How Calibre 50 Became Folk Heroes of the Mexican Immigrant Community

On a mild Sunday evening in March, a month in which they ruled Billboard’s Regional Mexican Airplay chart, the four members of Calibre 50 rolled through Las Vegas in a tricked-out bus, headliners bound for the Silver Nugget Casino & Event Center. That meant leaving the glitz and glamour of the Strip and rumbling north, past the old downtown and across the freeway, beyond the Bargain Pawn and the Knotty Pine Motel and the Pair-a-Dice Trailer Park, to a side of Vegas few visitors see.

To be precise, this spangly suited norteño group — part Facebook-savvy boy band, part boot-stomping Sinaloa cowboy quartet — would not be playing in the Silver Nugget but behind it, on a sandy, weed-choked lot. By the time Calibre 50’s bus pulled up to the 1960s-era casino, the concert had been going for seven hours already: a parade of brassy orchestras, a prayer service, even a bull-riding exhibition featuring a pair of grumpy beasts called Scissors and Danger Zone. There were “buckets” of beer for sale, seven cans in a plastic sack with ice, and, at the merch tent, Calibre 50 condoms, each package stamped with the image of the band’s squeezebox-wielding, 26-year-old frontman, Edén Muñoz.

Of the 3,000 people crowded around the stage (who each paid up to $60 to get in), nearly all were of Mexican descent, and almost as many seemed to be employed in the tourist industry, from maids and cooks to ­landscapers and construction ­workers. “They are the gasoline of Las Vegas,” Muñoz told me in Spanish before the show.

With millennial acts reshaping the face of regional Mexican, a ­category ­encompassing everything from the ­mariachi-laced ­ballads of ranchera to the ­frenetic horns of banda, Calibre 50 is ­leading the charge, a resurgence largely out of sight of the American mainstream. While global crossover ­artists like Shakira and Pitbull tend to define perceptions of Latin music, the most ­popular Spanish-language genre in the United States is by far regional Mexican, a format steeped in nostalgia and bravado that accounts for 60 percent of the Latin radio stations monitored by Nielsen. “Regional Mexican is not regional ­anymore,” says Sergio Perez, vp U.S. ­marketing and promotion for Fonovisa-Disa, the label that represents Calibre 50. “It’s universal.”

By marrying sly, romantic crooning with the countrified oompah of accordion and tuba, Calibre 50 has scored eight No. 1 songs on the Regional Mexican Airplay chart since 2013 (more than any other ­musical act) and two No. 1 records on the Top Latin Albums chart. On Spotify, the band boasts 2.2 million monthly ­listeners, and, this year, it is a finalist for three Billboard Latin Music Awards. The group’s latest hit, “Siempre Te Voy a Querer” (“I Will Always Love You”) — which it ­performed on Conan’s recent “Conan Without Borders: Made in Mexico” ­episode — is one of its biggest yet, amassing more than 100 million YouTube views since December. Still, to tour the United States as a top regional Mexican act is to straddle ­parallel ­universes of adulation and anonymity. Before a ­luminous sea of cellphones greeted the band outside the Silver Nugget, the ­members of Calibre 50 had strolled through the MGM Grand, in crocodile-skin boots and rabbit-skin ­sombreros, ­unbothered — as invisible to the raging ­fantasyland of Vegas as the ­immigrant laborers they came to entertain.

“Keep in mind that you’re the ones who make it all run,” Muñoz tells a whooping crowd between songs. “There may be a shitload of very tall buildings, a shitload of casino towers, but without all you — you, who bust your asses — the bonfire wouldn’t be the bonfire, nor would the United States be the United States.”

Calibre 50’s repertoire, most of which Muñoz pens, has always featured ­mordant social commentary. But with this ­country now in the throes of an existential debate over immigration — stoked by a White House that has vowed to deport ­millions — the stakes for the band and its U.S. ­audience have never been greater. All across America, attendance has been ­sagging on the grass-roots Spanish-language ­concert circuit, which every weekend brings regional Mexican acts to dance halls and fairgrounds. While perhaps still remote, the prospect of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raiding a venue or cordoning one off with a checkpoint has intimidated fans, even those with papers.

“Many of my friends didn’t want to come,” says Rosa Rosas, a 40-year-old housekeeper from the Mexican state of Guanajuato, who had swapped her hotel uniform for ranch attire: tight jeans, leather boots, plaid top. “I told them, ‘¡Vamos! Let’s go see Calibre 50!’ But they told me, ‘No, we are afraid.’ ”

In other words, a Calibre 50 show has become an increasingly piquant exercise in cross-border communion. When the band enters the United States — legally, dozens of times a year — it is more ­conscious than ever of the need to console and fortify audiences whose own journeys north have left them vulnerable. “You can sense it: There’s a lot more fear,” says Muñoz. “What we’re trying to do is make the people feel more deeply that we’re with them now.”

From the band’s start in Mazatlan seven years ago, Calibre 50 has performed a balancing act: sweetness and swagger, the propriety of traditional ranch life with a splash of gunslinger danger. Even the band’s name tries to have it both ways. A 50-caliber bullet is reputed to be the world’s most lethal. “No armor can stop it — only God,” says Muñoz, who greeted me before the show at the MGM, where the band had stopped to shower after driving in from Salt Lake City. Of course, Calibre 50 also refers to the band’s music — penetrating hearts, cultures, borders.

Norteño music gets its name from the northern borderlands of Texas, where accordion-loving German and Czech immigrants settled in the 1800s. Because Mexico’s Pacific Coast is a bastion of horns and woodwinds, Muñoz, the son of an elementary school teacher and a homemaker, picked up the accordion out of pragmatism: “There was nobody else that played it.”

When he formed Calibre 50 with ­guitarist Armando Ramos, who adds the ­shimmer of a 12-string, they adapted to their ­environment by forgoing a bass and adding the boisterous marching-band honks of a tuba. (Alejandro Gaxiola replaced the ­original tubaist in 2014, the same year drummer Erick Garcia joined.) While their polka-based corridos may sound old-timey to the uninitiated, Muñoz has fashioned the group as a contemporary chronicler of Mexico’s drug-fueled disorder, much like such godfathers of the genre as Banda el Recodo, Los Tucanes de Tijuana and Grammy winners Los Tigres del Norte. 

Although most of Muñoz’s lyrics come with a wink or a moral, they are still ­considered too provocative for Mexican radio, which is wary of any song that might glamorize narco culture. In Sinaloa, the government banned Calibre 50 altogether, a yearslong prohibition on performing at home that is finally supposed to be lifted in May. Like the other young ambassadors of regional Mexican’s new generation, Calibre 50 has dodged the censors by expanding into romantic terrain, its style-bending ­repertoire both more sentimental and acerbic than that of many earlier groups. “If they tell us not to play corridos,” says Muñoz, who as Calibre 50’s wordsmith is also its mouthpiece, “we can do two or three hours of pure love.”

In their matching suits of snug leather or ornate lamé, they play up their heartthrob credentials. Every member of the foursome is still in his 20s, and while Ramos recently became a father, Muñoz still lives at home with his parents. They have a playful social media presence, heavy on rascally memes, which has earned them 12 million Facebook followers, a base that skews teenage, female and bilingual.

“There was something about their entire package that felt right: the look, the sound, the attitude,” says Conan’s former music booker, Jim Pitt, who discovered Calibre 50 by scouring YouTube and Spotify before he left the show in early April. “They’re just sort of fun.” Because the band ­members speak little English, they confess to knowing almost nothing about Conan O’Brien before appearing on the March 1 episode of his TBS show, broadcast from Mexico City. Only after friends and relatives in the United States ­conveyed their delight did the group grasp the ­magnitude of being drafted by Team Coco. “We ­discovered that our friend — the high-­foreheaded one, the crested-hair one — is very famous!” says Muñoz.

Like many top regional Mexican acts, Calibre 50 has an “owner” who not only manages and produces the band but also commands its recording and touring infrastructure. “These boys are like my sons,” says Andaluz Music president Jesus “Chuy” Tirado, who has guided Calibre 50 since the band’s founding and now oversees a 100-employee team that supports every aspect of its career.

Right now, Calibre 50 does about 150 to 200 events a year, its route often ­mirroring the migratory patterns of the Mexican labor force. Leading up to Vegas, the band had gone from Noble, Okla., to Shelbyville, Tenn., to Gardendale, Ala. But with live shows here becoming problematic, clouded by speculation about la migra, Tirado is already looking ahead — south, rather than north. This summer, Calibre 50 will for the first time tour Central America, even ­continuing down to Colombia.

“We’re opening new markets,” says Tirado, “precisely to avoid what’s ­happening in the United States.”

In “El Inmigrante,” the song that speaks most pointedly to its audience’s hopes and wounds, Calibre 50 tells the story of a 17-year-old boy who, determined to lift his mother out of poverty, risks his life sneaking into the United States: “They think, because I jumped the border, I’m a drug trafficker. Enough already with these countless humiliations, just for being an immigrant.” It has evolved, in the three-plus years since its release, into something approaching a Calibre 50 anthem, the one song the band never fails to play.

“They sing about real life, about what really happens,” says Daniel Chaparro, 45, a fan at the Silver Nugget show who buses tables in a casino steakhouse.

Although Calibre 50 enjoys a level of comfort and mobility that separates it from its fans, it has vowed not to end up in a gilded cage. “You can reach a point where you are cut off, where you become a Michael Jackson or a Justin Bieber,” says Muñoz. In that respect, Calibre 50 might have more in common with a chart-topping country performer, working in a genre that expects its stars to be just like their fans.

Band ­members linger after every show to take ­pictures with their audience, an exchange that always reminds them of what so many of their ­compatriots have endured. “You can see it in their faces — that they’re ­people who crossed the river, who crossed the desert, who crossed in the trunk of a car,” says Muñoz. “It’s not the same as if you had crossed with ­bleeding feet ­yourself, but you imagine it.”

At 10:45 p.m., at the end of a sweaty, 75-minute set, the band rushes offstage and takes shelter in the bus, a Volvo coach emblazoned with the Calibre 50 logo inside and out. After mopping himself dry, Muñoz emerges in a camouflage T-shirt and torn jeans, then proceeds to spend the next half-hour servicing a long line of fans, bestowing kisses and grinning for cameras. One portly fellow hands Muñoz a can of beer right before they pose; Muñoz takes a swig of foam and grimaces, but manages a smile in time for the photo.

Back on the bus, there is no afterparty: no music, no girls, no tequila. Most of the guys hunch over their phones, scrolling through Instagram. Fees still have to be collected, wads of hundred-dollar bills counted out. Of their five or six trips to Vegas over the years, Calibre 50 has never blown off steam in a club or casino. “In the U.S., I know the hotels, the airports and the freeways,” says Muñoz. “Like our fans, we come here to work.”

It is midnight by the time the bus lurches into gear and lumbers off the Silver Nugget lot. Calibre 50 is not even heading back to the MGM to sleep in the rooms it paid for. With a week’s worth of shows awaiting it in Mexico, the band is driving straight to Sinaloa, 1,200 miles to the south, ­dreaming of dinner Monday night at home.

This article originally appeared in the April 29 issue of Billboard.