Your Mix Fix: DJ Mafondo
BY Juan Data | PUBLISHED: Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
DJ: Mafondo
MIXTAPE: Palenkeando
DJ Mafondo is the record spinning alter-ego of Jorge Gonzalez, a self-defined “border hybrid”brought up between Tijuana and San Diego. Maybe that hybrid mentality is what sparked his anthropological interest in the Afro-Latin roots of our music, that mythical meeting point where the African slaves mixed with the natives and the conquerers to create our hybrid music.
Palenques, also called quilombos in some parts of the continent, were the first settlements of freed Africans in Latin America. In Palenkeando, DJ Mafondo connects, in bit over an hour of music, the different palenque communities of the Spanish-speaking part of the continent and their descendants. Everything from Colombian cumbia and champeta to Puerto Rican bomba and plena, passing through Mexico’s son jarocho, Caribbean reggae, soca and calypso and more. It’s only missing the Brazilian side of the story, but that’s so monumental that it’d take a whole other mixtape to cover it appropriately. By the way, that’s leader of the slave rebellion Gaspar Yanga in the artwork below, an AfroMexican from Veracruz. Download now and learn a history lesson rarely mentioned at school.
Free Mixtape: DJ Mafondo’s “Baile de Muertos”
BY Afroxander | PUBLISHED: Thursday, November 3rd, 2011Día de los muertos, or day of the dead, has come and gone but you can keep the spirit of the celebration alive with DJ Mafondo’s latest free mixtape Baile De Muertos (just out yesterday). Our resident mixtape guru Juan Data introduced us to Mafondo (a.k.a. Jorge Gonzalez Estrella) back in September. As you can see, Mafondo’s kept busy since then. Baile De Muertos is an almost hour-long mix filled with back-to-back Spanish cuts that your old-school abuela with her handmade veil and your tio with the pointy, snake-skin boots can enjoy. Some of the changes between songs are too sudden or abrupt but it doesn’t kill the vibe or flow. Some tracks in the mix include remixes from San Diego’s Afro reggae band B-Side Players, Cuban ensemble NG La Banda, to Venezuela’s Los Amigos Invisibles and a ton more. A hand load of the tracks are also named “Bruja” as an ode to this special day of the year. So light a candle on your family altar and download the mixtape below.
BAILE DE MUERTOS mixtape by DJ-Mafondo