As bombs exploded on the streets of Lima, Peru, Luis Zapata drowned out the noise with an explosion of a different kind: the furious guitars on Kiss’ album Alive! Music, specifically heavy metal, provided Zapata refuge during a childhood spanning the 1970s and 1980s – an era of violence in Peru. The military dictatorship that took power in 1968 considered rock & roll “imperialism,” he said.
Given the political environment of his childhood, Zapata admits that the dream he is now living is a fantasy that even his younger self could not have envisioned. He founded Rock Lectures exploring Latinx and Native American contributions to rock & roll, plays a key role in putting on major Austin events like the Pecan Street Festival, and has his own production company. “In December, we recorded with Gene Simmons in Electric Lady Studios,” he said. “I mean, what the fuck would I have thought? That was my hero.”
Zapata is one example of the impact immigration has had on Austin’s music scene. The city’s vision has always been global. It is the Live Music Capital of the World, after all.
Zapata first came to the city in 1983 when his parents sent the rambunctious teenager to learn English. His father had studied engineering at the University of Texas at Austin from 1959-1960.
“Man, here, to be 15 years old by yourself? I was bored in Tarrytown, and it was a matter of taking a cab to Sixth Street,” Zapata said. “Then all of a sudden you’re like in this paradise where you had one club that had metal, the other one had New Wave, the other one had country, the other one had blues, reggae, all live.”
He spent two months with a host family in Tarrytown. His parents hoped that their son would have “grown up,” but instead they found a kid who hadn’t cut his hair, had gotten his ear pierced, and had gotten better at applying eyeliner in the style popular among metalheads.
Six years later, he came back to study at UT, where he met the famed professor of Latin American music Gerard Béhague at the bar in the Texas Union. After the two struck up a conversation, Zapata lay in his bed in an alcohol-induced haze and had an epiphany: He was going to make a career in the music industry. He started at Catfish Records as an intern and is now a key player in Austin’s music scene.
But Zapata acknowledges that he wouldn’t be here without the support of people in the music industry, like Ernie Durawa, Casey Monahan, and Tary Owens, who wrote letters on his behalf for the visa application process. Now, he has made an effort to connect with younger generations of artists living in the city.
One beneficiary of the wisdom of Zapata is fellow Peruvian Salvatore Sissa. Zapata studied at UT with Sissa’s father. “Having another Peruvian who has gone through the same process, with all the fees and stresses of it, has been very helpful,” Sissa said in a text. “He gave me a lot of advice based on his experience.” The Berklee-trained guitarist was running out of time on his student visa, which allows students to stay one year after graduating, and was navigating the opaque process to acquire an O-1B visa, designed for people with extraordinary ability in the arts, to let him work in the city he had come to love after almost one year.
As Sissa considered his post-college options, he went through a list of cities – New York, Los Angeles, Miami – but none felt right. Finally, he landed on Austin. Like so many other artists, he had visited for South by Southwest in 2023. He had been struck by the sheer density of musicians at the festival. “There’s a lot of talent there,” Sissa said of Austin in general, citing musicians like Gary Clark Jr. and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
An Outdated System
Sissa, who has known he wanted to be a musician since the age of 15, dreams of creating a cultural exchange program between Peru and the U.S. focused on music, particularly a Latin American style of rock that he thinks could take off in Austin. Since moving to Austin in September 2023, Sissa has played with a variety of bands, making appearances at prominent festivals like Austin City Limits Music Festival, South by Southwest, and UTOPiAfest.
Those types of performances helped boost Sissa’s visa application, but the process is seldom straightforward. For that reason Sissa and other artists work with lawyers. Jason Finkelman is one such attorney. Finkelman sees the immigration laws as due for an update. “A lot of the modern-day things that we would think about to show that a person has extraordinary achievements – like they’ve got internet buzz, or they’ve got Twitter followers, or they’ve got massive Instagram or Spotify downloads – it’s like those don’t even exist, because these archaic immigration laws don’t reflect the reality of the world we live in today,” he said.
The O-1B visa considers six criteria, of which artists aim to meet three. They include having a high salary in your field and letters of recommendation from music industry leaders. “You can’t just be like, ‘Oh, we’re a garage band from the UK. No one’s ever heard of us. We just want to come here and tour the U.S. and start to drum up business,’” Finkelman said. On the other hand, you don’t necessarily have to be a Shakira-level star.
Finkelman added that international musicians continue to want to live in Austin. “On the musician side, I continue to see it still being a city that attracts talented musicians, because it’s a great live music scene, it’s already got talented musicians, producers, engineers that are here that foreign talent wants to work with,” he said.
As Sissa navigated his immigration process, he didn’t have to look far to see the tenuousness of his status in the U.S. Fellow Berklee graduate Nicol Kuburoğlu, who grew up in Cyprus and the United Kingdom, found herself in a nightmare in July 2023 when she received notice that she was being deported and needed to leave the country in five days. With an apartment lease freshly signed, a dog to care for, and a dwindling savings account after the government informed her a month prior that she could no longer work, Kuburoğlu frantically made arrangements to put her life in Austin on hold and return to her parents just north of London.
After graduating in 2022, she had received an offer to be a talent buyer with C3 Presents in Austin. “A month before anyone had even reached out to me about this job, I remember saying to my dad, ‘The last place I’d ever move to in the entirety of the United States is Texas,’” she said. But, after a weeklong visit to the city, she quickly fell in love with its strong sense of community. “There’s a warmth to Texas in general, but Austin as well,” she said. “It kind of reminds me of Cyprus in that way. It’s very community-oriented.”
Little did she know that she would be stress-testing that sense of community a year later, when she had friends care for her dog and some of her things. “At the time, we thought my lawyer knew a lot about the O1 visa,” said Kuburoğlu of the lawyer C3 Presents had hired to process her case. Despite starting the process in November 2022, her lawyer didn’t submit the application until May 1, 2023, just five weeks before her student visa was set to expire. In mid-June, the government asked for more evidence and laid out that she didn’t qualify for the artist visa. By July she received the deportation notice and left the country on August 3.
But she didn’t quit on her dream of making a career in the U.S. “My parents put everything into me being able to move to the U.S. and pursue a career in music,” she said. “I think part of it for me was not letting them down and not letting one idiot lawyer just be fucking everything up.” She added that her love of music and her work at C3 Presents motivated her to push on.
She managed to continue her work for C3 Presents in the UK, though technically she was working for Live Nation London, and paid for her own attorney to start the process again. When she revisited her original application file, she found that it was nearly empty, devoid of evidence. Eventually, Kuburoğlu’s application was approved. She’s been back in Austin since November 2023. Now, she’s working toward taking the next step: a green card, which would give her permanent resident status.
Immigration Powers Austin’s Growth
Under a new administration that promises mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, it’s conceivable that migration to the U.S. could slow. But if recent demographic trends hold, the number of international musicians who call Austin home could continue to grow. While the city’s population growth plateaus, immigrants continue to move to the city in large numbers. “We saw a big increase in international migration,” said Lila Valencia, a demographer with the city of Austin, about last year. “International migration made up 22 percent of the population change this time around, when typically it’s closer to like 10 percent or so.”
As international migration drives the city’s growth, Valencia said that it’s exciting to consider that the city could be starting to develop the type of international diversity seen in other Texas cities like Houston and Dallas. How musicians fit into that dynamic remains unclear. Valencia said that the city has a “vibrant” music scene, but it’s hard to identify any trends for a group that makes up such a small share of the economy.
Valencia also noted that “disruptions” in South American countries are playing a role in the boosted international migration numbers.
Claudio Ramírez’s birthplace of Venezuela has been among those South American countries that have seen its population leave en masse, often for the U.S. The Caracas native wears a few hats in the Austin music scene, including audio engineer, music producer, and performing musician (mostly playing bass). As a touring musician, he saw many different styles of music in countries like Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador. Eventually that touring took him to Austin in 2013 for a show at South by Southwest. “I was like, ‘Oh, looks like a cool town, with a solid music scene,’” he said.
The next year he and his wife returned to SXSW on a tourist visa to scout the city. They were sold on it. They liked the pace of the city, with enough to do but not overwhelming. “I’ll take the city over many others every day,” he said. Ramírez moved to the U.S. in November 2014 on an O1 Visa, noting that his portfolio of work was already strong as he had been working in the industry for about a decade. He became a permanent resident in 2019.
He has seen multiple waves of Venezuelans leave the beleaguered country, including this most recent group. He considers himself lucky to have gotten out with some savings and a plan. The country he grew up in has now become almost unrecognizable. “I was just a speck in the diaspora that happened,” he said. “Most of the venues I miss are no longer there. Most of the bands I miss are no longer there.”
Here in Austin, he feels firmly rooted and has experienced “Is this really happening?” moments, like hearing a song he produced (“Respiração” by Ley Line) on the radio while driving his parents or playing in KUTX’s Studio 1A with Harry Edohoukwa. But he’s also stayed close to his roots, noting a yearly tradition of gathering with other Venezuelans to eat food from the country. As the number of Venezuelans in the city has grown, he has found some of his favorite dishes increasingly popping up in Austin (try the Patacón at Sabor Venezolano, he says).
The growing Venezuelan population represents how global trends can impact something as seemingly unrelated as the Austin music scene. And no global event has been bigger in this century than the COVID-19 pandemic.
Oil : Water :: Pandemic : Live Music
The pandemic proved a challenging time for musicians, particularly for those who found themselves thousands of miles from home with a precarious immigration status. Sissa, for one, had started at Berklee in January 2020 but opted not to leave because Donald Trump tried to make it so students could not attend university while living out of the country. Kuburoğlu lived with her partner at the time in Philadelphia, opting not to leave the country for the same reason.
For nonstudent artists, the decision was also a difficult one. Henri Herbert, a rock & roll piano player, moved to Austin in 2019. He grew up in a town called Clacton-on-Sea in the UK and played his first “gig” as a 12-year-old while on vacation in Apt, France. A group of buskers were short a pianist, and he joined them. By the end of the show, the group’s hat was filled with money. He’d made about 100 euros and knew that he could make money off his musical ability.
Eventually he moved to London and joined the Jim Jones Revue. The band toured the U.S. and made an appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman in 2011. Two years later, a video of Herbert playing piano in a train station went viral on YouTube and labels began to reach out. Around that time, he started seriously considering moving to the U.S. “All my best work was in America. All my best concerts were in America. Everything was happening for me in America,” he said. Herbert had come to Austin for South by Southwest for a show featuring his own music in 2016.
When he finally moved to Austin in 2019, he quickly realized the weight of the decision he had made. He said the most difficult part was the distance from family. He said that “there’s a permanence about” leaving your home country. He felt that permanence acutely when the pandemic began just months after he’d arrived. Tragedy struck when his grandmother passed away in 2020. “I had to say goodbye to my grandmother over the phone from thousands of miles away,” he said.
The nightmare of the pandemic helped Herbert keep perspective on his work. “Any kind of difficulty, financial difficulty I was in, or any kind of inconvenience to my profession or anything like that, it was all dwarfed by … people were dying. People were losing relatives. People were losing friends, brothers and sisters,” he said.
But he also saw the strength of Austin’s music community during that time. He felt support from club owners in the city and other musicians. Theo Lawrence too felt welcomed when he moved to the city in 2023. Lawrence, who grew up in Paris, had dreamed of moving to the U.S., because of his old-school country style. “We were always kind of seen as an oddity,” he said of playing country music in France. In 2019, he came to Austin to visit the city and realized, “This is where I need to be.”
Unfortunately, shortly after he got back from his Austin visit, COVID struck, so he had to postpone his dream. Finally, after the borders reopened, he brought the band he was a part of back to Austin in 2022. Then in September 2023, he moved to the city for good along with his bandmate Thibault Ripault.
Calling Austin Home
Lawrence has benefited from the openness of Austin’s music scene. Prominent club owners wrote letters of recommendation for his O-1B visa application. Now that his visa has been approved, Lawrence is feeling settled in Austin. “We can just be here and play and be surrounded by all these musicians, improve, get better at what we do,” he said. He even played at the ACL Music Festival in the fall.
Meanwhile, Sissa received his permanent immigration status in the fall for an O1 visa, giving three more years to stay in the U.S. He admitted that he found the archaic process taxing. “It’s very hard to achieve in one year,” he said of the visa criteria, “while sustaining yourself financially.” Like Lawrence, Sissa expresses gratitude for the support he’s received from Austin’s music scene and people like Zapata.
From Zapata’s perspective, bringing in exceptional artists from around the world benefits him too. He sees young, talented musicians like Sissa as critical for the city’s arts scene. “Sooner or later, your era is over, and it has to be, because the arts need to renew,” Zapata said. “The nobility of this moment in life is to teach what you have learned, so they won’t make the same mistakes you may have made.”
Preserving Austin’s globalized music identity means embracing international musicians, and, despite the best efforts of an outdated and often antagonistic immigration system, Zapata and other Austin music leaders intend to continue doing just that.
This article appears in November 29 • 2024.