Mexico Rock City
Café Tacvba: 'Chilanga Banda'
When he was 10, Pedro Gerson heard the coolest song ever. Years later, far from home, he reconnected with the raunchy track — and felt a new national pride. “The fact that what they were conveying was not particularly profound, and to some ears rather gauche, didn’t matter. It was truly Mexican rock.”
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One of the cool things about taking the late afternoon school bus in primary school was that the driver would let the high school seniors pick the radio station. This morsel of autonomy meant that we almost always got to listen to Mexico City’s only alternative rock station at the time, Radioactivo (get it?). It was like an American college rock station, but spiced up by argumentative DJs who had Big Thoughts on what was Real and what Mattered. It was, needless to say, educational for a 10-year-old.
Radioactivo played relatively little Spanish-language music. The US and the UK were the true North, just like at most stations of its kind around the world in the Nineties (and probably today). When they did play music with Spanish lyrics it was often not Mexican; Argentina and Chile have much richer traditions of independent rock music.
But they did play Café Tacvba. It was on one of those bus rides that I first heard “Chilanga Banda” (rough translation: “Mexico City Posse”). I liked it instantly. At first, it’s just Ruben Albarrán’s raspy voice. Then the beat comes in, setting up a groove that feels like a low-rider cruising down a boulevard, making space for Albarrán to sing at a quick clip that brings him right to the edge of rapping. I couldn’t really make out the lyrics, except for the chorus, which slows down enough for anyone to pick it up: Pachucos, cholos, y chundos. This was slang I hadn’t heard before, and I had no idea what it meant. But it sounded like the coolest thing ever.
Before I could get my hands on a CD, the song became ubiquitous and, naturally, began to lose its sheen of coolness for me. The deal was sealed when our middle-aged fifth-grade teacher used pachucos, cholos, y chundos as a label for a picture of some of us in the yearbook. And so I left Café Tacvba behind.
Years later, attending college in the USA, I was alone in my dorm room feeling friendless and desperately homesick. To make matters worse, I couldn’t even make myself feel better with the company of other Mexicans students. I found most of them unbearable. It seemed to me they’d come to university to expand the portfolio of rich kids they knew, whereas I, infinitely more mature and enlightened, was there to find The Truth through the liberal arts. My closest friend from high school was there with me, but we were barely on speaking terms because his girlfriend and I hated each other.
Sitting there avoiding the reading I was meant to be doing, I started going through my music files, looking for something to cheer myself up. I wanted something in Spanish, but nothing I had was clicking. I had salsas, merengues, and pop songs that I used for party emergencies — but this was no party. I wanted to listen to guitar-based music (“rock”), and I had plenty of albums in that vein, but they all felt like rock music that happened to be in Spanish rather than something distinctly Mexican or Latin American. I had never connected to this music. Fairly or not, I felt that a lot of it was just the Spanish-language version of a better English band. Why listen to Argentinian guys when the Cure was right there?
Then I remembered Café Tacvba. To my surprise, I didn’t have any of their songs on my computer, so I Limewired their entire catalog . As soon as I could, I clicked play on “Chilanga Banda.” When it was over, I played it again, then again, then again. First because it gave me comfort, transporting me back home, back to the school bus — but then to marvel at its achievement. The words (this time I understood them, mostly) hit you not because of what they say (they’re about a guy who just wants to party, drink beer, and get laid) but because of how they sound. The lyrics center on an alliterative and maximalist use of the “ch” sound. A typical section:
Mejor yo me echo una chela
Y chance enchufo una chava
Chambeando de chafirete
Me sobra chupe y pachanga
Forget about the meaning, it doesn’t matter (it’s crude and raunchy, you can look it up). Instead, admire that there are nine “ch” words out of 19 (out of 11, if you don’t count pronouns and prepositions). This pattern repeats throughout the entire song, and most of those “ch” words are Mexico City slang. More than a song, it’s a flex of what Mexican Spanish can be — a thought I hadn’t been able to formulate when I was 10, any more than I’d been able to identify the incorporation of sounds from Mexican traditional folk genres like banda or ranchera into the funk-rock framework.
The more I heard the song the more I was comforted not by nostalgia but by a newfound connection with my home country. I felt proud that Mexicans had developed the dialect the song used, and that Café Tacvba had created a song to showcase it to the world. The fact that what they were conveying was not particularly profound, and to some ears rather gauche, didn’t matter. It was truly Mexican rock. Ever since, it’s been a balm that brings me back home whenever I feel far away. ✹
Pedro Gerson is a law professor living in Chicago.
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Oh and also:
Coming Soon:
- on LCD Soundsystem
Daniel Hornsby on Prefab Sprout
- on Neil Young