Cyber Aztlán

This is the third entry in our new 10-part nightlife editorial series, produced by Dirt & Elsewhere. Get caught up:

Gates of Hell

On shoes

Vita Dadoo on Kumbia Net, a digital, global repository of futuristic cumbias with roots in the US and Mexico.

Amid flashing lights, lasers, and smog machines, paired-up dancers emerge from a circle of spectators at Mi Sabor Café, a restaurant-turned-dancehall in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick. Beneath this intersection of the M and J subway lines, where botanica shops meet Dunkin’ Donuts and flower shops are used as fronts for sea-foam green cafés, the hypnotic beat of the guacharaca— a repeating chik-chika-chik-chika-chik rhythm, central to the tropical genre of cumbia— booms from heavy speakers.

Suspended on a small stage, Turbo Sonidero, a cumbia DJ and producer from California, and Bronx-native, hellotones, perform their duties as bicoastal musical bricoleurs, readily dialing up the bass for a well-outfitted crowd inside the club, donning cowboy-inspired outfits, Tecate Beer crop-tops, and Virgin of Guadalupe paraphernalia, and those outside catching a smoke break under the fluorescent lights of a taco truck.

Once the IRL moveable sound systems come undone on the dancefloors of Brooklyn, San Jose, California, and Mexico City, these cumbias live on as part of Kumbia Net, a digital, global repository of futuristic cumbias with roots in the US and Mexico.

Originally a genre developed in the Colombian Caribbean, cumbia and its many iterations have become the musical lingua franca of Latin America. But to Mexicans living across Mexico and the United States, cumbia has become a transnational movement that fuses together popular iconography to develop a singular visual identity, often wrapped up in the mythology of the two countries.