Jasmine Garsd

I hate what "world music" has come to signify. It too often stands for any non-English-language music — usually declawed, teeth pulled out, with little remnants of its original kick. For this week's show, we brought in NPR's Anastasia Tsioulcas, who agrees wholeheartedly.

She recently returned from WOMEX ...

For me, the highlight of the Latin Grammys is the running commentary Felix Contreras and I exchange via text messages — that is, until he falls asleep during the fourth or fifth hour of the show, at which point I drift off into an existentialist crisis to the soundtrack of ...

Tens of thousands of people will be on the National Mall Tuesday night for a Veterans Day event called "The Concert for Valor."

We're always thrilled to share new music. But this week is a special treat, as some of Alt.Latino's favorite new artists release new music that's driving us crazy (in a good way). We also celebrate the 20th anniversary of Cafe Tacvba's album Re — a crucial, seminal record that changed ...

Corchado covered the Mexican drug war during its bloodiest peak. He joins Alt.Latino to discuss his book Midnight In Mexico and the music he enjoyed while writing it.

Sam Amidon recycles music. The L.A.-based musician — he's originally from from Brattleboro, Vt., where his parents were both folk players — takes older songs, folk songs, and transforms them into his own music through rearrangement and sensitive performance.

Sometimes Amidon's re-imaginings come close to his other musical love, ...

For me, nothing beats falling down a musical rabbit hole, where encountering a single artist or record sets you off on a long path of discovery.

My recent journey into Latin soul started a few months ago. Two things set it off. First, we did a fantastic show about La ...

I watched the season premiere of Law & Order SVU, and I was excited to see that it covered a topic I've reported on for the last year — sex trafficking of women in Mexico — and that a very rich cast of Latino actors were featured on the show. ...

Like many music fans, I have an obsessive relationship with songs. When I find an artist I love, I listen over and over again, sometimes dozens of times in a row, to the point where my neighbors probably think I'm insane. I research the artist and all of his or ...

The Latin Grammy nominations have just been announced: 48 categories of great and not so stellar music. But we want to hear about the good stuff — which is why we invited our friends Jasmine Garsd and Felix Contreras, from the NPR Music show Alt.Latino, to tell us who they're ...

Latin pop often gets a bad name — for being too schmaltzy, for being heavily commercial, for being overly produced. There can be truth to those critiques, but they can also feel like poorly veiled cultural elitism.

If you listen to Alt.Latino regularly, you know that I'm a big fan ...

There's a joke that says the biggest town in Puerto Rico is called New York. Several waves of diaspora have created a deep and complex relationship between Puerto Ricans and the city. Boricuas have had an immense influence on the Big Apple — its music, its literature, its landscape, and ...

Earlier this month, we were shaken by the death of Latin rock legend Gustavo Cerati, who died in his native Argentina on Sept. 4 after spending several years in a coma following a stroke. When we found out, we were just sitting down to record Alt.Latino. We decided that, ...

Alfredo Rios, aka El Komander, is the Jay Z of Mexican drug balladeers. He says government pressure, in the form of fines and banned or canceled concerts, is forcing him to think about retirement.

Last week, as we were heading into the studio to record Alt.Latino, we received word that Latin music legend Gustavo Cerati had died. We were shocked. In the '80s and '90s, as frontman for the band Soda Estereo, Cerati became the first pan-Latin American rock star — and he was ...

Legendary Argentine musician Gustavo Cerati, who fronted the pivotal band Soda Stereo in the 1980s and '90s, died Thursday in Buenos Aires. Soda Stereo, which authored rock and roll anthems for several Latin American generations, was instrumental in launching the Latin rock movement. With his boundary-crossing music that spanned several ...

On Alt.Latino, we constantly ask what it means to be Latino. What do I, an Argentine woman, have in common with Felix Contreras, a Chicano from California? And what do we both have in common with, say, a Central American child who comes alone and undocumented to the U.S.? Poet ...

Mexican actor Mario Moreno, known as Cantinflas, made dozens of films between the 1930s and 1980s. A biopic about the comic, whose humor tweaked the rich and powerful, opens in the U.S. this weekend.

I recently started a habit of listening to new music for Alt.Latino while reading. I'm on a new book called An Anthology Of Latin American Chronicles, a compilation of the best long-form journalistic pieces from contemporary Latin America. It's all non-fiction, yet as fantastical as you can get.

These ...

If you love music and dancing, a DJ can make or break a party. We've all been there: You go out with the burning desire to dance like a lunatic, only to find terrible music wherever you go, so you have no choice but to head home and blast records ...