Hay que venir al sur is a column from the music journalist and Songmess podcast host Richard Villegas. Winking to the campy classic from the Italian disco diva Raffaella Carrà, the column is an invitation to explore the kaleidoscopic music scenes blossoming south of the border. In this issue, Villegas plunges into the irreverent, archetype-defying darkness of Latin American goth.
Listen while you read: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5WG1kDaH4XahFZdtDlwgEI?si=0f4c1336ad39445d
Goth, in all its blackened, tenebrous motifs, may seem antithetical to a region packaged and sold to the Global North as a series of tropical paradises populated by “spicy” and “caliente” tropes, but make no mistake: Latin America has been through serious shit. We are children of gruesome colonization; of strip-mined patrimonial wealth; of constantly destabilized governments and growing national debt. Sorrow and bleakness are as much ours as the fortitude to overcome.
This turmoil is often refracted through the lens of magical realism, a literary canon wherein masterpieces like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo weave criollo superstition and robust sociopolitical critique. Goth refines the narrative language through macabre imagery and raw emotionality, more explicitly examining the violence and injustice that historically ravage Latin America. Published nearly a century apart, María Luisa Bombal’s The Shrouded Woman and Mariana Enríquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire unspooled tales of stifled protagonists and murderous patriarchies from within coffins and bonfires. In film, Mexican director Guillermo del Toro employed horror and fantasy to dissect the very human cost of the Spanish Civil War in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. And in the 2023 dark comedy, El Conde, filmmaker Pablo Larraín lampooned power-hungry despots by depicting Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a pathetic 250-year-old vampire.
Latin America is a perfect ecosystem for goth: a territory where the syncretism of Indigenous spirituality, African elemental deities, and baroque European Catholicism has produced a wondrous and often silly folkloric canon. Vengeful specters La Llorona and La Patasola roam the streets of towns in Mexico and Colombia, while mythical creatures like Chile’s goblinesque Trauco and the ’90s pop culture favorite, the chupacabra, lurk hungrily in rural shadows. Moreover, in communities where pre-Hispanic wisdom remains intrinsic to quotidian life, death is ever present and honored as an immutable chapter of existence. November’s Día de los Muertos festivities originated as a metaphor for the corn harvest and subsequent crop renewal—a cycle of life and death taking place in the very soil on which we stand. Admittedly, the added promise of one day reuniting with our loved ones makes the mysteries of the beyond go down a little easier.
When it comes to music, a similar grab bag of influences emerges. You’ll recognize goth hallmarks most clearly in the rock en español wave of the ’80s and ’90s, where early records from superstars like Mexico’s Caifanes and Argentina’s Soda Stereo presented the bands as moody Robert Smith lookalikes adapting a cocktail of British new romantics and Spanish punk. Caifanes in particular made a splash with sullen faces and teased black locks, striking gold with their cover of the Cuban son classic “La Negra Tomasa,” which they Frankensteined into a cumbia rock anthem for the ages. The song’s unmistakable tropical DNA and its enduring ubiquity within alternative circles bridged the divide between traditional music and imported style codes, a marriage that later recurred in La MiniTK del Miedo’s dæmonic cumbias and Gallo Lester’s leather-clad mambo-metal epics.
In the Dominican Republic, merengue godfather Toño Rosario—known to the world for his gibberish party starter “Kulikitaka”—is affectionately referred to as El Cuco, or the Boogeyman, a flashy nickname reappropriated from childhood bullying. However, he lives up to the sinister moniker with extravagant outfits inspired by industrial music and metal, complete with mesh tops, leather harnesses, and spiky grommets that contrast against the formal elegance of trailblazing peers such as Johnny Ventura and Wilfrido Vargas.
Toño Rosario shot to stardom in the 1970s with his family’s seminal merengue group, Los Hermanos Rosario, going solo in the ’90s but staying true to the genre’s fast-swinging crowd-pleasers. In interviews, he credits his Puerto Rican wife, Yaritza Rivera, with masterminding his transgressive stage persona in the early aughts, noting the initial pushback to his wraithlike style evolution and ripples across new expressions in Caribbean masculinity, now epitomized by adventurous reggaeton stars like Rauw Alejandro and Bad Bunny. The latter’s Nosferatu-inspired turn in the music video for the trap fever dream “Baticano” is one of the finest examples of Latin goth cross-pollination.
Gender and sexual exploration are among the perennial tenets of goth, and in the 2010s, reggaeton became a perfect case study with the malcriado rise of neoperreo, ushering a new ass-shaking underground spearheaded by women and queer people. The movement’s high priestess, Tomasa del Real, embodied an intersection of internet lawlessness and vampy raver aesthetics honed in the Chilean beach town of Iquique, a hemisphere away from reggaeton’s Caribbean home turf. Early club favorites like “Tu señora” and “Barre con el pelo” flipped outdated criticism of reggaeton’s objectification of women by showcasing a hypersexual interlocutor with unapologetic agency over her body and desires. To further counteract música urbana’s pervasive boys’ club antics, del Real assembled a coterie of raunchy collaborators including Lizz and DJ Sustancia, storming the digital scene in barely there latex getups and enough eyeliner to black out the sun.
The paradigm-shifting ethos of neoperreo (which boiled down to safe, sweaty dance floors for all—not unlike goth’s own subterranean bacchanals) proved exceedingly pliable. In Mexico, these grainy dembow beats hybridized with otaku fashions and chirping anime samples in uproarious projects from Sailorfag and Army of Skanks. A few years later, the dawning of a new generation of nightclub divas, including Isabella Lovestory and Six Sex, thrust the scene into hedonistic techno bedlam and vampire raves right out of the Blade films. Hell, even rock’s virulent resentment toward reggaeton eroded under neoperreo’s libertine worldview, leading acts like Friolento and Saúl De los Santos to reimagine crossover smashes from Karol G and Maluma into viral post-punk howlers.
It’s one thing is to hear gothic echoes across a plethora of genres; it’s another to plunge into the heart of darksness—shout out to Mexican viral star La Elvíra, mistress of Latino goths, also known as “darks.” Any attempt to pinpoint these origins should begin in late 1970s Spain, at the end of General Francisco Franco’s nearly four-decade dictatorship. Shedding the shackles of censorship, political persecution, and cultural starvation, Spain reentered the world stage at a time when artsy punks in London and New York were chipping away at the rock establishment, while nerdy avant-gardists in Paris and Berlin brought disco and electronic experimentation to the foreground. Musicians, filmmakers, painters, and playwrights were reinvigorated by this phantasmagoria of ideas, and, dovetailing into an irrepressible gay liberation movement, they produced the creative golden age of La Movida Madrileña.
In 1977, a ragtag group of writers and illustrators in Madrid formed the punk band Kaka de Luxe. They wore gaudy hand-me-downs and thrifted finds, evoking the retro-futurist cheek of the B-52s, and recording a handful of greaser-inspired rock songs that were closer to Chuck Berry than the Sex Pistols. Though they disbanded within the year, the wreckage spawned crucial scenesters like Fernando “El Zurdo” Márquez’s new wave groups Paraíso and La Mode, as well as the first iteration of future rock en español behemoth Radio Futura. However, the spotlight lingered over the triumvirate of Nacho Canut, Carlos Berlanga, and a teenage singer called Olvido Gara, who’d become the outlandishly painted face of La Movida under the stage name Alaska.
Before the decade was out, the trio formed a new band called Alaska y los Pegamoides, stacking their ranks with fellow underground denizens Ana Curra and Eduardo Benavente, and embracing a bouncy mix of disco and post-punk. The absurdly gothic cover for their sole album, Grandes éxitos, is framed like a family portrait, abundant in colorful mohawks and powdered faces that nodded to formative ghouls Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Their lyrics drew from classic horror and sci-fi, spinning bizarre tales about slashers and inter-dimensional travel. But it was “Bailando,” an ode to nightclubbing frivolity, that topped charts in Europe and across the pond and cemented La Movida’s camp irreverence.
Soon after, Curra and Benavente broke off into the enormously influential death rock band Parálisis Permanente, building on acerbic songwriting with chainsaw guitars. They leaned into a snarling punk counterculture seething under the rage of a generation raised in tyranny, which grew increasingly anarchic at the hands of Eskorbuto and La Polla Records. Meanwhile, Pegamoides’s remaining members mutated into Alaska y Dinarama, doubling down on disco and new wave and reigning throughout the 1980s with an avalanche of freaky freedom anthems, chief among them “Ni tú ni nadie” and “A quién le importa.” Alaska was also one of director Pedro Almodóvar’s first muses, appearing in his 1980 film debut, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, which captured the riveting no-budget ingenuity of the time and even inspired the one-day Oscar winner to launch his gender-bending new wave act, Almodóvar & McNamara.
Eventually, the Aqua Net fumes wafted south, touching down in Argentina and igniting a ferocious punk scene that took aim at their own military regime. The abject quagmire that was the 1982 Falklands War—and for any sudacas in the chat, “Las Malvinas son Argentinas!”—resulted in a preposterous ban on English-language music, which in turn catapulted dissident bands like Los Violadores and Sumo to national stardom. Similar intersections of social resistance and gloomy tunes emerged across the region, with Los Traidores in Uruguay, Los Prisioneros in Chile, and Cabine C in Brazil pouring anger and despair into the era’s quintessential post-punk records.
Though Mexico was not directly subject to a dictatorship, government officials flexed their repressive might during altercations with student groups in 1968 and 1971, massacring dozens and deepening social resentment. In December 1971, the reefer and love-friendly Avándaro music festival attracted an estimated 250,000 patrons over the course of two days, incurring a tidal wave of backlash from conservative media and officials despite no deaths or serious injuries being reported. To tighten his grip on youth culture, President Luis Echeverría passed legislation barring rock music from large stages or clubs, even imposing fines on radio stations that played rock in Spanish. This paved the way for an Anglo takeover of the airways and drove Mexican rock into dark, clandestine pockets.
It’s almost shocking how unphased Size came off when they burst onto the scene in 1979. Having just arrived from Canada, singer and performance artist Jaime Keller Cortina, better known as Illy Bleeding, began jamming with the experimental musicians Walter Schmidt and Carlos Robledo from the electronic outfit Decibel. The lo-fi punk band incorporated synthesizers that injected a spacier, eerier quality into songs like “El diablo en el cuerpo” and “Castillos en el cielo,” which denounced institutional corruption and celebrated carnal instincts. Bleeding’s ease with English helped build a tandem repertoire outside the censorship radar, and though Size disbanded in 1985, Schmidt, Robledo, and late addition Ulalume Zavala went on to form Casino Shanghai, a cornerstone of high-glam Mexican synth pop.
The subversive wails of Latin American post-punk rippled throughout the ’90s, most pronounced in the mournful operas of Mexican alt-rock titans Santa Sabina. Taking their name from the Oaxacan medicine woman and mystic María Sabina and led by theatrical dark lady Rita Guerrero, the band became an MTV staple, adorning stages in flowers, candles, and flowing velveteen fabrics while still calling out political impunity in anthems like “Olvido.”
In the new millennium, the advent of the internet gave goth an exciting digital facelift and positioned Mexico as darks pack leaders, launching superstars of emo (PXNDX), electroclash (María Daniela y Su Sonido Lasser), and even raven-haired pop (Belanova). As a new online generation stepped into the shadows, regional hybrids began to exploit contrast, producing micro scenes like tropi goth and cholo goth. In Puerto Rico, a fleet of beachy punk bands such as Dávila 666, Los Vigilantes, Re-Animadores, Ardillas, and Los Pepinillos, collaged influences from B movies, ’60s Motown pop, and the exasperation of an island stunted under American colonial rule. In Southern California, the industrial band Prayers epitomized the highly stylized intersection of Chicano street culture and sorrowful introspection, while over in Houston, electronic duo Svntv Mverte lured la raza onto glutted dance floors throbbing with grime, techno, and dembow.
In fact, dance floors are the unsung heroes of goth, which at its core is a subculture about community: misunderstood loners looking to meet, writhe, and—even if they won’t admit it—be loved by other sexually and emotionally curious people. In 2006, Mexico City club El Real Under opened its doors, managed by the eccentric DJ Lord Fer, who galavanted around town dressed like Jareth, the Goblin King, from David Bowie’s 1980s classic, Labyrinth. Following in the tradition of hoyos fonkis—the filthy dives where Mexico’s rock resurgence blossomed—dancing at the popular haunt grew into a rite of passage for Chilango creatures of the night, a crucial space of ghoulish communion and hallowed ground for goth’s continuing survival.
I’ve thrashed away many nights at El Real Under, as well as the somehow dirtier Mexico City punk den El Centro de Salud. At Bogotá’s Asilo, I squeal with glee whenever the DJ transitions from the Cure to Alaska y Dinarama, or some other ear-catching darks deep cut with a dangerous bass line. And the prospect of an upcoming trip to Brazil bumped a visit to São Paulo’s legendary club Madame to the top of my to-do list. Each time I traverse these cavernous spaces unknown to light or deodorant, I spy smiles and elation from the most sinister faces. Then it hits me: “Right . . . they’re just painted that way.”
Richard Villegas is a music journalist, podcaster, and professional chismoso with bylines in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, and Remezcla. When not raging behind his desk in the Dominican Republic, you can find him traipsing through Latin America in search of fresh underground music and a cheap local beer.
Illustration: Jonas Kalmbach
