National Geographic Music (National Geographic)

Los de Abajo is one of the more successful groups to emerge from Mexico City's fertile punk underground in recent years. The group calls its unique sound "tropipunk"—a breakneck collision of punk, ska, cumbia and Mexican regional styles, leavened with a dose of agitprop. The band lifted its name from Mariano Azuela's classic novel of the Mexican revolution, and it translates as "those from below"—a moniker they happily live up to with their calls for social justice and support for the Zapatista rebels and other indigenous rights causes.

Los de Abajo first came together in the early 1990s, playing Latin-tinged ska in Mexico City's underground punk clubs. The original lineup consisted of vocalist Liber Terán, guitarist Vladimir Garnica, bassist Carlos Cortez, saxophone player Damián Portugal, keyboardist Carlos Cuevas and percussionists Yocu Arellano and Gabriel Elías. But by the middle of that decade, the band had evolved an increasingly more punk sound and a distinctly political edge, putting out two cassettes that made them hometown favorites.

In 1998 Los de Abajo made their international debut with a self-titled album on the Luaka Bop label. Their sound and fury were still intact, but to many casual listeners, they sounded like just another rock en Español outfit playing Clash and ska—inspired material. It wasn't until the group's 2002 release, Cybertropic Chilango Power that Los de Abajo would breakthrough to an international audience.

In a country where Mexico City residents are derided as chilangos—lazy, unscrupulous "city slickers"—Los de Abajo embraced the intended insult with pride. In naming their sophomore major-label release Cybertropic Chilango Power, they made a defiant multilingual assertion of the unbridled creative energy of their hometown. The album found the band branching out and experimenting with a host of Mexican and Latin roots styles, and the loping ska-meets-cumbia sound of such tracks as "El Loco" became the band's calling card. They began to tour frequently, both in North America and abroad, and took their energetic stage show and pointed political message to audiences all over the world.

By the time of Los de Abajo's 2005 release, LDA V. The Lunatics, the group had weathered some personnel changes and added an eighth member, while Terán and Cuevas had emerged as the group's principal songwriters. The scrappy outfit also commanded real international respect, signing on to the Real World label and attracting the likes of singer Natacha Atlas and former members of UK ska-revival outfit the Specials to collaborate on the album. —Tom Pryor