For one weekend this month, when Bad Bunny’s two sell-out concerts at Tottenham Hotspur became the largest Spanish-language shows in UK history, the north London I grew up in was transformed. As tens of thousands of Londoners, Latinos and non-Latinos, walked towards the stadium from Seven Sisters Latin market, reggaetón blaring from local shops selling Puerto Rican pava straw hats, a sun-filled Tottenham High Road suddenly felt like Spanish Harlem.
The Latino takeover of Haringey was a far cry from the place I arrived in, aged seven, having left Buenos Aires, the only place I knew till then. If you had mentioned the word “Latin” back then, people would have thought you were talking about ancient Rome. Forty-five years later, as Pitbull became the first Latin artist to headline British Summer Time in Hyde Park last Friday, and my own festival, LatinoLife in the Park, the UK’s largest Latin Music festival as it celebrates 10 years on 19 July, Latin music is well and truly planted in British culture, and it’s here to stay.
Growing up in Hornsey, I didn’t know of the existence of any other Latin Americans outside my parents’ circle of friends. But I do remember lots of dinner parties at home, with long, dark-haired, poncho-wearing folk, and the fierce political debate of a more intense splinter group on the smoky top floor, plotting revolutions in far-off places.
The soundtrack to these events was the likes of Cuba’s Pablo Milanes and Silvio Rodríguez, Chile’s Víctor Jara and Argentina's Mercedes Sosa, their protest songs giving voice to a region battling against repressive regimes. But I remember the exact moment when the music from this other place I belonged to really hit me. It was 1981 and I was nine years old, squeezing through what seemed like a forest of flared jeans to get to the stage at what was then called the Hammersmith Palais.
When I got to the front, my eyes fell on a beautiful man on stage, who filled my ears with a playful, sweetly percussive sound that I'd never heard before; so rich yet with an easy simplicity, joyful, yet so so tender. Overwhelmed with emotion, I didn’t know whether to dance or to cry.
I still thank the flaky babysitter who failed to turn up that night, forcing my parents to sneak me into my first-ever concert on a cold winter’s night. It was Gilberto Gil who cemented my love of music forever. More importantly, that experience made me feel for the first time that what made me different, and at times embarrassed, like when my mum waited for me in the playground in that dreaded poncho, was suddenly something I wanted to be part of.
I then met Jose in 2001, 20 years later, upstairs at Bar Lorca in Islington, a popular salsa club at the time. I had just come back from Latin America, where I had spent most of my twenties as a journalist, like my dad. Jose was pretty much fresh off the boat from Venezuela. He was a massive music fan who was running a Latin music record store, and I was writing a book.
Even though we met dancing salsa, Jose was most impressed with my collection of Argentine rock, Spinetta, Charly Garcia, Soda Stereo, whom he was crazy about (though I was more of an obsessive for Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota, a proud ricotera).
The crowd’s reaction was unbelievable, and we could see what a buzz it gave young Latino artists. They were on the big stage, and the next generation in the audience could see themselves in the future
From the day Jose and I met, we’ve been inseparable, joining forces in life and in work, building a family and a cultural institution at the same time. About a year after we met, Jose came back from his record store with a CD, Tego Calderón’s El Abayarde, the seminal 2002 reggaetón album. “This is the future of Latin music,” he declared. That was saying something for a die-hard salsa fan.
Jose soon was a pioneer in the UK urban Latin music scene with his La Bomba nights at Ministry of Sound, which he then took to Europe, and produced the UK's first ever Reggaeton Festival in 2004. At the time, few music curators or media pundits in the UK were taking notice; those that were inclined towards disparaging.
While Jose was promoting reggaetón nights, I began a Latin culture magazine, determined to fulfil an unfinished dream of my dad, who, back in the 1980s, started a Latin news magazine in English, before his Venezuelan investors pulled out. Jose couldn’t stop coming up with ideas (“there is no Latino this or that; we should do it”) and I would take up each baton and run.
The next thing we knew, on top of the club nights and the magazine, we started The LUKAS (Europe’s only Latin Entertainment Awards), a red carpet event inspired by the MOBO Awards, celebrating Latin achievement in the UK.
It wasn’t till 2016, however, that we launched LatinoLife in the Park (initially called La Clave Fest). But still while the LUKAS was a brilliant VIP red-carpet gala, no festivals would book our award-winning artists. For the LUKAS to have some kind of legacy, like the MOBO’s, we decided we had to do a festival ourselves.
The most important thing is to begin
We wanted to tell our own story of Latin music, away from the “world music” framing of it. We wanted a festival made by Latinos, for everybody. The best piece of advice I’ve ever been given was when I went to the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba to interview its mayor, Jaime Lerner. Lerner had transformed his city into one of the most socially integrated in Latin America. How did he do it? “The most difficult thing of all,” he told me. “is to begin.”
With no money, our only option with the festival was to start local and start small. We were living in Hornsey, and figured it could definitely do with an injection of Latin joy and so approached the organisers about us taking over their own festival a day. We wanted a proper cultural takeover. And so we approached small venues, ending up with over 20 events; poetry readings, jazz concerts, pub gigs, theatre pieces, even a human tower competition, and a street parade with Bolivian monsters, drumming troops and samba dancers marching down Crouch End Broadway, to the amazement of local shoppers.
That parade is today, the ever-popular Big Dance Extravaganza of 500 dancers that kicks off the festival every year. As we grew, the mayor of London, who had now started funding us, kindly offered us The Scoop, the stunning bowl scooped out of the ground beside the then egg-shaped City Hall, between London and Tower bridges.
Being in Central London doubled our audience and the day turned into a full-on salsa rave in the middle of the city. I remember how Cuban violinist Omar Puente jumped into the public with his violin and sent everyone crazy, and at one point the whole 5,000-plus audience was line dancing.
Alas, again, with Scoop overflowing, we were told we would have to find somewhere else. With councils now making big bucks hiring their parks out to major festival promoters, pickings were slim. Ah, but a stroke of luck…back in Haringey, the Friends of Finsbury Park had told us they were in talks with Haringey Council about being given a day to celebrate the park’s 150th anniversary. Could we help them?
The very organisation complaining about major events in Finsbury Park wanted LatinoLife in the Park – an accessible independent festival, loved by those who attend – to help restore the park’s original intention as “The People’s Park”. London was finally to get its first major Latin park festival for years, and for the first time ever, it was UK Latin artists who would be headlining.
And so it was that by 2022, it became clear that there was a new energy that was taking centre stage, and it belonged to young people. We were the first festival to feature UK Urban Latin talent, singing their very own London-Spanglish. The crowd’s reaction was unbelievable, and we could see what a buzz it gave young Latino artists. They were on the big stage, and the next generation in the audience could see themselves in the future.
Now LatinoLife in the Park is the UK’s largest one-day Latin music festival, the only Latina-run major park festival, and voted the UK’s most inclusive festival (FestSpace). And yet it is now just one in a whole ecosystem of activity, events, media and talent development to push forward the Latin music industry in the UK.
When I think of us, I think of Jose provoking me with his red cape of ideas, and me charging at them with the stubbornness of a mad toro. We are both idealists and naturally entrepreneurial, or suckers for punishment, and have more than once ended up collapsed in a bundle, wondering what we are doing and why and who started it.
This year, with Bad Bunny just having produced a fever over in Tottenham, with the British media talking about the joy and warmth of his music, it feels like the country I call home has finally understood the music that I fell in love with as a child. Whatever happens in the World Cup, stays with the World Cup, because in the 25 years after Jose and I first met, Latin music has gone from being a niche genre to the most consumed genre in the world. And on its 10th anniversary this July, LatinoLife in the Park has grown from an obscure community festival to the UK’s largest Latin Music Festival.
LatinoLife in the Park will take place on Sunday 19 July in Walpole Park, London W5
