VERACRUZ, Mexico — At the top of every hour, in every weather, the bells of the clock tower in the central plaza of this Gulf of Mexico port city ring out the same tune: "La Bamba." Not the 1958 Ritchie Valens rock 'n' roll standard that swept across American radio and MTV generations. The older melody, the one written in Spanish and rooted in the region's African, Indigenous and European past, has been echoing off the colonial facades of the historic center for generations.
"It's our hymn," one longtime local musician told NPR correspondent John Burnett.
That claim is not hyperbole so much as a description of civic identity. "La Bamba" is the best-known song of son jarocho, a regional style whose name translates roughly as "the music of Veracruz." It is not performed here as a nostalgic artifact or a barroom novelty, but as working repertoire, played at length, danced to by strangers and family members alike, and repeated until the night gives out.
The setting for the music is the fandango — a joyous community gathering at which people bring instruments, sing, and dance. The word carries a double meaning in the digital age; fans of the streaming service of the same name may recognize the name long before they know the tradition, which predates the internet by centuries. On a given night, a fandango can be a private living-room affair, a church-adjacent celebration, or a sprawling outdoor party, but its logic is consistent: the music is participatory, and so is the dancing.
The fandango grew out of the multiethnic population that took shape along the Gulf Coast after conquistador Hernán Cortés dropped anchor in the early 1500s and established Veracruz as Mexico's first port. The city's culture emerged from a mix of Indigenous communities, Spanish colonizers, enslaved and free people of African descent, and Caribbean trading partners, and son jarocho — syncopated, jubilant and rhythmic to the point of physical compulsion — carries the marks of all of them. The sound is a melange of European string instruments, Caribbean percussion patterns and Indigenous melodic cycles, filtered through a port city that has been a crossroads for 500 years.
By most estimates, fandangos as organized musical gatherings are more than 300 years old. What has changed in recent memory is not the music itself but its reach. Burnett reports that the popularity of the form is now spreading around the world, with son jarocho and fandango culture turning up at international music events, in diaspora communities far from Mexico's Gulf Coast, and among listeners who may never have set foot in Veracruz but recognize the sound the moment it starts.
"But if you want to experience the real thing, go to Veracruz," Burnett writes.
To understand why, consider an ordinary Saturday night in mid-August. The punishing coastal heat of the day has not fully broken. Outdoors, on a wooden platform known as a tarima, a couple dances: the woman wears a floral dress that fans out dramatically each time she strikes the floor with her heels, and the man wears the broad-brimmed straw hat associated with jarocho dress, along with a tropical shirt soaked through with sweat. The heel-striking is not incidental. The tarima is an instrument, and dancers supply its percussion.
Nearby, a man in a black T-shirt and sunglasses works a quijada — the jawbone of a donkey, its teeth scraped and its mandible slapped so that the loose bone rattles. The effect is dry, percussive and unmistakable, and it fits comfortably alongside the strings. Around the edges of the crowd, people drink ice-cold Mexican beer and eat tamales wrapped in banana leaves, the sweet-sour scent of the corn filling mixing with the salt air.
As the night wears on, the boundary between performers and audience dissolves. Audience members wander up and join the original trio of musicians, and what began as a small group becomes a mass jam session, dozens of players sustaining the same rhythms. Among the instruments is the jarana, a small, distinctive eight-string guitar native to Veracruz — lighter and more agile than a standard guitar, tuned to the quick, bouncing figures that cue the dancers.
The scale of that jam explains the title question. A fandango is not a set list of three-minute songs; it is a long, cyclical night of dancing, and "La Bamba," with its driving, endlessly repeatable rhythm, is exactly the kind of piece that can hold a room for the better part of an hour. The clock tower's hourly performance is the compressed version of something that, in a courtyard or a rented hall, unfolds over hours.
For observers, the appeal is the combination of rigor and abandon. The musicians are working inside a highly structured tradition, playing in carefully timed cues and responsorial passages, but the physical result is chaos by design: a floor full of stamping feet, a jam session that swells by a dozen bodies, and a crowd that becomes a single moving thing. There is a lesson in that about how music survives — not by being preserved behind glass, but by being used, loudly and repeatedly, by the people who keep it.
Burnett filed his report from Veracruz in mid-August, photographing a fandango where jarana players joined a mass jam session while dancers pounded rhythms into the wooden tarima. The story aired on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday and is part of the network's coverage of the Americas.
In the plaza, meanwhile, the bells keep their appointment. Whatever the streaming service of the same name is doing for fandango fans elsewhere, in the city that gave the genre its name, the music is still free, continuous, and — in the judgment of a longtime musician — something close to prayer.
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