Felix Contreras

Kid Frost is a bit of a pioneer in Latin rap, and his 1990 track "La Raza" is also a ground breaking track, sampling the El Chicano jazz/rock classic "Viva Tirado." All of that is a given.

What blows my mind is that it has been 25 years since that ...

Rita Moreno will receive the Kennedy Center Honor next month for her career in show business. With a new gig as a voice in an animated TV series and a new album, there's no way she's done performing.

In an era of segregation and base stereotypes, Richard Durham brought a different tone to broadcast radio. On Sunday mornings in the '40s, he told nuanced stories of history's great black Americans.

It only makes sense that a listening party led by twin sisters Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz, who make up the duo Ibeyi, would turn into a cool singalong. The two seem to have music pouring out of them at every second: As soon as they sat down in the ...

I am old school — I still get my music mostly from CDs, and I had a stack to play for this show.

Sometimes the music speaks for itself. So that's what we're doing on Alt.Latino this week. As they used to say in the radio biz, it's all about ...

Much has happened for Gina Chavez since I first saw her at an unofficial SXSW showcase about five years ago: two albums, fan and industry recognition, this year's Austin Music Award for Austin Musician Of The Year. Chavez's music has developed over the years, just as it should.

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My Alt.Latino co-host, Jasmine Garsd, has never shown much interest in an episode about children's music. She doesn't have kids, so the magic of the idea is lost on her. So I enlisted two of my fellow NPR dads, Eyder Peralta and Rolando Arrieta, for a discussion of what we ...

How do you go back to the well after 40 years spent drawing up buckets and buckets of creativity? Where do you find the inspiration? How do you get motivated? How do you stare down that blank page one more time?

That was the dilemma Los Lobos inevitably faced ...

Have you ever spent hours in a record store and come home with so much great music that you didn't know where to start?

"Record store? What's that?"

OK. To get a feel of what that was like, take a look at the list of songs we play in this ...

We listen to a lot of different kinds of music at Alt.Latino. Every now and then, we like to play material that falls outside of the Latin Alternative vein. So we asked our colleague Anastasia Tsioulcas to bring in tracks that she's collected for her blog, Latitudes, and help ...

Few of us get to witness a true historical moment — the kind that can change the world. On August 14, the moment the U.S. flag was raised over a newly opened U.S. Embassy in Cuba, Arturo O'Farrill witnessed one of those moments.

The Cuban-American musician was one of ...

Last December, the night before Barack Obama announced that he would seek to update U.S. relations with Cuba, Arturo O'Farrill and The Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra played a gig at Havana's U.S. Interest Section.

O'Farrill took the ALJO there to record an album in the hopes of illustrating that, ...

Like most of you, Alt.Latino won't be able to make it to Brasil Summerfest 2015, a 10-day explosion of music held each year in New York City. But the least we can do is bring a bit of the festival to you.

We invited co-curator Beco Dranoff to ...

When mariachi musician Nati Cano died last year the world lost a true cultural warrior. His dedication to the Mexican folk music was a lifelong passion that took place initially in bars and at public events, then eventually on the world's greatest stages.

His singular focus was highlighting ...

Our little corner of the music world seems to be getting bigger and bigger.

Earlier this month, there were three music festivals in one weekend dedicated exclusively to Latin alternative music. They reflected the genre's growth and popularity in very distinct ways. To get to the bottom of this, we ...

The Colombian folkloric vocalist Totó la Momposina is considered a living, cultural treasure in that country. Since the 1970s, she has been singing and dancing to the music of the Colombian Caribbean coast on stages around the world.

Her seminal album was La Candela Vive, which she recorded for

For the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead's founding, the band will perform three shows — their last — in Chicago this weekend. According to Billboard magazine, the "Fare Thee Well" concerts will bring in an estimated $50 million. That's pretty impressive, considering that band's lead guitarist died two ...

Had we served pisco in the studio, it would made for a pretty cool party. But even without beverages, we still had a great time with members of the Peruvian band Novalima serving as Alt.Latino guest DJs.

Along the way, we took a deep dive into the magic of Afro-Peruvian ...

The Summer Solstice seems like as good a reason as any to dig into the mail for some new music. Alt.Latino co-host Jasmine Garsd is traveling on assignment, but she did leave behind a few tracks to share on this week's episode, including something new from our favorite artist of ...

My Alt.Latino co-host, Jasmine Garsd, accurately describes this track by the Peruvian band Novalima as a three-layer cake of time. Consider the ingredients: It's based on an iPhone recording of a 1950s-era vocalist; it's propelled by an Afro-Peruvian cajon, a percussion instrument that dates back to the slave trade in ...