Tag Archives: Manu Chao

Grupo Frontera to Perform in Mexico City’s Zócalo During This Year’s Grito de Independencia

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Grupo Frontera will be making a special visit to Mexico’s most iconic plaza…

The Regional Mexican group will perform at Mexico City’s Zócalo — the country’s most important public square — on September 15 for the annual Grito de Independencia event, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has announced.

Grupo Frontera“The members of Grupo Frontera will be there on September 15 at night in the Zócalo,” said the Mexican president at the end of his usual morning conference, where he played Frontera’s cover of “No Se Va,” originally by Colombian group Morat.

López Obrador reiterated his taste for the music of the Regional Mexican group, which he has included in his playlist to challenge corridos tumbados, a musical genre that although he has said he will not prohibit, he considers to glorify drug traffickers.

Grupo Frontera joins a long list of national and international artists who have set foot in the second-largest public square in the world, only behind Tiananmen in Beijing. Musicians such as Paul McCartney, Justin Bieber, Manu Chao, Shakira, Café Tacvba and the late icon of regional Mexican music Vicente Fernández, among many others, have performed at the Zócalo.

The attendance record for free concerts held in the so-called Primer Cuadro in the Mexican capital is held by the Argentine rock band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, which achieved the milestone of gathering 300,000 people on the night of June 3, beating Grupo Firme, who held the record after summoning 280,000 people in September 2022, according to figures from the government of Mexico City.

This week, the sextet scored their first top 10 hit on a Billboard album chart with El Comienzo, which jumped 39-4 on the Top Latin Albums chart on August 19 after its first full week of activity.

El Comienzo also jumped 12-2 on Regional Mexican Albums and debuted at No. 39 on the Billboard 200 all-genre chart.

Chao Shines a Light on the Plight of Arizona’s Jailed Immigrants…

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He’s known for his politically charged music… And, now Manu Chao is using one of his classic songs to denounce the conditions undocumented immigrants are forced to endure at Arizona’s Maricopa County Jail.

The 50-year-old Spanish singer/songwriter has released a new music video for his classic migrant song “Clandestino.” The new version features the singer and one of his guitarists singing in front of the infamous jail’s tent city section, where detainees must tolerate the intense heat in summer and sub-freezing temperatures in winter.

Manu Chao

“The particulars were the result of the work of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, who met after a concert with Chao in California a year ago to talk with him about the situation being experienced by immigrants in Arizona,” the video’s director Alex Rivera told EFE.

After wrapping up his U.S. tour at the Festival of Resistance in Phoenix, Chao fulfilled a promise to offer a free concert in protest of the implementation of Arizona’s harsh anti-immigrant law in September.

During his visit to the state, Chao took advantage of his presence there to record this new version of “Clandestino” in front of the tent city jail run by controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who once called it his ‘concentration camp’. The special Arizona edition of the tune features some lyrical changes as Chao sings “Mexicano, clandestino! Hondureño, clandestino! Guatemalteco, clandestino! Maricopa, ilegal!” emphatically pointing his thumb to the tent city jail behind him after the last line.

“We wanted to do something powerful about what’s happening in Arizona. That’s how the idea of filming ‘Clandestino’ in front of Arpaio’s infamous jail came up,” said Rivera.