in Spanish. 

 

RUBLI: “So just imagine the government hearing that. They were so scared… And now the next thing is they want to say, okay, let's go to the National Palace and overthrow the government, which was ridiculous.”

 

Of course, it’s one thing for a music journalist to say that. But while writing his history of rock, Estremécete y Rueda: Loco por el Rock & Roll, Rubli found a way into the secret archives of the government and pulled intelligence documents from the security services. Historical documents backed up Rubli’s assertions. 

 

RUBLI: “What I found is that they deployed agents, undercover agents, to Avandaro and they were reporting to their authorities in Mexico City. That's also very important because that allowed me to construct this hypothesis about what the government really had in mind when they canceled all rock and roll performances after the festival.”

 

Even before the festival had ended, the government was mobilizing against this homegrown Mexican rock movement. Leading the charge was the Secretary of the Interior, Mario Moya Palencia. By the time that festival goers were headed back home, the press — which largely operated under fear of censorship or repression — was already smearing Avándaro. 

 

The popular Alarma! Magazine showcased the festival on its Sept. 29, 1971 edition, with the headline “El Infierno de Avándaro.” Another headline read: “Encueramiento, Mariguaniza, Degenere Sexual, Mugre, Pelos, Range, Muerte!” Basically: stripped naked, marijuana, sexual degeneration, blood, hair, dirt, and death.

 

The tone was not an outlier. Other publications described a festival full of drugs and sex, an orgy. Some claimed that several people had been killed, hundreds injured. These were the kind of messages that could mobilize the middle class against the counterculture movement and help the government to clamp down with justifiable cause. 

 

RUBLI: “The first newspapers that I saw was in the city of Toluca, which is about one hour from Mexico City on the way to Avándaro. What we saw was very surprising because we saw the headlines of the newspapers which said there was a huge orgy of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in Avandaro… All the newspapers were full of that… When we saw those headlines, we said, Well, what is this? I mean, this is not true. Nothing of this happened.” 

 

The press was obsessed with the image of one woman who undressed while dancing to the music. Her nakedness became a symbol of both the growing numbers of women in conservative Mexico calling for political and cultural power as well as what many elites in the macho, patriarchal culture feared the most. 

 

RUBLI: “At that time, women's liberation was, of course, very repressed. But still, my estimate is that they were about 20 percent girls in Avandaro, which is a lot for the time.” 

 

Two bands featured female singers: Maricela Durazo with the group Tequila, and Mayita Campos with Los Yakis. 

 

Within days of the end of the festival, one of the country’s major newspapers published a government notice declaring that recordings of any songs by groups from the festival were prohibited from being played on the radio. Producers at Radio Juventud were fired. Soon, concerts and television performances by Mexican rock were all prohibited. 

 

Piedra Rodante attempted to correct the record by documenting that Avándaro was largely a peaceful celebration in its October 30, 1971 issue. The magazine declared, “Avándaro was a stomach punch to the gut of the oligarchy.” And then continued: “It spread panic among the powerful. Avandaro symbolized change that none of them had planned; a change, undoubtedly, revolutionary.” By early 1972, the magazine had been shuttered by the government. Rubli said he was told to write about anything but national rock. The repression of Mexican rock would become known as el Avandarazo. 

 

In response, some Mexican rock bands sought to dialogue with the government, but that went nowhere. Each of them faced a no-win situation. They could try to continue to play rock in defiance of the government by going underground, they could go abroad, they could give up music altogether, or they could adapt to the new reality. 

 

Even powerful artistic figures in Mexico faced repression for giving Mexican rockeros a stage. The last major concert by Mexican rock bands of the era was probably held at el Palacio de Bellas Artes. According to Rubli, whose 2023 book Prometeo 71 recounts the event, organizers had obscured the role of rock bands in the show by marketing it as theatrical. Three Souls of My Mind, Peace and Love, and Santana mentor Javier Bátiz performed. By Monday, the director of the Palacio de Bellas Artes had been ousted, a warning shot to anyone who dared defy the government’s shutdown of Mexican rock. 

 

RUBLI: “All this censorship was a huge blow to the evolution of Mexican rock as a cultural expression. I would say that because of Avandaro, rock as a cultural expression got stopped for about a decade.”

 

Of all the musicians that were invited to Avandaro, two of the most important names missing from the festival were La Revolución and Batiz. La Revolución had already booked a gig in Monterrey, in the north of the country. Here’s Javier Martin del Campo again.

 

CAMPO: “Ese día sí nos dolió no ir. Este. Fíjate que íbamos en nuestro camión rumbo al norte y veíamos a toda la gente del norte, a los mochileros en en en las carreteras los veías a todos. Pues yendo hacia el sur no? Mientras al norte.”

 

He says even though they weren’t able to show up, the prohibition of Mexican rock after Avándaro affected them deeply.

 

At first, the band tried to continue touring. But Campo said that audiences had turned on them. During one show, he said people destroyed the auditorium, breaking the glass fixtures and refusing to pay. 

 

The band joined other groups in underground concerts at what artists called “funky holes,” which were basically hastily organized shows in warehouses or abandoned stores in the worst neighborhoods of Mexico City. Campo remembered one time his band was playing with El Tri and Batíz in a large empty store, and there was nothing but a dirt floor. The crowd was kicking up dust as they strained to listen to the band over the haphazard sound system. 

 

CAMPO: “Y era una bodega grandísima, entonces no alcanzaba, apenas alcanzaba a ver allá del otro lado este, al maestro Batis por decirte, o al Alex Lora, porque había tanto humo y tanto polvo eh, que casi eh, casi no se veía el sonido. Pues lógicamente no, no era, no era el adecuado, o sea, era malo.” 

 

It was just a bad scene. Mexican music historian Tonio Carranza told me in an interview over WhatsApp that he recalled those underground rock concerts as dirty and suffocatingly hot in buildings that were not made for music shows. On the other hand, he said the funky holes were the only places people could go to hear their favorite bands. 

 

By 1972, La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata had moved to Cuernavaca, Morelos, the city where the revolutionary hero had made his base during his uprising. They had also been invited to play themselves in a feature-length movie. 

 

Campo found himself in the lead male role of a romantic comedy opposite the famed actress Angelica Maria. The movie was called La verdadera vocacíón de Magdalena. Its director was Jaime Humberto Hermosillo.

 

Despite the backlash against Avándaro by the government, the film producers made the bold decision to cast Campo playing himself along with his fellow bandmates. A key plot point involves the band at the festival, which was reenacted with the help of dozens of jipiteca extras. 

 

Campo was about 17 at that time. He said the entire experience was crazy. And he felt uncomfortable that they cast him opposite the then 27-year-old Maria. He remembered thinking, I’m a musician. What am I doing here? The band ended up releasing an EP along with the movie. 

 

As Carrizosa told me, there was no prohibition against recording rock music. You just couldn’t promote it on the radio, you couldn’t play it live, this meant it was basically impossible to sell music and live off of it. 

 

Realizing their careers were at a crossroads, Campo and his bandmates turned to their manager. He also managed other bands that had turned away from rock, including the balladeers of Yndio. Let’s get romantic for a moment with their song “Como te Extraño.” 

 

The manager suggested that La Revolución try performing ballads. Campo said they decided to try playing “Como Te Extraño” as a joke. It wasn’t so bad, so they recorded it. “How I miss you” was a surprising hit on the radio when it was released in 1974. Here’s their version. 

 

But the response from rock fans and fellow musicians was brutal. They were called sellouts. But for Campo and his bandmates, it was all about survival. 

 

CAMPO: “Y entonces este acá en México nos empezaron a tratar como de traicioneros del rock a la hora que pasó eso no? Y. Sí, claro. Nosotros queríamos sobrevivir. Bueno, y al final de cuentas, eso nos ayudó a sobrevivir. Y sabes porque empezó a haber más trabajo? Y funcionó.” 

 

And they did survive. Other bands from La Onda took different turns. Members of Los Dug Dugs and Peace and Love fled to the United States or went underground. Many others broke up, and their members left music altogether. 

 

La Revolución became associated with what was then an emerging transnational sound that had been born on the borderlands of Mexico and the U.S. It was a mix of cumbia, boleros, ballads, and rock known as la onda grupera; it would become Mexico’s most commercially successful musical export.

 

Carrizosa’s book La onda grupera: la historia del movimiento grupera recounts the emergence of the genre, pointing out that many of the biggest figures were actually frustrated rock musicians who could find no other means to make a living in music. 

 

Among the musicians that adopted the style were Mike Laure and Chico Che. 

 

Perhaps the most frustrated influential rocker among them was Rigo Tovar. Carrizosa wrote that Tovar’s dream was to follow in the footsteps of his metal heroes, like the Scorpions. He emerged in 1974, and his music revolutionized cumbia. Instead of traditional instruments, he incorporated electric guitars and synthesizers. 

 

“La Sirenita” may be among his biggest hits. ¡Escúchala! 

 

Although he got his start in Houston, Texas, it was in his hometown of Matamoros, in the border state of Tamaulipas, Mexico, where Tovar found success in 1974. If not for the cumbia beat of his music, Tovar might as well have been a rock star. He dressed in leather jackets, wore shades, had his own signature dance move, and had a legion fanatical fans. Journalists declared him the Mexican Jim Morrison, and bigger than the Pope, able to draw larger crowds than El Santo Padre himself. He even recorded one of his albums at the famous Abbey Road Studios. 

 

In 1980, Tovar appeared as a fictional character named Tony in the film Vivir para amar in which he led a band that was competing with none other than … La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata. 

 

Campo recalled meeting Tovar and realizing they shared the same passion for rock. 

 

CAMPO: “Yo creo que todas las y todos los músicos de nuestra generación éramos rockeros de esencia.”

 

Campo said that even though they became affiliated with la onda grupera movement, he argued that the music his band recorded was somewhat different. It was neither grupera or rock. They felt a bit unmoored from the scene. 

 

But they continued to record music, and their ballads continued to chart in Mexico and reach American audiences. And perhaps that’s how it would have continued, except that the PRI was slowly losing control of power through forces it could not repress or co-opt. 

 

Mexican political historian Alejandro Quintana told me the election of President Lopez Portillo in 1976 was boycotted by the opposition parties that were unwilling to continue playing the charade of a democratic Mexico. An economic crisis that began in 1979 and spiraled out of control in the early 1980s outraged the public and fed animosity toward the PRI. 

 

Meanwhile, underground, Mexican musicians were still exploring the possibilities of rock. In Mexico City, shows took place at forums and concert halls with names like La Rockola and Kerigma. El Chopo, a sort of rock flea market, flourished on Aldama Street in the Guerrero neighborhood — which remains a vibrant gathering place for music fans. Here’s Zolov again.

 

ZOLOV: There's going to be a shift in intellectual discourse and understanding of what rock meant because in the 1960s, and peeking out of Avandaro, Mexico's leading left wing intellectuals all saw rock music, Mexican rock music, not foreign rock music, but Mexican rock music, as an inauthentic emulation of something from without as cultural imperialism. (20:03 - 20:35): It's not until the mid-1980s when they’ll come full circle and acknowledge that urban popular culture is not a manifestation of cultural imperialism. But in fact, a reflection of – and this was a new term that comes about – it's cultural hybridity, right, and hybridity can be a form of empowerment, of transformation of cultural and political values. 

 

Then, on Sept. 19, 1985, at 7:18 a.m., an 8.1-magnitude earthquake led to widespread devastation in Mexico City. Importantly, it also shocked the political elite. 

 

Built on a plateau that had once been home to many lakes, the city was not prepared for the magnitude of the shifting of the earth, even though the epicenter was 250 miles west. The tremors led thousands of buildings to fall and killed more than 10,000 people. Many more were left homeless. 

 

ZOLOV: “The earthquake of 1985 … reveals the kind of ineptitude of the PRI, the failures of one party governing in the most explicit way, and this becomes the response is very much a sort of grassroots, we're going to save ourselves attitude on the university campuses, rock music becomes the basis for solidarity and fundraising and just self-organizing, and it gains a kind of a new valence rock as links to political organizing, and struggle.

 

The rock generation of the 1980s emerged from this disarray. While rock remained prohibited, they found a way to play in concert halls without political repression. When asked, they sometimes said they played rock pop. Amidst this underground native scene were bands that included the future Cafe Tacuba, Maldita Vecindad, and others. Unlike the English-language acts of the 1970s, they gravitated to Spanish. In 1987,  the country saw its largest rock concert since Avándaro. 

 

The following year, Mexican rockers Caifanes released its debut album and its single “Mátenme porque Me Muero” became a Mexican radio hit. But it was their next single, a cover of Cuban folk song “La Negra Tomasa,” that sold more than any other single in the history of Mexican rock thus far, and caught the attention of international record labels.

 

During the early 1990s, dozens of bands would go on to release albums on major labels and even tour with alternative rock artists such as Jane’s Addiction and play Lollapalooza.

 

For its part, La Revolución returned to playing rock publicly by 1994. And, perhaps in their most prominent film role since the 1980s, their song “Nasty Sex” was featured in the 2001 cinematic hit Y Tu Mamá También, as the two main characters share a joint. The band continues to record, releasing a single of hard rock called “El Santuario” with the Argentine bands El General Paz and La Triple Frontera earlier this year. Here’s a sample of that track. 

 

Today, the rock scene in Mexico is flourishing. While mainstays like Cafe Tacuba and a reunited Caifanes often tour around the globe, dozens of new bands have emerged in recent years with a diverse, surprising range of music. Unlike the bands of the 1990s that broke through and embraced the cultural symbolism of Mexico, most are boldly experimental and confrontational. 

 

There’s the postrock of Austin TV, based out of Mexico City, who often perform in masks. With no singers, the only voices come from recorded clips. Here’s them performing their 2023 single “De La Orquidea y la Avispa.”

 

Another band from the Valley of Mexico, Unperro Andaluz, sounds at times as experimental as Sonic Youth and as modern as Dry Cleaning. Here’s “manos de caca.”

 

And there’s Valgur, from Oaxaca. Their music stretches the boundaries of rock to include everything from anime to off-kilter electronica. Take a listen to “Vanidad” from their album “Armaggedon.” 

 

These bands aren’t just redefining Mexican rock, they are challenging the global cultural production of Latinidad and the idea that it has to be contained within national identity. 

 

The members of Valgur told Remezcla that they embrace some aspects of Mexican culture, but feel distant from many others — “especially those rooted in nationalism and territory.” 

 

In many ways, this is the ultimate rechazo — or rejection – of the nationalistic status quo that the formerly authoritarian government of Mexico had attempted to impose. It is also a clear break from the jipitecas of La Onda and the neotraditionalism of rock en español of the 1990s. It is a country that is a major node in the global network of culture that touring bands, including the Arctic Monkeys and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, can’t afford to avoid. It is also a major force of original, innovative music that can’t be ignored, won’t be ignored. This is the revolution.