Latino Punk Festival NYC Favorite 

Promoted as a DIY festival with no corporate sponsorship, the 2015 Latino Punk festival in Brooklyn, NY featured bands from all over the Americas. With an emphasis on local bands supporting each other and nurturing local scenes, this festival functions in reference to the ideals of the punk and Riot Grrrl movements in the 1990s. These ideals are expanded from predominantly white, middle-class concerns to the concerns of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the US and musicians and artists living throughout the Spanish-speaking world. My band, Electro Insides, played at a basement show during the festival as the follow up to a talk and community discussion by Anarcho Punks from Mexico. The volume, music, and discourse merged in a optimism for the power of DIY community to combat some of the most frustrating and invasive elements of modern neoliberalism. Still, there were many PBRs drunk and few female musicians. Even without corporate sponsorship, the power structures of the larger cultural environment seep in.