The Lake Placid Center for the Arts (LPCA) has announced two young Latin bands will perform at globalFEST: The New Golden Age of Latin Music on Tuesday, February 13 at 7 pm.

Acoustic alt-folk band Las Cafeteras, from East Los Angeles and indie mambo Orkesta Mendoza, from Tucson, AZ will take turns on stage.

The six-piece band Las Cafeteras began as a group of students at Eastside Cafe, a community space in East Los Angeles, where they learned to play son jarocho, a traditional music style from Veracruz, a state in the Gulf of Mexico. All of the band’s members are children of immigrants.

The group features traditional Mexican folk instruments including the jarana, an 8-string guitar; the quijada, a donkey jawbone (which serves as a percussive scraper) and a tarima, a wooden platform for dancing. While rooted in son jarocho, the LA Times called their sound a “uniquely Angeleno mishmash of punk, hip-hop, beat music, cumbia and rock.” It’s a mix-and-match of styles and sources that serves to deliver socially conscious lyrics, in both English and Spanish.

They have released two recordings. Their song “La Bamba Rebelde”, a politically-charged remake of “La Bamba” (perhaps the most famous son jarocho) from their CD It’s Time (2012) became a theme song for the telenovela Bajo El Mismo Cielo on the Telemundo network. Las Cafeteras’ second album, Tastes Like LA, featuring the powerful song “If I Was President”, was released in April 2016.

Orkesta Mendoza, originally founded by singer and guitarist Sergio Mendoza in 2009 to play a 20-minute tribute set honoring Cuban mambo king, Dámaso Perez Prado, is a dapper sextet that plays a high-energy combination of mambo, cumbia, psychedelia and rock. The Orkesta´s music, arranged to suggest a big band with a touch of lo-fi electronics, speaks of a borderless world in which US culture and Latin traditions come together.

It’s the music of ¡Vamos a Guarachar! (Let’s Party!), the band’s most recent release and an invitation to dance with a travelogue of styles that goes from surf rock to mambo and pop rock.

Tickets are $15 in advance and $20 at the door. For more information or to purchase tickets, call the LPCA Box Office at (518) 523-2512, or click here.

Photos provided: Above, Las Cafeteras (photo by Rafael Cardenas), and below, Orkesta Mendoza (Josh Harrison photo).