Carlos Reyes created the “Latin Pitchfork” using dial-up and free wifi.
On a Saturday morning, he’s at one of Phoenix’s public libraries, where he’s just arrived via public transportation — the Valley Metro. Carlos comes here twice a week because there’s free internet and an ever expanding collection of Spanish language books, CD’s and films.
He pulls a DVD off of the shelf. It’s called “Mejor es que Gabriela no se muera,” or, It would be better if Gabriela didn’t die. Carlos explains that it’s like if “David Lynch made a telenovela.”
This is the kind of cultural artifact Carlos lives for, that he pulls from for his influential music blog, Club Fonograma. The website has 200,000 unique visitors a month and the compilations he makes — called Fonogramaticos — are highly anticipated. His covers mixtape, completed in 2010, has been downloaded 80,000 times.
Club Fonograma, which covers mostly Spanish language indie music, has been called the Latin Pitchfork. Rising stars like DJ Tony Gallardo and Colombian art-princess Lido Pimienta credit Carlos, a first generation Mexican American and his small volunteer editorial staff, with catapulting their careers. The website has become required reading for Latino hipsters, including filmmaker and actor Gael García Bernal and Mexico’s most respected pop diva, Julieta Venegas.
The day after he publishes an album review or music video critique, his content appears in various incarnations on other sites and blogs across the United States and Latin America, some with big editorial budgets. Carlos says he appreciates “being a tastemaker,” though he is heavily borrowed from and rarely cited.
It’s a peculiar role for Carlos, who says he has never fit in. He’s suffered the dislocation of being an immigrant, the racism that comes from being a Mexican in Arizona. And the discomfort of being a decidedly un-macho man in two cultures that place a premium on traditional masculinity.
When Carlos moved to Paradise Valley, he describes the experience in Spanish as painful and traumatic. He didn’t speak English, or even have a Latino group of friends to fall into. He had moved to a rich, conservative Anglo suburb all about sprawl, where the desert heat alone can make it hard for kids to get outside and play.
A few years after his family moved north, his mother found an old Mac at a yard sale. At first, there was no internet, so Carlos just practiced typing sentences in Word. When he was 14, a relative installed dial-up, and he launched a blog of movie reviews, called Cine Azteca.
Later, in the early 2000s, he created Club Fonograma, which began gaining steam when Julieta Venegas made Carlos one of her “top friends” on Myspace. That drove traffic in the beginning, but soon it attracted people based on its own merits. By covering pop music in Spanish, Club Fonograma hit a sweet spot for hispanophiles, chipsters and especially young American latinos who like indie.
“The internet was about escape for me,” he says. “But it was an escapism that had a goal: to create something.”
