For example, he’s learned to eat burritos. On this bright day in his adopted home of El Sereno, he’s enjoying the burrito de chicarrón con salsa verde from his favorite taco truck, La Pasadita—which is delicious, he notes, but not as spicy as usual. He’s washing it down with agua de jamaica—a bit sweet, but at least it’s cold.

The 35-year-old Castro has an easy, engaging manner, smiling and laughing as he sits in his red metal chair in a shady place in the empty parking lot next to where La Pasadita parks. He switches between English and Spanish as he discusses the folk music of his home state, and how he’s helped spread it around the Southland.

But he’s brought up short by what should be a simple question: What does son jarocho sound like? He furrows his brow and gives it a go:

“It sounds like great drum in the middle of lots of small and medium-sized guitars playing all around it, with a ceremonial character, but with an internal happiness that you can’t see on [the musicians’] faces … in which, all of a sudden, from any point can emerge a profound cry that will give a message, that will repeat, and all of this happens to the same beat, in a musical cycle that is repetitive, brief, and very well synchronized. This generates a force that, if you don’t feel it, it must be that the fandango is no good, or the group is no good.”

He shakes his head and smiles again. “Wow, that was hard!”

OK, so that’s what it sounds like, but what is it? Son jarocho is the Afro-indigenous-influenced folk music of Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Jarocho is also a slang term for people or things from the region, or more specifically, the city of Veracruz, which locals calls el puerto (the port) to avoid confusion. And everybody in the U.S. knows at least one son jarocho tune, or at least a version of it: “La Bamba.”

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