Perhaps the only artist to make almost every single attendee in Grant Park dance in unison, Los Tucanes de Tijuana brought their classic song “La Chona” to Chicago’s fifth annual Sueños Music Festival on Sunday evening. Performing on the main stage for a “special performance,” the norteño-genre veterans drew a truly multigenerational crowd on Day 2 of the Memorial Day weekend event.
Sunday’s Sueños lineup was an ode to Mexican Regional music, with the great majority of artists in the lineup identifying as Mexican immigrants or Mexican Americans. For local residents, the significance of the artist selection was not lost on them after Chicago and the surrounding suburbs were targets of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign Midway Blitz last year. Latinos came to the fest over the weekend “to show up and show out,” proudly representing their cultures.
The spectrum of banda and norteño music has been topping Billboard, Spotify, Apple and Amazon Music charts for multiple consecutive years, as showcased by last year’s popular Peso Pluma performance at Sueños. Even so, the Trump administration has implemented changes that tighten restrictions on the visa process, with artists based in Mexico having reportedly experienced denials or challenges to perform in the United States.
On Sunday, Los Tucanes — clad in black and blue-green shiny suits — delighted young and old with “quebradita” and “corrido” jams like “El Tucanazo,” “Mis Tres Animales,” “Espejeando” and “Suena La Banda.”
In an interview with La Voz/Sun-Times, vocalist Mario Quintero defended corridos (Mexican ballads) against the ongoing stigma and reductionist claims that they glorify narco culture. “We identify with the corrido because we love stories; we love hearing about the events taking place in our hometowns. And that is precisely how corridos came to be. We are people from the ranchos, and that’s how we used to get our news.”
He continued, “We saw that people truly enjoyed those stories — sometimes intense in their subject matter —those true-life tales of events you could scarcely imagine actually happening. They are like musical movies, three-minute films set to music.”
The under-35 crowd at Sueños flocked to see Sunday headliner Fuerza Regida, who has many times sold out shows in Chicago. The millennials from San Bernardino, California, got on stage all dressed in black, and yelled “Chicago, make some m———— noise.”
The five-member band opened their set with the wildly popular “Marlboro Rojo,” which they chose to replay due to technical difficulties. Vocalist Jesús Ortíz Paz, better known by his initials JOP, donned a black trench coat with an oversized hoodie and silver chains.
Fuerza Regida’s success is largely credited to the innovation the group brings to traditional Mexican Regional music with the fusion of brass and wind instruments, multiple acoustic guitars, the accordion, the tuba and the upright bass known as tololoche. Fans sang along to “Excesos,” “Sabor Fresa,” “Crazyz,” “Rosones” and “No Pasa Nada.”
At one point, he invited his tololoche player, Moy López, to sing a new release alongside Fuerza Regida’s mascot, “El Chuyín.”
The daytime highlights were Kane Rodriguez with his trending song “Se Volvieron Locos,” while the popular singer-songwriter Chino Pacas sang shirtless for half of his set and invited a fan from the crowd onstage. He later made a guest appearance with Fuerza Regida, where they sang “Que Onda.”
While Los Tucanes de Tijuana interpreted the classically composed corridos that many immigrants grew up with — with themes of rancho life, migration, work and family — Fuerza Regida embodied the modern lyrics and musical taste of the bilingual children of immigrants who, as adults, are making Mexican music go global.