Working on a Miracle #3
Fuerza Regida, h/t Les Izmore, Brian Keene, Scares that Care, and Owen King
“We’re sending love and strength to our Latino communities during this difficult time. We’ve been deeply moved by the events of this past week. These are our people, our fans, the very people who inspire our music. We see your strength and resilience. We stand with you and are actively working on a plan to help those directly affected. Stay safe, stay strong, and remember Juntos Podemos Lograr Todo.” San Bernadino’s Fuerza Regida, Instagram post 6/11/2025
Together we can achieve everything. This is perhaps the most important message anyone can hear right now, and this is a statement being made by one of the biggest bands in the country with the second highest charting Spanish-language album, 111XPANTIA, at #12 on Billboard’s Top 200, just behind Bad Bunny’s huge Debi Tirar Mas Fotos, 22 weeks on the chart now and at #10. Both acts made chart history just over a month ago when Fuerza Regida’s new album debuted at #2 (a first for a Spanish language album on Billboard) next to Bad Bunny’s #1, another first in our history that Spanish language albums filled those two spots.
At the opening of 111XPANTIA, gorgeous classical guitar renders the theme from The Godfather as the basis for a norteño about the material benefits and lonesome costs of a life spent hustling. Thematically, the whole record is a modern blues—like its cousin gangsta—in the sense that Ralph Ellison defined the blues, a detailed document of pain and the real and perceived victories that keep the musicians and the fans going.
The characters growled to life by lead singer Jesus Ortiz Paz often look like they are on top of the world, but they do better with women in the plural than any relationship that might make them feel less alone. That’s how the singer winds up at the end, almost strolling down some dusty road accompanied prominently by a banjo. Perhaps surprisingly, that percussive stringed instrument that has its roots in West Africa is part of what makes this album sound so contemporary, the way it’s naturally worked into the band’s already rich mix of acoustic and electric guitars, alto sax, and sousaphone. Appropriately enough, though every track on the album has charted, the #1 Mexican Regional song for the past three weeks has been “Marlboro Red,” essentially a fight song equating music with weaponry.
The recent advent of more folk instruments in popular music makes its own statement as the historical sounds of those without finding a way to make ourselves heard. In a country where poverty not only continues to grow and being poor itself is increasingly criminalized, music that recalls its own history and the unity of our musical traditions takes a political stance very different than those being made in the halls of power.
Over 100 towns and cities banned public camping last year, and the Governor asking the President to arrest him over the National Guard occupation of Los Angeles has himself taken an aggressive stance against homeless encampments without offering any real solutions. All immigrants or even people who look like they might be immigrants (which, of course, includes our Indigenous population) are being treated like criminals.
According to the Sentencing Project, “The United States is unparalleled historically and ranks among the highest worldwide in its dependence on incarceration. Over five million people in total are under supervision by the criminal legal system. Of these, nearly two million people, disproportionately Black, are living in prisons and jails instead of their communities. Compare this to the figures of the early 1970s when this count was 360,000.” The Bureau of Justice Statistics show violent crime doubling between 1964 and 1974, while violent crime rates fell 49% over the past twenty years.
Meanwhile, it is increasingly illegal to feed the homeless (https://nationalhomeless.org/tag/feeding-restrictions/) and both states that border me (Kansas and Missouri) have been trying to pass legislation that would make it illegal to help undocumented immigrants. Helping those in need is already criminalized in some places, and that cancer is growing. Little wonder the United States has the third highest incarceration rate in the world.
While we’ve watched the current acceleration of fascism on the streets of Los Angeles and throughout the country, I’ve been inspired by the vision of those fighting for a path forward. I want to thank a wonderful Kansas City musician, Les Izmore, an artist who manages to bridge the rock, funk, soul, jazz, and folk communities, for doing what he does every day— https://www.facebook.com/LesIzmoreMusic/ AND https://www.facebook.com/izmore
More about Izmore’s music in the future, but I’m tipping my hat to him today for highlighting Margaret Kimberley’s insightful thoughts on strategy from the Black Agenda Report: https://www.blackagendareport.com/solidarity-against-ice-and-entire-state-apparatus
I am endlessly inspired by the thousands of people showing up at courts across the country to let ICE and the rest of the state apparatus that is aiding its extralegal behavior know that we care about each other, and we are particularly concerned about those who are most vulnerable. That’s the theme here, isn’t it? How do we as a society treat each other, particularly our most vulnerable brothers and sisters?
Many people seem comfortable using the term “late-stage capitalism” without a lot of discussion of what that means. When America’s 19 richest families made a trillion more dollars just last year, when the top 10% control 95% of stock market wealth, and that money went up by 23% last year, when almost 60% of the population is a paycheck from homelessness, the system isn’t working, and “late-stage” means there are many reasons to believe it is not coming back. What we are seeing is a power structure preparing for an American public that is on the verge of losing all its rights, and the way we are treating our immigrant community testifies to how the social contract is being redefined by the revolving door corporate state.
Juntos Podemos Lograr Todo!
In the spirit of working together, I want to express some love for horror novelist Brian Keene, whose work endlessly shows the beauty of people coming together across subjective divisions. See The Complex for an action-packed example that leaps to mind. Anyway, I’ll write about Keene’s books from time to time here, but right now I want to talk about the work he does supporting his fellow artists in the field of speculative fiction. For starters, he’s organized multiple conventions for writers, publishers, and fans every year for at least twenty years, and he sits on the Board of Scares That Care, which raises money for those who desperately need health care. I attended the one in St. Louis last October, and the quality of participation and the spirit of the thing was both mind-blowing and exhilarating.
When the Diamond Comics distribution company filed for bankruptcy, Keene used his Substack and Patreon to warn people in his industry about the coming fallout. On June 2nd he received word of the trouble Apex Book Company, which has published a number of his books. By the 4th, he used his outlets to write about the quality of the work going on at Apex, and he waived his royalties for his latest book (a book praised by Stephen King no less) Island of the Dead. He acknowledged that other authors couldn’t do that, but he felt he could. He urged readers to buy from Apex directly.
https://www.apexbookcompany.com
For that matter, Brian and his author wife Mary SanGiovanni have a great bookstore called Vortex Books & Comics. I suggest ordering from them as well. https://www.vortexbooksandcomics.com/
If you make it out to Columbia, PA, I highly recommend stopping in. Last time I was there, I bought an armload of books, including a copy of Owen King’s Self Help. https://owen-king.com/self-help/ It’s a beautiful, brutal book, a comic that continuously grows more intense as a self-help charlatan crosses paths with Finnish mobsters, a look-a-like ex-con, and a white supremacist mob that has followed the con out of prison. It’s a thrilling nightmare of another side of Los Angeles— what things look like when everyone is out for themselves, a mother and daughter outstanding as some hope for community and deliverance, just about the only thing that can save us in all this darkness.
Thank you