Into the Tropic of Cancer
How a wandering surfer’s search for waves resulted in one the world’s great musical festivals in a Baja Pueblo
by Mark McDermott
A few years ago, a van swung onto Manuel Márquez de León, a street that runs through the downtown “Centro” district of Todos Santos, a pueblo in Baja California Sur, Mexico. The vehicle parked in front of a makeshift taco stand named for its owner, Alma, who makes arguably the best shrimp and fish tacos in town (and whose son, Carlos, works around the corner at a music venue called La Morena and makes arguably the best margarita in town, almost mystically so, since he does not drink). The van’s sliding door opened, and a ragtag crew emerged.
They walked down the street, improbably elegant in their disarray, carrying instrument cases. At the head of the pack was a tall blonde guy wearing a 1950s Don Lopez gabardine-style wool jacket and a white Stetson hat. Another had longish hair dyed bright red. A dark-haired gypsy-looking man wore a black hat, and another slouched along in a poncho with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
A jewelry vendor whose habit it was to stand on the corner outside his store watched the crew from across the street.
“Llegaron los Rolling Stones,” he said, or “The Rolling Stones have arrived.”
The band was the Charities, not the Rolling Stones, but the point was the same. The rockers were arriving. Many more were on airplanes flying south or in vans heading north from the Cabo San Jose airport en route to Todos Santos. They were coming to play at the Tropic of Cancer Music & Arts Festival, one of the most unlikely musical intersections on the planet, in which artists come from points as far afield as Sweden, Spain, Canada, Chicago, Nashville, Tijuana, Mexico City, New York, and Los Angeles for little or no pay to perform for the benefit of the Bomberos, the local fire department that each year fights back the fires that erupt in the palm forests surrounding this desert oasis near the southernmost tip of the Baja peninsula.
Grace notes abound at the festival.
After her stunning performance on the Saturday night of that year’s festival, its headliner, Marisol “La Marisoul” Hernandez from the band La Santa Cecilia (named after the patron saint of music), stayed up all night singing traditional songs and drinking mezcal with the staff at the Hotel California, on whose stage she’d performed. La Marisoul, an LA native whose parents run a gift stand on Olvera Street, possesses a force-of-nature voice and her music blends bolero, ranchero, and cumbia. La Santa Cecelia has played at Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. But nowhere is the band as revered as it is in Mexico, and La Santa Cecelia reveres few places as much as it does Todos Santos.
Brian Wright plays with the Cordovas at last year’s Tropic of Cancer Music Festival. Photo by Mikayla Jones
The next night, the Cordovas, the band that organizes the festival, handed over a check that included every last peso of the event’s proceeds to the Bomberos. The fire chief, Salvador “Chava” Cadena, offered a few earnest words of gratitude from the main stage. Yet as much as the funds would help the firefighters, Cadena’s most heartfelt thanks to the festival was for bringing such sweet people to his pueblo.
“I never saw a music festival that ended with a benediction from the fire chief,” said Joe Firstman, of the Cordovas. “He was just blessing all our crew, I think for helping them, but also maybe for not being annoying and not being elitist and not thinking about echelons and stuff.”
Kamal Schramm, who oversees the non-profit that helps fund the Bomberos, said that the department relies almost entirely on such donations to provide services that are essential to the community.
“They’re not just firefighters,” Schramm said. “They are paramedics. They do all the rescues. They rescue people on the highways, they rescue people from drowning, and they’d go take snakes out of houses, all sorts of things. And they just kind of live off of donations such as this.”
Cordova Lucca Soria said the band and the festival had simply done what musicians should do. They listened carefully.
“Chava is the guy who is entrusted with saving your ass when it’s time to save your ass, and that is a big part of it,” Soria said. “The other part is that people from Todos Santos that I have spoken to want the right people here, and you have to do that in the right way, and you have to have blessings.”
Things happen at the Tropic of Cancer, in other words, that do not happen at most festivals. This festival is not a commercial product. It is an honest celebration, and it is ongoing. This year’s festival takes place January 10 to 15 and again features La Santa Cecelia as a headliner, along with the legendary California country rock band the Mother Hips, and the increasingly legendary Todos Santos band Los Hijos del Trópico, as well as more than 80 other artists from all over the world.
Unexpected things will unfold. One of those artists, the soul singer Courtney Santana, came to the festival two years ago mainly known as a backup singer for the well-regarded Austin, Texas band Shinyribs. She didn’t quite know what she was getting into, but sang with 17 different bands that year, and last year played with Mark Bryan from Hootie and the Blowfish. Now she has an upcoming solo album that will be released this year.
“This little festival is put together by this band of merry souls that is really about the music,” said Santana. “I look at them, and I’m just like, ‘What’s the agenda?’ There’s really no agenda here other than let’s make good music and drink a lot and talk. It’s the purest of the pure.”
Festy beginnings
As all things do, it began with a wave.
In 2005, Joe Firstman decamped from Hollywood, where he was the musical director of the Late Night with Carson Daly television show. He’d had a whirlwind few years, arriving in LA as a 19-year-old in 2000 from Charlotte, North Carolina via an $18 Greyhound bus ticket, landing a deal with Atlantic Records by 2002, releasing two records, touring with Jewel, Willie Nelson, and Sheryl Crow, and earlier that year, 2005, parting ways by mutually disgusted consent with both Atlantic and the corporate recording industry.
“Atlantic, and even his manager, I had a feeling none of them had any idea what they had on their hands,” said Steve Gorman, the drummer from the Black Crowes. “I just saw a kid with way too many ideas, way too many songs, and way too much inspiration and talent to be anything a record company could deal with in 2002.”
He moved to the El Porto neighborhood of Manhattan Beach for one reason: to learn how to surf. He learned how to catch waves quickly, which begat a search for more waves.
In 2006, Firstman took his first surf trip. He both wanted to clear his head from the TV gig and get better at surfing. He flew a thousand miles south, to Cabo, in Baja Sur. Not much was happening, wave-wise, and so he went to a surf shop and asked, “Where are the waves?” The answer he received was Todos Santos. He rented a car and drove north.
“As soon as I got into town, I remember looking left, and there was a guy in all black with long hair, a local guy,” Firstman said. “He’s sitting there just simply reading a book, and I went, ‘Yeah.’ Like just some punk rocker reading a book on the side of the road, it represented some bizarre part of the local scene here. Something about that hypnotized me. I felt like something nice was going to come.”
Joe Firstman in Todos Santos. Photography Crystal Lotus Studios/ @travisinmotion
The locals embraced him, he surfed more, and he built a little one-room house in La Poza, the hill that overlooks Todos Santos and the Laguna Sierra to the east and the Pacific Ocean stretching out to the west. For the next three years, he came down whenever he could during weeks-long breaks from the television show. At first, Todos Santos was just about getting away from it all, and surfing. The TV gig was lucrative and gave Firstman a chance to play with guests like Quincy Jones and to hire a house band that included future jazz luminaries Kamasi Washington and Thundercat, but it wasn’t exactly his dream. Increasingly, he began playing music when he came to Baja. And increasingly, all he wanted to do was come south. Todos Santos was becoming the dream.
He wasn’t the first North American musician to be drawn into the magical labyrinth of Todos Santos, and he wouldn’t be the last. In the early 2000s, Daniel Lanois, who produced albums by U2 and Bob Dylan, was so taken by a visit to the pueblo and what he described as its “symphony of dogs and roosters” that he recorded an album in a mobile studio that he built there. REM’s Peter Buck also built a home and later founded a festival of his own, which would establish some of the musical footprint the Tropic of Cancer would later inhabit.
“Peter Buck showed up to town and all that kind of started happening,” Firstman recalled. “I’m driving down the road coming home from surfing and there’s the REM guy with metal teeth. It was Peter Buck in a full mariachi costume, and he had not only moved to town, but he had bought a haunted house in town and painted it purple and proceeded to have a music festival in his own name and brought a lot of my heroes down here to play. Guys like Bright Eyes and Kevin Kinney.”
In 2009, the TV gig ended. “The TV job was a lot to deal with, and so I had just wanted to get away,” Firstman said. “And then the TV job ended, and I still had this house in Todos. But all the money, all the riches – everything just went away.”
He bought a big truck and toured relentlessly, doubling down on his own music. “Nothing works in my proverbial plan unless the songs continue to get better,” he said at the time.
It was a long road, sometimes soul-crunchingly so. Each winter, he swooped back down to Todos Santos and revived himself. By now, the trips south were also about music. He wrote songs of and for and in Todos Santos and started a residency at the iconic La Esquina Café that has continued, seasonally, ever since. The road up north opened wider. He co-founded the Cordovas, obtained another record deal, and in his travels met Soria, a brilliant young guitarist and songwriter from Iowa possessing impeccable melodic gifts. By 2016, the festival Buck had founded ceased to exist, and local venue owners approached Firstman. Thus was born the Tropic of Cancer Music & Arts Festival. Whatever it lacked in bigger names the fest made up for with its generous spirit. Rather than just one big venue, it sprawled throughout town, in cafes and bars and taco shops and finally, last year, at the spacious new Oystera, a Roman-arched plaza that includes an expansive outdoor garden stage that looks like it was built with this kind of celebration in mind.
The word festival originates from the plural form of the Latin word “festum,” which means feast. The Trópico de Cáncer Festiva de Musica y Artes has become a moveable feast. It includes several venues, including La Morena, Oystera, and La Esquina, but in a bigger sense Todos Santos itself is the venue upon which this unusual festival plays out. And Firstman, who has played stages ranging from Disney Hall to Baja Sharkeez in Manhattan Beach, says that the stages of Todos Santos are unparalleled in their receptivity.
“The stages here I consider to be holy. Sharkeez and Disney Hall, when you look at it from the bottom, they are the same,” he said. “And that is one of the challenges. As a musician, I think a lot of us have programmed some part of ourselves to want to be stunning, to be able to be impressive. And it’s very hard to impress people. So down here, that’s why I think the stages are holy, because it may be just as difficult to impress people…But down here, they are giving you a chance.”
Moonshine Wagon, a hard rock Americana outfit from Spain who the Cordovas met touring Europe, performed at the Tropic of Cancer last year. Photo by Fernando Martinez
Real live
Todos Santos sits astride the actual Tropic of Cancer, the northernmost latitude on Earth where the sun can appear directly overhead. This might have something to do with what goes on in this pueblo of 7,000 people, which wasn’t reached by a paved road until the 1970s and didn’t have a telephone until 1982 – a single phone that the entire community shared until later in the decade.
The festival is, in a real sense, organic – it’s not fabricated but arises from the place itself. Todos Santos has been designated by the Mexican government as a “Pueblo Mágico,” or a magical village, as part of a program recognizing a handful of rural places throughout the country that offer cultural richness, symbolism, legends, historical relevance, cuisine, arts and crafts, and that indefinable spark of communal creativity that can most closely be described as magic. The designation only named what visitors to Todos Santos have experienced for nearly a century. In 1943, one of those visitors was General Manuel Mujica, the governor of Baja, who was so astonished by the natural artistic talents of the children of Todos Santos that he vowed to build them a theater.
“You keep beautiful things inside yourselves, but you do not have a proper space where you can work on them and display them freely,” the general said, and he kept his vow, erecting a theater by February of the very next year that still stands to this day off the town plaza. The theater, like the street the Charities arrived in town on, was named after another general, Manuel Márquez de León, a hero of the 1847 war with the United States.
Downtown Todos Santos, a community in Baja Sur designated a “Pueblo Magico” by the Mexican government. Photo by Mikayla Jones
Unlikely things. These days, Todos Santos has become a tourist attraction for a certain type of U.S. citizen, as well as home to a large expatriate community.
In this context, it seems natural that the Tropic of Cancer Festival would become the antithesis of what music festivals have become in much of the rest of the world.
Courtney Santana noticed it right away.
“I come from Austin, the land of festivals, right?” she said. “ACL and South by Southwest, they are cattle calls. I felt something really special here. It feels like a moment where we all get to be in an intimate setting and do some music together … .You feel like you’re a part of a group, a family almost, like everybody’s connected. Everybody just wants to be around each other.”
“It was just what I needed when I needed it,” Santana said. “Life can be stressful, and sometimes you just need a break. And when I got off the plane, I immediately knew that I was going to be in a space with like-minded individuals, the music was going to be great, and the atmosphere was just beautiful.”
The boundary between the artists and the audience does not exist in the same way it usually does at music festivals.
“At most festivals, you’re quartered off and you’re separated, and you’re walled off and you’re booted off, you are cabled off and you’re roped off,” Firstman said. “We have only what’s necessary. No one is stabled. You are allowed to just show up and talk to the artists, and artists might sit down and just play the guitar for you. There’s got to be a respect, of course, to the artists. But those borders and those boundaries don’t exist here.”
“There’s a comfort level because we all know everybody personally and nobody is asked to show up on the festival grounds and be like, ‘Well, we better stick to our little zone,’” Soria said. “The opposite of that is encouraged…. Because then those moments can happen. You know, Marisol sitting around with the staff and playing til 5 a.m. I mean, I witnessed it twice. That was the heaviest folk music hang I’ve ever seen in my life, and it happened because she was allowed to do that. In many situations and contexts, nobody’s really allowed to be that free about it.”
Courtney Santana performs with Lucca Soria of the Cordovas. Photography by Crystal Lotus Studios/@travisinmotion
Every year, an unexpected star emerges. Two years ago, it was Santana, who utterly shocked audiences and artists alike with her rafter-raising voice and life-affirming soul. Four years ago, it was 17-year-old Tyla Jones, a Canadian singer-songwriter who sings like Joni Mitchell and who was literally a child of the festival – she grew up spending winters in Baja, and thus was a child of the festival, meeting artists and acquiring musical tastes from the time she was 13.
“I kind of imagine it as like a funnel, where all of these different interesting people get poured into the top and they all end up in Todos Santos,” Jones said. “That’s my description of the festival.”
The key is the freedom to let things happen. There is no script.
“You’re putting the direction of individual expression into the person who should have it most, which is the musician or the artist,” Soria said. “It’s not this thing where it’s like, okay, ‘Play 45 minutes or the stage manager guy is going to be all annoyed and pissed off.’ And then that’s going to be the vibe, and then everyone’s going to kind of play in sort of some way related to that, and then the guy goes up there and talks about Budweiser. It’s stifled, and that’s usually what you encounter in a lot of places. This is just, ‘Oh, you are a genius horn player. Alright, go, it’s going to be on you now, because we trust you.”
Curation has become an overused word, applied to everything from beer selections to vintage car sales. But here is how the curation of artists occurs for the Tropic of Cancer: the Cordovas tour the world, including an annual Spring leg across Europe, and everywhere they go they keep an eye out.
“We’re just kind of like standing and watching someone’s set, and we’re newly their friend and we’re just like, ‘Damn, we should ask if they want to come to Mexico for the festival,’” Soria said. “And that’s what happens. There is nobody that we don’t know that’s coming, or at least have not encountered in some sort of cosmic sort of way.”
La Marisoul sings at last year’s festival. Photo by Fernando Martinez
Abe Juarez, the CEO of Santa Terra, which will host the main stage at Oystera this year, said that the Tropic of Cancer is just beginning. He noted that the Tourism Board of Baja Sur is now giving its official backing to the festival, and his own venue will open a larger amphitheater by next year.
“This festival is super important for the entire community, for the Tourism Board, and for locals from Cabo to La Paz to Todos Santos,” Juarez said. “It is on its way to becoming one of the most important festivals in all Baja, and it will be here for many years to come. It’s music, food, art. It’s community.”
Video and additional reporting by AJ Gardipe of DarkBeatVisuals.com, @darkbeatvisuals
For more information, see Tropicofcancerfestival.mx/
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