Border Blasters: The Past, Present And Future Of Country Music And Its Latin Fans And Artists

From Imperial Beach, California, to the mouth of the Rio Grande the border between the United States and Mexico shoots and meanders and follows river courses some 1,954 miles.

It’s a utopian exaggeration to call a border “just a line on a map.” The U.S.-Mexico border is fenced, walled and checkpointed. It spans vast unforgiving deserts and bifurcates dangerous water.

But even those obstacles can’t stop ideas or culture or music from traveling both north and south.

Like all modern music, country music in 2024 is the product of cultural cross-pollination, a stew from the melting pot. Scotch-Irish instrumentation mixed with sacred music and elements of the earliest blues encountered cowboy music as it moved west, songs the range-riders learned around the chuckwagon campfire from the earliest cowboys: the Mexican vaqueros.

Mexican influence in country music isn’t hard to find; just listen to any guitar riff from Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads …. And there have been artists with Latin heritage with some success — Johnny Rodriguez, Freddy Fender and Linda Ronstadt were hitmakers in the 1970s, The Mavericks blurred the boundaries starting in the ’90s and today, the duo Kat & Alex had bilingual success before their professional and personal breakup late last year. Frank Ray charted with “Country’d Look Good On You” and followed that up with a Spanish-language EP. Cover artist Carin León (see page 20) collaborates with Kane Brown and covers Chris Stapleton. Nelson Albareda’s Loud And Live is again promoting the Country Bay Music Festival in Miami (see page 17).

But the marketing of country music for decades dulled those interesting edges. Wherever country music had come from, it was widely viewed — and carefully packaged — as the music for rural and working-class whites.

But then Nashville noticed something. In 2015, the Country Music Association commissioned an audience study and the result shocked many on Music Row. In the five years prior, the white audience grew a modest but respectable 7%.

The Hispanic audience, however, had grown an astounding 25% in the same period. In purely business terms, this was great news, because the research showed that minority listeners spend more on music — about $100 more annually — and listen about 26 minutes longer each day. Those extra five or six spins per day add up.

Given the rapid growth of the Hispanic population in the U.S. in general — the U.S. Census Bureau says that the Hispanic population accounted for 53 percent of the increase in the American population between 2010 and 2022 and 70 percent of the growth between 2022 and 2023 — it would be malpractice for the country music industry (or really, any industry) to ignore it.

The CMA is in the midst of another market research round — the results are expected later this year, a spokesperson says — and the general expectation is that the Hispanic audience will show significant growth over the last decade.

How did this happen?

“Country is very rooted in cultural values that are very similar to Latinos,” Albareda tells Pollstar. “The music itself and the genre is about storytelling, about values, struggles, the American dream which is no different really than Latino culture right? We’re about working hard. We’re about enjoying life.”

University of Michigan professor Nadine Hubbs, whose forthcoming book “Border Country: Mexico, America, and Country Music” explores country music’s popularity with Mexican American audiences, reminds us that in Ken Burns’ country music documentary, Johnny Rodriguez said country music was “the music of our people,” a sentiment echoed by those she interviewed for her book

“My interlocutors in Texas would say It is inevitable that Mexican Americans would like country music,” she says. “You’re only surprised if you aren’t from the Southwest and if your notion of country music is that it’s Southern music. … I had a Mexican American student in my class and he said he had known ranchera and regional Mexican and listened to Peso Pluma and he said he couldn’t tell the difference [between] those two musics. I was blown away by that.”

It’s impossible, she says, to “chronicle what came from Mexico” in the modern country song, much as it’s difficult to trace American influence in Mexican music.

“This cultural exchange and the border is as permeable as it is deadly to the wrong bodies. We’re never going to be able to put a finger on what came from where,” she says.

She believes the perceived growth in country’s Latin audience is almost exclusively among Mexican Americans and, because it’s a lyric-driven style, by English speakers. Some of the draw, she’s learned, is in the presentation.

“The 30s were a huge moment in country with western swing and with the singing cowboy. It was a different sound. That was a crucial moment because the presentation changed. Instead of overalls and straw hats and blacking out your teeth, you wore a cowboy hat and that’s stuck,” she says.

The famous rhinestone Nudie suits that became popular for country artists in the 1970s were influenced by traditional Mexican fashion (Nudie’s assistant and later son-in-law and successor Manuel was a Mexican immigrant).

“When I talk to millennial Mexican Americans they say ‘We love country music because it’s so relatable: it’s all rancho culture,” she says. “Clearly, the costumes Porter Wagoner wore are indistinguishable from what mariachis wore on the same stages.”

But mostly, as Albareda said, the music is what connects.

“They tell me ‘The music is so relatable.’ Not in general because everyone has heartache, but relatable to them as Mexicans because it’s about their life and culture,” Hubbs says, as her interview subjects mentioned love, faith, hard work, family and patriotism as values expressed in country music that are prominent in Mexican culture.

Streaming has boosted the audience and is likely to work both ways — fans of ranchera, for example, will be exposed to country and vice versa — and that is helping to erode what Hubbs says is decades of “gatekeeping” by the country music industry — and not its artists or fans — that’s coded the music as being for white people exclusively, a marketing strategy that coincidentally (or not) began in the era when Rodriguez, Fender and Ronstadt were certifiable chart-toppers.

But streaming changes that gatekeeping conversation and it may even help country break in Mexico itself, blurring and blending genre lines even further. That 1,954-mile border is stubborn, but it’s not impenetrable.