Los ANGELES had never seen an event like this before, an awards show honoring the colorful, raunchy, outrageous array of performers arising from the region's blue-collar Latino neighborhoods. This was the Grammys for the immigrant underground, artists who had built grass-roots followings in barrio nightclubs with swaggering, foul-mouthed songs about drug smugglers, fugitives, coyotes and killers, often spiced with sex and social defiance.
At the debut four years ago of Los Premios Que Buena, sponsored by upstart Mexican radio station KBUE-FM (105.5), program director Pepe Garza, the man who had unleashed this boisterous musical movement on the world, nearly passed out from stress and a piercing migraine. High-strung and twitchy by nature, Garza was rushed to the hospital in midshow, leaving security at the Universal Amphitheatre to worry about his abandoned Jaguar, still parked backstage two days later.
Given the carnival-like chaos at the recent awards show, it's a wonder organizers don't have an ambulance standing by permanently. He's not only host, writer and celebrity hand-holder at the December event but also co-creator of songs to be performed as skits, dramatizing with a hip-hop twist the generational conflicts afflicting Mexican families.
He's not jittery this time around, though. He weaves serenely through the colorfully costumed crowd backstage at the Amphitheatre, squeezing past the oompah bands and their tubas, reassuring presenters wearing celebrity attitudes as thick as their fur coats, offering shy smiles to bosomy vedettes busting out of their bustiers.
Crowding the corridors is a stream of stars he helped create. Los Razos, a band of paunchy, middle-aged men from Oxnard with a mean accordion and a crude vocabulary, who sparked a melee including flying bottles during a 2002 appearance in Pico Rivera. Adan Sanchez, the son of Chalino Sanchez, L.A.'s narcocorrido legend who was murdered in 1992 after a show in Sinaloa. And Akwid, the duo of brothers who became a grass-roots rage with their cholo look and blend of banda and hip-hop.
Garza, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, has emerged as one of the most influential figures in the Latin music industry by giving L.A.'s immigrant population something it never had before -- the chance to be on the radio and become stars. Until he moved here in 1998, the music of these working-class artists was dismissed as low-brow, crude or simply awful.
Garza's ambition, to celebrate the sound of the streets, has propelled KBUE -- known as La Que Buena -- from obscurity to tastemaker status. Lately, as it struggles to keep pace with new trends and fend off stiff competition, KBUE has been knocked off its perch as a leader among stations specializing in Mexican regional music, the catch-all genre that encompasses a wide variety of country styles. But if his track record is any indication, Garza's not far from tapping another sound to bring listeners back.
Garza, who worked his way up in the Mexican radio scene, was the first in L.A. to capitalize on the craze for narcocorridos, especially the so-called corridos perrones, or bad-dog style, that can be shockingly explicit. He was the first to play Lupillo Rivera, the Long Beach kid who went from selling records at swap meets to buying a fleet of luxury cars and a home on the marina. And most recently, Garza was the first to champion groups like Akwid. He hopes to step into the spotlight soon himself, with an album of his own music.
"Pepe Garza is totally original, and he's not afraid of criticism," says Pedro Rivera, Lupillo's father and owner of Cintas Acuario, the small Long Beach label that jump-started the local narcocorrido phenomenon. "Whether other stations like it or not, Que Buena is the pilot light for [Mexican format] radio in the U.S. Wherever I go to promote my records, other program directors always ask, 'Is Que Buena playing it yet?' "
Garza, 38, explains his success modestly. "This is not a matter of creating culture or imposing it on people," he says in his host's black tuxedo and ruffled shirt. "I put the music on the radio, but the movement was already there."
A need to stand out
When Garza was named program director of KBUE in 1998, the then- 4-year-old station barely registered a blip in the ratings. Few listeners even knew it existed in L.A.'s increasingly crowded Latin radio market.
Garza knew his station didn't have a chance if it stuck to playing established stars, such as mariachi singer Vicente Fernandez and norteno accordion ace Ramon Ayala. With its limited signal and promotional resources, it needed a way of standing out. (Que Buena compensates for its lack of coverage by broadcasting simultaneously on another frequency, 94.3 FM.)
