Live Music in Mexico City

Few cities can claim to have physically transformed a genre, but Mexico City did exactly that with mariachi, urbanizing it from its western Mexican roots into a national symbol through the capital's salons and plazas, with the Tenampa salon becoming a central hub for the music from the 1930s onward. That same instinct for reinvention shaped cumbia, which arrived from Colombia in the 1940s and exploded into something distinctly chilango, mixing with danzón and rumba and eventually spilling into massive outdoor street parties called sonidos by the 1980s. The city's rock scene proved equally restless, producing Caifanes, Maldita Vecindad, and a punk-inflected ska movement in the late 1980s that still resonates today. Anchoring the larger end of the live circuit is the Auditorio Nacional, a 10,000-person venue where Caifanes made history as the first Mexican rock band to sell out two consecutive shows.