Enter the Cumbiaverse

From the West Coast to the Big Apple, a generation of artists and DJs have taken cumbia to new audiences.

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The walls at Mi Sabor Café wept the night of Cinco de Mayo 2023. Moisture filled the room as a diverse crowd of twenty-somethings—in mini skirts, snapbacks, cowboy boots, baggy pants, and Gore-Tex jackets—packed the dance floor near the lunch counter where combo plates were dished out during the day. Heads bobbed and bodies waved to the chik-chika-chik-chika-chik of the hypnotic cumbia rhythms that blared across the space. Couples practiced the pasos prohibidos as they weaved, spun, and strode through the flashing neon lights.

The Bronx-born DJ Tony Dominguez aka Hellotones, aka “El Hijo de PueblaYork,” had brought out a packed house for yet another installment of his Kumbiatazo party series. That night, representing the West Coast, producer Turbo Sonidero and DJ/M.C. Mextape joined Hellotones and the Brooklyn-based artist and DJ Ivan Cantor (Shadow Records) behind the booth. Hellotones, accompanied by a lineup of pure cumbiamberos, was bringing cumbia to a club scene that had hardly embraced the sound before. 

Hellotones has paraded his “Cumbias Mezcladas como Nunca Antes” beyond Mi Sabor Café, the homebase he shares with Like That Records, to other Bushwick hotspots like Market Hotel, Paragon, and Elsewhere—outings that went on to land him a feature in The New York Times. He’s even forged his way into iconic NYC venues like the MoMA and S.O.B’s, where he’s played multiple times this year. Most recently, it was for Préndelo PueblaYork, a party whose name—like Hellotones’ “El hijo…” alias—recalls the transnational connection between New York City’s Mexican population and the state of Puebla, from which many of them emigrated. 

Hellotones connects cumbia’s rich history to the present. He’s recontextualizing the sound for audiences in New York and around the world, taking the music of his parents and grandparents and repackaging it for modern dance floors. As diasporic Latin sounds continue to become the norm in dance music, Hellotones and artists like him are keeping cumbia in the conversation, ensuring that the genre’s legacy is honored even as it evolves.

A “PueblaYork” resurgence

Though cumbia has only recently found a home in Bushwick nightclubs, cumbia has long thrived in New York City. As Mexican migration to the five boroughs boomed during the 1980s and ’90s, cumbia sonidera parties began to take place in nascent enclaves such as Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. The often outdoor parties, known for their mobile sound systems—much like those from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and beyond—are filled with endless dancing, though they’re distinguished by the sonidero, a DJ-slash-emcee who fuels the night with their callouts and selections. The open public spaces where these parties originated blossomed into a nightlife scene that thrives to this day, in clubs scattered across Mexican neighborhoods throughout the city. 

The sonidera style originated in the barrios of Mexico City and in villages throughout Puebla during the 1950s. The sonidero—literally, “sound man”—is both the sound selector and emcee, providing live vocals and taglines as well as shoutouts, greetings, and dedications at the request of the crowd. 

As migrants from Puebla and surrounding Mixtec Indigenous regions like Oaxaca and Guerrero continued to arrive in the U.S. throughout the latter half of the 20th century, they brought along their unique sonidera styles. Sonidero parties became a vital communal space—not just for cultural preservation, but also cultural innovation. Today, different regional scenes incorporating distinct musical styles, dances, and even hairdos have developed across Mexico and the U.S., with notable hotspots in California and New York.

A generation removed from the foundations of cumbia sonidera in the U.S., Mexican-American DJs like Hellotones and Turbo Sonidero have infused the music with hip-hop and club influences, mixed it in new ways, and introduced younger, uninitiated ears to the multiverse of cumbia. 

Though Hellotones’ style of mixing differs from the standard sonidero style, the culture and its various subgenres inspired his ventures into DJing cumbia. His mixing pulls from a range of influences, including the classic sonideras that his parents first introduced him to, as well as cumbia tropical, cumbia editada, the contemporary pop cumbias of Argentina, and the more underground remix-based styles he finds on SoundCloud from producers throughout Latin America.

“The format in which I do it is not of the traditional baile sonidero, emcee, soundsystem culture where they’re just playing a whole song out, doing their shoutouts over it, buying some time and then into the next song. I created it into a nonstop experience,” Hellotones told me over Zoom. He is also quick to shout out the cumbia wepa sonideros of San Luis Potosi, like the late Sonido Kiss, for pioneering a style that blends tracks together. “But it’s a quick blend, it’s a super super quick blend,” he said. “The difference is because I learned a lot with club music… my favorites… are a lot of long-form blends, [where you’re] remixing a lot. I took that approach, and I put cumbia to that.”

Hellotones’ departure from the traditional sonidero style, with its established nightlife scene in New York, made it difficult for him to get booked to play cumbia.“That is M.C. culture, that is sound system culture, that is saludos. That is a very particular ambiente,” he explained. “And who am I to come in and be like yeah, I don’t really get on the mic, and the music doesn’t stop … the bailes weren’t trying to hear that shit … I didn’t really have any ‘in’ there either; no one knew who I was in that world.” 

Though Hellotones had been DJing hip-hop and club music, throwing parties, and taste-making in NYC nightlife with Marvelito and Ase Manual of Like That Records since 2019, with the three even playing a set for Boiler Room in 2021, he even struggled to get booked to play cumbia in the same clubs he and Like That Records had already been frequenting. “They wasn’t familiar with cumbia, they wasn’t trying to hear that shit… cumbia was so abstract to them … So now, I have two sides of the coin, and neither side wants to hear my cumbias,” he said. “But [then] we started with Mi Sabor Café.”

Mi Sabor, a Dominican restaurant-slash-club, sits along the intersection of Myrtle and Broadway in Bushwick, a location that has become synonymous with New York’s electronic underground. Mi Sabor, however, has been home to merengue tipico parties for the neighborhood’s historically Dominican and Puerto Rican population for over 20 years. It was there where Hellotones first met with Ase and Marvelito of Like That Records, which led to him joining the independent label in 2019. But it wasn’t until late 2021 when the crew threw their first party in the space. From there, “it turned into a conversation of doing it again … so now we had a space where we could do our own shit,” said Hellotones. 

Last year, Hellotones and Like That Records celebrated two years at the space with a “2 Year Anniversary Especial.” (Zack Fox and Earl Sweatshirt were in the audience.) It was “the [crossover] that I always wanted to breed naturally. It happened on its own. Where it’s like yo, culture is happening, culture happens here and culture’s gonna happen wherever me and my homies go and decide to put our blood, sweat, and tears into,” Hellotones described. “And that’s what I think is the ethos of what we’ve been able to transform Sabor into.”

Turbo Sonidero: Alternative cumbias breaking out on the West Coast

Years before Hellotones brought cumbias to Mi Sabor and electronic clubs in New York, he was inspired by others doing similar things out on the West Coast. Mexican American producer and DJ Roman Zepeda, AKA Turbo Sonidero, took a similar sonidero-derived cumbia sound beyond its long-established scene in California. Fusing his cumbias with hip-hop and electronic music, and similarly not MCing, Turbo ventured to bring the sound to new audiences. Turbo, like Hellotones, has paid immense respects to the history of sonidero culture and the extensive history of cumbia, and he himself is a direct result of that history: His parents, each hailing from regions in Mexico with thriving sonidero scenes, first met while dancing at a baile in his native San Jose, California. 

“They were the only ones who danced alike,” Turbo told me over Zoom. “Growing up there was always cumbia. My parents would come back from Mexico with a lot of records.” Those records came to inspire his own sound, which blends cumbias editadas with hip-hop and trap drums, electronic music, and the sensibilities of the East Side San Jose underground scene that birthed his career.

Starting out as a producer in 1996, Turbo made hip-hop instrumentals and electronic music before he crafted his first cumbias in 2008. “It was more of an accident,” he told me, “I was just messing around with samples, and I started uploading them on Myspace.” Those early cumbia tracks garnered the attention of his close friend and collaborator, Mextape. A fellow San Jose native, Mextape invited Turbo to play his first-ever show at Cultura en tu idioma, a party series hosted in the office space of a local community organization. From there, Turbo continued to be booked for shows, until he and Mextape founded Sonido Clash in 2010, with San Jose artists Fernando J. Pérez Fiesco, Quynh-Mai Nguyen, Thomas Aguilar and Osvaldo Chavez. As a collective, Sonido Clash carved out their own space in the San Jose music scene with weekly parties and an annual music festival. 

Sonido Clash opened a space for cumbia and alternative Latino music to be played and appreciated in a time when these sounds weren’t so widely accepted, Turbo told me. Following the early success of Sonido Clash, and with a severance check from his day job, he took the righteous next step in his cumbia-making journey — a pilgrimage to Cholula, Puebla, the mecca of the sonideros.

He described his thinking at the time: “I was getting more into cumbia to the point where that was the only thing I was listening to and then I was like, you know what? If I’m gonna be producing this, if I’m going to get serious about this, I need to go to Cholula, and I need to be out there and feel it out.”

Cholula, a sacred city since pre-Hispanic times, boasts over 250 churches, each with a feast day commemorating the namesake saint or virgin of the parish. On these days, Turbo explained, “they make these parties, and the [person] that they call first is the sonidero, and the sonidero is gonna bring the sound system, the lights, the entertainment, the music.”

During his trip, Turbo immersed himself in the local sonidero scene. “[I was] going to a lot of sonideros, meeting a lot of people, especially sonideros, buying a lot of CDs, listening to lots of music … I was there to just explore the sounds,” he said. The trip proved to be an essential part of his evolution as an artist: “With cumbia you have to feel it, and I think if I would have never went to Puebla, I don’t think I would have evolved in my production,” he reflected.

Since Turbo hailed from the U.S., Mexican promoters and organizers initially booked him at fancier bars and clubs. where he faced an upper-class audience that was averse to the cumbias that he played. “I would start playing, and they would start booing at me, you know … At the time [cumbia] wasn’t accepted at all. [It] was only accepted at sonideros or barrios. For me, I always wanted to play at a sonidero, and I have, but I always wanted to play in different spaces … Playing it for different people and exposing them to cumbia sonidera.” 

Over time, he began connecting with artists and DJs with a similar approach to him, who invited him to shows in Mexico City. Turbo describes this time in the early 2010s as a “boom,” where there was an audience for cumbia producers who weren’t sonideros, and were instead taking more and more from electronic music and infusing those sounds into cumbia. He listed other artists who were influential in the scene: those at the Buenos Aires-based label ZZK, as well as Papi Perez, Sonido Confirmacion, Orhihuela MSS and Amantes del Futuro. But as things began to fizzle in the mid-2010s, succumbing to the overwhelming popularity of reggaeton, cumbia producers like Turbo questioned where to take their sound next.

In 2016, he dropped Killa Kumbias, a collection of eight tracks created in the time following his return from Mexico, on the Peruvian label Terror Negro. Inspired by the music scenes of both Puebla and San Jose, the album housed a sinister sound that blended R&B, ’90s hip-hop, and early trap samples with dark cumbia rhythms. From songs like the title track, which plays like the cumbia theme for a murderous clown, to tracks like “Murder in the First Degree,” Turbo’s horror inspired sound spawned a movement that led to the creation of Kumbia Obscura. 

Hellotones was paying attention. “Light bulbs just started going off in my head,” he said, of his first listens of Killa Kumbias and Turbo’s early work in an interview with There Radio. Hellotones explained to me that the album inspired him years before he first started DJing. “That’s the first time I heard cumbia in a really, really forward-thinking way that incorporated shit that I love as a little hip-hop nerd, and I was like ‘This shit is incredible, I wanna do this. I wanna make shit like that and I wanna play shit like that.’” 

From the time of the album’s release, Turbo’s unique sound helped him bring cumbia to even newer audiences in the Bay Area and beyond. As one of the only artists to play cumbia at Oakland’s Sick Sad World, where drill, Southern hip-hop, and Hyphy proudly reigned, Turbo made true on his goal of bringing cumbia beyond the sonidero or “Latin” music scenes, especially at a time when the space for cumbia DJs was yet to be defined. 

Inspired by the successes of Sonido Clash and Kumbiamberos Internacionales (K.I.), the online based collective he also was a part of, Turbo founded Kumbia Obscura in 2018. He brought together a broad network of producers, all united by their sonidero-influenced styles, synth-heavy production, and dark and loopy sample-based sounds. He recruited artists he met in Mexico, like Plastic Toy Sounds, Ato 05, Orihuela MSS, and Amantes del Futuro, as well as others he’d met online, like the U.K.-based Arrabalero, Queretaro’s Él Satanico, El Cifickzer from San Luis Potosi, La Santa Diabla, and Space Primo.

In 2019, Turbo and Arrabalero, together known as Grupo Jejeje, put out their self-titled album as the first release for the LA based record label Discos Rolas—a record that, with its critical success, proved instrumental in purveying cumbia to new audiences in the 2020s. Maintaining the elements of dark cumbia, the album leans heavily into the cosmic and futuristic elements synonymous with sonidero culture. These elements start with the album’s cover art—a collaboration with the legendary Mexican visual artist Jaime Ruelas, a DJ-turned-graphic-designer for Mexico City’s famous sound systems of the 1980s. Ruelas had illustrated futuristic cityscapes, cyborgs, and spaceships for thousands of fliers that came to define the visual language surrounding the city’s sonidero culture. 

The album’s connection to sonidero history continued with the rebajada version remixed by the legendary Sonido Dueñez, the originator of cumbia rebajada. Dueñez, who birthed a style of cumbia that remains at the forefront of Monterrey’s sonidero scene, connected with Turbo through a mutual friend in Monterrey. Eager for him to play in the U.S., Grupo Jejeje gladly invited Dueñez out to the album’s release party in LA. 

After flying him out to Tijuana, Turbo and co. embarked on a “mission” to pick up Dueñez, cross the border, and drive him to LA where he would play the record release party at the hipster hotspot Footsies. With this legendary event, Turbo fulfilled a dream of his: uniting the history of sonidero culture with the contemporary U.S. scene he helped create. It was, as he described, “what I had always envisioned in the cumbia scene, or just what I had always envisioned like having two worlds collide, you know. The old and the new and having them all together in a room was like, ‘Damn, this is tight.’”

Kumbia beyond borders

Grupo Jejeje’s barrier-breaking first album proved to Kumbia Obscura members that there was an audience for their contemporary cumbia sounds. Around 2020, Kumbia Obscura created Kumbia Net, a “kumbia cyberspace” surging from “the most remote parts of the Deep Web.” On Soundcloud, the group is based in “Cyber Aztlan,” a play on the mythical homeland of the Aztecs that was lusted after by Spanish colonizers, and later reconceptualized as a term of self-contextualization during the Chicano Movement.

Kumbia Net feels hyper-online—a place beyond borders that relishes in the blending of genres. Still, these sounds are distinctly grounded in the history of sonidero and hip-hop culture. It has taken the futuristic elements of the sonidero scene and dialed them up to 100. Listening to the Kumbia Net’s compilation tapes is a journey not only across borders and genres, but across space and time, with tracks that blast you off into the unknown regions of the cumbia multiverse. 

Dig deeper into the solo tracks of individual Kumbia Net artists, and the influence of the internet and harder-hitting club sounds become even more noticeable. On their most recent single released with the label, the Colombian-born, Toronto-based DJ and producer ESCOBUTT blends cumbia and baile funk for a club-ready electronic mix.

Meanwhile, Sacramento native Azúcar crafts “hypercumbias” with experimental electronic music, creating mind-bending mashups. “I just try to experiment with music and play with it like it’s Play-Doh, and just do what I want,” he told me from the lush backyard of his spot in Oakland. He describes my favorite song, “Vaquita,” as a cumbia inspired by Jai Paul’s “aquatic synthesizers that sound like these Aston Martin engines, but like, super coursed out.” The mix of styles produced a song that, in his words, looks and feels like “dolphins playing metal gear solid.” The cover art by gr0wlnet captures the sentiment perfectly. Azúcar’s blend of electronic sounds lends itself more easily to settings he’s played in — clubs in Mexico and Bay Area raves and nightclubs, where his sounds have gone as far as to inspire “cumbia mosh pits.” 

Azúcar, like Hellotones and Turbo, has done his research and is a student of the extensive history of cumbia, despite not having a Mexican or Latino background. He’s been co-signed by Hellotones: “He knows his shit, he cares about this shit. He done spent more time in Mexico than I have; his Spanish is nice now!” Hellotones told me. Though Azúcar is hesitant to call himself a cumbia artist, he’s an example of the type of change within the sound that people like Turbo have come to inspire: his sounds are innovative, but considered and informed by history.

Another new-gen, non-Latino cumbia selector is Millz. A club DJ of Gambian descent, he was exposed to cumbia through his friendship with Hellotones, and quickly began to incorporate it into his sets. Hellotones has come to see Millz as an example of cumbia’s organic spread. “He has his own sauce entirely … he be dancing cumbia now!” he said, proudly. “This is what I’m talking about opening it up, and opening it up with care and integrity … he went and learned artists he likes from my mixes, from the homies’ mixes, then he went and did his own digging.”

Throughout this yearslong movement, respect and care remain central to the craft — its artists continually acknowledge and reference the established history of sonidero culture in Mexico and the U.S., and share a sense of comradery in making and playing these recontextualized sounds today. When describing his connection to Kumbia Net and New York-based artists like Hellotones, Sonidera Blues, and DJ Chihuahua, Mextape once said, “We are family through music, and the culture that we represent … we are the old, new, and present guard.”

Cumbia: From Latin America to the masses 

From its origins in Colombia as a blend of African and indigenous rhythms, cumbia has only infused more sounds, resulting in uncountable regional styles throughout Latin America. The genre is widespread, and in many parts of Latin America, it’s simply mainstream music. However, artists like Hellotones, Turbo, and Azúcar are taking the sound to new extremes, bringing it to completely new audiences in the U.S. and worlds away. And while none of the artists I interviewed seemed to have definitive answers as to why their sounds have seemed to unite a range of partygoers and listeners, cumbia’s malleability seems to be key.

In an essay covering the “Sonidero Movement of the Future,” the Colombian ethnomusicologist Hector Fernandez L’Hoeste told Vita Dadoo Lomeli, “Primero que todo, la cumbia tiene un fuerte componente de clase y, dos, no viene ligada a un proyecto de nacionalismo fuerte,”— “First of all, cumbia has a strong class component, and secondly, it’s unbound by any strong projects of nationalism.” Cumbia is a music for the people, and in that it has the potential for immense reach.

As “Latin club” has risen to prominence in recent years and the music industry continues to capitalize on the success of sounds like reggaeton and regional Mexican music, the wide appeal of cumbia seems to be headed in a similar direction. However, the artists I interviewed don’t fear the commercialization of their sound.

All Hellotones hopes for the future of cumbia, he told me, is “that the real rises to the top as much as it can … I just want quality cumbia to become a familiar sound to everybody, and I want me and my homies who have put in the fucking work, and by extension anybody else who I don’t know… who really put in the work for this, to win and eat off this shit.”

Similarly, these artists know that cumbia sonidera can never really be taken away from its origins in the streets. No matter where cumbia goes,  said Turbo, “the sonidero scene is always gonna exist. It’s just a part of Mexican culture that’s so ingrained … you’re always going to have a sonidero, you know, and people are always going to want to dance and have fun.” In other words: cumbia is, and always will be, musica de barrio.