On Oct. 15, 2022, Como Las Movies played a massive Austin altar.
“There on the humongous Honda headliner stage, a half-dozen men of color dressed in authentic Americas garb fired up the fiesta,” reported the Chronicle of their ACL Fest debut.
Amassing revelers out of thin air in patented ATX fashion – exactly the same as local blues beacon Jimmie Vaughan on the same stage, afternoon slot, and second weekend just last month – the equally homegrown and no less quintessentially Texan Como Las Movies put on a 21st-century cumbia-thon. To paraphrase Rocky Horror Picture Show‘s “Time Warp,” it’s just two tiny jumps to the left, then the same to the right. Dancers, slithery electronics, ratcheting percussion, live-wire guitar, and equine tempos threw down a metaphysical gauntlet: Dance or die.
“Fantastic experience, man,” nods Nelson Valente Aguilar 363 days later, last year also marking a decade for his phoenix from the ashes of previous long-term rock commitment, Maneja Beto (2002-2012). “Musicians have asked me about that day. It was magical.”
Formerly of festival promoters C3 Presents, Shiela Gonzalez duetted with Aguilar that afternoon on “Café,” a bright, bulbous hip-grinder now batting third on Como Las Movies’ debut full-length. Vinyl only until uploading online at the end of November, Como Las Singles finds multi-instrumentalist Aguilar taking over bilingual vocal duties from previous mic wielder Rene Chavez.
“I remember us having a conversation leading up to ACL about his transition to frontman after the original frontman left,” emails Gonzalez from Miami. “He’s like, ‘I wouldn’t have chosen this. It’s a lot of attention.'”
“Sheila goes, ‘Hey, by the way, what stage will y’all be playing?'” recalls Aguilar. “I told her, ‘Oh, I think it’s the Honda stage, I don’t know.’
“She goes, ‘WHAT?!’ She freaked out. ‘Do you know how fucking big that stage is!?’
“Then I started freaking out. I suffer from anxiety, man. ‘Oh fuck, what are you talking about!?'”
Sí, hombre. You’ve come a longass way – like all the way from the Valley. What does it mean to come from there?
“It’s a collection of border towns,” begins the singer, proudly sporting a Selena/Slayer mash-up tee. “Es una colección de pueblitos ahí. You know, right there next to the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico, where my family’s from. You start at Rio Grande City and go all the way to Brownsville.
“I remember us having a conversation leading up to ACL about his transition to frontman after the original frontman left. He’s like, ‘I wouldn’t have chosen this. It’s a lot of attention.’” – Shiela Gonzalez
“It used to be a place to go across and, you know, get dental work. Back in the day, you also went to Mexico to party. It’s cheap and extremely poor. Now you have Elon Musk in Brownsville taking over Boca Chica. He went to Cameron County, one of the poorest in the country. I’m from [nearby] Hidalgo County.
“Not much to do. There’s agricultural work. As a kid, I helped mom out [picking melón]. From McAllen we moved to Weslaco, which is sandwiched in between McAllen and Harlingen. We lived in the colonias [the unincorporated subdivisions] of Val Verde.
“My upbringing was marked by poverty.”
Despite window display daydreams involving instruments as early as age 4, Aguilar didn’t own any. He recounts a heartbreaking near-miss when mom also favored an Easter basket at the store with a uke-sized guitar. She asked Aguilar to mind her purse in order to use the facilities, but that little blue number distracted him from his watch.
“We were poor as fuck,” he says. “Everything was in that purse: birth certificates, money, the key to the house we rented. She never got mad at me for losing it, but she cried the whole way home.”
Looney Tunes eventually saved Aguilar.
“At 13, I borrowed guitars,” he continues. “Somebody had a plastic Bugs Bunny guitar with two strings and that’s how I started learning. I did a podcast during the pandemic and people don’t talk about how it takes money to play music. It was very difficult for me, living in the colonias, to get an instrument.
“Mom couldn’t afford one, but also nobody around played. Nobody had a fucking instrument.”
Father banned 10 years earlier, a violent encounter with his younger brother resulted in Aguilar being “taken in” by two high school English teachers. When Austin came up among his friend set, his “fosters” agreed as long as it included the University of Texas, where he enrolled in 1993. Five years later, he walked, and 25 years after that, he teaches second grade in Southeast Austin.
Launched with an in-store at Waterloo Records last Friday, Como Las Singles cops to cumbia from second song “Am I Cumbia? Yes, I Am.”
“It’s ingrained in me,” chuckles Aguilar about the Q&A title. This comes after detailing his early DIY Chicano act Shaft el Grupo de Rock, a crucial booking at infamous punk dive Blue Flamingo (now Chess Club), and LCD Soundsystem as blueprint for Como Las Movies, currently a fivepiece. “I didn’t realize it until I was much older, though. Not only did I rediscover my identity as a brown person at UT. I discovered this beat, this rhythm, this style.”
Cumbia futurist from the genre’s Colombian crucible, Víctor-Andrés Cruz of Austin act Nemegata concurs:
“The abundant use of synthesizers in CLM’s cumbias makes me connect it to what’s known as the ‘Cumbia Villera’ – slum Cumbia, ghetto Cumbia, shantytown Cumbia – that developed in the working-class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires in the ’90s,” he texts. “That sound became popular throughout Latin America.”
Arrow straight through the corazón as depicted on its mestizo cover art by Cat Barrera, Como Las Singles delivers from first feather to last pull from the quiver. Sabrina Ellis of Sweet Spirit and A Giant Dog trills Spanish on opener “La 6,” while the flip side christens to vinyl the group’s 2018 bow Nuevo Wave. The just-as-joyously disarming EP cover tributes Aguilar’s cousin and childhood BFF, Kokiss.
That first CLM gig with Grupo Fantasma at Flamingo Cantina in 2012 feels far, far away.
“I don’t explicitly recall that show,” messages Beto Martinez. “What I do recall is that the first session I ever did in my studio here in Buda was with Como Las Movies. Adrian [Quesada] was in the process of renovating his home studio, so [he produced them here].
“Nelson and I go back to the Maneja Beto days. We have a shared background in growing up on the border and being into 1980s metal and rock.”
Today, Aguilar wears an AC/DC Highway to Hell shirt. He addresses a lecture hall full of public relations majors receiving a crash course in journalism taught by multiple professor,s including yours truly. Among my meetups with Aguilar, one rendezvous at Batch planned this chat at his alma mater, parallel to the one you’re reading.
He tells the rapt room of students about Como Las Singles centerpiece “El Beso,” a song written for his mother to help unburden her from their past. “Lloré, lloré, lloré y al fin yo canté,” laments a rapturous lyric and melody. “I cried and cried and cried, until finally I sang.“
Jarana chest high, Aguilar tunes the half-sized, eight-string Mexican guitar. Collective breath held, he strums tartly while sweetly crooning “Una Vuelta Más.” Excited molecules charge the auditorium air. He’s unburdened himself.
“[The album] is out and I can finally take a breather,” exhaled Aguilar beforehand. “In Spanish there’s this phrase, ‘un desahogo,’ a relief. I put so much energy into this and now, mi desahogué. That’s very therapeutic for me, because now I can begin working on the new stuff.”
Como Las Movies plays Been There 2, a festival benefiting the hosting Esperanza Community for unhoused Austinites, on Nov. 11 alongside the Pharcyde, Brownout, and more. They’re also booked at Waterloo Greenway’s Creek Show on Nov. 16. Pick up a vinyl copy of Como Las Singles online via Try Hard Coffee Roasters or in person at Waterloo Records. Aguilar says the album will be up on streaming services at the end of November.
This article appears in November 10 • 2023.
