World Cafe celebrates Latino Heritage Month

National Latino Heritage Month kicked off this week, so World Cafe is taking a look back through the archives to highlight some of the incredible Latinx musicians who have joined us on the show in recent memory.

Helado Negro

For a period of time in 2020 and 2021, “outside” was a loaded word — “We can’t go outside!”; “I miss the outside!” “Outside” felt like a world that we could only experienced in our dreams. Roberto Carlos Lange, who performs as Helado Negro, crafted Far In, an album that spoke to that longing by finding solace deep inside ourselves.

Lange grew up in South Florida before attending college at the Savannah College of Art and Design. A two-week trip to Marfa, Texas, to work on an art installation turned into a six-month stay that shifted his perspective during the pandemic and led to the work on Far In.

Hurray for the Riff Raff

Hurray for the Riff Raff’s 2017 album, The Navigator, was a bold concept album that established band founder Alynda Segarra as a musical force. It focused on the character of Navita Milagros Negron, a stand-in for Segarra, as they leave home in search of themselves.

Instead of looking out, the follow-up record, Life on Earth, was decidedly more personal and more immediate. Segarra says it’s a memoir, written in the isolation of the pandemic from their home in New Orleans. At its heart, when so many things are terribly frustrating, Life on Earth is an affirmation of humanity and of how we can find joy in difficult times.

Natalia Lafourcade

Natalia Lafourcade holds the record for most Latin Grammys won by a female artist: She’s won 15 over her 20+-year career. The 38-year-old Mexican singer is beloved, not only for her own compositions, but also for her projects that have paid homage to the folk music of her native Mexico and Latin America.

Plus, you also might know her from her performance of the Oscar-winning song “Remember Me,” from Pixar’s Coco. In this session, Lafourcade talks about her 10th studio album, called De Todas las Flores. It was her first album of entirely new material in seven years, and she premiered it live in late 2022 at Carnegie Hall to a sold-out audience.

Café Tacvba

Café Tacvba’s four core members have been making music together since the early 1990s. Their 1994 album, Re, is consistently ranked among the greatest Latin rock albums ever. It’s considered a groundbreaking contribution to “Rock en Espanol.”

Up until then, Latin rock music often sounded like rock music sung in Spanish, sometimes even in English by Latin bands. But Re was different: It was a kitchen sink of musical influences, from electronic sounds to ballads to funk and, of course, Mexican and Latin sounds. The musical diversity on Re is a hallmark of Café Tacvba‘s approach, and you can still hear it decades later on their 2017 release, Jei BeiBi. The band spoke to former World Cafe Talia Schlanger about the record, plus they perform live.

Gustavo Santaolalla

He was never formally trained to read or write music, yet Gustavo Santaolalla has a gift for capturing moments and, more importantly, feelings that are hard to put into words.

That musical instinct has helped Santaolalla reach some incredible heights. He’s won heaps of awards for his film scores, including Brokeback Mountain and Babel, plus he’s produced dozens of records in the Latin rock world.

Santaolalla provided the score for The Last of Us video game, and last year, he was nominated for an Emmy for scoring the HBO adaptation of that game. In this conversation with World Cafe‘s Raina Douris, Santaolalla charts the course of his career, from his humble beginnings in Argentina to the silver screen.