At Besame Mucho, a Latin Music Capital Por Nosotros

El Tri at Austin's inaugural Besame Mucho on March 2 (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

Booked like first-year Lollapalooza and staged à la ACL Fest, Circuit of the Americas’ Latin music eclipse, Besame Mucho on March 2, manifested a first for Austin and who knows where else: an alternate reality.

Brown music for brown people, tens of thousands of them, of US – ustedes, nosotros – in every size and shape and skin tone, and not one dressed down for an all-star Spanish-language spectacle as deep and vast as a Hill Country night.

Running 11am-11pm and listing 84 acts on four stages, the racetrack concert site still comes off as largely inhospitable. As far back as Mayhem Fest one apocalyptic August in 2013 at the then-Austin360 Amphitheater, the terrain blew a cloud of dust and grit akin to festival staging in a rock quarry. A decade hasn’t improved conditions much, but the footprint for Besame Mucho proved largely brilliant.

Day of the Dead decor at Circuit of the Americas (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

Enclosing a large but never sloggy roundabout, way better and more diverse food booths in the ACL style formed an outside circle to the grounds, with bars either accompanying or dividing up the stage quadrants of three headliner platforms and a slightly smaller fourth one. All employed revolving stages resembling those used on rodeo floors: spin the band! One set finishes, dudes clear the cables and outcroppings, and the whole riser revolves to reveal another ready-to-go Latin superstar.

Case in point: switchover from Spanish folk metallers Mägo de Oz to Argentine alt-rockers Enanitos Verdes on the Rockero stage went off more like a magic trick. What some assumed was an encore of the former band actually kicked off the latter group. Madrid’s Jethro Tull/Iron Maiden mix transitioned to Rock en Español anthems spanning 45 years in the blink of an eye.

Enanitos Verdes (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

Enanitos Verdes ventures here more than most, but playing to their native demographic, they could hardly be heard over the audience harmonizing. That proved the case for all headliners starting at dusk. Casual observers appeared few and far amongst the Latinate born and bred into this music.

Even in a state where country music dominates, urban sophisticates get antsy in a large gathering of hat-wearing Southwesterners. At Besame Mucho, cowboy hats rivaled any C&W summit, yet the contemporary vaquero look – women in shorts and boots, and men sporting sunglasses and open shirts – strutted and preened with head-swiveling chic in comparison to most REI-assisted festgoers of the boomer and/or collegial set. Carnaval-sized Day of the Dead decor rose equally striking all over the grounds, including a 20-foot red and undead chihuahua sitting between the Las Clasicas and Te Gusta el Pop? stages.

In the crowd at Besame Mucho (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

Chilean slickers La Ley thinned out Enanitos’ boomer choir with Nineties arena rock, so a trip to El Pop uncorked Sin Bandera. Mexico City duo of brains (Leonel Garcia) and beauty (Argentine hunk Noel Schajris), they roused aspirational balladry in the musical vicinity of Christian pop. The former held down the band as the latter shucked his shirt and parted the crowd with his sculpted torso.

Mexican rap-metal legacy Molotov lit the fuse on the Rockero stage, concentrating a sea of leather-wearers with swaggering riffs and beats. Raging against the machine one electroclash moment then pulling back proto-tropically the next, they headbanged throughout. 1997’s “Puto” bounced thousands like a trampoline.

Ramón Ayala (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

Over on Las Clasicas, El Tri mainstay Alex Lora also brought out the “puto” for a throng of native speakers. Dressed in Eighties leathers like Scorpions bandleader Klaus Meine, the Puebla-born potty mouth, 71, yowled like an alley cat in manner befitting a Mexican institution reaching back to the late-Seventies and once called their country’s Rolling Stones. Then again, “Triste Canción de Amor” brought out the cell lights, and in a luchador mask, Lora rasped a snippet of the festival’s theme song.

Grammy-winning accordion king Ramón Ayala, 78, held court there next, disarming the swelling masses with a swooning romanticism in standards such as “Rinconcito en el Cielo,” “Cuando Yo Era un Jovencito,” and “Tragos Amargos.” Fellow Ciudad Mexico hit men Café Tacuba, who played the second Lollapalooza in 1992, similarly electrified a younger demographic with buoyant and trademark pop existentialism courting a timelessness reminiscent of the Cure, Depeche Mode, and the Smiths.

Caifanes (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

Mexican rock rarity Caifanes followed by working the nuanced edges of guitar-driven New Wave, while ladies ruled the Pop platform. Monterrey-born Gloria Trevi stomped mainstage divahood while shucking outfit layers like a nesting doll. Lake Charles twosome Ha*Ash pranced and pounded a keyboard or two, and Alejandra Guzman ignited power ballads courting Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Six hours vested and temperature dropping, we trekked the mile-plus back to the car, missing Juanes and Los Tigres del Norte, but awed by a glimpse at an alternative Texas, an alternate sonic dimension, and the ever universal convergence of live music capitalists in Austin, Texas.

See more of David Brendan Hall's photos from the festival below or check out the entire gallery

Los Tigres del Norte (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

La Ley (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

Photo by David Brendan Hall