culture
Daily PANAMANIA Tip Sheet: Café Tacvba
You know what’s world-class? PANAMANIA’s music festival programming. Here’s our guide to the must-see free music shows of the day, every day, during the fest.
Café Tacvba
Panamania Live @ Nathan Phillips Square (100 Queen Street West)
Wednesday, July 22 at 9:45 p.m.
Across the entire Spanish-speaking world, which includes some 400 million people in the Americas and beyond, Mexican rock band Café Tacvba is a household name. Period.
Named for a century-old Mexico City restaurant whose midcentury heyday helped launch the pachuco subculture (picture liberated 1940s Latinas in slacks and pomaded gangsters in zoot suits), the beloved band has been around since the early 1990s but hasn’t lost a speck of its relevance. Like so many contemporary, popular Latino artists, they’re known for bringing strains of regionally-specific music—in this case, staple Mexican genres like norteño, bolero, and ranchera—into otherwise straightforward rock and ska. Their songs are danceable, singable, and infinitely catchy, and point to the mindblowing dynamism of the Latin American artistic soul. If that doesn’t sell you on tonight’s free show, go for the crowd watching; we promise hundreds of screaming fans from around the world will make the experience well worth your while.