Bands who play the thumping tuba-and-drums songs of northern Mexico on beaches in the resort city of Mazatlan appear to have emerged victorious after noise complaints from foreign tourists who like to observe the resort’s sunsets in peace – or with a bit of soft music – had threatened to silence them.
A local hotel owner had taken up his guests’ cause, suggesting limiting the time or places where the bands could play. The bands usually wander the beaches, asking for a few dollars per song to play.
Their music is hardly conducive to reflection or relaxation – think of a frantic, speed-fueled polka with lots and lots of brass and snare drums, earning the bands the nickname of tamboras, or drums. But after a protest march by the musicians turned into a violent scuffle with police last week, efforts to limit them appear to have been abandoned.
“The people are very conscious now, and they are defending their rights,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday. “This is how they make a living, and besides, this is a long-standing tradition … and for that reason they protested and managed to get it reversed.”
“What isn’t good is the violence,” López Obrador added. “But the Sinaloa bands, or the musicians of the Sinaloa bands, are completely within their rights to protest, just no violence.”
While there never appears to have been any city-wide ban, at least one hotel had put up signs prohibiting the bands from offering their services to beachgoers.
Videos of the scuffles between musicians and police went viral last week, with some band members hitting police with drumsticks. Drums were turned into weapons.
Rubén Rocha, the governor of the northern state of Sinaloa, where Mazatlan is located, wrote in his social media account that “I do not share the idea of prohibiting the musicians of Mazatlan from carrying out their honest, dignified work, that allows them to feed their families.”
The issue came to a head when local hotel operator Ernesto Coppel posted a video urging that the bands be limited as to when or where they could offer to play.
“They are a disaster on the beaches of Mazatlan. They don’t allow people to rest,” Coppel said. “I have a lot of complaints from hundreds of (North) American tourists who say to me ‘I won’t return to Mazatlan because of the noise.’”
The ideas apparently included designating certain spaces on the beach for musicians, rather than having them wandering up and down the sand, playing to people in beach chairs in front of hotels.