Nortec Collective: From Tijuana to GMU via the Cultural Institute of Mexico

In 1999, some DJs from Tijuana began mixing traditional Norteño and Banda music of Mexico with the modern pop and dance music they had heard as kids on American radio stations over the border. Thus was born Nortec Collective: a fusion of Norteño ("from the North") and Techno, documenting the collision between the style and culture of electronica and traditional Mexican music.
 

Nortec Collective is not a thing or a genre or a group, but an entire electronic aesthetics; it is the convergence of high-tech and low-tech, of North and South, of the First World in the Third World and vice versa. Tijuana is their laboratory, a border metropolis of two million people, a major hub of global pop culture on par with Tokyo, New York, LA, and London. It is America’s most important switching point, where cultures, cash, languages, styles, laborers, and sounds (lots and lots of sounds) all migrate into each other without the proper documents, clashing and connecting and merging and marrying, like few other spots on the planet. Nortec Collective's Tijuana is Macintosh G5s and bad sewage; digital file swapping, Moby concerts, and "jeans;" Derrida and Mozart; Philip Glass and "corridos;" travesty Beattles blasting postmodern "Yesterdays."

Nortec Collective is comprised of five artists: Fussible (PepeMogt), Bostich (Ramón Amezcua), Panóptica (Roberto Mendoza), Clorofila (Jorge Verdín) and Hiperboreal (PG Beas). 
 

Saturday, April 8 at 7:00 pm., Dewberry Hall, JohnsonCenter.

Sponsored by George Mason University Life, Office of the Provost, Latin American Studies, and the Department of Modern & Classical Languages, with the collaboration of the Cultural Institute of Mexico. Free and open to the public. Parking available at the Parking Deck.
 

Pre-concert lecture/conversation sponsored by the Cultural Institute of Mexico with José Manuel Valenzuela, Research Professor, Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, about this musical phenomenon: 6:30 pm, Room G19A, JohnsonCenter.