Viva! Viva! Viva Zarate!

As I walk past the BBB (Big Black Ball) at Regensburg Uni a cry rings out: Viva! Viva! Viva Zarate! A few people turn but most hurry on to class.
Later in Neupfarrplatz: Viva! Viva! Viva Zarate! Heads snap around to find—nothing. And again in Haidplatz: Viva! Viva! Viva Zararte!
Zarate seems to be everywhere, like Underdog of fond memory. But who or what is Zarate?

Zarate is the smartest band on the Regensburg club scene and a transnational enigma.

I was introduced to Zarate by Joeseph (aka Big Daddy) a percussionist I’d seen at the Irish Harp. One evening after he did some pretty impressive scat singing, I asked if he’d heard of Cab Calloway or “Scatman” Crothers. He hadn’t so I scribbled their names down for him and we talked 40s jazz on his break.
“You have to come Halloween.”
“Here?” The Harp had been advertising its big Halloween blowout.
“No. Hinterhaus. You Know it?”
‘Yes.”
“We’ll do our own music.”
“Who’s we?”
“Just come, ok?”

Hinterhaus Halloween. I pushed through the red striped doors at the back of the ally and looked for a seat. A good looking ghoul glided up to me and just as I was thinking: “I still have IT” (trying to remember what IT is) she said: “Vier Euro.” I paid; she stamped my hand—to date the apex of my intimacy with German Fräuleins.

I’m early, indicative of squareness, but I get a seat up front. At 9:00 Zarate comes on with a lot of energy, gritas and vivas passing out gourd shakers to the audience. Big Daddy gives me a gourd about 20 inches long and that night I play my first gig as a percussionist.

“VIVA! VIVA! VIVA ZARATE!
The kinetic Latin-looking front man, Ramirez Miguel Gonzales, bounds on stage sporting a goatee, a gray suit, a too small white cowboy hat, and a large red blossom on his lapel. With what looks like a kung-fu kick, he breaks into a Mexicano rap that almost makes sense when its not gibberish. This morphs into a driving rock break behind the refrain: When I open my eyes I dream of San Pedro. Bump! Bump! Bumpbump! Bump! Bump! Bumpbump!
I cashed it in before Midnight but Zarate’s drummer liked my gourde work (or so I like to think) and told me to catch the next show at Wunderbar. I promised.

A week later at Wunderbar. “VIVA! VIVA! VIVA ZARATE! German audiences, raised in the beer-tent culture respond enthusiastically: “VIVA! VIVA! VIVA ZARATE! Zarate is the quintessential cross-cultural act. After all, Bavarian oompa music is the root of Norte Mexicano music and everyone recognizes Ramirez’s call: Salud! as Prost! by another name.

Meanwhile there is the mystery—who is Ramirez? And what is Zarate? How did a Mexican band come to Regensburg?

The band takes its name from the family of its members. Ramirez, its front man, was born in San Pedro, Mexico on the Guatemala border. Somehow as an infant Ramirez was brought to Germany and raised in a small Upper Palatinate town in Bavaria cut off from his Mexican roots. When he reached the age of 18, he left to find himself and traveled to Latin America, first to Chile and then to Mexico. There he found that San Pedro, the village of his birth, had been leveled to make way for Mexico’s first Super WalMart. Broken inside, Ramirez returned to Germany where he sheds his Mexican identity to perform at the Augsburg Poetry Slam under the alias Michl Bossle.

Unable to accept life as a Bavarian, Ramirez returned to Latin America traveling through Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina (the Ché tour in reverse) ending up in Ecuador where he hooked up with Zarate as their singer. As Ramirez and the Zarate brothers became a sensation in Mexico and the circum-Caribbean, Ramirez finally came to terms with his transnational self one night after drinking a quart of Mescal atop the Kukulcán pyramid at Chichén Itzá (and eatting the worm). "I am Ramirez,” he shouted, “a Mexican sensation without nationality!"

Ramirez convinced the Zarate brothers to return with him to Germany as representatives of the Zapatista movement and use Mexican music and culture to undermine the global industrial system from Regensburg.

The plan is going well I’m told and I’m assured that global capitalism will fall within a year after Zarate gets a recording contract. Meanwhile Ramirez encourages supporters to to continue to spread fear and confusion among the capitalist elite by giving the grito “VIVA! VIVA! VIVA! ZARATE! in public places loudly and without warning.

And be sure to catch their shows.
http://www.ramirez-artist.de/seiten/diary.html
http://harbourconcept.de/info.html