KGNU’s Dennis Rider chats with Hector Flores of Las Cafeteras. Hector talks about how the band incorporates diverse musical styles like hip hop, cumbia, and electronic music. The band’s live shows are energetic and engaging, emphasizing social consciousness and community involvement. The band members met through organizing work and use music to promote social justice causes like immigrant rights and gender justice. Las Cafeteras is performing at the Denver Botanic Gardens on July 30th (Interview date: July 8, 2024)
Dennis Rider: Next up, I want to let you know that Las Cafeteras is going to be at the Denver Botanic Gardens on July 30th. And on the line right now I have Hector Flores who is the co-founder and artistic director for Las Cafeteras. Hector, welcome to KGNU.
Hector Flores: You know, from LA to the Midwest, we never rest, so it feels good.
Dennis Rider: I just want to let you and the audience know, you’re one of my favorite bands. I’ve seen you in a number of places: Ontario, Louisiana, Detroit and here in Colorado at the Folk Fest. So you do travel a lot.
Hector Flores: I think Los Lobos is the only band I think tours more than us.
Dennis Rider: I guess you could say the second little band from East LA.
Hector Flores: That’s right, we’ll never be number one, but we like being number two, we’re good.
Dennis Rider: That’s not all bad.
Hector Flores: Not all bad.
Dennis Rider: When I think of the band, to me there’s two aspects. One is the musicality, and one is the social consciousness. And what I’d like to do is, if you could let the audience know a little bit about the musicality, like traditional instrumentation, what you do on stage, and some of the band members.
Hector Flores: Three core members are myself, Denise, Carlos, and Jose Cano. We began as students of an Afro Mexican style of music called Son Jarocho from Veracruz, Mexico. It’s a 400 year old musical form. The most popular song from Son Jarocho is the song called “La Bamba” that a lot of people know. And we play that style. So,we play an eight string rhythm guitar called the jarana, four string requinto that plays the melody. We dance the dance of the feet, called zapateado. So there’s all these sort of indigenous and Afro Mexican ways and instrumentations that we engage with, but we also love hip hop and electronic music and folk and rock, and so it’s a beautiful mishmash of all that. It’s the past, present, and the future kind of in one. And we put on a show. Our albums are cute, but like you said our shows are something else. And this is the first time we’re coming to Denver Botanical Gardens and we’re really excited to join the lineup.
Dennis Rider: Yeah. Let me just say – this is from the LA Times: “Las Cafeteras is a uniquely Angelino mishmash of punk hip hop, beat music, cumbia, and rock”.
Hector Flores: See, I told you! I told you, baby!
Dennis Rider: There are a few tickets left, looking forward to the show. But one thing that is always exciting- whenever I’ve seen you, you get the audience involved, and when you’re done, you guys are all sweating because the show is so energetic.
Hector Flores: Yeah, it’s because we didn’t start off as a traditional band, we didn’t grow up with music. We started playing music in our early twenties, but we were all organizers. So we all met doing organizing work, fighting for immigrant rights, gender justice, environmental justice work. I met Jose at a rally for student rights and against budget cuts. It was a protest. He had a big drum and I had a big mouth and 20 years later he’s our drummer and I still got a big mouth. We feel like music is a wonderful way to the heart even though we are political beings. The political is personal and the personal is political, but not everybody wants to have that conversation. So how about I play you a song, what if we break bread, what if we sing together first, and then we can talk about the kind of world we want to build, cause I don’t think it’s that different from what you want. I feel on the dance floor, nobody asks where your mama was born, nobody asks how much money you got or what language you speak. On the dance floor, we’re all one. And we feel like if we can become one on the dance floor, then we can become one in the community. And so we’re trying to change the world one, one show at a time.
Dennis Rider: Maybe continuing along that line, you’re continuing to be part of the community, putting on various workshops, like Sounds of Resistance. It’s from storytelling to movement building. And then some of the others, let’s see, a People’s History of Music in the United States and a workshop on racism. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Hector Flores: Racism, ain’t nobody got time for that. And I feel again, we come from the organizing world and music has taught us so much about our stories. For example, the song La Bamba is a 400 year old Afro Mexican song. And it survived slavery, colonialism, Bush 1 and 2, and that song survived because people passed it down. They passed down the stories. They passed down their pain, their love, their hopes. If we are to survive as a people 400 years from now, our stories have to survive and we have to tell them. Music and storytelling has taught us so much about the role we have to play in this world, and it’s not just the role for artists on the stage, we’re all storytellers.
So we have a lot of workshops to help people understand their role, how they see themselves as artists, as storytellers, and how they can build that kind of mentality, community, and art wherever they’re at. The music that we play, it’s African, Arabic, Spanish, indigenous, beats, rhythms, and rhymes. It comes from a lot of places, and when we understand that music, and food, and culture comes from a lot of places, then it’s really hard to be racist. Because you appreciate all these beautiful things. The funniest picture I ever saw was a Ku Klux Klan member wearing Michael Jordan. He was wearing Jordans, I thought that was hilarious.
Dennis Rider: That’s hilarious, maybe not what he was wearing up top, but, music does bring the world together.
Hector Flores: Correct. And music allows us to see a world beyond our own worldview. You grow up in a certain place, a certain part of the world or town, and music just opens it up. And you realize how much more connected we are because we all dig this. I feel like I’ve seen that with my own eyes, and I can’t wait to come to Denver Botanical Gardens and bring that kind of energy to Colorado. Like you said, you’ve seen us a bunch of times, but I feel every year we’re getting better, every year we’re getting brighter, every year we get prouder, louder and dancier, so I’m excited. And we just dropped a new album.
Dennis Rider: We’re gonna talk about that in a minute, but I just wanted to point out to our listeners that you’ve come up together through even grade school and you’ve talked about social justice and everything. But your background, every one of you has degrees, and master’s degrees, and you have the learning and experience to talk about all these things, about injustice in the world, and your brother, he’s working on a PhD.
Hector Flores: He just graduated and is now a professor at Sacramento State.
Dennis Rider: Ah, congrats to David.
Hector Flores: Yeah.
Dennis Rider: You’re feeling it from your hearts, but you have the intellectual backup to promote all these social justice things that you’re talking about.
Hector Flores: Yeah. I feel it’s interesting because at least the core members, right? Myself, my brother, Denise, Jose. We all had parents who came to this country undocumented. And they came looking for a better world and worked hard, raised their families, sent their kids to college. All of us have different degrees. Myself, ethnic studies and sociology. Denise has an MSW in social work. Jose the drummer is a mechanical engineer. When people talk about immigrants and the role of immigrants, we’re an example of what happens when you let immigrants in, when you give immigrants an opportunity.
The children will work hard and thrive and support and and even play music, and fix buildings and bridges and support with your problems as a social worker, and help contextualize how to build better neighborhoods as a sociologist. Our life experience and our academic endeavors have really shown us that we can’t do this alone.
We have to do it together. And if we are to build a world where many worlds exist, we have to do it together. It doesn’t have to always be difficult. It could also be joyful. And music and food and culture is a way where we see, Oh yeah, that tastes good. That sounds good. And it’s something different from your culture or the same. I feel like our life experience has really allowed us to be exactly where we need to be. And, I’m very grateful to be a full time artist at this time in history because music is medicine. I feel like right now, sometimes it can feel like some sick times. And so music is a great way to heal the soul in a time where I think we need healing.
Dennis Rider: I just want to point out that some of the things you support are really contentious issues today. Immigrant rights, gender and trans justice, environmental movement, those things are almost bipolar instances in our current society. And you try to address those with a presentation that people will get up and dance and listen to what you’re saying and at the same time, just have a heck of a great time.
Hector Flores: It’s interesting, in Lafayette, Louisiana, we had a show.
Dennis Rider: And I was there!
Hector Flores: Yeah, remember, and on Saturday, we played right after the Wailers. So I don’t know if you saw the Wailers in Lafayette. And, they put on a great show. But you listen to a lot of the music, it was revolutionary for that time. They have a song called “I Shot the Sheriff”, “No Woman, No Cry” and they have a lot of songs, “Buffalo Soldier”, just talking about the racism that existed, talking about the segregation, talking about incarceration. They have that song “War”, until one nation doesn’t feel superior to another, and everybody was singing it because they felt the beat, they felt intentionality, and now it’s a pop song. So it doesn’t feel so threatening because it’s a pop song, and I think that’s what we’re trying to do. Music allows you to digest ideas and imaginations. In one way you could think it;s radical, everybody wants their kids to go to the beach, but those oil companies, when they pollute the water, that’s an issue. So what would you rather have? Access to a beach, or all these oil companies fracking, right? It’s not rocket science. There’s a line from Tupac. “We all came from a woman, got our name from a woman. Why do we hate our women? Why do we rape our women? It’s time to heal our women, be real for our women. If not, we’ll have a race of babies that’ll hate the ladies that make the babies. And for all the men who can’t have one, you have no right when and where to tell a woman where she can have one”. It’s like these artists before us taught us how to use the platform.
And if you have a platform, don’t just be for yourself, but be for others. We don’t feel these are radical ideas. We feel we’re trying to build a world where many worlds fit. We don’t have to agree, but we can respect each other. We don’t have to agree, but we should all have access to education and food and housing, and I think it’s possible. I think we have the opportunity and I’m excited that I live in this time where we have the opportunity to shape the country into the place that we believe it could be.
Dennis Rider: I’ve seen a number of your YouTube videos also and you know for some people here in Colorado maybe getting together for Independence Day having a barbecue, but some of your videos shows that even in East LA, in the barrio you get together have a great time, people enjoying themselves. And one thing that your music does is, it’s reaching out to everybody in the audience and they’re up and dancing and listening to what you say at the same time.
Hector Flores: There’s one time – we had a show in Michigan. We had a show at a folk fest and we played our version of “This Land is Your Land”, but we did it in the Norteño style. And it was super fun, super dancy. I remember there’s this group of folks, this group of men that had these MAGA hats on and they were sitting down giving us thumbs down. They didn’t really like us, but they’re all their wives did. They were up and dancing with us.
Dennis Rider: Yeah. There’s divisions forming in our current society that we need to try to overcome.
Hector Flores: Correct. Because it’s like, okay, maybe you didn’t like the song or our approach, but you couldn’t deny that people were having a good time and dancing and so maybe it’s not that bad. So if you like the tacos, if you like the music, if you like the culture, remember that on election day. Yeah.
Dennis Rider: I wanted to just remind everybody that you’re gonna be at the Denver Botanic Gardens. You haven’t played there before, but it’s a great venue. There are a few tickets left still. You’ll be there July 30th, and you’re probably on tour for your new album, like you said.
Hector Flores: Yeah, we’ve been on, we’ve been heavily on tour, East Coast, West Coast. This week we’ll be up in the Bay Area, Santa Cruz, we’re doing a podcast with Kamau Bell, we’ll be in Oakland, and then we do New Mexico right before we land in Denver. The Denver show, It’s on my birthday, on July 30th, I’m so excited.
Dennis Rider: What is that, 30 years old now, I think?
Hector Flores: Almost. Almost, yeah. I’m going to be 42 years old, or 42 years young, depending on how you say it.
Dennis Rider: Hector, it’s been a pleasure talking to you, and I hope everybody here at KGNU appreciates the band and what you do for social consciousness and everything. And I’d like to go out with something from the new album, the tune, “Caravana”. Can you tell us a little bit about what it’s about?
Hector Flores: Ooh, “Caravana”. “Caravana” is a song about people who have had to leave their country and the pain and hope that it brings. So it’s a song dedicated to our parents who had to leave their homelands, but it’s a song really about anybody who’s ever had to leave their lands. So if you’re not a hundred percent indigenous to the land, or at one point you or your family made a decision to leave in search of something better, that song is dedicated to all those who did that.
Dennis Rider: To my parents who came from Poland. Is that what you’re saying?
Hector Flores: Yeah. And Poland, and they got a great soccer team, my friend. I’ve been watching them in Eurocup. They’ve been doing great. But yeah, in the chorus of “Caravana”, it says, “vamanos allá”, which means let’s go over there. And sometimes people have gone to the other side of the neighborhood. Sometimes “allá” means the other side of town or the other side of the state, other side of the country or the other side of the world, but at some point a lot of our family made a decision to go “por allá”, over there. That’s the story of the song.
Dennis Rider: All right. Again, we’ve been talking to Hector Flores from Las Cafeteras. They’re gonna be at Denver Botanic Garden, July 30th. Thanks again for visiting with us
Hector Flores: Thank you so much for that and I’ll see you on my birthday.
Dennis Rider: All right, here we go. “Caravana”.
