Mexico accordion how to#

“Are there people here from Central America?” “Are there people with Mexican blood running through their veins?” he asked. Later on, Elías, the front man, began calling out different regions of Latin America.

The steps, they realized, weren't so different from country western line dancing.

Mexico accordion how to#

Ordoñez and his wife didn't quite know how to cumbia, but joined in. The first song had just started when the aisles began filling with spinning couples. “It’s a lot of nostalgia,” he said of the band’s music. But when he found out the band was coming to Greensboro, just 20 miles from his hometown of Liberty, he told his wife they had to go. When Ordoñez was a kid, he would roll his eyes when his mom played Los Ángeles Azules while she was cleaning. Many are the American-born offspring of immigrants, like Alfredo Ordoñez, 30, whose parents came from Guatemala. In North Carolina, where it’s not uncommon to see a Mexican or Salvadoran flag flying along a country lane, 1 in 6 children is Latino. Six siblings, four brothers and two sisters, make up the core members of the band. Guadalupe Mejia Avante, right, plays a guache during a show in Estero, Fla. Jose Hilario Mejia Avante, left, one of six siblings of the group Los Ángeles Azules, plays the drums in Greensboro, N.C. And when he looked over at his wife, who was also born in Mexico, his eyes were shining with tears. He belted the lyrics - “Untie the ribbon from your hair / Remove the dress from your body” - and shuffled side to side with his friends.

So when the opening accordion line of “El Listón de Tu Pelo” finally rang out, igniting a roar from the audience of 4,000, Romero was flooded with nostalgia.

Most of all he missed his mother and his siblings, who 25 years earlier had accompanied him to a street festival to see the very band now before him on a Greensboro stage: Los Ángeles Azules. He missed the chaos of the capital, the greasy miracle that is a quesadilla de chicharron. But even though Romero, now 42, had built a good life here - with a family, a well-paying job as a handyman and a side gig as a DJ for quinceañeras and cumpleaños - the truth was his heart often ached for Mexico. North Carolina was beautiful, the work plentiful. It’s 100% different than Mexico, but it's beautiful.”Īnd they were right. It had been 22 years since he had left home, 22 years since his friends had told him: “We found a beautiful place. Antonio Romero had waited all night in a packed arena here for the band to play his favorite song, a brassy, sultry cumbia he had danced to as a teenager in Mexico City.