Concert to benefit PVUSD High School Scholarship Fund

Las Cafeteras Performs Friday, January 30, at the Henry J. Mello Center 

Watsonville – Las Cafeteras, a group of musicians from southern California will perform on Friday, January 30, at the Henry J. Mello Center for the Performing Arts in Watsonville. Showtime is 7:30 p.m. Their concert performance is a benefit to raise funds for the Pájaro Valley Unified School District High School Scholarship Fund.

Born in the streets of Los Angeles, Las Cafeteras are immigrant children who are remixing roots music and telling modern day stories with what the Los Angeles Times has called a “uniquely Angeleno mishmash of punk, hip-hop, beat music, cumbia and rock… Live, they’re magnetic.”

Las Cafeteras formed as a band in 2008 with the purpose of documenting the histories of their neighborhoods through music. As musicians, they started as students of the Eastside Café, a Zapatista inspired community space in East Los Angeles where they were influenced by the culture, storytelling, and poetic music of son jarocho, a traditional music from Veracruz, Mexico.

Their namesake derives from the organization where they took classes, the Eastside Café. However, to honor women and challenge masculine language, they feminized their group name by calling themselves, Las Cafeteras, rather than Los Cafeteros. They have taken the music scene by storm with their infectious live performances and have crossed-genre and musical borders, playing with bands such as Mexican icons Caifanes, Lila Downs, Colombian superstar Juanes, Los Angeles legends Ozomatli, folk/indie favorites Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and most recently with Talib Kweli.

The sound of Las Cafeteras is brought to life by the eclectic instrumentation used, which include jarana’s, requinto, a donkey jawbone, a West African bass instrument called the marimbol, cajón, and a wooden platform called the tarima used to dance zapateado.