- Post date
- 27 Mar 2018
- Caption
- Let’s continue with this black and white/noir theme (uy si). Here’s some fan art for Las 15 Letras’s song “comunista,” in which the lyrics of the song are juxtaposed with an image of Roberto Negrete, the band’s singer.
Las 15 Letras were formed by three Cal State L.A. students who met on campus and immediately identified each other as rockeros as they were wearing Caifanes shirts. “Roberto was wearing a Caifanes shirt as he was entering the library, so I followed him and asked him that besides Caifanes, which other “rock en español” bands he liked. It was so rare to see someone with a rock en español shirt at the time!” Said Martín Sánchez, the singer and composer of many of the band’s songs. Negrete was a Political Science major, while Martín and his brother Abel were working towards their degrees in Child Development and Education respectively.
Soon Negrete and the Sánchez decided to start a band and asked the Sánchez former neighbors in Echo Park, brothers Jorge and Edgar Briones to join the band.
What set Las 15 Letras apart from most of the other Rock Angelino bands during the early 1990s, is that all of the members were born and raised in the U.S. and several of their parents had also been born in the U.S. as well. This at a time when most Rock Angelino bands were comprised of recent migrants from Latin America. As Sánchez explains, the fans that attended the shows quickly embrace the band as many of them were U.S. born Latinas/os second or later generation who embraced their Latin American culture(s) and also college students. “We reflected on each other. We were students like many of them.” The advent of Las 15 Letras within Rock Angelino also represented a moment of greater aperture in which Latinas/os born in the U.S. not only were part of the audience or mere music fans, but they also became musicians and cultural producers, thus infusing their own intellectual perspectives as U.S. born Latinas/os within the transnational Rock Latino-Americano music genre.
Now if I can only find the fan that created this amazing photo, it was given to the band in the mid-2000s.????
- Location
- California State University, Los Angeles
- Type
- other ephemera
- View on Instagram
- https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg2v-Gfn2AS/