Latino acts prepare for Coachella

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Growing up in a middle-class home in Mexico City’s genteel Coyoacán neighborhood, Camilo Lara watched MTV and listened to the Happy Mondays and the Charlatans “in my room, very loud.” But whenever he drifted into his family’s communal living spaces or the kitchen, he’d get a shot of José José, classical music, cumbia (which the family’s cook favored) or “some crappy Mexican pop.”

Lara’s self-consciously transborder approach to music-making echoes that of most of the nominally Latino acts performing at Coachella this year, which include the Argentine-Uruguayan collective Bajofondo and two veteran Mexican rock outfits, Molotov and El Gran Silencio. The eclecticism and growing international standing of these bands indicate how globalized Latin rock has become in the roughly two decades since the beginning of the so-called rock en español movement.

Read the rest of the report by Reed Johnson and Deborah Bonello here.

In the video above, we spent some time with Lara in his studio in his Mexico City home.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City