Mexican Pop

Latin Trade,  Dec, 1999  

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BY NOW IT IS CLOSE TO 4 A.M. IN THE OUTFIELD of a small baseball park in the town of Guamuchil, located near the Pacific Ocean in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. On stage, Los Tigres del Norte are dressed in suits of turquoise satin and white fringe and are bouncing through one of their popular nortenos.

In the outfield--normally home to the Garbanceros, Garbanzo-Bean Growers--hundreds of young people, primarily teenage girls, crush together at stage front, mouthing lyrics to a song recorded when most of them were in elementary school. Farther back, older couples sashay to the polka beat. Nearby, chortling along with Jorge Hernandez. Los Tigres lead singer, groups of reeling young men wearing white cowboy hats, silk shirts and cowboy boots, are attempting to hold each other upright.

Fernando Cervantes, a young man standing unsteadily by the stage, his eyes at half-mast, says, "It's a miracle no one's pulled a gun."

The crowd of about 3,000 people is minuscule by Tigres' standards. The group routinely plays crowds of 100,000 in Los Angeles, Monterrey and Guatemala City. Lesser bands might even consider it a step down. Yet the group plays Guamuchil every year. Following a Tigres tour is to follow the spread of the Mexican diaspora in North America: North Carolina, Tennessee, Minnesota, Colorado, Oklahoma and, this year, Montreal, Canada, where a crowd of 1,500 turned out.

This is the essence of the band, arguably one of North America's most enduring pop acts ever. Remembering their roots and coming back to play in towns like this have made Los Tigres--four brothers, a cousin and a friend who have played together now for 31 years--the kings of Mexican pop. Informal market surveys. Long before the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) forced Mexican companies to pay attention to their customers and obsess about constant innovation, Los Tigres del Norte made it their business to be available to their fans.

In Mexico, concerts begin at midnight and end when the crowd is exhausted. Jorge Hernandez stops every show to take requests that the audience scrawls on scrap paper and throws on stage--a nightly market survey. The band also breaks to take photos with fans who line up backstage--a source of income, since it charges for the photos, and another way of maintaining contact with its consumers. For this reason, the band's crowd is a regenerating crop of 18- to 25-year-olds, often children of its first fans, though half the band members are well into their 40s.

Based on requests for "El Triunfo" off its new album, "Herencia de Familia," the band recently decided to produce a video based on the song. Tactics like these have led to the sales of 30 million records. From Los Tigres' home base of San Jose, California, they have also made 14 movies and won a Grammy. Many of its tunes are now classics in Mexican popular music.

The band employs 34 people. Its logo is as well known as Coca-Cola's in Mexico and Mexican communities in the United States. The group tours 44 weeks a year, records albums when not on the road and takes a break for only 4 weeks every year--though the band could have slowed down long ago. "At first we never saw it as a business:" lead singer Jorge Hernandez says. "I thought about working, doing my art."

Cultural bards. Los Tigres emerged from a little-noticed migration starting in the 1960s. As restless children in the United States were rebeling through drugs and music, restless working-class Mexicans began coming north.

Their exodus was another rebellion of sorts, Mexico's young were leaving corrupt Mexico, the Mexico that never gave a poor man a chance, eager to re-create themselves in the fields and restaurants of Gringolandia.

The irony was that in the United States these immigrants wanted more than ever to be Mexican. They missed their pueblo, a girlfriend, Mom. Mostly, they asked from the United States what Mexico never gave--a chance to earn real money for hard work, progresar, or advance.

As these immigrant numbers grew into one of the most important cultural flows in the second half of this century, Los Tigres became their chroniclers, spokesmen for a community largely voiceless in both Mexico and the United States. The band's best songs are stories distilling the essentials of Mexican working-class life--brutal machismo, piercing irony and the most tender melodrama.

The group arrived in 1968, four kids at the border in Tijuana, traveling with a music review contracted to play the Mexican Independence Day parade in San Jose.

"Little tigers." Because the oldest in the band was only 14, they had to convince a middle-aged Mexican couple to pretend to be their parents. The band had no name. But the immigration officer kept calling them "little tigers." Because they were headed north and playing norteno music, they became "Los Tigres del Norte."

Los Tigres never returned to Mexico to live. Their San Jose show was broadcast over the radio and heard by Art Walker, an Englishman who owned Fama Records, the first panish-language label in California. Walker signed the band, gave the members music lessons and suggested that they use electric instruments. "We never thought you could play norteno music with a full drum set and electric bass," bass player Hernan Hernandez says. "That was for rock groups."