Tribal Guarachero Is Having A(nother) Moment
More than 15 years after it first lit up the international dance music radar (and was then promptly forgotten about), the distinctly Mexican genre has suddenly re-entered the discourse. Why?
Let’s get this out of the way. When it comes to electronic music, I’m generally not in favor of the word “tribal” being used as a descriptor. First Floor actually published an entire article about the term last year, pointing out how it’s not only deeply patronizing, but something that reinforces stereotypes, flattening regional sounds into a kind of amorphous blob that can be more easily digested by the critics, curators and consumers of Europe and the US.
Avoiding the word in my work usually isn’t all that difficult, but when it’s a part of established genre nomenclature, things do get a bit trickier. Tribal house, for instance, has been in circulation for decades, and while one could certainly argue that the name is a problematic byproduct of the white gaze, they’d also have to reckon with the fact that throughout the genre’s history, many of its leading figures have in fact been Black or brown. The case of tribal guarachero is even more complicated; first emerging in the 2000s, the house-adjacent sound—which is most easily identified by its distinctive triplets, which give the music a loping, almost seasick feel—was born and developed in Mexico, where many of its originators specifically sought to engage with pre-Hispanic sounds and influences. (In those early days, the genre was actually known as “tribal prehispánico.”) Although Mexico undoubtedly has its own issues with race and class that color the way its people engage with culture, it would feel a bit ridiculous to suggest that those same people are using the word “tribal” in a problematic way.
Funnily enough, these issues weren’t even part of the conversation when tastemaker types in Europe and the US first began to take notice of tribal guarachero in the late 2000s and early 2010s. By then, the genre had already been bubbling for several years in Mexico. Ricardo Reyna’s 2004 track “Danza Azteca”—which sampled a new age-ish artist named Jorge Reyes who used analog synthesizers and pre-Hispanic instruments—is generally cited as the first tribal record, and fellow Mexico City producers like DJ Mouse and Manuel Palafox continued to develop the sound. But it was in Monterrey, an industrial metropolis nearly 500 miles to the north, where the genre became a full-fledged phenomenon.
Novelty had something to do with that, as the scene’s distinctive, cowboy-influenced fashion—and its cartoonish “botas picudas” (pointy boots) in particular—caught the attention of cultural rubberneckers from around the globe, including some folks from VICE, who eventually went to Monterrey and recorded a mini-documentary. Yet tribal guarachero was still very much rooted in music, and the teenage trio of Erick Rincón, DJ Otto, and Sheeqo Beat, who together formed the group 3Ball MTY, were its most visible champions. Finding a home at ArcoIris—a downtown Monterrey club where their weekly Sunday afternoon parties would attract upwards of 4000 enthusiastic (and equally young) fans—the crew honed their aesthetic, filling their tunes with squealing synths, samples pilfered from YouTube and a veritable grab bag of references to various strains of Latin music and culture.
As those tunes filtered through an extended, cross-border network of MP3 blogs, USB swaps and filesharing hubs like 4shared, proper music publications gradually began to take notice. Back in 2010, The Guardian published a sort of tribal guarachero primer, and I myself wrote one for XLR8R just a couple of months later. The FADER, however, went even deeper, sending Jace Clayton (a.k.a. DJ / rupture) to Monterrey to meet the 3Ball MTY gang in person, document what was happening on the ground and deliver an immersive feature detailing what tribal guarachero—or at least this one particular slice of it—was all about. (Reading the piece now, it’s almost hard to believe that niche publications once had the budget to routinely send their journalists on multi-day reporting trips.)
With the hype machine in overdrive, 3Ball MTY went on to ink a major-label deal with Universal and in 2011 released “Inténtalo,” a song that, despite being far more polished (and far less weird) than the trio’s prior material, was also tribal guarachero’s first crossover chart smash. That success laid the groundwork for a career that’s still going today—the group is currently in the midst of a European tour—but back in the more fashionable corners of the electronic music realm, the genre was already losing momentum.
It wasn’t that artists in Mexico—the vast majority of whom were not signed to majors—had stopped evolving or making quality tunes. But electronic music fans in Europe and the US have a long (and rather disappointing) history of treating regional sounds as temporary fads, and even in the aforementioned Guardian piece, the writer brazenly suggested that tribal guarachero might be “just another passing world music craze, like baile funk.” By the time that Mexico City’s N.A.A.F.I imprint released three Tribal compilations—Prehispánico, Guarachero and Costeño—at the end of 2014, the trilogy got little attention, and essentially functioned like a kind of eulogy; label co-founder Tomás Davo was later quoted as saying, “People talked about tribal but it became a novelty and swoosh, disappeared.”
He wasn’t wrong. In the decade that followed, the occasional tribal guarachero reference would pop up here and there, and during the so-called “Latin club” boom of the early 2020s, the genre would sometimes be namechecked, but both the music and its creators largely disappeared from the conversation. Late last year, however, something began to shift.
When Debit—a NYC-based Mexican artist who’d previously experimented with tribal guarachero on her 2019 EP SYSTEM—was interviewed by First Floor about her cumbia rebjada-focused Desaceleradas album, she mentioned that she already had another full-length, Potpourri, ready to go, and that it contained her “explorations of tribal and guaracha.” Just a few weeks after that, N.A.A.F.I unexpectedly dropped a 20-track compilation called TRIBAL 2025; billed as “both a tribute and a reinvention of Mexican tribal,” it showcased a new generation of producers experimenting with the sound and sought to declare that the genre remained “a space for experimentation, identity and the global reach of Mexican electronic music.”
This April, Rosa Pistola—a Colombian artist who resides in Mexico—released Incorregible, an album that directly engages with the legacy of tribal guarachero, and does so with the assistance of Nahuatl-language poems from Teotihuacán native Maribel Garcia. The LP—which was recommended by First Floor—wasn’t Pistola’s first venture into the world of tribal, but it was an indicator of her renewed enthusiasm for the genre, as she’s also curated a new compilation, Dioses Tribales, which features both a pointy boot on the cover and tracks from foundational producers like Ricardo Reyna, DJ Mouse, DJ Tetris, Javier Estrada and a handful of others. And speaking of DJ Mouse, he’s also just turned up on a new release for N.A.A.F.I., a collaborative two-tracker called Epic / Ella Quiere Party with fellow tribal veteran Alan Rosales.
Debit’s Potpourri officially landed in June (also via N.A.A.F.I), and the record has been greeted with some of the most fawning praise of her entire career; aside from glowing reviews in Pitchfork, The Quietus and Futurism Restated, the album was mentioned in The Guardian’s latest monthly “global music” round-up and the artist herself has been the subject of detailed features in Mixmag and Bandcamp Daily. Nearly all of that press coverage mentions tribal guarachero—and yes, pretty much all of it also neglects to mention that these outlets have more or less uniformly spent the last decade-plus more or less ignoring this genre they’re now celebrating. (The tendency of the music press—and Western music culture in general—to act as though it’s always been down with suddenly fashionable artists and sounds continues to be deeply annoying, particularly when the artists and sounds in question are tied to the chronically overlooked Global South.)
What is going on here? Why is tribal guarachero seemingly back on the electronic music world’s “hot” list? The recent efforts of N.A.A.F.I and Debit surely have something to do with it, but they alone are not powerful enough to pull the entire genre in their preferred direction. Perhaps it’s a lingering side effect of the excitement around so-called “Latin club” and Latincore, or maybe it’s a sign that even in the Latin-tinged zones of electronic music, the culture’s growing obsession with revisiting, recycling and recontextualizing the past is affecting people’s creative impulses and consumption habits. It could also just be a matter of aesthetics. Tribal guarachero, especially in its earliest iterations, didn’t shy away from sounds and samples that electronic music’s headier crowds would have immediately regarded as tacky or garish, but all these years later, in an era where trashiness is being openly embraced by the culture (and Zoomers in particular), this playfully rough-around-the-edges genre might be just what the doctor ordered.
Whatever it is, it seems clear that tribal guarachero is having another moment, and while I remain deeply skeptical that moment will last very long—again, electronic music’s track record is terrible when it comes to long-term appreciation and cultivation of regional sounds—there’s a decent chance we’re all going to be subject to a whole lot of tribal-related talk in the months ahead. And in the interest of making that talk a bit more robust, I’ve decided to dip into my archives and highlight some of the artists and tracks that grabbed me during tribal guarachero’s early years.
I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I was very into this stuff during the late 2000s and early 2010s; aside from my work as a journalist back then, I was also co-running a label and party that focused on hybrid Latin electronic sounds, so my various hard drives are loaded with tunes from those days. Given that most early tribal guarachero wasn’t given a proper release, many of those tunes are poorly labeled, and were possibly sourced from YouTube rips and random online mixes; that can make crediting the artist, or even listing the correct song title, a real challenge, but in preparation for this piece, I’ve done a bit of research and scoured the internet in an effort to present these tracks as accurately as possible.
What follows is an unranked and wholly subjective list, and is by no means meant to represent a comprehensive snapshot of early tribal guarachero. It is, however, a curated selection, and in this case, that really matters, as the youthfulness and “anything goes” attitude of the genre’s first few years also meant that a whole lot of terrible music was created. Want to hear snippets of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech in a tribal guarachero song? That absolutely exists, and so do a lot of other deeply cheesy tunes. I’m hoping to steer you away from that stuff, and possibly provide you with some starting points for when you log onto YouTube and go down a tribal-themed rabbit hole of your own.