Photo by Mateus Mondini
"In the early 1980s, I got really into b-boy culture. I spun on my head and all of that shit." Martin Sorrondeguy, the documentarian and Los Crudos vocalist is reclining in his San Francisco apartment, recalling a time before he was either of those things. "Via dancing, I could actually come to together with kids from other neighborhoods and we weren’t killing each other."
Sorrondeguy is reflecting on his young life in Pilsen, the working-class Chicago neighborhood where his family arrived in 1968 from Uruguay. Enticed by 1980s mainstream media portrayals of punk in fear-for-your-children exposés and leather-clad Lux Interior’s performance in Urgh! A Music War—Sorrondeguy’s subcultural allegiance shifted from b-boy to hardcore punk.
In 1992, he released the first record by Los Crudos, a trenchant hardcore band whose lyrics, sung primarily in Spanish, treated underserved communities with unflagging empathy, savaged machinations of the state, and lampooned conservative attitudes within the scene. Los Crudos toured five continents, raised money for countless social-justice causes, and issued releases on its own Lengua Armada Discos label. In 1998, wary of tour regimens undermining the band’s capacity for activism, Los Crudos disbanded.
Sorrondeguy’s work since, as a documentarian, depicts the subculture as a tenacious force throughout the Spanish-speaking world. In 1999, he released Beyond the Screams, a documentary that chronicles Latino punks’ resistance to American immigration policy and prejudice. In 2013, Make-a-Mess Records released Get Shot, a photographic anatomization of punk around the globe. Sorrondeguy is less the voice and more so the amplification of Latino punk, highlighting a historically marginalized narrative of Latino punk in which Los Crudos played a pivotal role.
Near Sorrondeguy’s apartment is the headquarters of Maximum Rocknroll, punk’s longtime paper-of-record and record label behind Los Crudos’ new Double LP Discography. Sorrondeguy updated lyric translations ("Over the years, people seriously took it upon themselves to make certain changes.") and reproduced dozens of Los Crudos flyers for the booklet, while former MRR coordinators Mariam Bastani and Golnar Nikpour contributed incisive liner notes.
What follows is a truncated version of our Crudos conversation, but Sorrondeguy also underscored his more recent queer activism. "It’s still so stigmatized, in society at large and especially in Latino communities, even the left parts or among punks," he said. "As much as some punks want to say they’re anarchists or whatever—you can circle the "A" as much as you want but that fucking cross is still on your back."
Pitchfork: A lot people still disparage 1990s punk for being too political. "Self-righteous" is the usual dig. How do you see it?
Martin Sorrondeguy: You have to look at the context. People can look back at it twenty years later and say that, but coming out of the mid to late-'80s punk scene—it was a fucking disaster. All of the old-school people left, and what they left behind were the dregs: the most violent factions, the height of American skinhead culture. I would never have come out of the closet at that time.
It was the first time for a lot of these communities—like feminists in punk, queers in punk, Latinos in punk—where there was finally space and time for these issues. We didn’t talk about vegetarianism. …We talked about immigration, something that was very real to us. If you remember, that was the Pete Wilson era, with proposition 187, which was completely anti-immigrant. So, basically I can give a shit if some punk or hardcore kid was annoyed.
Pitchfork: Crudos lyrics emphasize families and especially the perspectives of mothers, which strikes me because punk tends to be very individualistic.
MS: That has to do again with these bigger issues, which don’t have to do with punk necessarily, like immigration and deportation. They don’t give a fuck if you’re an individual. I’m not going to speak for every Latino person, but a lot of our audience came from communities like ours in California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, wherever. …We didn’t have the luxury to pick and choose our politics.
Pitchfork: Golnar makes the point in her liner notes that Los Crudos starting Latino punk is a myth. Your documentary work shows its deeper roots.
MS: Latino punk existed in Latin America almost as soon as punk was a thing. Chicano and Latino punks have been there since the beginning in Los Angeles, but the lyrical content wasn’t always focused on those communities’ experiences. The Brat did a great song called "The Wolf". It’s in English, but it’s talking about immigration… The Plugz did "La Bamba" with altered lyrics in the 1970s. There was Huasipungo. Dogma Mundista… If you put all of those pieces together, you can create a narrative or a lineage. The Latino punk scene in the 1990s is when people started identifying with it.
Pitchfork: Touring was obviously huge for Crudos bringing Latino punk visibility. What else contributed to the band blowing up so quickly?
MS: We went to Mexico in 1993 after we’d been a band for about two years and there were about 1,000 people at the show. That had to do with bootlegging. Our first demo tape and our first 7” went from Chicago out into the world. Kids in Mexico started dubbing it and dubbing it—next thing you know there’s a 30th generation copy that sounds like fucking garbage and some kid is rocking it on a boom box.
Pitchfork: Most of the flyers reproduced in the liner notes are benefits, for anarchist community centers, women’s shelters, indigenous peoples’ organizations, and lots of other causes. The shows you’ve done since getting back together have mostly been benefits, too.
MS: If it wasn’t a benefit, and it was a local show, the majority of the money was given to touring bands. That’s just the way we were. The agreement between members of Los Crudos was that if we were going to bring the band back together it had to be done in Crudos style. That was the condition. And everybody was in agreement. We could’ve [released the discography] ourselves but we wanted to do it with Maximum and help them out a bit, which basically continues in the tradition of giving a lot of our shit away.
Pitchfork: Assembling material for the new compilation, were you trying to emphasize anything about the band in particular?
MS: With the flyers, I wanted to show the diversity of the shows we played. I didn’t want people to think we were all about Latino power, because we weren’t only about that. There are kids who come up and think we don’t want to interact with other cultures, but we weren’t into separatism. At times we had to correct people on shit like that. The flyers show variety—there’s Justice for Janitors.
Pitchfork: What causes did you raise money for where the effect was particularly moving?
MS: We drove through the land and met [Native-American land activists] the Dann Sisters, who were part of the struggle. Out in the middle of the desert there was a guy who was just staying out there to make sure their land wasn’t getting taken away. This punk guy from the city had been living there for months because of our 7”. He was like, “Hey, I got your record, I read the shit in it, and I came out here to help them.”