Various Artists, Featuring Don Tosti Pachuco Boogie Arhoolie U.S. release: 23 April 2002 Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band Movimiento Music Flying Fish U.S. release: 1992 Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeño Band ¡Puro Party! Flying Fish U.S. release: 1995 Los Mocosos Mocos Locos Aztlan U.S. release: 1998 Los Mocosos Shades of Brown Six Degrees U.S. release: 5 June 2001 Quetzal Sing the Real Vanguard U.S. release: 5 March 2002 Lila Downs Border - La Linea Narada World U.S. release: 3 July 2001 Los Super Seven Los Super Seven RCA U.S. release: 1998 Various Artists The Rough Guide to Tex-Mex World Music Network U.S. release: 1999

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In a land obsessed with protecting its borders, isolating and excluding aliens, and demonizing cultural difference, it is easy to overlook the actual multi-centric, hybrid culture that has been developing in North America since the Immigration Act of 1965. The Immigration Act changed the rules, and fundamentally altered the demographic contour of the nation.

As performance artist and self-styled "warrior for gringostroika" Guillermo Gómez-Peña frames it in The New World Border (City Lights, 1996), for cultural border-crossers, how does one begin to comprehend "the perils and advantages of living in a country that speaks at least ninety different languages and -- unwillingly -- hosts peoples from practically every nation, race, and religious creed on earth"?

If music is indeed the universal language, then consider the plethora of recent erudite recordings focusing on the troubled history and vibrant cultural dynamics of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Pachuco Boogie resonates with the joyous, culturally hybrid, bilingual dance music that issued from the racially mixed neighborhoods of 1940s Los Angeles, a document of the urban landscape's social transformation by wartime migration and industrialization. Long before rock en español, banda, Chicano groove or the swing revival, and a decade before Ritchie Valens (nee Valenzuela) turned the Mexican folk tune "La Bamba" into a chart-topping national hit, innovators like Don Tosti's Pachuco Boogie Boys and Lalo Guerrero fused big-band swing, bop, Afro-Cuban, boogie woogie and R&B into an energetic, highly danceable popular song form. This is the enticing brew of the zoot-suited pachuco hipsters whose eclectic, outrageously stylized search for cultural identity drew uncomprehending Anglo hostility - as recounted in Luis Valdez's breakthrough 1978 play/film Zoot Suit. It's all here, the street slang of "Pachuco Boogie", the eternal quest for that elusive controlled substance ("El Tírili"), killer guitar, horn and piano vamps ("Muy Sabroso Blues", "Frijole Boogie"), scatting and percussive groove ("Wine-O-Boogie", "Mambo del Pachuco"), even the moralistic censure of the zoot-suiters by Mexican American social conservatives (Las Hermanas Mendoza's stinging canción, "Los Pachucos"). Pachuco Boogie thus resurrects some essential American social history.

Steeped in the pachuco heritage and the Chicano old-school vein is band-leader, saxophonist, cultural anthropologist and San Antonio native Dr. Loco and his Rockin' Jalapeño Band. Movimiento Music is the more pointedly political of the group's two Flying Fish releases, with a cover of the Juan Formell/Rubén Blades' pan Latin American anthem, "Muévete" ("Take Action"), songs dedicated to the Mexican revolution, the struggles of undocumented immigrants, the Chicano movement, a get-down reworking of the funk classic "Night Train" as "Barrios Unidos Train", and Latin covers of well-known civil rights songs, "Ain't Gonna Study War No More" and "Nosotros Venceremos -- We Shall Overcome". As the album title suggests, ¡Puro Party! takes a more laid-back stance, resurrecting classic Chicano hits by Lalo Guerrero ("Vamos a Bailar", as heard on the Zoot Suit soundtrack), R&B classics like "Wooly Bully", and a mix of original compositions, Afro-Cuban jazz, merengue, cumbia and Tex-Mex.

In an allied but somewhat more contemporary vein, Los Mocosos present a searing Latin ska, rockero swing, R&B funk and Spanglish hip-hop blend that cut its eyeteeth on the San Francisco Mission District's polyglot streets. The band's tight, bright invocations of Willie Bobo, Santana, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria and Tower of Power reflect the unimpeachable pedigree of old-school Bay Area Latin music. But Los Mocosos' percussive groove renders a wickedly witty but absolutely sober party music whose outspoken politics align them with the best of War, El Chicano, Malo, El Vez ("the Mexican Elvis"), Cheech Marin's wicked Springsteen lampoon "Born in East L.A.", the improvisational theater of Culture Clash, and the over-the-top work of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. California's anti-immigration demagoguery and English-only ballot initiatives are clearly out of touch with the Latin "street".

As for vexed cultural encounters, and for what it's worth, the reader may recall Robert Rodriguez's border-town cult classic, El Mariachi, and the film's gringo heavy, "El Moco" (the nasal slime). But this is moco of a different order. Perfectly, inscrutably, the album booklet leaves Los Mocosos in a deliberate ironic shroud. The cognoscenti already know. The cover shot features the blurred image of a zoot-suiter reflected in the chromed door of a customized automobile against a backdrop of vintage low riders. The back page is a vaporous backlit violet portrait in which the musicians' faces are indiscernible.

Now you have the picture, what about the music? An irreverently inventive, collective intelligence is plainly at work from the first beat of the band's leitmotif, "Somos Los Mocosos" ("We Are Los Mocosos"), to the pop-culture meta-commentary of "Lonely Bull" ("Badges? We don't need no stinking badges"), the incongruous James Bond theme, "Thunderball", the blaring brass throb, guitar slash and Darth Vader hip-hop vocals of "Soul Mocosos", and the ska-tinged Latin chestnut "Volver, Volver" (reprised in the closing remix by DJ Choko), along with the self-referential "(I Want to Be the) King of Ska" and "Latinos with Soul" (muy Santana).

Ultimately, the irrepressible humanity of this release demands live engagement with a cultural reality that a putatively "white" America naively wishes to will away. Consider the unapologetic "Brown and Proud", over which the tenacious spirit of Papa James Brown hovers, and the infectious beat, menacing horns and taunting refrain of "Wetback" (a kind of Latin "Dancing in the Streets" and hemispheric call to cultural arms). This recording announces the arrival of a new generation of West Coast rockeros and their partisans, whose crossbred vitality, no longer confined to the margins, refuses easy cultural categorization. Mocos Locos issues an expressive challenge to a society inexorably bound to recognize, respect and even embrace the actual diversity of its hybrid cultural formation.

Their newest album, Shades of Brown, carries the challenge forward. Los Mocosos breathe wry life into War's old hit, "Spill the Wine" (complete with some perfect Beny Moré gritos), but otherwise the album celebrates the streetwise attitude of their dead-on songwriting and musicianship. There's a montuno tribute to Tito Puente, a pointed denunciation of sweatshop worker abuse ("The Border"), a wry repudiation of San Francisco's dot.com-latté gentrification ("Mi Barrio Loco"), and the title track's infectious ode to racial tolerance, which, with any justice, may just become the anthem of a new generation. Shades of Brown is an essential title for anyone who seeks to comprehend the cultural dynamics of life on the border.

Founded in 1993 as part of East L.A.'s artistic renaissance, Quetzal represents a new generation of politically engaged Chicano musicians. For founder Quetzal Flores, their debut album, Sing the Real, seeks to take the music to a wider audience, looking through and beyond the specific concerns of Mexican Americans to the transborder dynamics we gloss as globalization. Inspired by Mexican muralists Orozco, Rivera and Siquieros, and recalling the vanguard orientation of the Harlem Renaissance (which had many contacts with politicized Mexican artists of the era), Quetzal sees its work as laying out a mission statement through music. As Flores recently told Public Radio International's The World, "We are looking at our music and the responsibility that we have as artists and musicians and songwriters, and how we can best be accountable to the communities we come from and to our background".

Group members are all university-educated, and they conceive of art as a means for communities to redefine and reconstruct themselves. (They all are involved in community development programs, teaching art classes and music to young people in the Los Angeles school system.) The album pulls no punches from its opening track, "The Social Relevance of Public Art", addressing issues including social justice, immigration, the socioeconomic displacements of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, Mexico. Sung in English and Spanish, their music combines diverse rock, Chicano and Latin American folk influences, reaching fluently and passionately from Los Angeles to Mexico, Cuba and Brazil. Siblings Martha and Gabriel Gonzalez are evocative singers, and Rocio Marron's superb violin and viola work sets the overall musical tenor of an exquisitely produced, musically understated debut.

Lila Downs cultivates a similarly activist perspective. She grew up listening to Mexican ranchera singers Lola Beltrán and Lucha Reyes, and looking north to the likes of Billie Holiday and Woody Guthrie: a measure of the bicultural paradox at the core of borderlands music. Her work elegantly fuses indigenous Mexican and Latin American traditions with Tex-Mex conjunto, folk, C&W, rock, jazz, funk and hip-hop influences. Her top-flight band reflects the same cosmopolitan aura, hailing from Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Paraguay, Canada and the United States.

At the core is Downs' astonishing voice, whose poignant coloration and three-octave range (in Spanish, English, and indigenous Mexican idioms) reflect an immersion in opera and classical voice training, with a stunning sense for vocal improvisation, and an intuitive feel for the expressive traditions of greater Latin America. Composer-arranger Paul Cohen (tenor sax, clarinet, keyboard, and her significant other) crafts a sturdy musical foundation, weaving together the textures of Latin percussion, folkloric Mexican music, and the many popular strands from north of the border. Her third release confirms a talent for passionate composition and a continuously maturing artistic and political voice.

Border - La Linea, Downs's third album, is an extended essay on the paradoxical presence and meaning of the U.S.-Mexico border in the lives of Mexicans and North Americans alike. In "Sale Sobrando" (Good for Nothin') she pulls no punches: "...the narcs and the border patrol catch you, and then give you their blessing in Chiapas... those people who've been sacrificed... all march to 'Mexico Lindo'" (a pointed reference to a popular patriotic tune titled "Beautiful Mexico", a thorny message bolstered by an artfully inserted musical quotation). Similarly, she criticizes the Mexican Army's notorious slaughter in the indigenous Chiapas village of Acteal, in the song of the same name. In "La Niña" (The Girl), Downs reflects unsentimentally on the dreary work conditions in the border assembly plants known as maquiladoras, which specialize in hiring young, impressionable, single female workers fresh from the interior of Mexico.

Downs may have a political edge, but she also has a sense of humor. "El Bracero Fracasado" (The Failed Farm Worker) relates the down-and-out tale of a hapless country boy who crosses the border at Tijuana and gets pulled off a freight train by the authorities in Salinas; sung in classic conjunto style, the tune includes an ironic musical quote from "The Star Spangled Banner". Demonstrating the breadth of her musical vision, Downs even throws in a popular Maya cumbia, "Hanal Weech", sung in its native tongue. And her inspired reworking of Woody Guthrie's "Pastures of Plenty - This Land Is Your Land" (she interprets Guthrie with an authority and power not heard since Dylan's early tributes) is completely unexpected, overwhelming, invoking the powerful spirit of the author himself, reborn as a rootless cosmopolitan. There are other marvels here, and Border - La Linea confirms a passionately articulate vocal artistry and deeply expressive sense of composition, in a continuously maturing voice whose capacity to provoke and surprise warrants careful listening.