Regional Goes Global, Part 1: Finding Peso Pluma's music revolution in Nashville

Alt.Latino

NPR

Music

4.5 • 673 Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Earlier this year, Peso Pluma — a 24-year-old who grew up in between Guadalajara, Jalisco, and San Antonio — became the first regional Mexican artist to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 chart. Something in the music industry was changing. Streaming numbers for regional Mexican shot up astronomically, as the musical stylings of banda and norteño made their way onto the Coachella main stage and burgeoning stars like Peso Pluma began to book their first U.S. tours in major markets. But what accounted for regional Mexican's rise? And what does the genre's continued popularity say about not just changing trends in the Latin music industry, but the changing shape of America?

For the next three episodes of Alt.Latino, Anamaria Sayre and Felix Contreras dive into the regional Mexican explosion, revealing the complex relationships both Mexicans and Mexican Americans have with identity from either side of the border. In this first episode, Felix and Anamaria travel to Nashville, Tenn., to witness Peso Pluma's performance and to try to understand the root of the phenomenon, through their own personal experiences and the people they meet along the way.

Audio for this episode of Alt.Latino was edited and mixed by Janice Llamoca and Joaquin Cotler, with production support from Shelby Hawkins, Suraya Mohamed, Natalia Fidelholtz and Lauren Migaki. The editor for this episode is Jacob Ganz and our project manager is Grace Chung. Our VP of Music and Visuals is Keith Jenkins.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Does the idea of listening to political news freak you out?
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0:08.2	Every episode will break down the day's headlines into totally normal language
0:12.5	and make sure that you walk away understanding what the day's news might mean for you.
0:17.4	Take a deep breath and give politics another chance with the NPR Politics Podcast. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Take a deep breath and give politics another chance with the NPR Politics Podcast,
0:22.2	available wherever you get your podcasts. Hejo, I want to cantal his a corridor of the album of Genesis.
0:39.3	This is a young the Rubicon.
0:42.3	He just said that the Mexican Music Revolution has a name and that name is Pesso Fluma.
0:57.0	And people really hate that.
1:00.0	I love this.
1:02.0	From NPR Music, this is all Latino.
1:11.4	I'm Felix Contreras.
1:12.6	And I'm Anna Maria Sayer.
1:14.5	Let the Chisme begin.
1:19.7	The Tzu Pesopuma doesn't look like a revolutionary.
1:28.3	He's 24 years old, scrawny, kind of unassuming.
1:33.3	The first time in Nashville,
1:35.3	Vena, yeah.
1:37.3	But here he is, standing in front of a roaring crowd of thousands of Latinos braving a torrential
1:47.1	rainstorm in the capital of country music, Nashville, Tennessee.
1:50.7	Standing there, standing there in that
	...

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