ABSTRACT
Latinas/os have long had an association with rock music, for whom it has been an expressive sounding board and a form of “mediated production”. There is a mantra-like pronouncement increasingly repeated throughout the mainstream and Latino media about the changing panorama of US popular music with regards to the participation of Latinas/os. The engagement of “the invisible men and women of American music” has become the subject of an expanding critical bibliography that is rendering a less biased history of popular music in the U.S, whose whole rhythmic basis was influenced by diverse regional musics from Latin America. Nevertheless, if the early Mexican-American embodied identification with the figure of rocker-as-such has been interpreted as assimilation in the traditional cultural identity framework, the issue deserves further discussion. Los Lobos’ sense of bicultural musical tradition belongs to the undercurrent that characterizes the third period of participation of Latinas/os in rock, at a moment in which Latin music lost popularity in the U.S.
